Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Homeschooling and pace to go at?

My own belief is that there is no such thing as "college level work," or "high school work," or "junior high" or "elementary" work. Those are arbitrary categories invented in the recent historical past that probably don't fit any children particlarly well.

If it were me, I would teach them as much as they want to learn -- hold nothing back. You don't have to ship them off to college just because they are done with "high school work." They can keep learning more stuff till they're old enough to move away from home, and they'll still be challenged by a good quality college.

I agree, but to get access to that arbitrarily designated college level work, one often must go to college, or at least use a curriculum that considers itself to be college-level.

Categories exist because people categorize things. That includes the people who create homeschooling materials.

BTW, I was not grade-accelerated in school, and I still found my first year of classes at a well-respected liberal arts college to be almost completely review. And that's after I tested out of most of the freshman course load, so even the sophomore stuff was pretty basic for me. I'm not entirely convinced that a kid will be challenged at college if he gets way ahead.

The best thing would be that a student could take more college classes, I think. I would have loved to have taken more courses than I got to take in college!

On this topic, has anyone heard of Cal's Early College High School program?? It comes from a Gates foundation. The description doesn't talk about gifted children, but at first read, it sounds like an interesting option for GT too!

http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/gs/hs/echsgen.asp

Early College High School
The California Department of Education partners with the Chancellor's Office for the California Community Colleges to support the Early College High School (ECHS) Initiative of the Foundation for California Community Colleges.

Early College High Schools are small, autonomous schools that blend high school and college into a coherent educational program:

They are designed so that all students can achieve two years of college credit at the same time they are earning a high school diploma (within four to five years of entering ninth grade).
Students start college work based on their performance.
By reaching out to middle schools or starting with the seventh grade and providing extensive support, Early College High Schools ensure that all students are ready for college-level courses in high school.
Early College High Schools are designed for young people who are underrepresented in postsecondary education, including: students who have not had access to the academic preparation needed to meet college readiness standards, students for whom the cost of college is prohibitive, students of color, first generation college-goers, and English language learners.

Early College High Schools serve the developmental

They just started a program here that allows kids entering 11th grade to test into a program in which they go to the CC for their final two years of high school.

This is common here and the cost is covered. We'll probably need to make that leap sooner, but definitely looking forward to possibly 2 years tuition free!

Hi everyone, thank you SO much for all your comments. We really appreciate it.

In terms of college material, we were not thinking of sending child away early, though on certain days that has crossed our mind and if child were to work/study, it would be online or locally, etc.

We were kind of thinking like Kriston and passthepotatoes, that even if we went deep and wide, there is only so much deep and wide when the material obviously will be above grade level, eventually. And no matter how deep and wide, once a certain section is covered, it has been covered. We are thinking of doing a lot of other things that wouldn't normally have been possible in a regular classroom, ...

It seems true that much needs to be classified to determine "what grade level" a student is at. We feel a sense of restriction but also that we have to still "play" partially with the system so that when High School/College courses begin to appear we can confidently say to an administrator that we have or have not done something. (Future proofing, I suppose...)

Also, being able to give the child the opportunity to work at the edge of what they know will finally allow the student to develop perseverance, learn to manage their own frustration, learn about hard work, organizational skills, learn about what they themselves are capable of ... and this, for us (at least now, in our ideal state of mind) is what we're hoping for.

We (hubby and I) really thank you for taking the time to comment. I am sure we will return to this thread often ... As I think more about this in the next little while, I will post back here.

Well, I have an eleven year old who will be taking college coursework beginning sometimes when she is twelve.

She began telling anyone who would listen to her that she was going to go to college when she was twelve.... when she was two years old. Now, this might only be moderately alarming... but for us, it's TERRIFYING, since she also has a life-threatening hidden disability that has required a lot of us as parents in terms of management. (Complicated, I know...)

We will have managed to delay her graduation from high school until she's 14, but there's no doubt that this was not what we'd have chosen. We tried NOT to 'start teaching' her too young, in fact... but it was pretty clear that if I didn't teach her some phonics, she was going to go with whole language reading skills instead.

But once she learned how to read, it was like we had lit the fuse on a Saturn V rocket. No way was I ever driving this bus. Ever. She went from phonetically controlled readers to Harry Potter under the covers with a flashlight-- in about ten months-- and never looked back. By the time she was six, she had been reading the daily newspaper for a year.

She is omnibus gifted, which is a definite bonus-- it has allowed her to still be educated via a "school" (she's effectively been accelerated four grades) which means that we don't have (and hopefully won't have) the same issues convincing our local community college to let her enroll at 12. It isn't as though they have to take our word for it. (We got a lot of that kind of push-back when we homeschooled. Maddening.)

As complicated as this makes things, it's also very definitely the right thing-- for her.

My long way of saying this is one that you don't really GET a vote on. Not really. Not with a HG+/PG kid-- they regard anything else as punitive.

Tks for digging this out, howlerkarma. It was good reading.

For us, we don't have a clue about grade level. I just think in terms of topics of interest and we dig as deep as DS8 wants. So subjects are just called by their names- algebra, calculus, whatever. Science is even easier as they're delineated by subject group. DS just goes for it and we hunt down books, information, by topic. I don't/can't do anything at all about direction and rate or depth of learning but I do help with resources (exhausting!).

We have annual grade level exams to hand in as part of the requirement for homeschooling, but I don't envisage this to be an issue. At some stage, ds will have to take the SAT with an online hsld but that's a couple of years away. We'll enjoy ourselves in the meanwhile .

I second the 'thanks for digging this up'. I just reread my old post, we must have been having a really good day LOL! And Blob, I always appreciate your perspective. We don't follow any particular grade around here either. However, today I did go over some of the grade level expectations with DD7 while she was taking a bath!!!! And I wonder why she is so intense.... I periodically do this just to calm myself down because it seems like we haven't been doing much 'school work' lately. To add fuel to my fire, I've been having all of these conversations with adults who insist that their lives would have been better if they had been pushed a little harder by their teachers and parents. I spend so much effort trying not to push that hearing an alternate viewpoint really rocks my world. Needless to say, our pace is slow in areas of low interest!

Is everyone here aware of Academic Earth?

They offer free online streaming videos of college lectures from a number of different institutions. These are a great resource to handle the issue of higher level work for kids who might not be able to keep up with the social, emotional, or organizational demands of enrolling in college courses, but who are ready to absorb the material.

The Open Course Ware project has a huge college course repository as well.