Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy NEWBIE NEEDS HELP!!

I am meeting with a team from my dd's public school next week to create a plan for her gifted education in language arts. She is in 5th grade at a small public school system in California. ACT Profile test results put her in 93% for 8th graders. She is not gifted in math. DD is instigator of this meeting; she wants her time during the school day to be "more productive," she knows she wants to be a writer, and feels she is not being challenged by any of the curriculum (except math, which she dislikes). Her school has NO (and I mean it) resources or programs for gifted students (it's a very highly performing school district so they roll their eyes at pushy parents who want more),is very resistant to change, and there is not one penny of extra funding for anything. The principal wants to solve the situation as follows: "When the class is writing a paragraph, the teacher will make sure your daughter writes two paragraphs." She calls that differentiation. On the plus side, her current teacher is amenable to some kind of arrangement. At the moment, I am thinking of asking them to allow my dd to take online courses at school during school time, at school expense, to be monitored by the school. DD is currently taking an online high school class in Shakespeare in her own time at our expense.

I need advice regarding how to approach this meeting; as mentioned I am completely new to this. What are my rights under federal and state law? Does anyone have advice about my current above-proposed arrangement? Does anyone have advice on other possible arrangments? Thank you!

Looks like your state doesn't mandate gifted education. Here's the page from the Davidson database. Hopefully someone with more experience will chime in for you, but this should get you started thinking.

http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/state_policy_california_10005.aspx

My DD9 is doing exactly what you propose only we pay for the courses. She is in private school however. She is miles ahead of the grade level curriculum in language arts so she onlines at school for 2 hours per week. Giving your DD more work is not enrichment, nor is it differentiation. It's just more work.

Anyway, excellent online language arts enrichment exists online. Your DD has already found some so good for her. My experience is that the less resources you propose to use at a reluctant school the more flexible they will be. Good luck!

Sorry you're having this problem! It's great that your DD is so motivated to write. Unfortunately, from what I've read generally it is very hard to get a public school to do much in terms of differentiation, particularly for one student. We have been in private schools but except for a few totally awesome teachers, also have not gotten much differentiation. Our DD was pushing for more math, so we have been using EPGY, which is individually paced, and it's worked very well so far (and have paid for everything ourselves). I imagine that some of the online materials or even books about writing, where your daughter could work at her own pace, might be more worthwhile in terms of your effort as well as hers. Also, perhaps you could find a tutor who might be willing to work with her--like a college or graduate student in English, or something. (and if you can afford it, I would just pay for everything yourselves and perhaps ask from time to time whether the school might help pay for some of it, without being too adamant--that's the most likely thing to work, although it is too bad CA won't help). It's great the teacher is willing to make some arrangements--I guess then you could focus on what the metric would be. I would suggest perhaps that as long as your daughter is keeping up with the papers, tests, etc. from the regular class, she be allowed to do other stuff independently (and quietly, of course) during class time. Then the teacher really wouldn't have to do anything extra except maybe not call on her during class if she sees your DD is working on something else, and maybe check in with you from time to time to see how it's going. I know EPGY gives 'transcripts' when you finish a course, but sorry I don't know how those will go over in the future if we try to have DD skip ahead later. Good luck!

If your daughter consistently scores very highly on her non-math classwork, you might consider advocating for a subject pull-out for language arts. Her teacher will hopefully at least let her read in class if she's already done with her work. If the school doesn't offer to make any changes within the confines of your daughter's current schedule, I'd let it end there and "afterschool" your daughter (i.e. provide some stimulating enrichment for her at home).

The good thing in your daughter's case is that writers are in large part self-made, and she can develop her talents in that area outside of school. Most public school teachers aren't going to be the sort of mentor a budding writer needs anyway.

If nothing else, writing double the number of paragraphs sounds like it would be more productive. :|

Question 1: does she change schools for 6th grade, middle school? If so, what are the options there? Any gifted programming or special writing classes available there? Is there a choice of schools? It's not too soon to look ahead, not least because she will feel hopeful if there's something good looming.


My goal would be to use that writerly ambition as much as possible.


But I would not go for quantity for quantity's sake. That's silly and it won't feel good to your DD either, although I will say that one way to become a great writer is to write A LOT.


What you build in depends on how her schedule is ordered. Here are some ideas.

You could give your DD some written materials that teach writing skills and let her use her writing time to self-teach. Some people really like this curriculum that has rubrics for self-judging one's own writing in it:

https://store.schoolspecialty.com/O...=464112&gclid=CIbxqfKWnLICFQVgMgodx34AmA

If a paragraph was assigned, she could write the paragraph-- but instead of just doing it the assigned way, she could challenge herself to apply one of the concepts in the curriculum to make it a really excellent (persuasive, whatever) paragraph. Flexing extra muscles while doing the same work the class is doing. This would be literally no work for the teacher, and could work if your DD is motivated to try it.

If she's bored in social studies, teach her the principle of writing an op-ed piece and let her have at it. Would the teacher excuse her from lecturing on mastered material to write her op-ed? Perhaps?

Some people really like books about writing process (what comes to mind is Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird, but you should pre-read because I am pretty sure I recall some strong language in there). I bet there are better models out there for a young writer. Something like that is less technique-oriented but still could be inspiring in terms of writer's craft.

Good luck,
DeeDee

Sounds like it's not worth getting into a battle over who pays for this. If they never spend extra money, they'll fight you tooth and nail, and it seems that your emotional capital should be spent on getting everyone on the same page about how to help your dd.

