Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy skip to 3 or 4?

Hi,

So my DD (m-hg) is in yr2 at a GT school and i'm considering skipping to yr3. The catch is yr3 doesn't have a gifted class. So if we do, we'll continue school in a normal class rather than extension class. I know she is more than capable of the work in maths and english but if we were to accelerate to yr4, I'm concerned about gaps in other areas such as language.
The school doesn't really do subject acceleration as the class schedules don't match up.
DD's is generally pretty easygoing but is definately showing signs of underachievement and losing interest in school hence the reason to try something else to make it work for her. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

My initial thoughts are that it depends on the receiving grade's teacher and the flexibility of the school. Are they willing to do any in-class differentiation or curriculum compacting? I'm guessing you are asking because the year 2 in the GT school isn't working, but can you clarify what issues you're having? Have you asked the current teacher for more challenging work for your DD? And just to clear things up, can you not skip to year 3 in the GT school (ie., are we talking about different schools here, or just different available programs in different grades at the same school)?

The school isn't that flexible, so it's going to be a bit of a fight to accelerate, but we've tried every other option so far.
The current class already curriculm compacts and extends sideways. But it's still doesn't seem enough.
DD has gone from top of the class model student to barely completing the work, when she should be able to complete, poor hand writting when she has beautiful writing, few sentence stories when she used to write pages, getting frustrated over little things, having outbursts, wants to change schools, complains school is boring, friends are dumb, getting in trouble for talking, not listening, being rude to teacher. Behaviour which isn't like my DD. She's putting out low/average effort and turning into a trouble maker now.
We have asked for more challenging work, but the teacher has said DD is already in the top groups for maths and english. She can offer us additional assignments. But i don't really feel more homework is going to fix things.
At our school, every year level has a dedicated GT class but it just happens that currently yr 3 doesn't have enough numbers to pull a GT class together therefore there are only normal yr3 classes with no extension, curriculum compacting, differentiation.
We aren't looking at changing schools, as we have already changed in kinder and siblings now at the school, so really want to make this work.