Just chiming in to add that my DS7 also feels let down when "enrichment" activities are actually just arts/crafts tangentially related to things going on in class.
Related and unpromising - I was at our Site Council meeting yesterday, where we discussed a proposal to open a tinkering room for our elementary school. Hooray, right?
As it turns out, not so much. The mission statement included creating a place where kids could "purposefully explore and invent ..." I asked how "purposely explore and invent" differed from "explore and invent." As it turns out, the exploration and invention will be severely bounded. One example: kids studying animals will make a clay animal or cut out magazine pictures of the animal, and then cut out pictures of the appropriate habitat for it. The "exploring and inventing" was described as "ways to make the habitat stand up around the clay animal." Oh - and this was for 4th grade, not first. I can't imagine what they would consider "exploring and inventing" for first grade.
In our experience, enrichment has almost always been busy work rooted in arts and crafts. But I'm ETA that I think MegMeg's approach is brilliant and I'm going to try it!
When my DS went to the local PS, the enrichment work for the gifted kids were always artsy and craftsy - e.g. color the tallest dinosaur in the coloring sheet (for math enrichment to teach "greater than" and "lesser than concepts"), grow some wheat grass (no studies on germination or anything else, just planting seeds in paper cups and spraying them with water from a spray bottle), making patterns freeform with pattern blocks, making necklaces with candy to mark 50th/100th/125th day of school). He was tested very gifted and was placed in a 1st grade class for K and this was the enrichment that the whole class was given.
I got very frustrated with this and volunteered my Friday mornings to teach math and computer lab. I recruited 2 other parents, got some math manipulatives and sat with the kids and did a hands on "Math Lab" for 30 minutes and then a computer lab for 30 minutes. It was not difficult to get approved for it and the teacher took the credit for the "differentiation" and "acceleration" she was doing in-class, so it was a win-win situation for all the parties. (ETA: we did multiplication, division and fractions using the manipulatives and some money games. We used Terrapin Logo - funded by PTA - for computer lab. Since these were categorized as "enrichment games", the district could not object to the content being "above grade").
So, a good idea would be to "steer" the gifted enrichment in the direction that you would like it to go - find a few motivated parents to help you advocate. You can accomplish a lot by working within the system.
