I'm not really looking for advice, just had no where else to mention it. DD, just 6, has been spending time at a holiday program. Normally she does a holiday program for gifted kids, but for various reasons these holidays (it's our long summer holidays here) she has been attending a garden variety program a couple of days a week.
Each day when I pick her up I find she has spent the day playing with the grade 5 and 6 kids there (public schools here a K-6 and 7-12 as a rule). They're different kids each day because, like dd, not every one attends every day.
I find this wonderful on the one hand, and extraordinarily sad on the other. As the school year here finished I was left wondering how gifted dd actually was. She did well at school but they were telling me she was in the right placement, grade skipped one year. I was not so sure, but certainly her school work showed this to be the case. I thought maybe we'd have a quiet year ahead. However, over these holidays she has been devouring adult non-fiction, picked up some grade 5 maths questions that she found so easy they were 'boring' and, now, is choosing to spend her time with kids 5 or more years older than she is, who seem to be accepting of her. So perhaps it wont be such a quiet year after all.
DD6 was in a gymnastics class when she was 5 that had one 11yo starting out. The 11yo was the only one who socialized with DD, and vice-versa.
I always like to recommend compacting the curriculum instead of skipping grades in math.
How do you do compacting? Is it just letting the kid work ahead in the book until they're ready to move on to the next one?
Compacting is typically done by pretesting the material and only teaching what hasn't already been mastered, and by requiring less practice before re-testing mastery on topics that are taught.
Thanks for your thoughts. Sigh... I wish we could subject accelerate or compact in maths, the problem we have at the moment is that the school doesn't get a chance to see what she can do in math. She worries about her computation and so if someone asks her something simple she panics and spurts out random answers. They've graded her grades ahead with all her conceptual maths stuff, but working mathematically they say is at grade level (so far they have insisted that this isn't cause for conceern and doesn't need following up...) Where as at home, she knows I don't care if she gets an answer wrong if she's given it a go and so she doesn't freeze, or if she does I just reminder she knows (I literally just calmly say 'you know this') and then she remembers/figures it out straight away. But of course the school doesn't know what she knows, because she doesn't show them, so they don't prompt her, etc.
We're having some achievement testing done later this year so hopefully (if she answers then) this will provide us with some ammunition for subject acceleration or compacting (I'm a fan of compacting too, though we have done a lot of that at home - we haven't really skipped anything)
Thanks again.
Do some teachers really do compacting, but that seems like extra work for just one kid. And then the kid literally wouldn't fit in any box...would be outta step with the same grade kids, outta step with the next grade kids.
Giftodd, I feel ya. Sometimes my boy acts like he doesn't know an apple from a Lego, then another time it all comes pouring out blah, blah, blah, blah, blah... He knows a ton. I guess this is why achievement testing or iq testing comes in.
I also think this is where a little video of her working it out at home can help you explain better than your words can... But is the school really going to help anyway? Didn't you just say they have a tall poppy culture down under?
Also, would it help your daughter to use pretend play, make believe that when the teacher asks a question that the teacher really doesn't know the answer so your daughter has to teach it to her. (snipped that idea off the board, filed it in memory under neat idea. Son's not in school, haven't used it yet.)
Thank for those suggestions La Texican. I used to make videos all the time for that exact reason, but somewhere along the line we stopped. I like the pretend play idea too.
Imp, thank you so much for your advice re testing. I hadn't considered that - the school has said they will do some testing at the start of the school year, but we hadn't gone in to detail about what that would involved, what would be tested etc. I will definitely ask for end of year level testing.
I haven't felt confident that the achievement testing would make much of a difference, but I do like having our own data so I feel I have some ownership over the situation. I'm 5-10 years younger than a lot of the mums at the school and so I get a lot of verbal pats on the head from the principal and told outright 'not to worry so much about it' (meanwhile I have had to drag my kid to school everyday since she was in preschool and I'm told every conversation I have that they 'just don't see it', complete with hints at the possibility I don't really have any idea what I am doing or talking about). I get where that comes from, but I worry that their conviction that it isn't there (well, that's not strictly fair, they see she's gifted - just not very gifted) and that I'm just a compartively young and clueless mum colours their interactions with dd and helps them to dismiss the evidence they do witness. However, there's no point paying copious amounts of money for testing that won't get us what we need. I will have to do some more investigation and find out what they will test, what experience they've had with achievement testing and so on.
Thanks again!
Giftodd: Being older doesn't help with that "pat on the head" nonsense. There are a number of educators out there who consider themselves subject matter experts, and parents as ignorant, biased observers. Hubris respects no age limits.
Incidentally, the person we get this most from is the principal, just like you. In our case, we reached out to the gifted program coordinator for the school district and got her involved. Suddenly, we were speaking to someone who spoke our language, and the dynamic in the room changed where it became obvious that the principal was the one who had no idea what she was talking about.
The moral of the story is, if the principal doesn't get it, keep looking out for someone who does.