In our experience, it's hard for early elementary ed teachers to truly get that a child is beyond the regular curriculum. From what we've seen, the teacher is usually pleased that a child tests as knowing all the curriculum during the fall assessments, but it never really occurs to them that that means the child is ready for different work. When we've managed to convince a teacher that something more is needed, the enrichment they have come up with is almost always problem solving skills.

Last year when DS was in 1st, he was given problem solving worksheets to work on completely on his own. Things like, "If student A is sitting in the middle desk in the front row, student B is sitting behind student A . . . where is student H sitting? or "There are 10 people waiting for a movie. Three of them are going to see x. Two of them are not going to see Y. How many of them are going to see Y?" DS got very frustrated that he had to work completely on his own with these after he finished the grade-level work, I think because he was unused to having to actually think at school. Interestingly, he could do the work completely on his own at home because he was used to thinking at home. It took a period of adjustment (and a subject acceleration) for him to see that he needed to actually pay attention and work at school.

Since DS's 1st grade teacher was willing to do enrichment but not acceleration, we sent in a few workbooks for him. The ones that we felt like met his needs were the Flash Skills Grade 3 Problem Solving workbook. He also really liked Primary Grade Challenge Math by Edward Zaccaro, but that required more one-on-one time with him and a teacher or aide, so that wasn't done as much in school.

Thinking back to when DD was in K, they "enriched" by having her work on more complex patterns, graphing data, and answering questions about geometric shapes, but it wasn't nearly enough.

Has your DD's teacher given any indication of her feeling about the need for enrichment or her understanding of your DD's current level of math?


She thought she could, so she did.