If she already knows all of 4th grade math
Would that that were the case! It would make things much easier (except not, because 5th grade math includes a review of 4th grade concepts, IYKWIM). Honestly, she doesn't know the end-of-3rd material yet, because she's never been taught the terminology and isn't inherently mathy enough to solve the more-complex problems without ever having seen them demonstrated. She'd be delighted to be taught ahead if that got her more harder work at the end, but not if it meant worse drudgery at the end.
We got the link to her online math textbook at parent-teacher conferences, and her eyes lit up, and she said "I could work through the entire book at home!" and got out a piece of paper and started writing. At the end of the first page, she suddenly looked up and said "If I do all of it at home, I'm just going to have to do it again at school," put her pencil down, and never looked at it again.
Scheduling a one subject acceleration really isn't that hard (well, I guess it depends to some extent on how many classes per grade are in your school). Also, does your school have inclusion classrooms in each grade?
No inclusion classrooms. Our district does some weird sort of clustering for special ed, so while there's sometimes one kid who needs a speech pullout, it's uncommon.
We've got 3 classes per grade, but each class is on the same schedule. So all the kids in a given grade have lunch at the same time, and specials at the same time. It's hard to schedule cross-grade stuff, because if Class 1 has specials when Class 2 has math, you either end up missing specials or missing math. And in DD's class, their daily schedule has 3 separate math times, so a kid pulled into that class would likely only hit one, and a kid pulled out would have to ignore the math being taught and work independently.
my DS's age and grade level friends are sweet and smart. But, now that my DS is up two years in math, he has started to realize that the older kids are more interesting and he connects with many of the brighter ones in a way that is different from his 3rd grade friends.
Yep. DD had her friend down the street over to play on Monday afternoon. This friend is 6 months older, but a grade younger. DD decided that teaching her friend multiplication would be a great activity. Needless to say, it was frustrating for both of them.
The thing that really bugged me socially was to hear DD say "[Best Friend] is not very good at multiplication." Which is not true - that little girl is very bright, and one of the top kids in her class, and I'd guess her teacher would assess her as being very good at multiplication. But she's not like DD is, and it took 3 months for DD's assessment of her to go from "she's really smart, and better than I am." I was hoping that kids 18 months older would give her a run for her money, and it's just not enough.
