Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Horizontal diversification

Since I accelerated, I have been a big fan. But lately, after reading the posts, I am starting to think of horizontal diversification rather than vertical acceleration.

Thinking of the Chinese model where they learn a lot, I thought if she learns quickly, why not more of different things?

I have written that she is going to take Mandarin this fall. She already takes piano, ballet, gymnastics. I missed the Science & Nature program at the museum this year, but there are many programs I am committing to for science. So she can read and spell and do math beyond the K curriculum, but she is a young K already with a 9/28 birthday so why not expand the breath?

Yes, it is nice to have intellectual peers, but there are bound to be some in the circle.

Comments, opinions?

Ren

I totally agree. This has served us well for seven grades so far. There are so many subjects and fun things to learn out there.

That's pretty much how we have approached homeschooling so far. There is so much to learn out there and unless the kid is really dying to move faster (and some are- I think that I might have actually finished college if I had been allowed to start at 15), I think deeper is a great way to go. It's not possible in every situation or with every kid, but I think if you can get the right combination of the two, it's a valid alternative to radical acceleration. The only subject we really struggled with was math, because it's such a linear subject and Ds7 is so intuitive once a concept is presented, I felt like we were hurtling forward almost out of control. It was hard for me to step back and look for other ways. But once I did, I saw (thanks to a lot of help from this board) that even with math there are other ways to go than up.

I agree as long as long as "horizontal" does not actually mean more of the same work, which is how some schools define the term.
We are happy as long as our DD is learnig something.

Good point about the underchallenge during the 6 hours at school. Though, as for being chauffeur. I got a new bike with a child carrier. I plan to do my exercise as I take her to piano or gymnastics and then home.

During the 6 hours, there is lunch and outside time. Gym, art. I do not see any need for her art to be accelerated...;) But I am now thinking how much she does know, besides the reading and math. Like geography, science.

She was in swim camp and while they were having snack, some guy came to clean one pool. The instructor said that she left the group and went over to see what he was doing and kept asking questions until she was called back for the rest of her lesson. So we will see what happens, if she has problems, they said they will accelerate.

Ren

Yep, I agree that it's highly individual. In two of the gifted books I own, it talks of 2 different gifted programs being required. ONe for the gifted students who like to go deep and slow. The other is for those who need to go fast, forward, and deep. My son was just so burnt out after 7hrs at school (includes bus time), there wasn't much time for anything else since he already had travel soccer 3 days/week. He just wanted to be home and build with LEGOs and then the evening fight over homework would begin.

It really depends on the kid needs to be looked at on the individual level. I know gym and art was so not enough for my DS and specials were only 2x/week with gym 2x/week. Art is not his thing anyhow...it's math, science, history which is a core part of the day spent unhappy.

I'm with Master of None and Kcab - I want this stuff to happen at school. We do things on our own, but DS really does need playtime/downtime, and, as kcab said, 6+ hours of school eats brains! Also, I want to be able to spend our home learning time on things that cannot be learned in school - like how to cook, how to use power tools, how to garden, how to sew.

So what are the magic words? How does one convince a harried teacher to invent ways to sneak in something meaty for the whole class and not just send one kid to the corner with a book? I'm not sure it's possible, what with so much of the curriculum being out of the teacher's control. But could I someday get one teacher to try one project? Hmmm... that might be possible, given the right teacher and the right suggested project, but I'm afraid I'd never be able to make it snowball into the world I envision.

So I continue spinning my wheels....

What about kids that are agressive about their own curriculum? Anybody out there? Has anyone's kid told the teacher they know this, ask more questions than the teacher expects, tells the teacher they are bored?

The teachers told me last year, in preschool Montessori, that DD was telling them she was bored but with Montessori, they found new things for her. K will be different.

Ren

I agree that it's a very individual thing.

On the one hand, K has more play and fine motor skill work and less academic stuff. Grade 1 is pretty focused on academic stuff and so might be a good one to skip, especially for someone who's beyond parts of it already at the start of K anyway.

With our DD, DH and I both realized that skipping K was necessary for her. Her fine motor skills are beyond the K level anyway, and she loves to write. So going straight to first will be a good match for her desire to write and she'll get better at the lowercase letters. I think a problem with NOT skipping can be that the child self-learns stuff that could have been learned in school instead, if it had been presented earlier, via a skip. A lot of our kids will still be ahead after a skip in some areas, but at least most won't be ahead everywhere. If a skip is delayed or doesn't happen, some wind up being too far ahead in every respect and don't learn study skills (or even the concept of needing to study).

I never skipped a grade but spent most of elementary school wishing I had. I enjoyed kindergarten (arts & crafts, stories, etc.) but was bored silly in 1st grade. So K was a good fit for me.

We did a lot of extra stuff with DS9 (sports, afterschooling, trips) when he was in 1st and 2nd grades and wound up feeling tired all the time. Now we try to make most of the extra activities "organic." This is to say that travel time is at a minimum or non-existent (e.g. gymnastics next door to the school). League sports are out, for example. No way am I driving 30 miles to a soccer game on Saturday morning.

As for the aggressiveness about wanting to learn, I haven't met many teachers who go out of their way to help. A couple spring to mind, but the hit-or-miss aspect of it all is frustrating. I told DS9's pre-K teacher that he could read, but she just looked at me blankly. His K teacher was very helpful in that regard, though. The next good one was last year.

