Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Oh dear, second grade math

There seems to be a lull in the traffic at the Kindergarten thread so I popped in over here to see how the second graders have it.

YIKES!

I feel for you and your kids. If my ds5 survives K (homework = practice counting to 30 or higher), I can't believe this is what he has to look forward to.

Oh, I feel better knowing that I am not the only one going through this. DD6 has been through a few weeks of school now and I am so disappointed. Like most of you, her 2nd grade work is stuff she has been able to do for at least a year, probably more, but I have a bad memory . Our meeting with guidance about getting her into the gt program isn't for another 2 weeks, then there will be a "transition period" into a 1 day a week pull out! The rest of the time she will be in 2nd grade doing 2nd grade work.
We have a chance to move her to the private school I work at, so we talked to the head of school and the teacher and they are not quite sure what they are going to do with her, but they are willing to try lots of different things. So, we let her visit the class today to see what she thought. I was feeling quite hopeful that this would be the solution to our problem, but DD says she doesn't want to change schools! She says her current teacher is more fun, and she doesn't mind doing the work everyone else is.
But in the next breath she says it would be much more interesting though at my school where she would get more challenging work when she needed it, and be able to take a "brain break" and do regular 2nd grade work with everyone else when she needed that too.
I actually think she is scared of getting work that is challenging for her because she has always been able to do everything asked. (A bit of perfectionism to boot.)

Why can't people understand what these kids needs? I really feel sometimes like throwing my hands up in the air and yelling at them all. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
(Sorry, I'm just a bit frustrated and tired of it and it is only early in the year yet.)

Any ideas of how to get DD to get excited about changing schools to where she would be challenged, which is really what she wants (and needs)?

Well, the GOOD news (for me only, of course) is I now have confidence that DS5.5 will be considered a good candidate for whole grade acceleration into 1st since he has to test well on 2nd grade entry!

How awful for you though.

Well, sounds like ds9 isn't the only one complaining! LOL. After telling me that they are *still* doing place value in grade 4 on the first week, he sort of gave up updating me what they are doing in math now.

Yikes.

At first I thought your Avatar was a picture of you screaming w/wide open mouth.

I haven't cracked open my son's packet yet -- it oughta be interesting.

"Why can't people understand what these kids needs? I really feel sometimes like throwing my hands up in the air and yelling at them all. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

That has been SO us for the past several weeks stuck watching DS6 come home day after day with work he refused to do because it was stuff he mastered quite awhile ago. They pretty much sucked any love of learning out of him in less than 4 weeks all while totally messing with his self-esteem in the process. So I will scream right along with you AAAAAAHHHHHH!

DS6 came home from school today and had as assignment that he completed in class. (We're hoping that the teacher saw it). For the very, very simple addition (you have 5 apples and you get 2 more apples) he solved the problem, showed his work, and his "variables". Yeah he treated them like algebra problems

Then tonight right before bedtime he was doing that Singapore math pre-test again. There was a long division problem like 248 divided by four. His approach: he knew that 12 x 4 = 48 (he knows his times table) so he was adding up 48s over and over again until he got past 248. Then he took his result (I think he got 5) and of course multiplied that by 4. In the end he didn't get it quite right, but I'm saving that to show his teacher! If he had known the mechanics of long division, he'd have solved that problem. He was creatively finding a way to sum up 4s to get the answer!

Today at school was both good and bad... I'll post the interesting story in a new thread as to not hijack this one.

JB

Oh great, DS7 starts 3rd tommorrow, he will be one year grade skip, but math should be accelerated to 4th. I am keeping my fingers crossed.

So when do things start getting a little less "duh"? Am still upset post-assembly - it was book week last week, and so today there were announcements re books voted as best, and prizes for children who voted for them. But the favourite books were all picture books!!! Voted for and won even by children in Grade 7.

Maybe I do still have gifted denial. I've not thought my boys were all that stand-out, especially compared to some of the children talked about here. But apparently one of the key elements of Grade 1 maths this semester will be counting to 100. And despite having gone back and read it several times, I still wonder if it can really be true that a key scientific learning for the END of grade THREE is that offspring resemble their parents - eg "cats have kittens, dogs have puppies." Really and truly. So are my boys really fabulously smart, or does the education system assume that children are idiots? I'm strongly inclined to think there's an element of the latter.

Did the meet and greet today, and I think DD6's 2nd grade teacher knows about her. After meeting teacher she was explaining to me how she skips the first 20 assignments (because it's review) and that she teaches to the higher grade in her class (it's a 2nd, 3rd grade combo) and that she is always trying to challege her students (I love her already!) Now I know I'll have to speak to her later about going higher than 3rd grade level for DD, but I have a feeling this teacher is going to figure this out quickly.