Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy teaching to knowledge gaps before school

Hi - I guess I could have put this in learning environments too...

DD$ is due to start kindy equiv (new entrants) next May. After looking into the curriculum I had to get to year 5 before finding math content she wasn't yet familiar with. In the year 4 level she is familiar and competent with 80% of the work, and about 90% of the year 3 work.

My question is for the next 9 months should I keep going with her interests and let school figure out what level to teach her at, or should I try and fill in those knowledge gaps so that they can facilitate acceleration easier?

I don't want her having to spend years going over the same stuff, but at the same time I'm an un schooler at heart so I don't love the idea of introducing/pressuring topics she's not overly interested in yet.

She is still learning to read so she is not ready to grade skip yet - although even in the last week we have had a knowledge explosion so who knows with that!

Any advice from the BTDTers?

I'd probably steer literacy a bit, myself.

Math is easy enough to differentiate, in our experience, since it is decoupled rather well from everything ELSE in the curriculum.

Literacy skills are a lot of the curriculum otherwise in K through 2, however, and in years 3 and 4, there is a marked transition from "learning to read" into "reading to learn."

I'd be quite concerned that for your DD, "learning to read" is all that she is going to be getting out of her first several years in school, and she may see little POINT in doing so-- if you leave it to the school to do so. Why? well, because you noted that she already knows so much of the material that she's going to be expected to read-to-learn, even, as a 3rd-4th grader.

So in my mind, there IS only one "gap" here that even matters much from a functional standpoint-- literacy skills.

They might entertain acceleration without her knowing what the difference is between a "town" and a "neighborhood" or that plant cells have cell walls and animal cells don't... but not reading fluently is a way to deny acceleration across the board. It might even be a way to deny acceleration in mathematics, given that break from learning-to-read vs. reading-to-learn, and the fact that she's beyond it in math.

So I'd (gently) offer a variety of games/activities that encourage phonemic awareness, offer up some Letter People and Between the Lions on Youtube or the PBS website, etc. Letter hopscotch, rhyming games, you name it-- it's all part of the plan.

Once she learns to read for herself... she can take that tool and learn whatever she fancies with it, YK? That is definitely not a "schooly" kind of thing-- but it will also provide her with some relief in the event that she gets stuck in a classroom where she ISN'T learning anything new, too-- at least (with arrangements) she can probably unobtrusively read as enrichment, anyway.

Are you in NZ? If so can you home school?

Ditto Puffin. If you are an unschooler at heart - why not go with that?
It would perhaps be much harder to acclimatise yourself to having her in a schooling environment - especially if you have issues from the outset with needing curriculum adjustments and having to do major advocacy.

If you'll definitely be sending her to school, then yes, I'd seek out and fill the maths gaps so as to be able to tell a nice simple story, eg "she can do all the maths up to grade n, provided someone reads her the questions". But the reading is likely to be a block to even subject acceleration, in practice.

Hi all - just to put it out there - DH is 100% NOT on board with homeschooling at the outset. Of course this may change if the situation requires but we do have access to reasonably good education options if we can work out how to approach it.... He has concerns about the "social" aspects of it all - and he is unwilling to do any/read any research, meet anyone or be open minded about it at all. Not a battle I'm going to win. However if things go pear shaped at school, I know he'd be open to the idea of it, then.

Also DD is desperate to go to school, while personally I think she is in for a rude shock she does need to experience it first hand or we'll never get any peace! Personally I have very negative feelings towards school, some of which may not be entirely rational, so I'm prepared to wait until proven right on this.

HK - you are dead on with the literacy, we are having the difficulty that seems quite common of her not wanting to to push herself because it's "too hard" mind you she knows all her letters, can write legibly if copying and can sound out words like Scotland, popcorn etc. She just doesn't seem willing/able to make the jump to fluent reading. She is gifted visual spacially and auditorily (is that a word) so we can try lots of approaches but she is def a do it myself girl and doesn't want any input from me. She currently does reading eggs, and does quite well with it, but as soon as she has a book in her hands she doesn't want to know.

Being as she's 4 I'm aware that I can leave it, and I am really worried that pressuring her will turn her off reading, however I do see the importance of getting her up to speed.

As I said in my OP she is currently having a major leap in her knowledge so I'm hoping the literacy will come too. She's such a perfectionist!

