Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Pre-school Hi There

Hello! I'm Kelly - mother of a 3 year old little girl. I'm not completely sure I belong, but I'll explain a bit about us.

My daughter is 37 months, has been speaking in full sentences since she was 9 months (when she started walking), and currently has a crazy vocabulary. She can't yet read, but she identifies words on site, knows all of her letters, can write her name and any letter she is asked to, has a bunch of memorized books and can do simple addition/subtraction. Her pattern recognition and she constantly astounds us with her observations. She's currently in a Pre-K program half time and half-time in daycare pre-school because our state says she's too young to really be in Pre-K.

We went to her 3 year appointment today and her doctor explained that while he definitely knows she's gifted, that there are no resources for the top end kids, just those who need extra help.

Our largest concern is that our state doesn't allow for early acceptance to K, and she's already running through a large part of K curriculum 2.5 years before she'll be allowed in school. I'm worried that she'll be left bored and have no idea how to actually work hard until she's much older. Her father and I had similar problems growing up, where the lack of challenge early made the level of work we needed to do in college seem astounding!

So, I guess I'm just looking for some direction & resources and to understand what we can do to make sure we are doing everything she needs!

Hi Kelly, welcome (and bump for others who can help re US options). I think you're spot on about the importance of learning early to work hard. Have you read What a Child Doesn't Learn? I'm on a tablet without the link to hand but it should be easy to google esp if you use site:davidsongifted.org as it's often mentioned here; sometimes useful to show schools.

For now go with the flow, don't push, do help support her interests. Later you may need to be prepared to afterschool and advocate. Music lessons are great for encouraging effort (but as well as appropriate schooling, not instead).

I'd check the website for your local school district rather than relying on the doctor's say. There are often many options.

The lack of hard work and running into the brick wall in college is one of the problems. There are a ton of anecdotes here about anxiety and oppositional issues with kids are stuck bored all the time at school, misdiagnosis and things along those lines.

You may find exploring articles at Hoagie's gifted site useful:
http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/

And I just want to put in a plug for play! Open-ended, unstructured play is what kindy used to be about. It is important for emotional and intellectual development and protects creativity! I realize that is no longer the case for kindergarten sadly. But if you can find one that is more play based, it may meet social needs without being boring.

Do you know this to be the case?

I wouldn't rule this out until you've seen clear evidence in writing from an official source. Check your state's Department of Education for details about what state law does (and does NOT) actually mandate.

What it may state is that the state is OBLIGATED to educate only children aged 5 (by some cutoff date each fall) through 18 years of age, etc. It may also state the ages for compulsory schooling of some kind, and indicate what serves as "schooling" for those purposes.

I seriously doubt that there is anything in writing that says that children UNDER age so-and-so at such-and-such date are "ineligible" for attendance. That would be odd.

Of course, having something not be prohibited isn't the same thing as having it be permitted in a pragmatic sense. There, you'll need (as others note) to look into local policy.

But it pays to know when you're hearing baloney/excuses. Pay attention to that, though, because if a gentle inquiry results in defensiveness rather than surprise on that score, that usually indicates that there is UNWILLINGNESS at work, which is sometimes just as intractable a matter to deal with as official policy.

Let's just say we've been there. Our solution was homeschooling our then 4yo. We assumed that she would rejoin her age-mates when she was about 8. Not sure why we thought that would work, in hindsight... but it was the original plan. LOL. So we allowed her to work at whatever pace felt "right" to her and me for the next two years. That turned out to be a pretty high rate, and we ran through a LOT of homeschool curriculum that she didn't even use because she learned so fast and with so little practice/instruction. I eventually learned that the only packaged curriculum that I had any hope of actually getting our money's worth from was math, and the rest was bits and pieces a week or two at a time. It was maddening from a logistics/planning standpoint. Still, as spotty as things felt, she was learning at an incredible rate, and was reasonably happy a lot of the time. Until I wanted her to work on anything that was more age-appropriate in developmental terms, like handwriting.

Problem was that homeschooling was resulting in a trajectory that had our DD entering college-level material at about age 9-10, which we really weren't thrilled about since she also couldn't construct a reasonably coherent paragraph.

Anyway-- that detour is to note that we then enrolled her in a charter school-- as a third grader-- on the basis of out-of-level standardized testing. We used Family Learning Organization's second-grade CAT-5 battery for our barely 6yo, since it seemed to us that she kind of, well... already knew the stuff that was in the gr2 scope and sequence. In retrospect, we probably should have also given her the gr4 battery once we got the results, but we were a little shellshocked when the battery came back with straight 99.9's across the board.

