Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy End-of-school-year-itis

Isolating to do different work is an issue, if it's really an issue, IYSWIM. DS has not minded at all, fwiw. They work at tables, they're on different pages of their book anyway, he's using a different book, doesn't really matter. He does say that there's some system of a child chosen at random being called on to answer a question and sometimes because he's been doing his own work he hasn't heard the question and then his teacher lets him off answering it, so I suppose there must be some plenary that he's missing out on in that sense. You might ask Alex how she'd feel if she were sort-of home schooled for maths but did her maths "schoolwork" in the classroom at school - she might surprise you.

Needing a live person: well, actually learning new stuff from a book at school is hard and TBH I haven't so far expected DS to do it, and we've never seriously used canned explanations (DS likes to watch the Alcumus videows but it's for fun really.) Although - now that I try to explain how DS does learn new stuff I find it hard to explain. Chemistry he certainly learns from books these days, at home, because we don't know what he needs to learn. Maths? Most cases recently that I can think of have this pattern: I give him an assessment test of some kind at home, he can't answer a question, I explain how to do it and say "ah, so you need to do this chapter"; it's 2-3 pages of text and we look at it together on the bus some time; then he does the chapter-end questions (3-5 of them) at school. Maybe he refers back to the chapter if he didn't get something, I dunno. At the least, he has seen the material before and had a chance to ask questions about it. Probably now it would work for him to learn stuff without support at school, but it wouldn't have worked at the beginning of the year, and I suspect the chemistry experience has helped. I think the main thing I'd say from this long witter is that there just is a surprisingly small amount of new material at this level. I bet if you could sit down with Alex for half an hour twice a week, and teach her stuff she was ready to learn at her pace, that would be more than enough, i.e., she'd continue to learn more than 1 year of stuff per year. (This is one of the reasons why I insist that problem solving is so important - how fast these children would go if going fast through the curriculum were the objective just doesn't bear thinking about!)

However, at least half DS's maths time at school he's doing problems that aren't aiming to teach new material but to give him practice in problem-solving. That's really what I think Alex would benefit from. There's lots of material for this; three UK examples in increasing order of difficulty are:
Challenge your pupils
Junior and intermediate challenges
problems from the UK JMO


Ah, so she's valuing time when you're helping her learn above time when she's supposed to be learning things in school - sensible girl on many levels :-)

Otherwise known as theory of mind ;-)

ould homeschooling her next year be so impossible or such a disaster that it isn't worth even considering? Would the elderly grandparents be willing to supervise? How does the system work - could you try it for a term and put her back in school the next term if it didn't work out? It clearly wouldn't matter if she learned nothing for one term, provided that happened in a way which somehow made her likely to learn something in the next term, e.g. in the worst case through a renewed commitment to school...