Hi everyone,
I'm not sure what to do and I'm hoping others here may be able to help provide suggestions or guidance. My daughter is turning 12 at the end of this month and is currently in 7th grade. We are beginning to realize (as Grinity prophesized awhile back) that she might be a lot more gifted than we thought she was. I always thought she was MG, but she seems to really be coming in to her own lately and needing a lot more challenge than her honor's 7th grade program can provide.
She is very talented in the dramatic arts, and her strongest subjects are probably Language Arts and Social Studies. She is currently in public school in the honors program.
She's in pre-algebra this year, but bored out of her mind - they started in early August and are still doing review. I'm not even sure how this is considered honors level. I believe she could do algebra pretty easily this year if they would let her take the class but the counselor has said absolutely no skipping EVER.
Her social studies teacher just informed them that the principal has asked for less homework and focus on social studies so the students would have more time to work on English and math. Before this edict, she was getting one homework assignment a week from social studies which consisted of about 5 very easy questions that could be answered mostly by just skimming for the bolded terms in her textbook.
English is about the only subject that is even remotely challenging. The teacher does a good job of assigning thought provoking reading material, but he rarely has time to have conversations about the text with the class and, when they do, most of the other students can't keep up with the discussion.
I don't know what's going on with science - she never gets any work home and she doesn't really talk about the class very much - but the subject matter doesn't seem very challenging for her.
We can't afford the on-going cost of private school. We can afford lessons outside the home though - she will be taking dance lessons once a week as her birthday gift this year. And we can probably afford one or two more types of external lessons like that.
There don't seem to be any charter schools close enough to us that would serve her needs. There is one that's 30-45 minutes away, but that's a tremendous amount of driving every day for a mom with a full-time job and a baby at home.
There is a local high school that she can go to for 9th grade which seems a much better fit for her, but I'm afraid of her losing any type of passion she has for school before then - since she still has almost 2 years to go.
I work from home and my husband stays home with the baby, so we can do homeschool, but she has a hard time staying on task. It is possible this is because she's so bored with the work now, so the problem may not be as big of a deal if she had more challenge. I'm open to developing an environment that works with her learning style - it doesn't need to be traditional curriculum - but I just don't know where to start if we go down this route.
She is concerned about not being able to meet the challenge and potentially feeling bad about herself if she fails at first. This is not just with curriculum that we might control if we homeschool her, but also with lessons that she may get outside of the house - the drama and choir classes seem to be at a level of skill way beyond what she has access to in her current school.
And we are concerned about her shutting down and not trying to do anything and not fighting for what she wants if things do seem too hard at first. She has done this in the past, for even small things, and it's very hard to get her to break out of this.
Ideas?
