Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments School Options - Middle School Years

Hi everyone,

I'm not sure what to do and I'm hoping others here may be able to help provide suggestions or guidance. My daughter is turning 12 at the end of this month and is currently in 7th grade. We are beginning to realize (as Grinity prophesized awhile back) that she might be a lot more gifted than we thought she was. I always thought she was MG, but she seems to really be coming in to her own lately and needing a lot more challenge than her honor's 7th grade program can provide.

She is very talented in the dramatic arts, and her strongest subjects are probably Language Arts and Social Studies. She is currently in public school in the honors program.

She's in pre-algebra this year, but bored out of her mind - they started in early August and are still doing review. I'm not even sure how this is considered honors level. I believe she could do algebra pretty easily this year if they would let her take the class but the counselor has said absolutely no skipping EVER.

Her social studies teacher just informed them that the principal has asked for less homework and focus on social studies so the students would have more time to work on English and math. Before this edict, she was getting one homework assignment a week from social studies which consisted of about 5 very easy questions that could be answered mostly by just skimming for the bolded terms in her textbook.

English is about the only subject that is even remotely challenging. The teacher does a good job of assigning thought provoking reading material, but he rarely has time to have conversations about the text with the class and, when they do, most of the other students can't keep up with the discussion.

I don't know what's going on with science - she never gets any work home and she doesn't really talk about the class very much - but the subject matter doesn't seem very challenging for her.

We can't afford the on-going cost of private school. We can afford lessons outside the home though - she will be taking dance lessons once a week as her birthday gift this year. And we can probably afford one or two more types of external lessons like that.

There don't seem to be any charter schools close enough to us that would serve her needs. There is one that's 30-45 minutes away, but that's a tremendous amount of driving every day for a mom with a full-time job and a baby at home.

There is a local high school that she can go to for 9th grade which seems a much better fit for her, but I'm afraid of her losing any type of passion she has for school before then - since she still has almost 2 years to go.

I work from home and my husband stays home with the baby, so we can do homeschool, but she has a hard time staying on task. It is possible this is because she's so bored with the work now, so the problem may not be as big of a deal if she had more challenge. I'm open to developing an environment that works with her learning style - it doesn't need to be traditional curriculum - but I just don't know where to start if we go down this route.

She is concerned about not being able to meet the challenge and potentially feeling bad about herself if she fails at first. This is not just with curriculum that we might control if we homeschool her, but also with lessons that she may get outside of the house - the drama and choir classes seem to be at a level of skill way beyond what she has access to in her current school.

And we are concerned about her shutting down and not trying to do anything and not fighting for what she wants if things do seem too hard at first. She has done this in the past, for even small things, and it's very hard to get her to break out of this.

Ideas?

We are using CTY for math. That gives you something in addition to what she does at school and she can keep at her own pace. If she does that and gets credit, she could skip grades when she gets to high school. And you can try and create a science project. Are you near a museum that may have a program? Dd is in a great science program at the museum.

So much is online that she could do as projects and hand in. The teachers might respond if she does these things and hands them in.

Ren

There are some really good history/social studies books/on-line resources, which might be useful if she really enjoys this subject (combine reading and social studies)... Also, would an independent study work with her school? This helped a lot for some of DC19's classes in high school.

Hi Adhoc,
Great to see you posting again. I'm glad you found work that allows you to work from home and I hope that continues to work out.

From your first thread:

It seems like supplimenting with afterschool enrichment would be a great way to let her use school time for socialization and grow up a bit.

Folks tend to like:
Online G3Online G3 offers accelerated and engaging online humanities classes for gifted students. As a mother of a gifted child, the founder of Guinevere's Gifted ...
www.onlineg3.com/

and
http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Store/viewitem.php?item=intro:algebra
They have online classes too, but that would probably be too big a leap. If there is an Adult in your household who can teach from the book I would try that first, and then use the online class as a way to check that the information is 'really in there.'

I'm sad to hear that there isn't much learning going on in school, but happy to hear that 9th grade has more promise. Good luck!
Grinity

Thank you all for your responses and suggestions.

I had a much longer response written earlier, but IE crashed and I can't bring myself to write it all out again.

In short - I guess for next steps we will be meeting with teachers to see what the school can do for her, though I'm concerned based on feedback received already that it probably won't be much.

I'm not quite sure that after school supplementation works for her because if nothing changes in school, it's basically 6 hours a day of socialization, with futile homework, and then the extra work we'll be assigning her. It may work better if the teachers are able to provide more challenging instruction for her.

I do like the idea of independent study though and will be bringing that up with her counselor. They don't seem to be open to alternative options there, but there's always hope.

I think we can use the resources you all have provided for whatever solution we go with.

Does anyone have suggestions for other social studies programs? I went out to G3, but the website seems to have a lot of issues and I couldn't log in as a guest to see the samples. I'll be contacting them tomorrow to try to get that information. At the moment, I'm thinking that in-depth library books on specific events or time periods may be the better way to go.

My son is 12 and has always liked social studies. We use The Checklist by Cindy Downes in our homeschooling because my son doesn't like being tied down to studying one period of history and the checklist allows him to keep track of what he has studied. For each period of history there is a list of major events, people, places, terms, and discoveries/accomplishments to look up. He usually uses Wikipedia first and follows all of the convenient links so that he learns even more than just the original thing he was looking up. He also reads biographies and historical fiction and plays role playing video games set in the time period he is studying and looks up every unfamiliar word that he comes across so he continually adds to his vocabulary. It works really well for him.

That's a great suggestion - thanks!