Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Elementary School How far ahead in math are gifted kids typically?

My oldest is HG, but math is her weakest personal area. She was younger for grade with an early fall/late summer bd and she has skipped one grade. She is about 1 grade up for math achievement right now (performs in the top 10% of her current grade and is in accelerated math), so I'd say, overall, she's about 2 yrs ahead of her chronological age in math. I'd expect that most HG kids for whom math is a strength, not a weakness, would perform higher than her in that area, though.

I also expect that there are plenty of bright, but not gifted kids who are performing 1-2 grades above grade level in math. Dd10 scores slightly above the average 8th grader in math on the EXPLORE (8th grade test) at age 9 (4th grade). She doesn't consistently perform superbly in math (she is subject accelerated one year currently), but she grasps abstract math concepts quite well. I'd say that she does better with much higher level math and not as well with grade level or one grade level accelerated math due to the more concrete nature of 5th-6th grade math. She's maybe MG, maybe HG+ and I do think that math is somewhat of a strength of hers.

Has anyone else read Developing math talent? I am partway through, and it talks a lot about the lag in computation skills compared to conceptual understanding. It is such an interesting and helpful book, I highly recommend it. There is a new edition, released a couple of weeks ago.

I think there is something to be said for that. In the homeschool GT community kids doing "easier" curriculum certainly move faster than kids doing "harder" curriculum like they might use in Taiwan from what I've seen. My 4th grader is at algebra level doing "rigorous" curriculum and that is challenging. It's not the concepts to him that are challenging. It's the multi-faceted way math is presented and advanced problem solving. He's still not the best with keeping long calculations all in order either. So I'd say he is conceptually beyond where he is in the curriculum. Which I don't think is unusual.

You don't want to move to Taiwan, it's a crazy pressured school system with a lot of tutoring and parental pressure. We use Singapore math, which is marketed as great because Singapore has great standards. But I think it's mostly that Singaporean kids are highly pressured and tutored.
My DD's excellent K teacher had something interesting to say recently. The PTB had found her a book with some word problems. My DD can't read, so the teacher sat down with her during free play to take her through a few problems. (I know, we are lucky)

The teacher said "I sat down with her and read through the problem, but she didn't seem to really understand it. I went home and thought no, she's just not ready for it. But the next day I thought I'd give it another try, and she had them figured out". Yes, because you taught her how the day before!

It's so interesting that her gut feeling was that if you need to be taught something you're not ready for it. I'm sure she doesn't have that thought when she's teaching kids to read or count. But it definitely illustrates how these kids are expected to be perfect and computational errors are taken to be signs that they're not ready for the work. Does every child need to get 100% every time before they are allowed to move to the next grade?

We're also figuring out how to politely tell the school that the test they're planning on is one or two grade levels too low.

I agree that the depth of math, at least in our DS8's public school district is lacking. Its mostly operational math, with litlle thinking skills. We supliment using MOEMS, and may look at the AMC8 next year. DS8 is math skipped 3 grades to 6th, he may need one more skip, as the work still seems to repetative and not challanging. Even the 6th grade math is mostly operational math. MOEMS was challanging last year and again this year DS is not doing better then 4 out of 5 correct, so it still seems to be a good fit. I think in the age of NCLB the focus is mostly just getting them to reach a certian test level rather then teach problem solving.

DS7.5 is on that track: 6th grade/pre-algebra. It's material he knows, but it is relatively formulaic. On his own he's read through to Algebra 1 in Life of Fred. However our current acceleration is already pretty radical (going to the middle school for period 1 in the morning, then back to his 3rd grade homeroom for the rest of the day). He's only been doing it for a month but similarly he gets 4 out of 5 correct give or take. Typically they're dumb mistakes like forgetting to include the minus sign or something.

We really wished there was more teaching like the LoF books because those included great word problems.

JB

I read it a while back, and didn't really find it helpful at all; not wrong, just obvious, as I recall. But I have background in both maths and education; I suppose I didn't really need it, I was just curious about what it would say!

For me without an education background, it's nice to get case studies and the right language to talk to teachers. And the list of curriculum areas to cover is nice for me, and the reinforcement of my thoughts that they need a curriculum, not a collection of enrichment activities.

I am actually asking about a home schooled child who is working through 2 of the more advanced math programs (Singapore and Horizons) at least 3 years ahead of her chronological age compared to our local public school. Math and science are her strengths. They are NOT my strengths and I'm having a very hard time coping (if that's the correct word) with her ease and speed in math.

Thanks for everyone's helpful responses! What prompted this post was basically this: I thought she was about 2 years ahead of her age in math. Then recently I looked on the local school district's math curriculum map and discovered that she is THREE years ahead of what I thought - according to our local ps. I guess I didn't take into account how advanced Singapore and Horizons are. But it was just a little bit of a shocker. And she has been asking for harder math. Sorry, but my heads spins sometimes!

I thought maybe there was something that I couldn't find (on Hoagies, from Ruf or Webb) that kind of tells you if your kiddo is about x amount of years ahead, then they are gifted and if they are xx amount of years ahead then they are HG, and so on. I guess it's kind of a dumb thing to ask but I really do appreciate this discussion.

This is your 4.5yo, is it, MamaJA? That's a tricky age for asking for harder maths if it isn't your thing, since (I suppose?) she's not likely to be up for being handed a book yet. Do look at the Sir Cumference books and that kind of thing, though; encourage her to play with numbers and look for patterns in what happens when you add this to that (evens, odd) or multiply this by that... Get her to see what shapes she can make that tessellate, i.e. that fit together and cover as much floor as you like with no gaps... Explore arithmetic in different bases (where instead of bags of 10 you have bags of something else, e.g. "17" in base 8 means 1 bag of 8 plus 7 units = 15 in base 10". Etc... If you want ideas for exploring particular directions that interest her, just ask - there are plenty of people who like to talk about maths here!