Heehee.... yeah, well... higher ed may be mighty fine around here, but there's an EXCELLENT reason why we aren't in any local brick-and-mortar schools. K through 12 is a different story.
(We're in an "orange" state... and while they theoretically have to have a plan to identity and "serve" GT kids in schools... let's just say that there are few things missing. Like actual differentiation, for starters. Or identification-- GT kiddos pretty much have to be like mine to get noticed as "gifted" candidates. Er... nor is there any funding, come to think of it.
)
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Back onto the thread topic, however...
our experience has been that homeschooling absolutely
accelerated the rate of learning. Because there was no good (ie-- healthy) way to fetter DD's natural inclinations to use her learning
strengths to best advantage, we found that her progress was at least 150-200% faster when homeschooling. Even as compared to what she's done since, I mean. She literally went from preK material into Singapore 3B and reading at about a Lexile 8-10 level in eighteen months.
I honestly believe that if we'd continued homeschooling, several things would have resulted:
a) DH would have had me involuntarily committed (kidding-- sort of)
b) DD would have been in need of college-level material at about 8-9 yo (we've so far managed to delay that by about three years, we think)
c) we'd have gone completely broke.
Like annalisa, I spent so much time, money, and energy on materials that DD either refused to use at all, or enthusiastically used
once. (Ask me to share my horror stories about "shoebox math centers," go ahead...
)
DD loved school materials and workbooks. The problem was that she'd hit a wall with it (well, that's what it looked like to ME, as an experienced educator, anyway)... next thing I knew, she and I would be in an all-out power struggle and she would do NOTHING at all for weeks. Then, without warning, the rest of the workbook (or whatever it was) would be just plain obsolete from a learning perspective. Just *boom* and
mastery. I don't know how she does that, but she
still does that kind of thing.
When I enrolled her in school {virtual charter school-- that is an important consideration here}, we placed her as a third grader, but I really had no idea what her actual placement
should be. I only knew that she got very nearly perfect scores on the CAT5 for second grade two months previously. She then raced through
the entire third grade curriculum in about five weeks, working at her own pace. The following year, she finished 4th grade by winter break, and then we had to tussle with the school over them sending her 5th grade, which they finally did-- unfortunately, she had some medical problems that prevented her from working in March and much of April, she only had about five weeks to work and only got about halfway through. We all agreed that having her
repeat that for the first half of the following year would be a complete losing proposition. I think my exact words were a horrified "If that's what we're doing, someone ELSE needs to be doing it with her, because I'm not going to put myself through four months of forcing her to do things she's done previously."
We made DD promise to do her best to NOT work ahead-- to stay in synch with her (GT) classmates beginning in 6th grade. She's done that... though not without some pretty significant grousing on occasion.
We do a TON of enrichment.
This works because we control the school environment... and they control the absolute 'required elements.' We control the "how" of learning, however, and the basic pace. No drill-and-kill, and no problems allowing for the organizational skills of an 11yo.
