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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The day my first grader was pulled out for her routine reading evaluation with the reading specialist, she'd sneaked my collectible copy of The Lord of the Rings to school and was reading it in class. For the next 3 years she was in that school, the reading specialist never let me forget it!

Yes, gifted or precocious kids get bored in any and all group primary settings. It's the first experience, for most of them, that they are outliers and have to work on skills other than academics: patience, tolerance for nuisance, and generally biding your time until something interesting crops up. Sometimes kids act out because they're bored. I just gave my kid more appropriate books than my precious, thin-leafed, gilt-edged edition of LOTR! She stayed quiet in a corner and read. She still does that in 8th grade, despite being in all the most advanced tracks her public can offer (including being bused to the high school for math). The English teacher whispered to her as a joke: "DD, you read too much".

So ask the teacher for differentiation, supplement outside of school (BA is great! DD loved it), make learning fun, get them into a cerebral activity (violin for DD but could be chess or whatever) and a sport, and exhort them to patience in class, with all the books they can carry, or maybe a Kindle, if the teacher allows it.[/quote]

Thank you for your reply--It cheered me up. I appreciate the ideas. In terms of asking for differentiation and allowance to read outside material, I'm a bit nervous because I do not know the teacher very well yet. (DD didn't start at this school until mid-semester last year.) I don't want to come across the wrong way, lest the teacher get annoyed, offended, etc. Do I just wait and see? [/quote]

PP you replied to. Others have great advice. What did the teacher say in the parent-teacher conference?

I didn't ask for permission for DD to bring in books, if I recall correctly. This was in a pretty overcrowded public school in Montgomery County, and I knew the teachers were all rather overwhelmed. So DD brought whatever she wanted to school, and read those books during reading time. At every parent-teacher conference in November, without me broaching the subject, every year the teacher would say: "I wish I could do more differentiation, but I can't, so here's what she's been doing" and would hand me a miserable one-pager of slightly different math sets. Not the teachers' fault, they did their best. This is why we did Beast Academy. Essentially for grades 1-3 (she did a Montessori preschool that ended in K, and then went to a magnet for 4th grade), DD thought that school was a purely social scene, where you were occasionally required to do boring sheets of stuff, but the rest of the time, you could eat lunch in a very noisy hangar gaily enhanced with food-throwing, run around at recess, read and talk with friends, or watch someone scream and hit the teacher's aide. 
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