Starting school - advice please

[MyAngels]

Hi
DS is 4.5 and starts school in September. I appreciate he hasn't been officially titled G&T, but I know that he must have "high learning potential" (is that the better phrase?) and I thought posting here would put me in less danger of "bragging", than posting elsewhere..

If you had a gifted child (and you suspected they were, when going into Reception), how did you manage that with the teachers? Did you tell them your suspicions, and risk getting the "I'm a professional, its my job to educate/socialise him, I'll take it from here, thank you.." response (we got this from his preschool teacher), or keep quiet, wait till they notice and come to you?

My DS's abilities seem to have gone ballistic in the last few months, starting to read (on his own), adding up (begs me to do adding with him - can now do number bonds to 10 easily, to 20 with a bit more effort), learnt to tell the time this week - yesterday I found him searching on iplayer for his beloved Dolly Parton (we went to Glastonbury!) by typing "dolie" in the search line with no help from me....

I'm trying not to do too much with him for fear of looking like a pushy parent, but will, of course, answer him and show him if he asks me something.

We have had trouble at preschool with him - not doing as told, defying teacher, not sitting on carpet etc. His new reception teachers (job share) are aware of these aspects (which of course need attention), but I'm just not sure how best to approach them about his more intellectual abilities. We have a 30 minute meeting with the teachers arranged for the Friday before he starts in September, by the way.

Any advice very welcome, thanks.

Similar experience here to Really Tired and Rocket Jam. Infant school (and in fact education/learning) isn't about being sat down and taught facts. It is so much more than that. I was extremely bright and still chose a school that emphasised learning through play as in my professional opinion that was what was most important to develop her mind and happiness.

She has written several chapter stories and illustrated them (a lot of phonetic spelling and short chapters, but still I was impressed!). She has had a weekly session of African singing with a voice coach for half a term, been in a production, reads well, developed her maths skills (charts and graphs she hadn't done before, some times tables) learnt so much about countries around the world, animal lifecycles, sport, as well as playing with other people etc. I really wouldn't have wanted her sat still at a desk all day as it's counter-productive. She's done all this through play and exploration which is the best way to learn.

She brought home a book about art from the library the other day and was able to say "mum, is that one by Van Gogh - we "did" him in school." She'd never mentioned that before, I googled some pictures. She was able to say, "look mum, that's him, he only has one ear. He likes sunflowers, can we find some pictures he did of sunflowers?"

It turns out they all had different pictures to have a go at copying of his. Different children have the same challenge but respond to it at different levels - my daughter had absorbed a lot of the information, some might just have had a go at painting something pretty etc...

I honestly can't see why anyone would want a gifted child in a more structured conformist setting when having the freedom to explore suits a bright child that has the ability to really soar with projects and learning at their own pace in reception. I wish it was the same in year 1.

As I said before, DD wanted to learn things at school - she's read books about school, and expected to do formal learning: she wanted to know about DNA and volcanos. She wasn't that interested in building blocks, toys and sand by the time she was four, and didn't need to be taught phonics, number bonds or to count on. That didn't leave much of reception to interest her. There is only so often you can do some painting to fill the time before it gets a bit tedious.

When my DD1 was in reception she was desperate to do more formalised learning too. She didn't want to engage in the play activities and came home complaining of being bored every day.

I put this down to her being gifted. She taught herself to read and write soon after her second birthday and played with numbers constantly. The HV identified her as gifted at her 18 month check.

Now I understand more about the theory behind learning through play and since she was diagnosed with AS at the age of 12, I realise that she wasn't bored because the reception curriculum was beneath her. She was bored because she wasn't capable of learning through playing with her peers.

She may have been streets ahead academically but she was seriously behind her peers socially and emotionally.

OP, you need to look at your DS's whole profile and make sure he is progressing in all areas. A good play-based curriculum will allow him to work at his own level academically so don't worry that he won't be challenged. If he is NT he will be fine. The worry will be more whether the teachers will differentiate effectively once he is in Y1/2 and follows a more formal curriculum.

I'm really sceptical that there are many NT four/ five year old children who don't want to play/ explore. I suspect that many children who are on the spectrum hate reception because it is chaotic and they can't access that kind of learning. Often hyperlexia goes with aspergers. Parents over look their child's weak areas.

A child can be doubely unique. It is possible for a child to be on both the special needs and the gifted and talented registers.

It is possible for a child to be on both the special needs and the gifted and talented registers.

That describes both of my DDs.

I wish someone had told me about hyperlexia when DD1 was young. She wouldn't have had to wait until the age of 12 before she was diagnosed with AS.

Well that's good news the for DD and her friends, they all turn 5 in Sept - Jan.

