Age 8, frustrated and getting in trouble at school, what to do?

[goldencrowns]

DD, an only child, is 8 and has always been bright and ahead in school.

Both DP and I were former gifted/talented children, so are well versed in all the pitfalls and didn't want to go down that route with DD. She is at a decent but not stellar small local state primary. She's been greater depth from the start and was reading fluently at 3/4, but we've not made a fuss about it or pushed her and have waited to see how she gets on.

Recently she's been having difficulties at school and with friendships and attention in particular. Pandemic isolation has been an issue, and she's a sensitive and can be quite moody child - though she's always had good social relationships until now. Speaking to her teacher, one big issue we weren't aware of seems to be that DD is able to mess around in lessons, draw/write stories at the same time, and still keep ahead of all the work. She gets pretty much 100% on all tests and learning tasks but is distracting other children during lessons and playing up with teachers. Teacher admits that DD is able to work well beyond the greater depth work but that there isn't any provision to go beyond this.

Talking to DD, she says the work is far too easy, including the greater depth, that it deeply frustrates her and she's only able to manage the frustration by drawing/writing/talking in lessons at the same time. She's starting to be quite resistant to adults in the school setting because she's so bored. She's socially and emotionally very much 8 even if academically ahead of that.

I appreciate that DD has to learn to pay attention in lessons and to be polite to adults, but she seems increasingly frustrated and angry, and I'm not sure I want to tell her she should just sit there switching off and putting up, either. (I switched off around the same age for similar reasons and it was not at all good for my work ethic or mental health as a child/teenager.)

During lockdown we found she would be able to do all her set schoolwork in ten or twenty minutes because it was too easy, but would sometimes refuse to do it for hours, plus lots of shouting/tears/resistance, because she was so bored by it. Left to herself she is hungry for information and reads/absorbs it at a huge rate. We have a ton of books and more than enough ability to give her some intellectual challenge, but heavy workloads and no time or capacity to carry on homeschooling or doing extra work in the evenings. We also can't afford either tutoring or private school at the moment.

School don't seem to be able to suggest any other solution than that she has play therapy to help her feel less frustrated, and that she needs to learn to pay attention in class.

Any advice? Neither DP or I want to go down the IQ test / hothousing route - that was done to DP as a kid and he is very scarred by it. I was left in school to switch off and be bored academically and that scarred me too! I guess we're looking for a way to help DD by not doing either of those things - if it exists...

[goldencrowns]

(Oh and there are no ASD/ADHD traits that we or anyone else has noticed so far.)

[Hellocatshome]

Think back to your childhood what would your child selves have preferred. What would child DH have preferred rather than hot housing, whtbwould child you have preferred rather than being left to be bored. Somewhere there should be your answer I think.

[goldencrowns]

Agh, I think the answer I don't want to think about is probably a selective private school, but we can't afford it right now and would be unlikely to get a bursary (all the ones in our part of the country are super-competitive and expensive, sadly, and don't offer much bursary funding). (I used to dream as a child of being able to go to a school with Latin and Greek...)

DP was taken out of his primary school by his parents and made to have endless ed psych assessments and IQ tests, was eventually sent to an gifted child correspondence school to sit all his GCSEs at 11, and then he then ended up with mental health issues and dropped out of school for four years to do nothing. His parents spent a lot of money to get him back into the educational system by doing A-Levels at crammers.

I was in an ordinary state primary/secondary, switched off and was bored and unhappy and also got quite resistant / rude to teachers. Also ended up truanting for large parts of my teenage years as a result -- school didn't mind or care as when I turned up I got the top marks in tests and so no-one followed it up. I hated my life, though and have been left with longstanding issues with work and self-esteem.

Really don't want either of those experiences for my DD!

[Starlightstarbright1]

Can you ask for a meeting with head of juniors.

My ds was very advanced in reading ( asd high iq but not gifted)

He had to get reading books from higher years. They only let him go so far because of suitability...

