Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Still underchallenged?

Let me preface this by saying that DS still seems happy in his 2nd grade class.

However.

2nd grade math seems to consist of addition and subtraction facts to 18. DS already knows multidigit addition and subtraction with regrouping. He knows multiplication and division (although hasn't memorized those facts yet.) DS can count, add and subtract money, make change, tell time to the minute, understand fractions and is currently learning about exponents, roots and prime numbers at home.

Reading is not much better. I was excited to learn that he had taken an Accelerated Reader placement test. But we haven't heard what his AR level is. Yesterday for homework he was assigned a book called "The Big Box" which started out: "The kittens see a big box. It is a big, bad box. Can the kitten hop on top of the big, bad box?" etc. DS self-selects Secrets of Droon and nonfiction books of at least 4th grade level. He can read these aloud to me easily. He told me he asked the teacher if he could read a chapter book instead but that she said he had to read all 20 of the "baby books" (his words) first, and that he could only read one a day. He could read books like that when he was 3. Now he is almost 6... <sigh>

He always seems to know all the words on his spelling list as soon as he gets the list. They are things like: off, this, was (and the challenge words...) puddle, puppy.

Is this a typical 2nd grade curriculum? I guess if he's happy, we'll just continue what we're doing, but part of my motivation for skipping him was to provide some kind of challenge to keep him engaged and hopefully prevent perfectionism and underachievement. I'm not sure this is enough.

Are we living parallel lives on opposite coasts? I could have sworn you were talking about our DS...

JB

I think there may be an administrative issue when it comes to "differentiation" here. Here is the stated district policy.


So even if the teachers want to provide differentiated material, they have to follow the core curriculum first. At least, this seems to be how they interpret this.

I guess the grass isn't any greener over there...

<sigh> Yes Cathy, unfortunately this is typical second grade curriculum. Schools typically do not start multiplication until 3rd grade, and may start the beginnings of division by the end of 3rd.

Your little boy sounds very much like my son, who is now 8. DS understood multiplication and division before kindergarten, and has been reading advanced books since 1st grade. I know how you feel. It is a very hard call on what to do next. You can teach them material at home after school, in order to keep the love of learning alive. But that just makes the gap between what they know and what the other kids know even greater, and leads to increased boredom at school. You can advocate that they be accelerated again, in order to reach more challenging material. But I can say from experience that even with multiply grade skips, the material in the classroom just moves at too slow a pace for these kids.

The only thing that I can suggest from our experience, and this probably depends on the personality of the kid in question, is that our son can handle some non-challenging work at school as long as there is one (or two) areas where he is challenged. For instance, DS does not seem to mind that they just spent maybe 8 weeks reading a book that he read several years ago. Somehow he doesn't get frustrated with primitive reading assignments, as long as he can read more challenging material at home. However, DS has less patience with non-challenging math and science assignments, since they are subjects that he lives and breathes for.

So our compromise has been a whole grade acceleration, and then subject acceleration in math and science. This lets him stay with a good group of social buddies who are about 2 years older than he is for over half of the day in his 4th grade class. I think of this as his base camp. He is then challenged in the two areas that are most important to him by subject acceleration. This strategy seems to be working for the moment. <keeping our collective fingers crossed>. But even being 8 years old and in a 7th grade science class, we find that the pace of the new material is slow. But... it is way better than being stuck back in 4th grade science!

I don't know if this helps, or if the lack of a perfect solution is just plain depressing! But we are making due with a patchwork kludge. Our individual education plan (if we had one) should read, "Copious amounts of duct tape needed!"

But seriously, you described our exact scenario. So we still do a lot of enrichment activities at home. We did just start to work on spelling lists. And of course there is lots of fun math problems (thankfully he's starting to get interested in that again). And of course Biology, his continuing obsession.

And no, he's not academically challenged at school either.



JB

Hi Cathy

I agree with Dotti, you can add to the program. Our DS6 is in a very good gifted school, and he is happy with it. However they are still doing the basic standards. They did move him to higher math, but it still seems easy to me. Just like the spelling words 8 regular and 4 challanging. He could spell all but 2. It only took a couple of trys to get it. They will test on friday, so we will review once on Thursday. The one thing I did notice is that on math, we need to work on speed. Also word knowledge needs to get better. We just started on Droon and on the Merlin series of the magic tree house. He has never been exposed to a number of the words (exp. Solstice)These have given us opportunities to add to his base. We also just started times attack (Thanks JBdad) he loves it. The pressure of time helps to see that although he can do it, it's not intuitive. I guess what I am saying is that even in a very good gifted school we need to add things at home. We make sure that he does have some challange, and we fight the perfectionism. Hopefully the teacher will help you and add to the program.

