Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments multiple grade subject acceleration

DDjust12 was in a slew of classes with older kids, in some cases significantly older. We explained to her that being in these classes was a privilege and that she had to act with appropriate maturity (and lets be honest, sometimes the 14-16 year olds are just as immature as little kids). I checked in with her teachers and found that she did extremely well.

The two issues we had were:

1. Being out'ed by classmates who then treated her a bit differently (you're only 11, we thought you were 13!). Your DS is going to probably be different enough in appearance for this to be obvious from the start, which might actually be better.

2. Being more immature outside of class. With her closer-in-age friends and at home (who are all around 13) she's more immature than you'd expect. While we encourage appropriate behavior, we do see this as a bit of a coping mechanism... like letting off steam. Your DS will have his social time with his friends too, so this is good.

I haven't heard much about how it's going yet, but DS says he understands the material and he "made some friends". He is doing Connected Mathematics which looks like one of those "reform math" programs for pre-algebra. Anyone know about this? I think the kids are supposed to work together in groups. He brought home the book yesterday with a sticky on one of the pages that said "homework" (in teacher's writing) but I couldn't for the life of me figure out how he would do it, as he needed special materials and clips to form shapes and triangles. It looks very hands-on and like the complete opposite of DD's pre-algebra (Holt) book, which basically just teaches computations. I guess one positive is that he will probably not need to write very much!