Sorry should add that she can't read CVC words fluently, despite being able to sound out larger harder words

Mahagogo5, this really resonated with me so I wanted to give you some hope. Dd4.8 was exactly here 4-6 months ago. 3+ years ahead in math, able to spell and read long words but struggling with simple Cvc words. When I went for k screening at public school, they used her non-reading as an excuse for not being able to provide any acceleration in math. I, like you, was at a loss on how to bring her reading to at least end of k level. Fast forward now, dd is fluently reading beginning of second grade level. I wish I could tell you exactly how it happened and what I did. Alas, it just happened on its own. She went from a struggling, disinterested reader to a fluent one in a matter of weeks, increasing her difficulty level on her own. You might find yourself in the same situation in a couple of months or maybe even sooner since you mention the cognitive growth spurt. All the best with your decision.

That's just about how my DD learns too.

I really don't understand how it works but some children seem to have an internal compass when it comes to learning and if you interfere, they might withdraw and refuse to do anything for a long time. I don't want DD to believe that she can dictate her own learning across the board so it's been a fine balancing act. Outsourcing has made a difference for us. You don't want this to turn into Mom vs Child power struggle. I'd keep it fun and game-based as HM has suggested and provide her with many opportunities to choose her own materials but maybe you can also sneak in a few books that you think are at her practice level.

DD's piano teacher has 40+ years of teaching experience and she also teaches piano at a GT school so she's used to children who learn at a lightening speed. DD already has had 8+ months of private music lessons but she started DD at the very basic level, filling whatever gaps quickly. DD's done with Book A and moving onto Book B but the teacher decided today that DD can do the next level at the same time so when they are done covering the basics, DD would be ready to take off. Her teachers' words are "There is no point in holding her back or making her go through similar materials for repetition. We'll move at her speed." If only all elementary school teachers shared this point of view.

I never thought about compacting curriculum and filling the gaps simultaneously but DD was even more lively today than she has been during the last few lessons. DD has math gaps all over the place and for now, that's fine but when it comes to start filling those gaps, I'm going to see if I can use this approach.

Thankyou so much for this - it fits with her personality, I guess I'm still at the stage where I'm struggling to see how it can be possible to learn something so complex without any help! I think I'll keep you as my hope and try the other suggestions as a backup

The only explanation I have based on observing dd is that some kids have such good vocabulary and such amazing predictive power and just know so much, that they anticipate what is going to happen in any book, fiction and non-fiction. I say this because when dd is reading aloud, she will add words to a sentence to make it read better and then stop and realize those words are not on paper. This is also why even now if she can sometimes struggle with a simple word like 'but' but read butterflies every time with no problem. I don't believe dd is using the standard word decoding skills because no one has taught her that. Hopefully, when they do teach those skills at school,it will help dd become an even stronger reader.

Our DS went through a very similar stage with reading at about that age, maybe closer to age 5. I remember writing my mother (a former teacher) and saying I was really worried... she said to wait and not to worry. He suddenly started reading a short time later and was through all the appropriate chapter books in our town library (or the ones that interested him, at least) before he was six. There's something different in how he learned to read, although he knew some phonics, he didn't seem to need or respond to practicing that approach. My mom (definitely HG at least, probably PG) said her family said she herself suddenly started reading at about age four or five (after having been read to extensively but not "taught" to read).

Reading a language you can already understand is less complex to learn than understanding a language in the first place, if you think about it, and we assume children will learn that without being explicitly taught! I think DS learned to read by first memorising stories and then code-cracking against the written text.

I think that is what DD did, too-- and then kind of forcing the issue with the ONE thing that she didn't yet have-- actually blending-with-decoding-out-loud-- was the key. That was ALL that she needed to be explicitly "taught."

She learned to "read" in less than two weeks. But I have no idea how different things would have been if we hadn't pushed just that little bit. And make no mistake-- her personality was such that she howled a bit about it being "harrrrrrd" for the first couple of fifteen minute sessions with the phonemically-controlled readers. But once she figured out that we weren't budging, and that the easiest route forward was just just buckle down and do what we asked... well. Like I said-- this took two weeks. And when I say "two weeks" what I mean by that is that we had the first set of what were effectively a lot like BOB books (but snarkier, and in full color-- the first one was "Bug in a Rug" or some such thing), and we insisted that she work with a parent for about fifteen minutes every couple of days or so. Once she demonstrated that she COULD decode using what she already knew (which was... um... pretty much all of the phoneme stuff that is taught in K-2), we let her be.

