My DD8 is in 4th grade after grade skipping from 1st to 3rd. This was a huge deal as it was first time ever done at our school and very rarely within large school district. 3rd grade went well for her, teacher was amazing, there were indeed new things to learn, etc. 4th grade doesn't seem to be off to such a great start. I requested a meeting to go over and set a new educational plan. Meeting will be in 2 weeks, but now I'm trying to formulate thoughts on what she needs, what to ask for etc.
When I say 4th doesn't seem to be off to such a great start, on the other hand there isn't anything terrible about it either. Our school district has adopted new math program and it really stinks. I know the beginning of school is review usually, but I don't see any new material being introduced in this math book for a long time and even then a lot of it is stuff DD can already do. I'm sure many parents are unhappy with the math curriculeum for their children too but I don't know of anyone who is really making an issue of it. My DD's class is a full time gifted class, but only 1/4 of it is actually "gifted" children, the rest are high achievers based on last years state standardized testing. In addition, the teacher has not tested for reading levels yet so the kids are just randomly thrown into groups with all the groups reading the same reading level books. The children are allowed to each chose 5 vocabulary words for the week, whatever they want, define them, write a sentence about them and then share one of the words with the class at the end of the week so the class can learn them. With allowing the children to chose whatever words they want, you can imagine the range of words that come up. Once the kids share a word, the week is over and next week the cycle repeats. When the teacher does do spelling which is only about every 3 weeks, all the spelling words are the same for each child and so far have not presented much of a challenge.
The classroom just really seems to be run loosely. While my DD isn't complaining yet. I can't really see her learning much this year, except for writing skills. Writing is being pushed daily because the state standardized testing has a writing component this year. I can't even begin to get thoughts for knowing what to ask for for DD and how to suggest the teacher accomodate her. Any help would be appreciated.