Val

Thanks. The posts are very helpful. I guess there is this anxiety. Although I think it is going to be fine. For someone who has done 7 countries in 8 days, I am not worried about being a chauffeur. I only have one and we do live in Manhattan, so I bike 1 mile to Mandarin from school. Two miles to piano (where her ballet is also), but that is 2 blocks from home.

And since I am someone who has gone to London for lunch, I look forward to traveling with her. She was great when we went to Central America last year, excited about seeing Mayan pyramids. So I have 3 trips planned post Christmas.

And since we spend our summers on the beach, she gets great experiences here, like yesterday the neighbors went for a walk on the inlet and found all kinds of stuff, including a sea horse. So she held it etc.

Everything counts. The tennis lessons, the gymnastics. What I am finding is her understanding of the world expanding. And the piano lessons -- as painful as they are for me, since I must practice with her -- is so valuable to teach her perseverance. Everyone knows how easily things come to these kids. There are times where she is so determined but also times, she dismisses when it is difficult.

Strange the comments about K is mostly play. Here, kids must be reading at the end of K, or there is a request to send them to remedical reading in the summer. This was an Upper West side public school my friend's daughter went to and she had to take the summer reading. We are in NJ for the summer and they have 10/1 cut-off and parents are holding back kids with summer birthdays because they think K is like grade 1 and their kids are not ready. I cannot imagine holding DD back, even if ND. In NYS you cannot for public school. You start late, you go to grade 1 and catch up, expecting you went to preschool when you were suppose to go to K.

So I am willing to be chauffeur, I am willing to travel everywhere and plan trips to the Liberty Science Center on Saturday mornings. And practice piano with her every day. We used to have date night but that made me too tired, since I still had to get up the next morning. So now we all go to the Harvard club on Friday nights to go dancing and have dinner. DD loves it and actually there are a few families for Friday night so it is nice. So no date nights. That is our sacrifice. But we do get them on the cruises, when DD runs to the kids' club after she eats her dinner.

Ren

Thanks for the input Dottie. I was thinking about my own experiences, coasting through HS and not learning to study. But my close childhood friend, very high PG, only had the same grade skip as me, got into music and musical theatre and had great study habits because of strict father. She did take physics in undergrad and nuclear engineering for a doctoral. Was offered all kinds of classified jobs -- she is brilliant. She is happy working for a utility and changes her line of work (within the utility -- they do anything to keep her) every 7 years and is happy. Interesting that I also changed every 7 years from being an equity analyst to derivative trader to strategist. Seven year itch? So is the lesson that you just need to learn to apply yourself and it works out? Thinking back, I think I missed that one. So much came easy, I just didn't learn to "apply myself" when it got harder. I just wanted it always to be easy.

Ren

That was exactly how I was too. Everything came easy when I came across something that was hard I was at a total loss. With most jobs I've had I get bored in about three years except the last one and that one had evolved a lot during my time there.

I want DS5 to appreciate a challenge but so far I see way too much of me in him.

This may be true for NYC but not New York State. People do hold their children back and they go to K a year later. As a matter of fact I sincerely doubt that if you keep your child home for K (outside of NYC), the school will be willing to put the child to the 1st grade without a fight.

Good luck with riding the bike in Manhattan

I recently read an article about parents that spent the summer getting their children "ready" for k. They hired private tutors for reading and math because they didn't want their children to be behind when they enter K. Has K really become that competitive?

I think it varies a lot by region and school. There's a first grade teacher I know and I overheard her telling someone else what kids are expected to know when they enter first grade and she said things like letters and letter sounds, threw me off a bit as DS5 is well past that point going into K.

On another forum I'm on parents say kids are expected to be a reader at the end of kindergarten, it varies so much.

I was very worried about K last year before my daughter started. They sent home a note stating - make sure they know their alphabet. My daughter was already reading! It all worked out ok. The class was divided up into reading levels. My the end of the year they were all reading. The teacher was very creative and added challenges to the class that my daughter responded very well to. She had a wonderful teacher and k experience. I hope this year is just as good.

Yes, my son would have done well to skip K. He was definitely learning 1st grade material on his own at 5yrs old. While I think the pace would have been an issue, it wouldn't have been as bad and likely tolerable.

Did anyone see the article about pre-K testing mania among some parents in NYC? It was mucho depressing and described what I would describe as helicopter hothousing (i.e., this is no ordinary hothousing):



Depressing NYT article

Sorry to say, but for some people, this stuff is all about status and not about learning. It's so-o-o depressing. And of course some of them create problems for other kids who weren't drilled.

Val

I am so happy I was so naive when I applied for Private school for my dd. If I had known what goes on I would probably never even have applied.

Example: Last year our school had an advanced Math class. Whether or not you got into the advanced class was based on the curriculum pre-test taken during the 1st weeks of school. Rumor has it that some parents who were in-the-loop about this used the curriculum maps to drill the benchmarks so they could get placed into this class.

My child did not even make it in with the first group, so I got to over hear the comments about how X could be gifted and Y not be gifted when Y is in the advanced class and X is not.
As if they have any clue how my childs brain works.