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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][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]

DP.  A few options here, depending on how passive you want to be with the situation.  
1.  You could request a conference, frame it more as being worried that DD is having trouble adjusting to the new school, see what the teacher says, and then segue into her being bored.  It's not at all a direct approach, but it shouldn't annoy the teacher or make her view you as *that* parent.
2.  If you have some documented test scores that show your child is far ahead (did she do iready and get very high scores?  Did she have testing from her previous district?), be more direct that your child is struggling because she needs more challenge.  If you don't want to burden the teacher, offer suggestions for enrichment that require no effort on the part of the teacher.  
3.  Have your child just take a BA workbook or whatever chapter book she's reading, and then ask the teacher if she could do that [b]in place of the ST math or Lexia[/b].  The worst outcome is that the teacher says no.  [/quote]

The problem with asking to skip Lexia or ST Math is that our family strongly suspects FCPS higher ups are pushing teachers to get kids to log MORE hours on those time wasters. We've had multiple teachers switch from giving meaningful assignments to saying "just do ST Math" even for kids who are in advanced math. Similar push for Lexia. It's horrible and the kids would definitely get more out of just about any other learning website in far less time, but without a push at the school board/Gatehouse level I don't know how this ends.[/quote]

They absolutely are pushing more ST Math.  Some teachers hate the program and are willing to let the kids do other things instead.  Others are not.  It doesn't hurt to ask, and if the teacher says your kid simply must do ST Math, then ask the teacher to set it at a higher grade level.  [/quote]

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