Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Dd just shared something with me

I actually agree, but I wonder if my perspective might be warped. By school age, neither of my kids has needed to read aloud to anyone or be actively taught reading. I'm not sure, though, how many classes of first graders have whole reading groups in this category.

I got sent to the library for about 6 hours each week from third through 9th grades-- you know, once I ran out of elementary (K-6) reading material. It was slightly better than the storage room option, I'll say that for it.


As I reported earlier in another thread-- this is now what passes for "empowering" children to own their own education. That is, since they've given up trying to actually fix this problem, apparently the solution is to call it desirable instead. WOW.


Doesn't your DD feel tremendous "ownership" after being ignored all year? I thought so.

{/sarcasm}

This would be "exhibit A" in Why My Daughter is not Taking Advanced Mathematics from her Cyberschool.

It's a point which I've sometimes struggled to adequately explain to others. I think that they may feel that I'm exaggerating or that it's not really THAT bad. Well, it is.exactly.that.bad.

I just don't think that not HAVING a teacher in any practical sense is any way to learn calculus. It was not much of any way to learn algebra II or geography, economics, or HTML, either.

At best, DD gets about 32-40 hours of instruction from a live teacher.... annually. In any subject. It certainly gets WORSE from there, however.

Sure. That oughta work.

At one point in elementary I was given a separate room with a camera setup and instructed on how to make a stop-action animated movie about a foreign country I was studying. That was empowering and absorbing. And fun.

I don't know what to do about advanced readers in elementary; OTOH there is a fraction of the reading instruction (things like identifying a "theme," metaphor, etc.) they can benefit from; OTOH so much of what's on offer is a shoe on the wrong foot, regardless of grade level. We will face this again this year with our younger child. Getting anyone to see that it's a problem will be a challenge. I cannot imagine what accommodation would improve things, really.

DeeDee

This may work better because it is a highly gifted cluster program, where they expect to have a wide range of (high) reading levels, but DD's class did monthly book reports this year where not everyone was reading the same book. Instead, they had to pick a book of a chosen genre and have it approved by the teacher. The book report questions were designed to work OK with advanced and basic books from the selected genre. In addition, there were books that they read together in class and discussed.

The school library seems to have books with a suggested reading level up to about 8th grade - not as high as DD would like, but still pretty adequate for now. (The school goes up to 5th grade.)

By third grade, when most kids can string together some sentences into paragraphs, I think it's possible to teach "reading" to gifted readers. K, 1, and 2? Really tough, since there's absolutely no guarantee that they can produce any kind of output to match up with what they are capable of reading and processing. I don't know what I'd do with my son, either. He can probably read at the sixth grade level now, but he can only write at the first grade level or so. Slowly.

Last night, DD8 reported that she was the only 4th grader in her gifted class that could perform multiplication with large numbers. This is the school that wouldn't skip her.

UM, that gap doesn't seem to dramatically improve until adolescence. DD's writing lagged her other literature skills until very recently. Truth be told, she still only writes like a gifted 11th or 12th grader, and not the way that she reads and can discuss literature.

It's not really very easy to accommodate that in a standard curriculum. Charlotte Mason methods work much better than most public school pedagogy with this particular asynchrony.

"Reading group" time with my DS was basically him reading aloud from a book for the teacher and a couple of other kids... he enjoyed it, sure, but I'm not sure anyone learned much of anything. The books were far below his reading level.

So long as he isn't bored and causing trouble I don't worry much about reading instruction in school. We read a ton at home, together and alone. At night I typically read to him - a book well above his reading level and we do it quite slowly, defining words and discussing what's happening each chapter. He really enjoys it, and I'm pretty sure he's learning more this we way than via school.

Math class is FAR more concerning to me. The only differentiation anyone can seem to do is additional problems... or subbing in 2-digit problems for single digit, things like that. It's not been a major problem, but I do feel like he's lost some of his love of math as a result. I really hope we can get him into the G&T program this year, then we can actually leave the class for appropriate math instruction.

... you'd hope so.

We discovered that the GT option in math was "look, MORE problems! Yay!"

Took much of the shine off of DD's enthusiasm for "differentiation" in that subject pretty much right there.

Wait. Fourth graders in a gifted class can't multiply large numbers? Fourth graders in a standard class should be able to multiply large numbers. Or has she already started school and you're referring to kids right now, at the beginning of the year? In which case I wonder what they were doing in gifted class last year if they didn't get to multiplying 145*78?