Reading is fundamental. |
| Is your child already receiving math enrichment at school? If not, or if you don’t know, you can ask about that. If they are, then let them be a normie at school and do whatever enrichment you’d like after school. |
Your best plan of action would be to get RSM to advance your kid faster. If they won't do it, no one will. Use MCPS school as a place for social enrichment. It will serve your kid well. If that is not a priority for you (despite many on this thread who are hinting it should be), it will be less hassle if you homeschool and return and mainstream for a magnet high school or skip to college (if you think elementary school is slow, wait till you hit middle school!). |
| There are a couple of kids in my child's school who go to higher grade classrooms for math, and 2 5th graders who do math online (with a midddle school or high school class, I can't remember which) in the library because they are so advanced. |
This is what MCPS says they can do for true outliers, but it has been described as anywhere from a handful to a few dozen per grade across the system. It takes a lot for them to accept that a student needs it, and it appears that some administrators at individual schools are more amenable to identification/out-of-standard acceleration than others. How that identification occurs, whether there is a system-wide standard for that, whether it is ability-based or largely based on outside enrichment, and whether it is internally driven or reliant on family requests/private testing (for the last two, read: "$") remains unclear. YMMV. |
| I have a 6th grader. I guess she is gifted. But she's also small and skipped a grade so we aren't trying to get her to move forward. We just do outside enrichment. Can you look into math competitions like math counts? She might be a good candidate for that. Yes in school she was just be bored, but that's okay. Mine takes books, and she has AOPs problem sets she works on in class. |
I wrote something similar when OP posted and my post got deleted? Not sure why it was reported when it is a fact in my child's school too. There is a kid who takes higher level Math classes online at my kid's ES. |
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I think we tend to jump too quickly when our kids say they are bored with whatever it is at home/school/extracurricular. We were all bored as kids and that was ok, I'm not even sure my parents paid attention when we complained about it. Learning to deal with it is a life skill. My job is not super exciting 100% of the time.
My kids are high achievers and regularly tell me they are bored in certain classes. I tell them to get used to it, dealing with boredom is a part of life. They also don't enjoy doing running drills for their sports either. To be a productive member of society one needs to learn how to cope and combat boredom on their own. Its a good life lesson. |
THIS. Kids are all over the map at this age and school being easy in 2nd grade could mean anything from they're a super-genius to 2nd grade is just not that hard. School may be a breeze for your child forevermore, or they could find future grades very challenging for whatever reason. But odds are, they will encounter something that doesn't come easy at some point. And they need to know how to manage those feelings and work through them, rather than give up or shut down the first time something is tough. (Also, you can ask DC's teacher for guidance without requesting wholly differentiated instruction. E.g., "DC often finishes math after 15 minutes. Can they bring a book or a crossword? What would you recommend? How can we help cultivate good habits when they have downtime?" Etc.) |