Part of our problem this year even with the program is that while her classroom teacher is nice, I don't feel she is good with taking the initiative to do things herself. If she is told to do it and how to do it, it gets done. Otherwise it doesn't.
This would be a big red flag in our situation. A teacher with good intentions isn't enough. You need someone who is willing and able to come up with different appropriate-level work and actually make it happen
consistently throughout the year.
In our case, all the kids in class are given the opportunity test out of the math/language arts/spelling units if they want to take a pre-test. If they succesfully test out, they do not have to listen to any of that unit's lecture. Instead, they are given a different, generally open-ended activity. For example, in Language Arts, they were once sent to the school library and told to pick a book from a particular genre (e.g., biography). From their book, they were to prepare a report to deliver in class which included some type of visual piece (e.g., a timeline). In Math, they were once given books/fact sheets about an event in history and they worked in groups to come up with a verbal and visual presentation which included word problems based on the information to present to the class (e.g., It was below freezing from x date to y date, in z year. How many days was that? DS thought that one was funny because the kids had to figure out that it was a leap year before they could add up the days.)
Because the work is open-ended, it does let the kids work at a higher level. In our experience, though, it doesn't push them to do something that they might initially think is too hard, which is something we worry about with both our DC. I've been impressed with some of what DS has come up with on these projects, and he's much happier this year, so we've seen it as "enough" for now.
If "testing out" is the plan at your school, you'll want to know what score your DD will require in order to skip the work. Make sure it's not 100% -- just because someone makes a single mistake shouldn't mean they have to listen to several days' lectures on the topic. Setting an expectation of perfection to test out just does bad things for perfectionists. I think that's included in Winebrenner's book.
HTH. Keep us posted on your progress with the school!