She read her new book from the library before bed so no memorising and she only struggled with some names. I also asked her to tell me the time after my comments on this thread and she correctly told me 7.08.

I guess the horrendous amount of money spent on child care wasn't all wasted.

I have no idea if DD1 fits the G&T label but she can read already and is comfortable with addition and subtraction to 20 - none of this coached by us, she's always been interested - her favourite games are adding up and counting to 100. She loves to look up information on the cbeebies website (thankfully doesn't understand googling yet and I'm not opening that pandora's box) so can tell me all about dinosaurs I've never heard of. She asks inquiring questions like "why is is harder to walk uphill than downhill?" and "once all the dinosaurs died, how did the people get here if there was noone to born [sic] the babies?"
I've decided to leave it until the October half term - I would like to see her reading improve and not be still learning the phonic sounds she's known since she was 3 but a couple of months won't hurt and I don't want to look too pushy.

Surely a child reading the numbers 7, 0 and 8 on a computer is just reading numbers, not telling the time, littlepinkpear?

If your child is G&T IME the teachers will tell you. DS's reception teacher asked all parents to send in scribbled post-its throughout the year if their child did/said something which demonstrated a leap forward in any learning. A cunning way of not having to listen to myriad stories at the end of every school day?

A cunning way of not having to listen to myriad stories at the end of every school day?

That may just be a fortunate side effect. They are supposed to include observations and achievements from home because some children develop at different rates at home and school so it can give a more accurate and balanced picture. It can also highlight to teaching staff if the child is seriously underachieving in school so they can work out if something is causing them to struggle.

SuburbanRhonda - she's learned from the kitchen clock which has hands and numbers on. I asked her to tell me the time and she said - 8 minutes past 7. No digital display near her.

Her DG is a retired maths teacher and spent some time with her explaining the short & long hands, quarter past, half past, quarter too, 5 minute segments etc over Christmas. Prompted by DD not her gran as she was looking at their grandfather clock in the hall. She's picked it up quickly. I mainly think its due to her massive appetite and knowing when her next meal or snack might be arriving :)

Oh, I see, littlepinkpear, that makes it clearer.

It was because in your original post you said your DD told you it was 7.08, not 8 minutes past 7, the former being a digital time, hence the confusion.

DS will be starting reception in September. He can't read or write yet, but he can add and subtract two digit numbers, do simple multiplication and understand negative numbers. He's perfectly within the norm for his age and the reception teachers are perfectly used to dealing with children of much more advanced abilities. His best friend can read and write fluently. When they are in nursery together, they mostly play at superheroes, making pretend food out of playdough, cooking it in the home corner and serving it to their friends, running around outside, going on imaginary adventures with maps they have drawn orchatting about their favourite tv programmes.

Reception teachers are used to a vast range of abilities at the start of the year and also to children making sudden and dramatic leaps in ability over the course of the year. I'd certainly mention the stuff that he can do, and they will almost certainly ask for your input, but I wouldn't worry about learning through play - even the genuinely gifted children at the school are able to find play which stretches and challenges them.

Sorry Rhonda :) typing and BF don't mix!

Being ahead of other children at age 4 doesn't mean that a child is gifted - wait and see how he develops. Of my 2 children one couldn't read a single word on starting school, whereas the other was reading quite hard books, with only a little input from me. It's made no difference in the long run. In fact the one who struggled with learning to read made huge strides very quickly and since then has been a better reader for her age.

I shall bow out at this point as clearly I am a deluded parent of an average child, and my anecdotal input is rendered invalid because it is different from the experience of others. Because all gifted children have exactly the same personality this must mean I am weird, my child is weird, or both.

Good luck OP. If it turns out your child is gifted you'll have many more of this kind of conversation.

Cheebame - If it's any consolation, the Ed Psych I met said very similar things to you. I'd always assumed that my ds found other children difficult purely because of his ASD. The Ed Psych carried out some tests with him and observed ds in his classroom and concluded that a large part of the problem was that ds couldn't relate to the other children in class at all because he was years ahead of them and had very different interests.

Chebame the whole point of a play based curriculum is that all the children can work at the level appropriate to them as an individual.

You make an airport role play area with opportunities for writing tickets and boarding passes, reading magazines and flight times making signs and numbering seats, calculating numbers of passengers, etc. If you take the opportunity to create tickets as an example, some children will write "ticit" across each piece of paper, some will scribble a few wiggly lines with no recognisable letters and very able children will write out complex tickets, copying the format of any real tickets available to them and including prices and small print. Each child has learned or practised an important skill for them, be it holding the pencil, using their phonetic knowledge or finding out the correct spelling and exploring the other text on the ticket and its meaning. The most able child can find something valuable to learn there.

