Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy advocating for Math acceleration for 4th grader

FWIW, in our district they use 85%, with the understanding that parents/teachers would also look to see if the questions missed showed a gap where the student needed to be caught up before moving forward or if these were just random errors.

Whether a kid is at 80% mastery or 85%, it has been helpful to look for gaps (which can be quickly covered) and then allow him to move forward. In our district, they have given multiple year-end tests at once, to place students. (If he gets > 85% on 4th, they would also give 5th.)

Good luck!

Well, I guess all of my concerns were unfounded thus far. I just heard that DS scored 100% on 4th Gr. end of year test. We have a meeting this week to see where we go from here??

I would hope that includes testing for 5th grade. He seem to have hit the ceiling on their current tests.

Thank you to everyone for their advice...

Thanks for sharing the great news of your child's perfect score.

You may wish to begin a bit of meeting prep, for potential future advocacy.
- Make sure your family is of one mind
- Plan to take notes at your upcoming meeting
- Don't be rushed or pressured into making a decision
- After the meeting send a recap, summary, or letter of understanding, including next steps
- etc...

Congratulations on the testing going well. This situation reminds me of another recent post. If you're 3-4 years ahead of the math sequence, is a 1 or 2 year math acceleration really going to make things much better? I think you're going to find that its still review and that you're still after-schooling. Further, if AOPS is working well, I don't think you'll be able to find a comparable experience in the school system even if you were bold, they were willing and your son was advanced to a class actually at his level. (You're going to probably need Algebra by some time next year based on your posts)

This is a really tough problem but I'd think about more out of the box solutions for the long run. Maybe Math is never going happen in the school, can you find peers in the area, are there extra curricular programs that might work.

Good luck

That's the way I felt about my kid when he was a second grader who really needed 6th grade and beyond language arts instruction. What was a one grade skip or acceleration really going to do for him? And there really is great literature in the 3rd to 5th grade leve that he shouldn't skip over. So I never really pushed much about his language arts needing to be accelerated and just asked for them to really try hard to differentiate and one skip with differentiation worked through elementary. In middle, we had to add another accelleration of two grades (had to get him out of the middle school language arts curriculum altogether) to get to tolerable for him. College level would be the ideal intellectually....but I feel he needs a bit more time for life experience, maturity, and writing experience.

Sometimes there just is too big of a need to even wrap your head around a possible solution and just do the best you can.

Yes, with those results, I would also want to know how far ahead my child was with the 5th and 6th grade tests.

As others are pointing out, if you do find that your DS is several grades ahead, there is this idea that acceleration isn't going to help. I will say that a one year skip *did* help my child in the short term. It definitely made school more interesting and liveable that year. After a year, we could tell that we needed another skip, and after that, we needed another school.

DS just finished 4th and he says the teacher told him they are having him skip another year and he will be doing 9th grade math for high school credit next year. I don't think they have a plan for how this is going to work, but they somehow come up with something each year in the fall. I just wish I would be informed of what they are doing. I don't know why schools are always so worried about the social aspect, like kids are not going to be able to handle it. It's just one class. DS has done just fine in that regard even though he is awkward, and the kids were up to 3 years older.

It depends. If the 9th grade class is an honors class probably not. If it's a regular class it could be a problem. I think honors kids are more accepting of younger kids.

I don't think they'd actually put him with 9th graders, but with other kids that are accelerated. There wouldn't be anyone as young as him, I'm guessing most would be 2 years older. They may also have the middle school teacher come to the elementary and teach him individually.

Our high school and Grade school are different districts. You wouldn't get high school credit unless they attended class at the high school.