There are no easy answers or fixes, but the least worse option makes sense. What they are doing with our DS6 now is putting him in a 4th grade class for math every day. At the end of last year they had him do the end of 3rd grade math state assessment (off the record as he was only 5 and couldn't really take it officially). He only got one problem wrong and it was a careless mistake. So they assumed he could go into 4th grade this year. They didn't test him higher or anything...so halfway through the year as he was getting high 90's and flying through everything they realized that he could probably do 5th this year too. What they are doing probably couldn't be done in a lot of places as it does require a lot of support. They have someone in the class with him most days and when the rest of class is doing the repetition that he doesn't need, he goes to the back of the room to sit at a table and do extensions into 5th grade. Sometimes he goes back by himself if there isn't anyone extra that day and other times he is just with the whole class the whole time. Often times there are 2 other students that the teacher pulls back with my son that are pretty advanced so they can do some math together. For us this is working great. I think most kids like this can not just do one year at a time. I figure that every year he will at least do 2 yrs of math. It's a little frightening because that puts him in high school math at 8 or 9 years old...but it is what it is. They have never done anything like this before with a student, so it is new to them and everyone...but I am so glad they are trying new things and experimenting. We did EPGY on the side for a bit and still have it but don't really use it. It seems like math overkill with the math at school, math olympiads, and math books that he reads for fun (not like textbooks, just math related books and puzzles). He loves math, but there are lots of other things in life that he loves too
Funny what you said about academic kids, my son is kind of one of those academic kids...but that doesn't mean he enjoys everything he has to do in school. Last year his teacher never understood why his sentences in his journal were so basic and at first she felt he lacked creativity. He would write things like this "I went to the beach. I played. I had fun. It was nice. I went home." Well he was supposed to write 5 sentences so he always found the shortest ones he could and pretty much wrote "I played" and "I had fun." every journal entry, lol. We had to make a rule with him that he could never say "I had fun. I played" in his entries because that was in EVERY single one for months. He can be quite perfectionistic and wants to do well on things that he cares about. But other stuff he is quite fine with doing the minimal amount needed.
