showing what you know....can this be a problem for gifties that are bored silly? We are on week 2 of the first time in school after homeschooling for K and DS6 is bored out of his mind....to the point that he doesn't want to do any more of "this baby work" and he has started to refuse to complete the assignments and is beginning to act out. This teacher is worksheet happy and that is all they do - yesterday's work consisted of color the frog green, color the tree green.....color in one ball for the number 1, color 3 balls for the number 3.....the worksheet copied booklets for them to "practice" reading have one line of print on 3 pages such as "Hello Sam, how are you?" "We like to play". Then a whole collection of sheets that were identical each day last week of color, cut and then paste the picture that starts with a particular letter. For a super smart kid with dyspraxia, this is the equivalent of worksheet hell to him.
We have achievement test scores and completed work from last year that we have shared that very clearly shows that he is several grade levels ahead of this......He refused to go into the car this morning and said can I please just get some interesting work....so I grabbed his favorite Sudoko book and a geography workbook he likes and asked the teacher at the door if he could work on these when he got bored. She said no problem but that he needed to finish his classwork first. She then shared that his reading level is "quite spectacular" but his comprehension not as high. I was very surprised because that is usually the first thing an assessor makes a comment about - that his reading level and comprehension match and both are very high. I have yet to see him read something that he didn't fully comprehend...and then I remembered one time he was working with his speech teacher last year and he was so bored silly that he read the passage at Mach 10 (literally going through the words super fast so that he could just finish) and he had no clue what he had read because he was in such a rush to finish and move onto something more interesting....she said the following week she pulled out a much harder book to read and he was quite happy and had no issues. His teacher also shared that he sometimes made very careless errors - well I can understand that - if he is rushing to get through something that is super easy and not interesting, I can see how they can rush and make errors. But we have a load of stuff to back us up showing that he knows this stuff inside and out.
When I asked her if he could take advantage of the library's reading program (you check out a leveled book, read it and then answer comprehension questions on a computer and accumulate points) because he is all about task oriented, goal reaching programs and she said that it would be an excellent behavior reward for him to work towards - if he has had a good day then he can go to the library to check out a book and take the test the next morning. I was upset because in my mind...a reward is a sticker, extra play time, an extra board game....a reward is NOT an educational strategy to help meet the needs of a gifted reader. An educational strategy is what a child should get in order to meet his intellectual needs..it shouldn't be something he earns!
Would love to hear some opinions on the "show" your work/what you know thing when a kid is bored - thanks!