In play, the child chooses to extend or consolidate their own learning according to their needs at the time so no child has to be overwhelmed or bored.

My DD couldn't access that curriculum because she didn't see the point in pretending to be on an aeroplane in the first place and she didn't want to interact with the other children. That was due to her having AS. I hope that's not what you mean by weird.

Maybe your DD's reception teacher didn't provide an adequate play based curriculum for any of the children.

Will the play based curriculum in Reception continue despite the Gove changes to the curriculum?

Goldmandra, that's a lovely theory, but unfortunately with children at either end of the ability range, it doesn't always work.

Someone further up mentioned 'peers' and part of the problem with reception(and indeed as we are finding further up the school) is the absence of peers to do this kind, and indeed any kind of play with. DD wanted to do long complex imaginative play in reception, but the other children would wander off after five minutes and she got frustrated with that.

And one thing that is true of many gifted children, and which I think often causes the snarky comments about 'hot-housing' is that they really do have a hunger for knowledge and are upset when they are not, for at least a bit of the day, filling their brains up. They do ask for more maths, they do want to do workbooks at home, they enjoy it. For them, it is often the kind of play they want to do. And they don't get to do that in Reception.

That lovely theory is the basis of the whole EYFS and, if effectively planned, it does cater for all abilities. Part of that play curriculum is interacting with adults who can support and extend the play and there are also plenty of aspects of play that are not imaginative play.

If a child is only happy when completing workbooks and prescriptive tasks, the adult should be looking at how to support their development in other areas so that they can learn the skills they need to access the whole curriculum.

You be exceptionally bright and not bored in reception. My ds has always stood out because of his ability to analyse and being a deep and out of the box thinker and mature beyond his years was always well behaved in reception and never complained of being bored.
F anything problems came in year 6 not because of academics but because he had outgrown a tiny primary school. He went into top sets and despite being dyslexic managed well. He bypased all those that were reading fluently in reception.
His a level maths teacher says he asks questions that are bordering on genius and gets the whole of the maths department discussing his questions.
There is far more to being bright than asking for more work.

I didn't say only happy. I said that some children need a certain amount of that in their mental diet - we found that a couple of sessions a week were enough to keep DD satisfied.

You are very attached to the idea of EYFS, to the extent that you're not quite hearing what I'm saying. The peers thing affects the whole of Reception, unless you want to go and hide in book corner and read a book (and then there aren't any books at your level anyway, DD had a reading age of about double her chronological age in reception).

I'm not disputing that it works for ninety something percent of the population, but it's just not true for everyone. DD had a great time with the EYFS at nursery, but she had in great part outgrown it by Reception.

I accept, it's hard for teachers to make it work, especially with a class of 30 with a good swathe of special needs in and not enough support. And so in practice, it really doesn't work.

He does sound like quite a bright boy, but that shouldn't be what's worrying you or what you address with the teacher - refusing to sit on a carpet isn't the same as growing bored after sitting for hours learning to do something you can already do (loving the Eric Clapton analogy ), it's just being a bit naughty.

None of those instances of defiant behaviour seem logically attributable to being too clever to do as he's told - I'd be thinking more about that.

The peers thing affects the whole of Reception

Yes, and further up the school too. Social interaction is an important part of the non-academic curriculum for all years and some children need support with it.

You don't outgrow learning through peer interaction. It is used in classrooms right up to sixth form and beyond.

If your DD didn't have access to books at an appropriate level to her development, the problem was possibly the ability of the teacher to provide appropriate resources, not the concept of a play based curriculum.

If your DD didn't have access to books at an appropriate level to her development, the problem was possibly the ability of the teacher to provide appropriate resources, not the concept of a play based curriculum.

Yes, exactly. But that's what I mean: the theory of the EYFS is lovely, and does work for most children, but unless you have an exceptional school, the practice does not work for the outliers. And if you don't have access to one - as so many of us don't - you have big problems and frustrated childen.

We've now changed school, but I used to cry at this time of year, every year because DD would bring her work home, and it was so far below what she would quite happily do off her own bat at home (think storyboarding Handa's surprise when your child is reading Harry Potter) that I felt that we were utterly failing her.

But what I mean by 'peers' are not just age cohorts, but those on a child's particular level. Without that, reception is tricky because so much depends on interaction there (and yes, it would be lovely if the adults did it, but as I said there are 30 children, special needs and the quiet child who can read never ends up as the priority).

Interestingly, there is now research to show that some kinds of learning through peer interaction- specifically when advanced students are paired up with those further behind to 'teach' them- has no benefit at all for the gifted children and that the most beneficial form of peer interaction for the gifted is with those at the same level. I can try and dig out a reference if you want.