School Advancement Advice

[KatCan]

Hello,

I'm looking for some advice for a meeting I have with my daughter's school tomorrow.

She started Primary One in August 2009 (aged 6 - we're in Scotland). At the school's recommendation, she's skipped P2 (she did most of that work in P1), starting P3 this August.

Whilst we were confident she could handle the academic work, we were worried about her emotional well-being and the fact her motor skills are average for her age. She's a happy, popular girl, but she doesn't respond well to shouting, etc, and is ultra-sensative to many things.

We were assured she'd be treated 'sensatively' but, my daughter has reported that her maths teacher shouts at her alot for not working quickly enough, that she's often crying to herself in her maths class, has taken it upon herself to try to finish her maths work at lunchtimes and at home has started wetting the bed.

I've only uncovered all this after gradually probing her for information. I'm really upset and meeting with the school tomorrow.

Does anyone have any advice on how to proceed? I Feel badly let down by the school but want to keep them onside. I'm feeling really isolated as don't know anyone else in this situation.

Thanks for your help.

But DO make sure you know what is going to happen when your child reachers the end of Year 6. Certainly in Englans - not sure about Scotland, obviouly, children generally can't start Secondary School early.

It is possible for acceleration to work.

My own ds has been accelerated by three years and it works very well for him. Additionally he is subject accelerated for maths and science.

It is very unusual for a school to recommend it, so she must be very bright.

It sounds as though her fine motor skills may be holding her back. It certainly sounds like be the maths teacher resents her being moved up and this could explain your dd's problems in her class. Most teachers are anti acceleration.

I would be inclined to ask for a meeting with the school and push for an IEP.

I think you are right to resist moving her back down.

Has she been assesed by an educational psychologist?

Pixie, he is 9.

It has been a long hard road with him. He had huge problems with his age peers.

To cut a long story short, we went through Camhs and after several years he was diagnosed with ADHD and on the autistic spectrum.

Then I saved for an assesment with a private education psychologist and was stunned to find out that he has an IQ in excess of 200+.

After lots of meetings at school he was moved up first one, then two then finally three years. Each move improved his behaviour and the final move, three weeks ago and suddenly no ADHD or ASD. The consultant was stunned.

He will need a further move soon.

He is much happier now and more mature.

He goes to cubs, swimming and several other local clubs with age peers and enjoys this. He also plays out every night with all the local kids, also about his age. But he really does need the move up from his age group at school. It really depends on each child being different. It was the least damaging thing to do at the time.

Having the move and the stimulation at school means he can spend out of school hours with his age peers as he needs this too. Before he was moved, he hated school, disrupted other children and was constantly in trouble and then when he got home he was studying independently and missed playing out with age peers, so he was not getting any positive interaction or socialisation with children his own age. This way he gets both.

Nobodyissomebody, It?s really refreshing to hear a success story about accelerated learning. In these forums I keep reading how damaging it is.

I believe it works well for some gifted children. I have a son age 9, who in many ways has had a similar experience. From day one teacher reported vocabulary very sophisticated, shared few interests with age peers. He would manipulate the teachers to allow him to stay in with them, he preferred adult conversation.

We now Home Ed, he can study quietly and is happy persuing his interests. He socialises with others playing sport and has joined cubs. I insisted he go.

Pixie, its also nice to hear that your son is so happy socialising with his age peers. My DS had one very good friend in his class, a girl who was equally as bright. He struggled to understand the shoving and teasing between the boys in the playground and thought they behaved in a socially immature way.

As a child I spent almost all of my time with older children and adults. From about 6 yrs I had no interest in toys, dolls, skipping etc, so I am willing to accept that social skills are gleaned from all interactions with others, not just age peers.

I also wonder what forces have created the modern idea that socialisation only occurs within institutionalised settings, namely schools, where children are grouped according only to chronological age.

You have a point, minimaths, but mixing naturally with a group of children of different ages in, say, a medieval village setting would be different from being the only child of 9 in a class of 13yos. If a child is happier with adults, then accelerating to the point where they are put in a class with hormonal teens might not make their lives easier at all. It would be difficult to follow conversations if the others have reached puberty, talk about boyfriends, go out together after school without parental supervision, and read books and listen to music that the parents of the 9yo might not approve of at all. My dd socialises quite a bit with her 10yo brother, but she still thinks a 10yo in her class would be miserable because there would be so much of the conversation they couldn't understand. The older children might be very kind, but it would be a very obvious question of being kind rather than them really being friends.

I too preferred mixing with adults as a child, but realise in retrospect that this was not because I was socially mature (after all, I didn't have the experience to meet those adults on anything like equal terms); to the contrary, it was because I lacked the social maturity that teaches people to adapt to others. Adults were my best bet, not because I was like them, but because they were the people with the patience to adapt to me, without my having to do half the adapting.

My dd is at least equally gifted, but has always been really good at adapting to the needs of other people and speaking in different registers, so she could happily go from discussing Victorian novelists at home with me to playing fairies with her best friend at school and see no contradiction. I thought people who were different from me were silly, she finds them interesting. But then she spent all of primary school wanting to become a novelist and is now yearning to be an actress, so I suppose it makes sense to her.

. Wow now that IS G&T unlike all this 10% of every class nonsense.

And good to read of a success story of you finding a workable way with this, after what must have been a difficult few years.

