Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Timeline of subject acceleration?

So, some of us use reading as a proxy term for language arts or English or whichever term is in vogue in whichever country.

Also possible, but notice that it's completely different from what Kai said, so at least my feeling that the usage may be problematic is justified!

The problem with doing this is that writing is a much different issue than reading. I didn't even list my son's writing level because I honestly don't know what it is or was. And when I discussed his work with our homeschool advisor, *she* couldn't tell me either. I do know that his handwriting is messy and slower than even age peers. His composition skills seem variable to me--as in one day he'll write something very solid without a lot of editing help and the next will produce a total mess. I also know that his "Revising Written Materials" score on the Iowa test this year was at the 98th percentile as compared to 9th graders, but I don't know how much that correlates with actual writing skills.

Yes, so what I should have said is I use reading as a proxy term for that aspect of English, language arts, etc. specifically excluding writing. Because for me having a possible dysgraphic, his level of instruction on writing doesn't seem useful to this discussion.

I tend to agree.



This, exactly. I'll go even further and point out that there is no age of MG students who are just like PG ones, either.

It's the underlying problem with acceleration OR enrichment as differentiation. There just aren't enough other students "like" any child at very high LOG (and by "like" here, I mean sharing both ABILITY and INTERESTS with such children).

DD has been more or less reading on an adult level since she was about 7-ish years of age. And I don't just mean the newspaper and media sources, which aren't truly at a post-secondary level. I mean real adult literature, too. Dickens, Shakespeare, Poe, etc. The stuff commonly taught in college Lit coursework and good 11th-12th grade English Lit. But she mostly wasn't that INTERESTED in that kind of literature as a steady diet. George MacDonald and Tolkein were lovely, but there just isn't that much of that kind of thing when you read at the rate that she does. She likes clever writing and humor.

Acceleration as a means to meet needs only goes so far. It's the only way to ease a super-poor fit... but it's not what I'd call "adequate" to make it a GOOD one, if that makes sense.

Reading levels....

Grab books from each reading grade level and look at them and you will see a big difference. There is a difference between Sarah Plain and Tall (3rd), Beverley Cleary' Henry Huggins books (late 4th) and lit leveled at 5th grade.

But he doesn't need 2 weeks on Sarah Plain and Tall when he can read it in less than 45 minutes plus pass a factual test on comprehension and a vocabulary test. He would need another 20 minutes on lit analysis and be ready for the next book and the rest of the class is moving on to the second chapter and having to really study the vocabulary words from chapter one.


Maybe our situation is clouded by the fact that many (feels like the majority) of the children in our district are English language learners, or bi lingual or some category of ESOL. Most of the students at our school are 1,2,3 level out of a 5 level system where three is proficient and 1and 2 are below level in the standards of reading. Because they won't completely ability group...the only way to get hard enough work is to go higher.

Tolkien, please (You, or she, might like to visit
http://www.tolkeinsociety.org/ :-)
Tolkien is sufficiently important to our family that I may feel the need to delete this post shortly; please don't quote it! But yes, if I had mentioned The Silmarillion as something DS devoured on the way to this great event a couple of years ago (and could have devoured earlier than that, if he had happened on it), my incompetence to pronounce on typically developing reading might have been clearer; I should probably realise I'm in a hole and stop digging.

Did you/she realise that there is a lot of The History of Middle Earth, btw?

I think there's something to be said for levels of reading ability well beyond achieving fluency. Parsing grammatically complex sentences; tracking a flow of thought across multiple sentences (including anaphoric coreference); extracting crucial information that is not stated literally (e.g. through sarcasm, understatement, and other deliberate violations of Grice's maxims); tolerance for a slow start to a plot; and so on.

I think that a gifted child follows a "unique" path. There are no two gifted children whose paths are the same. My child at age 5 finished all "elementary" grade math (using multiple challenging curriculum) - this could have happened at age 4 and maybe I did not test him then. At age 6, he can diagram complex sentences and can write poetry (a few different styles)- this goes beyond reading at "X grade level" and comprehending higher level books. I have absolutely given up on tracking his grade level - because he maxes out scores in above level achievement testing all the time. Science has been done using only one curriculum and a ton of hands on activities at our science museum and many months of science/innovation camps during the summer. What his grade level is on science is impossible for me to measure.

My best advise to a parent who accelerates is this: provide resources at all levels to your child - some at a higher level to keep learning new things, some at a lower level to reinforce/review already learned concepts. Keep challenging them to think and learn every single day.

It's finally sunk in that my reading level plateaued at about grade 5 level.