Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Rock the boat?

I went to a parent-teacher conference last week. DS4 is right on track – knows his upper and lower case alphabets and can count to 30 (he got stopped at 100).

I sort of hinted that he could do simple multiplications already, and the teacher kept reiterated that he is right on track. I got a feeling that the teacher thought I am one of those pushy parents.

He is in preschool right now, and I was planning to send him to the same school for K.

I was going to bring up that DS is being unchallenged to the preschool principal, who mentioned they could give DS more difficult works this year.

I don’t want to rock the boat, but what if DS isn’t challenged academically at preschool? How about K? How about 1st?

DS was the same way in preschool. I mentioned casually a couple times that DS could read and the teachers just kind of blew it off. They probably thought I meant he could read a few sight words or something. Every week they took the kids to the school library. One day at pick-up one of the teachers came up to me and said "Did you know he can read?!" I laughed and said "umm, yeah." Apparently DS had picked up a random book in the library and started reading it fluently aloud. They asked him if he had that book at home (thinking he just had it memorized) and he said "no". I think every so often from then on they tried to listen to him read but for the most part nothing really changed. He was able to read second-third grade books. It was preschool and the main focus there is not supposed to be academic skills like teaching kids advanced math or reading, but more social and self-help skills, so I couldn't complain too much. But I did feel bad for DS having to sit through boring lessons about words that start with the Letter F or how to count to 20. In Kindergarten I got a little more pushy, but still not much happened. When my older kid (DD) was in K we ended up just grade accelerating her since she had the K curriculum mastered and she was 7 weeks off from the age cut-off (so not much younger than the kids in the next higher grade). Good luck--it's very hard to get people to teach advanced concepts in preschool and kindergarten. Now in first grade I'm expecting more but it's still not really happening. DS is testing about 2.5 years ahead in math (he already knows all the division and multiplication facts for instance) and his teacher claims she is giving him advanced math in his work packet but I doubt it's really that advanced or that he's spending much time on it. They can't subject accelerate him for math because it doesn't work with the schedule and I don't want to grade accelerate him because he is 2e(and they probably wouldn't allow him to anyway). Be prepared for a struggle in terms of getting him work at his level.

Yeah-- when I went to information night for kindergarten, I (luckily) had brought my DD (then newly turned 5) with me.

They went over all the 'stuff' that parents should be "working on" at home with their kids, and I was kind of taken aback because it was stuff that DD knew at 18-22 months old. Colors, numbers, etc.

Well, the teacher that I collared at the meet-and-greet at the end kind of blew me off, too-- until she SAW my dd, happily reading what was obviously a novel-- might have been a Boxcar Children book or one of the SoUE, something by Dahl. I don't really remember. But it was VERY clear that she was happily, silently, independently really reading, and reading material that most children don't tackle until somewhere around 3rd-5th grade.

THAT was what convinced her that I was, if anything, cautiously understating my DD a bit.

Of course, that is also what led that same teacher to tell me that it would be completely toxic to enroll her in kindergarten, and that we should homeschool if it was in any way possible.

Okay-- so that's my long way of saying that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Let your child provide it, THEN have the conversation. That way you don't wind up wasting a lot of time and energy convincing them that you aren't just a helicopter parent with a special snowflake. Odds are good that most educators will have encountered HUNDREDS of those parents for every one of us.

Don't just rock the boat, tip it over if necessary. You are your child's best advocate.

Yes, this. We all think our child is special and gifted and they are in certain ways. It's best to be able to let our child provide their own evidence by whatever means.