Hi,
Sorry, this is a bit long (I seem to save everything up and long posts - apologies!) I just felt I had to vent. DD5 starts her first year of school later this week and I am feeling a bit ambivalent about it all. I felt, before the end of the year, that things were looking pretty good. DD is skipping kindergarten and going straight in to a composite grade 1/2 class. She'd spent a couple of weeks in kindergarten at the school at the end of last year and loved it. The school had no concerns about her being skipped.
But over the holiday period dd has had a massive developmental spurt. While pre-holidays she was reading at a grade 3-4 level, she rarely read, and wasn't that interested academically. She was doing high 1st, early 2nd grade maths between 3 and 4 yo, but lost interest and just wanted to play for the last year or so, which we had no issue with - figuring her interest would come back some time. And it did. These last few weeks she has been overtaken with a need for information and challenge. She's suddenly reading comfortably at a grade 5 level, she's picked up her maths and puzzle work books for 9yos and started working with little input needed for me. She has become fascinated with science. When she hasn't been doing these things, she has just wanted me to read great books to her (fiction books a couple of years above those she is reading comfortably). This is with almost no input from me (other than making sure she has access to appropriate books, to equipment and more dexterous hands for her science experiments and so on). Goodness knows what she could pick up if she were being taught at her level. Her SB5 scores are <99.9%.
Where as only a few weeks ago I thought we had found a good fit, now I guess I look at all of this as a package and wonder how on earth she is going to survive at school. The school is very positive about trying to accommodate her, but they have realistic concerns about whether or not they will be able to. She is great socially, and has always been able to get along with kids from a range of ages. But I wonder how on earth they are going to accommodate her, with all their good intentions. And I worry about how she will fair emotionally with the new found empathy and awareness of the not so great things in the world that has come with this rage to learn.
Home schooling is not an option for us at the moment. Part of me thinks, 'well perhaps this a grade 1/2 class is a good place to start' - that it will be an easy enough transition, that she will have an equivalent of the school start a smart ND kid might have going in to kindergarten. Part of me worries that the switch has just been turned on and it might just as quickly be switched off.
Anyway, I don't really have any questions - but if you do have any stories of PG kids being ok at school and what worked for you, I'd happily hear them!
Thanks for listening.