Cory it's interesting what you say about learning to adapt. To some extent I think you are right. Is your daughter very creative? Being creative and intuitive will facilitate empathy and understanding, perhaps more than having a brain that whilst brilliant, is only concerned with concrete facts.

DS is very interested in politics and economics. His concern this morning
?Capitalism is creating wealth for some, but I think it's also creating poverty" he cares.

I don't believe I was given special consideration as a child, few subjects off limits in our family. We discuss everything, it's seen as key to our children's development. The starting point being that they are equally entitled, but less experienced/educated.

DS plays math games with a boy who is profoundly autistic; he is very adaptive to his needs and shows a level of awareness beyond his years. This boy was bullied at school by his age peers, which shows that children socialising doesn't always equal acquisition of empathy, manners, abstract thought, kindness, co-operation which are the key components of social skill.
I remember very clearly DS2 at 3 yrs being perplexed by the boy with the truck why, because the boy with the truck hit the others over the head with it.
For some children, who are academically bright, their need for socialising with their age peers is clearly important. I just wanted to express the view that there is an alternative that meets the needs of others.

Does anyone else think that the socialisation agenda within education is actually about creating the fuel for the capatalist engine? DS, aged 9, wonders, as do I.

KatCan - joining in a bit late on this thread, but as someone who was moved up a year at about the same age, I had a couple of thoughts. One is that possibly the teacher is generally opposed to moving children out of their age groups (some teachers are pretty adamant it is always a bad idea, even if their schools do sometimes do it), and so is trying to prove a point by ensuring that your DD can be seen to be 'not coping'.

Or alternatively (and this is what happened to me) she has ultra-high expectations of your daughter as she is bright enough to be moved up a year - but she may be expecting too much. When I was moved up a year (aged around 7), my class teacher assumed that my maths was so advanced that everything she was doing in class would still be too easy, so she gave me different work to do in class. I could just about cope with the work she set me, but also had to keep half my attention on what the rest of the class was doing as I hadn't actually covered some of the topics (and was too embarrassed to tell her).

It all settled down in the end, though, and I stayed with my new year group throughout junior/secondary, did most of my O-levels at 15, A-levels at 17 (took a year out before university, though) and thrived socially and academically. So I have to say that moving up a year can work, and I was six months younger than the next youngest in the class.

I can see that moving more than one year ahead could be difficult socially, but there is such a big difference in physical and social development within a normal one-year cohort that a child up to a year younger is unlikely to fall too far outside the norm, unless they are already particularly small for their age.

Gifted children are just like other children in that they are all different and no one solution fits all.

We had an awful time with ds until I took to the internet to find a solution.

All the best info on gifted children comes from the USA where accelaration is far more common and managed very effectively. So I read everything I could obtain and fought very hard. It wasn't until I could produce hard evidence (Iq and achievement data) that he was functioning light years ahead despite not being taught that we were able to go forward. I heard about the Iowa accelaration scale and worked from those questions which was very useful.

I work very hard to ensure he mixes with age peers too.

For some kids enrichment works but for my ds he needs to extend upwards and it is what the literature in America calls the least worst option.

Works for us but YMMV

Just wanted to say thanks to everyone who posted their advice and support. I had the meeting with the head of the unit yesterday and it turns out the problem has been simple yet infuriating.

There has been a serious breakdown in communication among the staff at DD's school. The maths teacher was unaware of the fact my daughter had been advanced. The maths set are currently revising maths they did last year, however it is work that DD had not yet done. Teacher did not know DD had never encountered these types of caluclations before and therefore expected her to work faster.

Pleased in can be resolved but furious my DD has had to deal with such pressure whilst agog that such incompetance from the school can arise with barely a blush from the powers that be.

My next stage, I feel, is to ask for an IEP for DD as I now feel I have to micro-manage all that's going on to ensure a similar sitution doesn't arise.

School are so far resisting the 'need' for a written IEP.

Sorry to hear about this cock-up, Kat, but have to say it doesn't surprise me at all. I found when dd was at junior school that I had to go in every year and explain to her teacher that she was actually disabled: despite repeated meetings with the head, deputy head, SENCO etc, no information ever seeped through to the teacher, and conversely the head was never informed of the teacher's experiences of her disability. The paperwork was all there, but nobody ever showed it to the teachers.

Oh dear, Cory, how frustrating that must have been. Our school scored very badly for communication in its last HMIE report 2 years ago.

If I could pin them down to something in writing, I'd photocopy it and hand it round all the teachers myself if that's what it took!

I will, Pixie, that's my Phase 2 in my plan of action!

I spoke with the dreaded maths teacher today ('I've never shouted at her!'). The deputy head and she have put their heads together and decided that DDs problem with the maths (because she's never shouted (!) and because they say she has no problem with the process (that she ended up having to teach herself)), is her 'perfectionism'.

Now, as far as I'm concerned, DD has never shown any perfectionalsit tendancies. In fact (at home, anyway), I'd sometimes put her on the wrong side of lazy and I know she'd hand in sloppy work if she thought she could get away with it.

I'm wondering now if the teachers have gone away, read a list of characteristices of gifted children (no one has ever suggested, nor have we, that she's 'gifted' btw), and applied the characteristic that would get them out of this current fix.

Unless she's a perfectionist at school but not at home? Can that happen? She certainly doesn't beat herself up if she thinks she's not produced her best possible work.

What she does want is the rest of her maths set to know she'd never done those sums before and that they had an unfair advantage over her. I'd call that competitivness rather than perfectionism.