Academically advanced students in NOVA parochials

[Anonymous]

What if anything do Catholic parochial K-8 schools in the Arlington Diocese do for/with academically advanced students? Say the child is two or more grades ahead across the board.

Has anyone had their kid bumped up a grade? Asked the teacher to provide harder classwork? Something else? I’m looking to alleviate boredom while in class.

[Anonymous]

Other than moving up in math starting in 5th or 6th grade, I’m not familiar with other tracking. There are some after school academic challenges such as Battle of the Books and Odyssey of the Mind.

[Anonymous]

I’d consider augmenting with out of school studies and leave your kid in their birth year grade. It’s a long term plan but your gifted student will have many advantages in the high school and college landscape with the advantage of time. Pushing ahead reduces their advantages.

[Anonymous]

Thank you for the helpful replies. I take the (wise) point about inadvertently reducing long-term advantages by accelerating grade levels.

We already supplement outside of school, but I’m hoping to reduce DC’s boredom while in the classroom. I plan to discuss this with the teacher, but wanted to see how others have dealt with this. My only idea thus far is asking for more advanced work, but I understand that involves additional burdens for the teacher, so I don’t know how well that would go over.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Other than moving up in math starting in 5th or 6th grade, I’m not familiar with other tracking. There are some after school academic challenges such as Battle of the Books and Odyssey of the Mind.

This is exactly my experience as well. And my DS read a lot. Extra work from the teacher is unlikely to be meaningful, if they agree to it at all. I can imagine busy work but nothing to really stretch skills or go deep on a subject. Remember the point of your Catholic k-8 is faith formation and helping our kids become good people. That’s far more important, especially if you go to Gonzaga or some other high school where you can find plenty of challenge.

I get your frustration because I shared it. But in hindsight, I don’t think it hinders them at all and you’ll be happy with the rigor in high school and college.

[Anonymous]

This may not be a popular reply. I can only speak to what happened with my child. She was asked to help other students in the class fairly frequently. Her teachers explained that she needed to work on unselfishness and kindness, which was frustrating at the time but in retrospect her teachers were so right and those experiences helped her learn compassion. We supplemented outside of class and she has done extremely well in high school and college. Extra work in elementary school is unlikely to be meaningful, as another posted noted, and might even breed resentment.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Other than moving up in math starting in 5th or 6th grade, I’m not familiar with other tracking. There are some after school academic challenges such as Battle of the Books and Odyssey of the Mind.

This is exactly my experience as well. And my DS read a lot. Extra work from the teacher is unlikely to be meaningful, if they agree to it at all. I can imagine busy work but nothing to really stretch skills or go deep on a subject. Remember the point of your Catholic k-8 is faith formation and helping our kids become good people. That’s far more important, especially if you go to Gonzaga or some other high school where you can find plenty of challenge.

I get your frustration because I shared it. But in hindsight, I don’t think it hinders them at all and you’ll be happy with the rigor in high school and college.

+1

Some people supplement with Kumon classes outside of school, but we tend to value unstructured time in our family. I ended up taking my kids to the library once a week and in the summers signed them up for coding camp, etc. They thrived in their Catholic high schools and ended up at very selective colleges.

[Anonymous]

Supplement with Beast Acadrmy for Math!

[Anonymous]

Our kid applied to St. Anselms as soon as it was available (6th grade).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Our kid applied to St. Anselms as soon as it was available (6th grade).

Unfortunately, there isn’t an option for girls that has similar rigor to St. Anslems.