We were worried that she was ignoring her weaknesses, and that the gap was growing ever-larger between her more age-appropriate skills (writing, large motor skills) and her strengths (late high-school reading level, science skills at middle school or higher). So we agreed (with the school) to place her at grade 3 and see how things went. Well, how they went was that she blazed through an entire year's worth of their curriculum in about six weeks, and then 4th grade the following fall in under twelve weeks.

Just mentioning this to let you know as you go into things that HG+ kids mostly do NOT have school settings that can truly accommodate what they seem to need, and that what they seem to need is often a moving target anyway.

It's an exciting ride. But a scary one, too-- other parents often have no real notion of the challenges and fears that parents of HG kids face. My DD13 will graduate at/near the top of her high school class of 300+ next June, before her 15th birthday. She could probably have done so this year if we hadn't held her back a bit during the middle school years. My DD2's stated plan? To "go to college" when she was TWELVE. She didn't get it her way... though intellectually, she was ready for material at that level. It's when she started taking AP/dual enrollment credits, and she was just 11 for her first community college experiences. But we didn't get to alter that trajectory as much as we would have liked, either.


Ultimately? You don't NEED to figure out what is going to happen in two years, never mind in a decade. You cannot really predict it, anyway; your child will be different from what you can possibly anticipate now. What will be, will be. Be flexible and respond with love to what your child needs without thinking too hard about what "normal" looks like. The rest will more or less take care of itself.

Here is my plan to possibly go around the early entrance rule. DS4.5 is eligible for K entry this fall because his birthday is couple days before the cut off so he will likely be the youngest in class and we are unsure what will happen once he goes to K but at least the nature herself skipped him when she made me give birth 3 weeks early (otherwise he'd had to wait another year to go to school). DS3 (just turned 3) is further ahead in many areas than DS4.5 and still more than 2 years from K. But he also has some other issues that we're working through so actual school setting right now would not work at all for him. BUT for the future if we conquer the other things, my plan for advancing his early years if we need to is homeschooling K & 1 (early) and then put him in 2nd grade when really he should had been in 1st grade but since he would have 1st grade officially behind him (homeschooled) as long as his academics would match or be beyond level, the age wouldn't matter anymore (or we might do it later on and base his entrance on his current homeschool level at that point). But not sure if homeschooling would be an option for you and if this would work in your state?

I wanted to second the encouragement to look for preK and K settings that are based on open-ended play. We chose a nature-based preschool for ds6, who was reading fluently (grade 4+) at 4. He was so busy running, jumping, baking, doing art and creating obstacle courses that he was never bored. He brought home new questions every night to research and the differences between him and age peers in verbal and math skills was never a factor at school.

Actually, this is the law in my state. Children must be 5 by Sept 1 to attend kindergarten. No exceptions. Period.

Many states/districts have rules about min. age for K-1 but in 2nd grade there is not a limit. Many people around here with kids just days past the cutoff will do private school until 2nd grade (ie start private school early and then just enter public later).

There is also a district policy to allow testing to advance a grade once the kids are entered in school. In elementary it's difficult to achieve mainly because kids have get high scores in all four core subjects and there may not have been exposure to the tested specific concepts in science and social studies.

Just sayin' like others have suggested there may indeed be a procedure or policy, it just may not be publicized. I found ours by hunting around on the district website or googling "XXXISD legal policy" or something. They need to have this in place for transfer students from other districts and out of state.

I agree with MON. I also think you can give your child a huge leg-up by encouraging them to learn how to extend themselves academically without explicit direction, instruction, workbooks, or curriculums. This is something you can really focus on in those precious preschool years, especially when your DD has already mastered preschool skills.

It is one thing to know how to count by twos, it is another to recognize when your preschool teacher asks you to count a pile of pennies, it is appropriate and faster to count them by twos, or threes even. Or, when coloring a rainbow, you can use the right colors in the right order--even if you have to add a line to fit them all in.

These are skills that I think you can develop using a child-led approach--asking your child, what do you want to learn? What can we do with this? What else can you do? Keep on your toes. Learning is everywhere. Explore with them.

I have really enjoyed the preschool years. I think we are fortunate to not have to worry about academic stuff. We can focus on learning for the love of learning. I think DD loved preschool and preK at her play based school. She has learned a lot there that she could not learn at home despite learning nothing academically. And, we are really excited for kindergarten. We found a perfect fit for us at an independent school.

We read a ton. Now she is reading a ton, also. I used to alternate our visits to three different bookstores and two libraries to not appear as book crazy as we were. We also visit a lot of museums, especially when we travel. We are guided by her enthusiasm. And, I leave probably too much time to independent creative play. If I have learned one thing in raising her thus far, it is that she learns so much with just a little bit of boredom and open ended toys and materials. I purposefully keep out of her way.