Reply to How to handle first grade when DC is way ahead

Forum Index » Advanced Academic Programs (AAP)

Reply to "How to handle first grade when DC is way ahead"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]A few things:

- Agree with talking to the teacher about how your DC is being challenged. Be careful with how you approach this. Don't say "DC is bored" or state that DC is ahead of the other children. Saying your kid is bored will feel like an attack in the teacher's approach (no teacher wants to hear that children are bored in class) and you don't actually know if your child is ahead of everyone else -- often there are multiple kids who are accelerated on a given subject, and your child might not even be the most accelerated in any given subject. But discussing where your child is at, how you can support what is happening in the classroom, etc., will give you a better idea of what is happening at school and whether it's meeting your child's needs.

- Don't discount the value in repeating certain basic concepts even if your child is very comfortable with them. In math, in particular, there can be value especially in covering basic concepts multiple times because it leads to a level of fluency that will benefit them as they move into more complex math. A child can be totally comfortable with addition/subtraction in 1st, but will still benefit from spending time on it because there's a difference between "comfortable with the concept, understands the function" and "can quickly and accurately solve problems without needing to think much about it." Unless your child is a math savant, they probably don't have that fluency yet even if they are already working on multiplication/division in terms of comprehension.

- Now is a good time for your child to start learning productive methods for dealing with boredom in class. I was a very accelerated child in elementary school, and while there was a G&T program, I still remember spending many hours in classrooms reviewing topics I knew backwards and forwards. During that time, I had a teacher who encouraged me to use curiosity to make even familiar, easy subjects more interesting. She would tell me to pay attention to the lesson even if it was easy, but when it was over, write down at least one question on the topic that the lesson did NOT answer. So an example would be be, after a lesson on exceptions to phonics rules, I might write down "But why do some words break the rules and some don't?" And then she would either give me an answer or help me find a resource that would tell me. And that's how I became interested in etymology of words as a child. To this day, I have a pretty unceasing curiosity about a really broad range of subjects, and my profession relates directly to this practice, and I'm very good at both asking provocative, useful questions, and figuring out how to answer them. And that started because I was a bored 2nd grader who initially wanted to zone out during lessons because I'd already finished my worksheet in the first 2 minutes of class and thought I knew everything I needed to know. I did not, and I remain grateful to that teacher for making the effort to show me that and giving me tools for reaching further and higher. This is something you could also do at home with your child regarding both lessons at school and any homework assignments coming home that seem boring or too easy for them.

GL.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics