Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Genius Denied

I caught my 7 yo reading Genius Denied last week.

She wrote her principal an advocacy letter yesterday. The kid is dangerous.

The power of information

Love your daughter's gumption!!

ROFL. I love it. You go girl.

The kid is AWESOME! Genius UNdenied!

Her school is k-12. There are 2 libraries, one for k-gr 5, and a middle/high school one. She is going to allowed to go to the upper school library for non-fiction books for her classroom work.

Also she is going to get more guidance about what she could read for pleasure out of the lower school library that is "harder" than the 5th grade-ish stuff she has found on her own. (She'll be 8 and in 3rd next year. I'm guessing this is a sign that her library access will continue to be fluid as she progresses through elementary school.)

She is going to get a harder spelling list asap - her class has differentiated spelling lists but she has asked for a 4th grade list.

The principal told her that reading groups were going to be done differently next year.

Her two best friends are in her spelling and reading groups. Her letter stated that she needs harder work, but doesn't want to hurt their feelings and feels stuck. The principal emailed her back within hours on a Saturday. So I think its going to be okay.

I'm so relieved. The school recently asked us to get a 2nd neuropsych eval done because they couldn't figure out how to help her. We had done one last year, and had gotten her many appropriate accommodations. But we didn't want to retest her and were feeling wary about sending her back to school next year. Clearly we all just needed to ask her what to do.

Thanks for reading.

It's encouraging that the principal was quick to respond. I was reading Daniel Pink's Drive yesterday and there was a passage on grit that made me think of your DD's letter. Grit is defined as "perseverance and passion for long term goals...in every field, grit may be as essential as talent to high accomplishment." Sounds like she's got it in spades.

When I was in elementary school, we had one library, but we were limited from K-3 to the "little kids" books, and we could only check out chapter books once we reached 4th grade (wow... now that I think about it, that would have been a DISASTER for both of my kids, and may help explain the lousy education system in my home town...). I was itching for chapter books by the end of first grade. I reached a compromise with the librarian that I could go to library during recess once a week to check out books from the big kids section. Don't recall that my parents even got involved... just saying that maybe your D could ask for an arrangement where she does something like this, goes at recess time once a week and is also allowed to check out fiction. Since it is K-12, maybe the librarians could also just have to okay what she checks out for appropriateness.