Within a month, she was reading basic chapter books like Cam Jansen.

Within six months, she was sneaking Harry Potter into her room at night with a flashlight.

Honestly, this was a matter of ME trusting what my gut was telling me, and I wish that I'd done it years sooner. She was missing that ONE piece. Just the one-- because when you think about how kids learn language, they SEE the process all around them, and can hear how it works. But reading? Well, adults don't spend any time demonstrating decoding skills orally, if that makes sense.

Once she had that key in her hands, the entire WORLD opened up in front of her. It was amazing-- and it was the first time that I truly understood just how different she actually is from NT.

Thanks HK my gut is telling me the same thing, she finds everything else just soooo easy. I might try that for a few weeks. If there's no progress I'll drop it for a while

Thank you all for the encouragement and great examples of your own kids doing the same thing. I was wondering what I was missing. Sounds like it happens quite a but for these kids.

Less complex in some abstract sense doesn't neccessarily mean anything about how actual brains do it. Babies and young children are pretty much hard-wired to seek and acquire the structures of natural language, and that doesn't translate to other systems with different characteristics.

Here's an interesting case in point: Little kids will naturally acquire a signed language that they are exposed to (by fluent signers, I'm not talking about parents who do "baby sign"), because it shares the structural characteristics of spoken language; but they do not acquire "signed English" as a natural language, because it is awkward and artificial and the pacing is all wrong. They can learn to do it, but it is more of an explicit learning task, like learning to do math, than it is like natural language acquisition.

Learning to read is in this category too. For most kids. Don't forget we have an extremely biased sample here on this board!

Like others here have posted, IMO, the focus should be on literacy.

Its absence almost certainly WILL be used to deny advanced placements.

Fasten your seat belt, though!

Learning to read is (was for my DD and I, at least) the fundamental bootstrap loader for pretty well everything else learned subsequently. Once your child gets it their ability to move forward hits rocket like acceleration (remember the seat belt).

For my DD her memory and abilities to glean context from the accompanying pictures and other cues allowed her to fool us into thinking that she could read earlier than she actually could. She was that good. LOL.

She had could sight read a lot of individual words and knew her 'letter sounds' but she needed a push to sound out the letters to pronounce the actual words. It took a very intense (for the both of us) 2 hour session one Saturday morning when she was about 6 or so when I gave her an entirely novel book and was horrified to learn that she couldn't read it.

I spent the time during those 2 hours to get her to sound out the words based on latter sounds and also the basic 'combination letter sounds' like 'st', 'th', 'ou' etc as we encountered them in the book. I felt like Dr Mengele and pushed through the tears to the sunlight and rainbows on the other side. Whole universes of knowledge now lay at her feet!

Within weeks she was tearing through Harry Potter, the Magic Treehouse, Geronimo Stilton and books on Egyptology, Astronomy etc with joy. The rapidity with which she cannoned through books was stunning.

I had been taught the same way by a relative myself as a kid with similar results (my story was a bit more complicated in that I actually learned and then forgot how to read but relearned it this way).

I thought that I had cracked the code to being the Uber Teacher until later I discovered that my DD was DYS material and that the talent was hers not mine LOL.

LOL that Madeinuk was Teacher of the Year for a split second.

I was trying to teach my ds at 4 because he was upset that he was the only one in the family that couldn't read. I had been a special ed teacher before kids so had tons of materials. I was amazed that he could do multiple lessons in one day and was wearing me out wanting to keep going and going and going. Finally, I told him the max number of lessons per day that was my limit and he took the book from me and stomped off to the side and sat down and finished the whole book on his own. I have often said he taught himself to read that day. But now I wonder if he already knew mostly how to read and just needed to get over that last hump and for him to know that he was a reader and for others to recognize it too.

I also want to reiterate the point above-- when DYS-level kids learn to really read fluently-- to decode completely on their own, that is?

They transition almost instantly into reading-to-learn. They "get" what reading is "good for" all right. They KNOW that the entire world is their oyster.

Whooooooo boy-- you only THOUGHT that they learned fast before that moment. Afterwards, they are truly alien/superhuman. DD has leveraged that reading ability (and speed-- heavens, her SPEED) to basically have the research skills of a lawyer. She's formidable when it comes to backing her arguments with data and statistics, and has been since she was six or seven.