Thanks, ebeth. Actually, it does help to know that your family has found a way to patch things together. Right now, our school refuses to do subject acceleration due to "scheduling difficulties" but I haven't really pressed them on it. Maybe that's next year's project...

This whole process seems to move plainfully slowly.

Edwin and JBDad, I'm right there with you! At least DS is excited about doing a science fair project this year. He wants to test the pH of some household substances using a homemade (from purple cabbage) indicator solution.

Dottie: I think it is a priceless analogy! More side dishes please! In fact, sometimes a whole meal can be made just from the side dishes! Now there is an educational idea! Throw out the meal plan and just devour the extras.

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.

Descartes' Cove is on our list. We just want to wait until DS is a little bit older.

I agree about the schedule crunch. We feel it too.

JB

Cathy and JBDad, it's really the not wanting to take away from DS's free time that makes me hesitate to afterschool. He barely has enough time to run around the backyard. But I guess I'm defining afterschool as more structured, effortful learning where he would struggle a bit, KWIM? DS challenges himself in many ways - plays chess, piano, sports, reads voraciously, does puzzles, etc. What he's missing is the academic struggle (maybe concentrated effort is a better word than struggle here). E-beth, it's helpful to get your perspective - it certainly is easier to prevent bad habits than to fix them! Do you think your DS would have benefitted from something like online learning or workbooks in 1st or 2nd grade? Can anyone see any negatives of doing a workbook or online learning once or twice/week if the kid would rather be kicking a ball around?

Well, this doesn't really apply to your DS, but there IS an obesity epidemic in this country. I must admit, if given a choice between sending my kids into the backyard for some exercise and sitting with a workbook, I'm pretty much always going to pick the yard!

Then again, it really doesn't have to take much time. Maybe think of brain-challenging games or conversations that take 5 minutes instead of giving him workbooks? That way it's family time (and fun) and not just MORE work.

Though maybe he already gets that with what he's doing now...

Hmmm...

That's a good idea, Kriston -- ds6 loves math games. They're learning ordered pairs at school and they sent home a "game" to play -- a big 6x6 line grid. We rolled the dice and used the numbers as our ordered pair, and graphed it. First player with three dots in a row won.

It really nailed the idea home, and ds loved it -- even though I won both times we played.

Games like that can be really mathy, and really fun. We just got a dice game at Barnes and Noble that included two 12-sided dice and three regular six-sided dice. You roll the 12 sided dice and multiply to get a "target number." Then you roll the 3 regular dice and try to get as close to the target number as you can with those numbers, using addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, exponents, etc. It's a lot of fun; ds really likes it.

So that lengthy intro was to say I agree! There are lots of fun ways to afterschool without making it a chore.

Another option is to work the afterschooling into your nightly schedule -- 15-20 minutes after dinner/bath is really all it takes to spread those little minds. We've taken to doing ds6's homework and playing a mathy game (Yahtzee or a "tricky math" worksheet or Timez Attack) between shower and bedtime, and it's working out nicely for us.

We're with you on that. DS5.5 had a total tired-induced melt down this evening. Both boys were in bed at 6:30 and asleep by 6:35... And there was no time for anything.

Most of what we do is indeed informal and unstructured. But he's generally learning something new. It's not the same type of thing where we study something and then take a test. During the weekends when we have more time we might do something a little more structured like read from a geometry book or biology book. Before school started it seemed like we had TONS of time to do this. Now we barely have any time at all.

I know this will change though. He is only 5 1/2 and he's never fit that "doesn't sleep much" GT type. Quite the opposite. So we don't get as much outside time as we did during the summer. He does get gym and recess at school and we usually play a lot outside during weekends. Probably about the best we can do.

No worries on obesity with my kids though... I was skinny as a bean pole until I was about 25 and it looks like they have my genes on that one. Pretty sure they got their brains from their mom tho

JB

LOL JB my DS5 is the same. He needs his sleep so we get very little time after school compared to when DS8 was the same age and need 2hrs less sleep each night.

I to prefer to head outdoors when possible so our more formal stuff picks up in winter when it's dark outside. Mostly more organized read alouds where we discuss the book etc as opposed to a quick story before bed.

Mia..........nice.........aren't you glad you made the switch.

DOK!

'Neato -- ummm ... YES. I can't say enough about this school (private gifted). He's having to *think* to do his homework! I love it!

I know it's not for everyone, but it's honestly been a godsend for ds6, since his public school wasn't inclined to do any differentiation anytime soon. He loves going every day. He comes home happy and tired (in a good way) and thinking new thoughts.

Yes, I'm glad we bit the bullet and made the switch!