My YS10 is also in 5th grade. And like your dd, my son was frustrated that he wasn't learning anything in school-- so much so that he considered it a complete waste of his time. Fortunately, the school team agreed with him after seeing his Explore results. But he declined a skip last year, so we've worked really hard with the school to figure out differentiation for him.

That means that I have found an online math program that would work in school this year. I gave the teacher two options and he researched them, and chose the one most highly endorsed by a math group (can't remember the name of it). DS will do the online lesson once a week in school, and do the homework in class while the rest of the group is getting their math lessons. I had to find the class and ended up paying for it, but it's worth it because the school is fully supportive and my son is excited about it.

The other thing they're doing, which doesn't cost money, and which might work for your dd, is the school is finding him a mentor in a different subject in which he excels. He'll choose a year-long project and work toward that with the mentor. The mentor will work with him weekly or bi-weekly and again, he'll get to do some of the research/work in class. Perhaps you can start reaching out and trying to find a writing mentor for your dd, or find some online classes. Or maybe there's a yearlong writing goal she can be working toward.

Davidson has a great list of online resources for gifted kids somewhere on the site-- that's where I found the online math my son is doing and I think there are LA programs as well.

One other thing you might consider doing is printing some of the articles from Davidson and highlighting some of the ideas for differentiation that make sense to you, and passing them on to your principal. I was lucky enough that our principal has her masters in gifted education, so I didn't have to do any convincing after I showed her his IQ and Explore scores. But I did try very hard to take a "team" approach so that everyone was in line with helping my son.

That said, I know there are principals who are obstructionists. The middle school principal proudly told me she didn't believe in skips (even though this was a gifted middle school), and she was proud of her ignorance in gifted needs. I wouldn't have been able to convince her, so that was another reason my son didn't end up skipping. I'm glad we didn't have to fight that battle yet. And I hope you don't face that.

HTH, Good luck!

I'm curious what your dd would like to see offered - what types of things in language arts/etc would she like to work on? Is it the mechanics of spelling/grammar etc, improving the depth/detail/etc of her written expression, studying other authors, learning about different types/styles of writing etc.

I'm not much help with making recommendations because we're on the other end of the "writing spectrum" (my ds12 has a challenge with written expression)... but I am interested in hearing what others suggest, because my dd10 loves loves loves to write.

I think if you're looking for an online course I'd look into one of the talent search program classes simply because that might carry some weight with the school district. Having an instructor to provide feedback is also very valuable, and I think each of the talent search programs has this with their classes (I can't tell you that for sure, we've only tried CTY online).

I also like the suggestion of asking for a mentor within the school or school district - this could be a person who she meets with only every now and then (could be after school or at lunch once/wk or once/month or whatever), and the mentor can give her guidance plus help her set some goals to use independently while she's working in class.

I also like the idea of having her try to stretch her writing deeper in other subjects - social studies essays etc.

Is your dd's school close to the middle school? Is there an early morning (first period) LA class she could enroll in at the middle school, then return to her regular day at her elementary school? We have kids here who used to do that for upper-level math classes. The parents had to provide transportation.

Another thing that might work is to ask your dd if there are any other kids in her class who are bored during LA (or social studies or history or whatever) and if there are, can you think of a way that a small group could be pulled out during the regular class time to work together on more challenging material? The thing you'll need to do here is figure out how the group would work, and what adult would oversee the group or mentor them (and this is something you could volunteer to do if you had the time - we've had parents do this at our previous elementary school).

Even though my ds has challenges with written expression, he found he was extremely bored in school by the time he was in 5th grade with his other subjects, including the books that were read together as a class. It's not the books themselves that were boring, but the pace at which the class read them was way too slow (and still is even though we've moved him into a more advanced academics situation). We're purposely assigning him high school and college level literature to read for part of his "fun" reading, and he uses that during the daily silent reading time in school. I choose books I read ages ago in school so that I have enough of a memory of them that we can have intellectual discussions about them at home. The cool thing about this is it's fun for me too

Good luck with the meeting!

polarbear

ps - I wouldn't even bother asking for the school to pay for an online class since it sounds like $ are tight as it is, I just doubt that you would get it and it could come across as asking for pie-in-the-sky which doesn't always work well going in the first time to advocate.

My daughter is just in K but language arts seem to be her strength. We're pondering, too, just how to help her and if it's possible or if we should just homeschool. I like a lot of the suggestions above, worth checking into pulling out to an upper grade. People think bc LA is the "same" every year that you shouldn't skip like with math but that's wrongheaded. I've taught gifted high school kids in English class and I had a ninth grader who would have thrived in AP12 not allowed of course.

What do we do with a kindy girl who reads fluently, writes phonetically/messily, and begs to learn oxymoron, cacophony, chiasmus, etc lately? I hope we at least get a real sense of where she really is by going thru school... For now.

I always wanted to be a writer, and I read the entire collection of Zane Grey novels when I was ten (talk about expanding the vocabulary).

We didn't have gifted classes, but the one teacher who "let me run with it" let me create my own book. Back then (4th grade) it was burlap-wrapped cardboard covering about thirty pages of hand-written pages. Now there are apps and software to create free e-books. If she wants to be creative, I'd let her make a book in her own as much as possible. I like the app Book Creator if you have an iPad.

I'd be careful, though, about accepting the "accommodation" of making her write two sentences instead of one. Learning to write succinctly is just as much of a needed skill as any other, and if she always has to write more that wont be something she learns.