Thank you very much for the reply. My son does the work required of him and breezes through it at school, but once he comes home is near tears at having to do work "I already know how to do it, Mommy!!"
He has had no interest in working on his schoolwork until I bought him an advanced curriculum (this past week) to do "for fun." He goes through 15 pages of it a night on his on volition.
Teacher suspected he was gifted and has been sending gifted level work home with him for the past 9 weeks (we thought it was standard work for grade one.)
However, he was tested last week and did not quite make the cutoff for further testing for giftedness.
I am not certain if this is a good or bad development.
As for your specific questions:
They do not do "project work" although they are exposed to many field trips, science lab, etc. It is, for the American public school system, and rather well fleshed out curriculum.
(We, at home, DO engage him in a lot of extra activities. Two days ago he went to a festival to learn about the history of farming and life in the "pioneer" days.)
We discuss his daily activities in depth with him, ask him questions, and lead him to fill in the knowledge gaps that resulted from the experience. He loves to learn, but is only insatiable in the realms of science and nature.
My DS7 is a leftie and I feel that his difficulty in penmanship is causing him a large degree of ambivalence towards writing and reading. Funnily enough, video games are the only thing that has whetted his appetite for reading until this past few weeks. We are reading "The Hobbit" to him, a chapter a night, and he has finally regained his love of books.
As far as the reading confusion, please remember that his father and I had read entire encyclopedias before kindergarten. I am ill-equipped to handle a seven year old who is struggling to read at his grade level.
DS7 is simply extremely able to master any mathematical skill that has been presented to him.
The problem is that his father became ill and abandoned him two years ago while i was in nursing school. For one year, DS did not have enough of my guidance while he was in school. The second year, I was more inclined to allow him a happy, normal life than to feed that desperate mind of his.
DS is a practical and scientific child. He has no interest in learning for the sake of learning. He only cares about aquiring skills once they become valuable to him as tools for understanding the world around him.
I hope this helps you to understand my scientifically minded little boy.
Thank you very much for the reply.
