Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Still underchallenged?

Sorry to hear about the 'scheduling difficulties'. And yes, it is a painfully slow process. Just keep in mind how long it takes most biological species to adapt to new situations. <eons!> Then the slow pace of educational administrator's adaptations seem more reasonable!

Is this documented on a web site somewhere? Our DS might be interested in that!

JB

We did it with a homeschool group. The house smells pretty yucky while the cabbage boils, but it is a GREAT experiment.

We also did a solubility experiment at roughly the same time (age 6y4mo or so), and it was a hit with both DS6 and DS3. I let them pick what they wanted from the kitchen and we hypothesized if it would dissolve in water or not. If I had it to do over, I'd add other solvents, too, but it was my first official science experiment using science terminology and everything, so I was pretty pleased with how it turned out.

Fun!

Hi JB. We saw it on a science video from the library once. You might try this web site.

http://chemistry.about.com/library/weekly/aa012803a.htm

or this one:
http://www.madsci.org/experiments/archive/859332497.Ch.html

Must have been ... very beginning of this year ... I know it was pre-post-GT denial we'd do experiments measuring the time it took ice to melt and measuring the water temperature. It was great fun! Charting, scientific method, phase changes. Good stuff.

Some what of a tangent discussion. But something we do to keep DS x 2 engaged.

JB

OT: For the cabbage experiment, you can also purchase this from Steve Spangler Science if you don't want to boil the cabbage!

Cathy,
Like JBdad, I could have written exactly the same thing about DS6. To the T! Just to remind you, DS is also in 2nd after a 1st grade skip. And, yup, kill and drill single digit addition for us too. He gets all the spelling words correct on the first try. Like your DS, mine also seems fine with everything. The good news is the teacher adores him and she does emphasize lots of creative writing, which can always be challenging. Apparently, he participates actively in class discussions. But he is nowhere near to working to his capabilities, especially in math. He is conceptually beyond arithmetic and the teacher is pretty adamant that he is sufficiently challenged overall and doesn't want to do any more. The fact that this teacher likes DS so much makes it harder to advocate - I really want her to keep a positive feeling towards DH and if I push, he may end up with some differentiation but will it be at the expense of the relationship with the teacher, KWIM?

I'm starting to entertain the idea of afterschooling maybe once/week...but I have mixed feelings about it. I'm not really seeing any "red flags" that he's bored out of his mind and he does tend to challenge himself in his free time.

Jool: The only thing that I will add to your above comment is that, on occasion, kids who find math easy sometimes stop paying attention to the particular details needed to complete the problem accurately. My DS, who was also fine with doing simple addition in 1st and 2nd grade even though he knew multiplication, etc., was use to being able to breeze through math problems with barely a glance at the sheet. Homework took at most a minute to do after school. He could literally speed read the entire sheet and just right in all of the numbers at once.

I think this developed some bad habits, that we are now beginning to see in 4th grade. He continues to speed read through problems, even though the problems are getting slightly more complex. This leads to sloppy errors in calculations for problems that he could do in his sleep. Actually, I see this in other areas besides just math. He is so used to floating through unchallenged that he pays very little attention to details on most assignments. Why should he? He has been able to get the right answer on almost all assignments with very little effort.

If I could go back and do it all over again <wishful daydream>, I would try to make sure that he was more challenged in K, 1st, and 2nd so that these habits did not occur. Cathy and Jool... you are both in a much better position than I am, since your grade skip occurred earlier. But you may still need to watch out for the same effect.

Here is what our afterschooling involves for us: it very low pressure, generally dinner-time discussion of something that DS5.5 or 2.5 finds interesting. That could be talking about cell division (nice way to get back into exponents), it could be talking politics (DS2.5 lights up anytime he hears Obama or McCain mentioned on NPR), doing an experiment to see how long ice takes to melt, or whatever. You get the idea. During the school week, this probably only happens half the time because DS5.5 is pretty exhausted.

The other thing that we do from time to time is bath crayons. I know that this could come out sounding like hot housing, but really when we do math or biology in the bathtub, it's usually cited as DS's favorite part of the day (part of our night time ritual is to name the favorite and sad parts of the day). Using bath crayons in the tub after getting washed up lets us do all kinds of crazy things... borrowing, carry over, diagrams of the kidneys,

During the weekends we do try to do something educational. We're lucky that we're in an area with a bit of history and near NYC and Baltimore. Since that does take time time, money, and planning, there are plenty of weekends where we just chill. We make available workbooks for 2nd and 3rd grade that DS just likes to do on his own from time to time. And we DVR educational TV like CyberChase and Between the Lions.

That's most of the extra-circuluar activities we do... (except for some other things in biology which I consider a special project of DS's.)

Jool, what are the mixed feelings that you are having?

JB

Yes, we do afterschooling, too. I have DS read to me at his challenge level every day and practice math facts. He does his Singapore math books, Flashmaster and HWT while we wait for DD to do her gymnastics class on Tues. and Thurs. We also do Descartes' Cove together on weekends. DS also has Taekwondo, swimming and now Cub Scouts.

Plus, of course, there are the endless questions (this morning he wanted to know all about sledgehammers!? )

I can't really fit anything more in. I don't want to take away from his free play time.