[WallaceinAnderland]

It sounds like she is old enough and bright enough to understand that distracting others and stopping them from learning is not acceptable behaviour.

Speak to the teacher and ask for either extension work or silent reading so that she is occupied. Talk to your daughter about respecting others.

[Smartiepants79]

What do school mean ‘there’s not provision for her to go beyond’?
I think you need to go back to them and start really asking what they’re going to do to try and re engage her. I’m a teacher so I’m usually on schools side in this kind of thing but it doesn’t sound like they’re trying very hard.
If she can work independently then there’s loads of side projects that she could be working on alongside her class work. The maths side is a little trickier but topic work in particular should be ok to add and extend.
They can insist she does the work set first.
And that she listens and engages during discussion/teaching times.
Then a tray/file of independent challenges?
Rudeness and distracting others from their learning has got to have consequences but the drawing and writing could be channelled into something more productive.
There’s quite a lot of resources around to challenge more able pupils.

[nocoolnamesleft]

Of course she's playing up, the poor kid is bored rigid. The school have a responsibility to provide her with appropriate work.

[StayingHere]

You shouldn't have to take her out and put her in a selective school. They should be able to provide more challenging work- can her teachers look to teachers from older year groups to provide some stretch and challenge material? Can you afford to send her to a tutor who could stretch her, then provide worksheets she could take to school once she has finished her work?
That aside, as you know your DD must learn not to be disruptive or disrespectful to others .

[goldencrowns]

She always does do the work even when she's also writing or drawing, and up until now (even with the same teacher, who she's had for two years), the feedback has always been that she's engaged and focused and gets on well with classmates, so this is a new thing that's only started happening this year.

It's a small class of about 20, and two of the other children working at greater depth left for private schools at the start of this academic year, so she's a bit out on her own; and I think she's also suffered a bit from the fact that the old table arrangement and flexible group learning has been replaced by the forward facing desks and just one learning partner they sit next to all half term (for Covid reasons). They also have much less time to play, and can't interact with other bubbles, so the learning is much less varied than before. Is it likely that once this starts to change, she'll be less frustrated maybe?

She is already allowed to pick her own books and so on, and already has extension/greater depth work plus extra challenges, which she says are also too easy. The teacher has admitted that that year cohort has fewer greater depth children and more who are SEND and EAL, so that resources have been primarily devoted to those children during the pandemic catch-up.

To be honest I don't want to make too much of a fuss with the head as I'm a governor - and I'm very aware of how challenging it's been for the school and staff especially during the pandemic. I'd much rather try to help DD address it with the teacher and also by talking to her at home and trying to think of some ways we can help her to manage it herself but also help her not to get too frustrated. This thread has been useful so far -- more suggestions very welcome!

[goldencrowns]

I should say I have no problem at all with scarce resources going primarily to children who need more help - that's completely fine. I'm just trying to find a way of helping DD be more settled and happy as the teacher has raised this with me herself!

[Remaker]

Firstly, go and get an IQ test. I’m quite confused by your description of your DH having endless rounds of them because you just need one. In fact once you’ve had one you can’t do another one for at least a couple of years or it skews the results. But you can’t help your DD with guesswork. Get the IQ test so you know what you’re dealing with. For instance I have one child with an IQ in the top 1%. Pretty easy to deal with that within the school system as long as the school is interested in extending bright kids. We needed a school move to do that. My other child is in the top 0.1% and that’s much harder to manage and we are still learning.

Basically you and your DH are at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of your experiences so it leaves you with a lot to work with in the middle. Don’t let your kid coast along doing easy work and being disruptive. At some point it will bite her big time. Everyone reaches their level at some stage whether it be high school or university or the workforce where some serious effort is required. Kids who don’t learn how to learn will often panic when faced with something that is hard and their self confidence crashes.

