If all school days were like this morning, I don't think there would be any problems with boredom.
His class is working on individual reports for different tribes of Indians. She showed them previously how to start organizing their report into a very basic outline. The teacher has copies of materials the kids were allowed to highlight for information. GS9 had very appropriate highlighting, some kids highlighted everything. Most kids were pulling information just from the teacher supplied materials, GS has some additional information from the net & library books. His report looks like it will have quite a bit more depth than the others. That's good for GS. So he was working at a more intense level than the other kids. The one bad thing I can say, is he's not getting instruction on report writing at his level. The teacher presented report writing at an appropriate 4th grade level and spent much of her time with kids who needed help achieving that expected level. 1 teacher for 27 kids and they were given about 45 minutes to work on it today.
We went to a different classroom/teacher for math. She introduced the distributive property of math and gave the kids manipulatives and instructions for a game to practice that property. She quietly commented to me to watch GS & the girl next to him -- "they are very good". OK, GS got it right away and showed the girl. (In all fairness, I had demonstrated that property to him some time ago, just hadn't told him what it was called.) That was pretty fun for him, the girl still didn't quite get it. Unfortunately I got the idea they will continue this until most of the other kids get it. GS said he often reads or takes AR tests while the other kids are working in math. So, one day out of the week(?) I guess he's getting something new. I do provide him with an assortment of logic and challenge problems for 5th-6th grade, he works on them during math while he's waiting on others. They do have a 4 minute drill, but he doesn't have to do pages of problems on things he's mastered.
GS does some of the class clown routine to entertain the other kids but I think it's typical 9-10 year old boy stuff. What I worry about older kids is how his feelings are so easily hurt by what they say. I also don't like how his best friend has treated him at times, just to be included with the older kids; I don't want GS to treat others badly just to be included with the 'in' clique. The school bus is a pretty rough place to be, that's where most of the bad behavior happens. The older elementary kids really picked on GS for the last few years. Any sign of tears was like a 'kick me while I'm down' invitation. GS is in 4th, K-5 ride one bus, 6-12 ride another bus. He'll have to get on the bus at 6:30 a.m. when he rides the jr/sr high bus. Then with the Webolos crossing over to boy scouts in the spring of 5th grade, it just seemed better to keep him with boys he knows from cub scouts, until they're all boy scouts in middle school and up.
And yes, Grinity, he's hit that mental puberty! He can read a paragraph, put down the book, demonstrate almost perfect recall of what he read, but can't remember where he just laid the book!
Dotty, unfortunately, private ability testing is not an option right now. But I plan on him taking the Explore in January. If we're looking at DYS levels on the Explore, I'll find a way for IQ testing.
I think I'll start a journal for the next few weeks to track how he thinks things are going in school, then bring it up at conference time.
