My experience to date has been less successful, so take my advice with a shaker of salt. You appear to have a good working relationship with your child's teacher. That alone is worth its weight in gold. Such a relationship with a principle would be priceless, as it might minimize the need to start afresh every year.
Most teachers we've had experience with are able to differentiate instruction plus or minus 2 grade levels from the current grade level. Differentiation beyond that requires a serious time investment on the part of the teacher. Most teachers don't have the time or resources. Most don't have any training in special and/or gifted education.
Consider checking out or purchase a copy of the following book:
http://www.amazon.com/Social-Emotional-Development-Gifted-Children/dp/1882664779It will give you a good idea of the options available and some hard numbers on what works both academically and with regard to emotional self-image and well being of children. You may be surprised by the degree to which current research and ingrained beliefs differ.
It is excellent that you've found a teacher so early who is both motivated and willing to work to meet your child's need. Exceptional girls are a difficult problem because by 9-10 years of age, they tend to transform from academic achievers to social conformists.
I think a key goal should be to establish a pattern of assessment and pretesting to avoid making DD do a whole bunch of work on material she's already mastered. What DD does in the free time that creates is a hard question to answer. But I could almost argue that anything is better than being forced to work on stuff you already know.
Check with the teacher and see if the standard curriculum has pre/assessment tests. But be wary. In 2nd grade, our teacher suggested that our daughter take unit tests before the material was covered, and move on to the next unit so long as she continued to demonstrate mastery. I tried using the results of standardized achievement testing and current progress reports in EPGY math to explain that she could do unit pretests every day till the end of the school year without finding unmastered material. In the end, the teacher provided a couple pretests, which were passed with flying colors and then stopped.
Eventually, toward the end of the year, I have to credit her with getting us involved in ALEKS (
http://www.aleks.com/). EPGY which we'd previously used is very good and rigorous on concepts. But it is very expensive and the presentation is dry and dated. Through our school we were able to get a one year license for ALEKS for something like $35. ALEKS isn't as rigorous conceptually. It is more prescriptive. But it has a crisp clean user interface which our daughter likes, and unlike EPGY, the local school district stands behind it.
If your daughter is an independent learner, then self-paced mathematics instruction through EPGY or ALEKS would be an excellent solution. At home, you might pick up a copy of the book "The Number Devil". It covers some advanced mathematical concepts in language that children find entertaining. I don't believe our daughter understood everything that she heard, but she did find it inspirational. If the book is well received, there is a computer game of the same name by Viva Media which she'll absolutely love.
You may also wish to read a book on mathematical cognitive development:
http://www.amazon.com/Young-Children-Reinvent-Arithmetic-Implications/dp/0807739049I have found the above book to be instrumental in figuring out where my children are at, so as to determine appropriate games and learning activities.
The reading plan sounds okay. The main goal being to let her develop a love of reading by letting her read what she wants. She'll run out of Magic Tree House books eventually. And don't be dismayed if she re-reads her favorite books several times. That's just something some younger kids do.
I think the important thing here is to gently nudge her toward a lot of the classics: The Boxcar Children series, anything by E. Nesbit, The Little Princess, The Secret Garden, Little House on the Prairie, Pollyanna, Heidi, Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, etc. Our daughter also greatly enjoyed the American Girl books, Series of Unfortunate Events, and Harry Potter. But there's just so much being published these days that it is hard to spot good ones.
You may eventually want to do nationally normed standardized intelligence testing. A WISC IV would give you an idea of what kind of learner your child is and the degree to which her achievement deviates from same aged peers. Most school testing stops when they've identified a child as being in the 99th percentile. But it is important to identify if your child's performance is significantly more than 2 standard deviations from the norm. I.e. does your child's testing results indicate a level of achievement that may be shared by as many as 1 in a 100 children or 1 in 10,000? The types of services that may need to be provided will vary accordingly.