Do you have grammar schools in your area? My kids are at the Australian equivalent of grammar schools and it’s a good solution. Everyone is smart so if you want to do well you need to put some effort in. And the work is sufficiently challenging so as a parent I’m not constantly advocating for my child. Everyone accepts that every kid there is very intelligent so you don’t get the rubbish about “oh well so and so can recite their times tables backwards while standing on their head so I don’t really think your child is THAT bright.”

Don’t rule out ASD/ADHD. Girls with a high IQ can mask those conditions and often don’t start to struggle until high school. The fact that your child “needs” to do something else while doing her school work is a bit of a flag for something on the ADHD spectrum. My kids switched to a primary school that had a gifted class and a few parents got a bit of a shock because traits they had attributed to a bored gifted child suddenly looked like something else when the child was being academically challenged in a class with other gifted kids who didn’t need to jiggle, shout out answers or constantly annoy their peers.

Once you have an IQ test you should get some recommendations from the psychologist and then you will need to advocate with the school. It’s completely unacceptable for them to say there is nothing more they can do. There is plenty more that can be done, they just don’t want to and they’re probably using the disruptive behaviour as evidence of her “immaturity” to justify not extending her into an older class for some subjects or giving her more independent work to do. But you need the facts to prove your case! Good luck.

[Namenic]

Would her teachers let her take in some of her books from home/library to read/do in school after she has finished her work?

Could she learn a language - I don’t know what your policy on electronic devices is at home, but my son likes duolingo - there might be a Latin one! There is a Latin for kids book called Minimus - which is v gentle intro (I did it at school, but if you have a good grasp of french, you could probably read ahead in the book - with internet/dictionary and help her with it)?
Logic puzzles/riddle books might be interesting challenges. DS likes fact books - like DK ones or atlases.

[Mumoftwoinprimary]

Is there a larger school she could go to? My two are in a year group of 90 which makes it a lot easier as statistically there will be others who are closer in ability. Reading was always done in a group of 3 or 4 from across the three classes so that was fine. Ds (year 3) now does maths in a group of 8 or 9 from the classes.

Dd (year 6) now has clear water between herself and the next strongest in maths (her strongest subject) but all y6 maths lessons are done as a “greater depth” group of about 20. Which means that the teacher starts at gd level and can then set extension for the 3 or 4 who need it and then “Emma section” for Dd. If the teacher needed to differentiate over a class with a full range of abilities then of course the “Emma section” would not get done every day but with a gd class he doesn’t need to.

[goldencrowns]

Remaker sadly we aren't in a grammar school area (but those only kick in from 11 anyway). According to the teacher she isn't jiggling or being outwardly disruptive - she's mostly doodling/drawing/writing stories, or wanting to chat with her learning partner.

The chatting and resistance to adults is I agree not on and needs to stop. I do think the post-pandemic situation is unusually frustrating for her - they aren't doing group learning or projects, and most of the curriculum has been replaced by "recovery" - so lots of tests, spelling, writing, guided reading, maths, but not much topic work or other subjects like science, art and music for the moment.

The writing and drawing she's doing is stuff like writing long stories and practising old-fashioned handwriting (at home her thing she does for enjoyment is writing mini novels and making books, as well as drawing and art). I have kept potential ASD/ADHD in mind, but according to the teacher things she distracts herself with in lessons are quite focused things, often related to the actual subject rather than messing about (like writing a story based on the text they are doing.) She's still always able to answer all questions and does do all the work. We did get her to complete all the work school set over the three months of lockdown even though there was a lot of resistance and boredom!

I don't know if the UK system is very receptive to IQ testing and it seems difficult to find someone reputable from what I can tell on this board. I don't know for sure but it doesn't seem like a psychologist's report has much weight in the primary system - can anyone else confirm? At one time I used to teach on a lot of gifted and talented extension courses for school pupils (under the last Labour governments!), but AFAIK pretty much all that funding/provision was cut some time ago and no longer exists.

[goldencrowns]

@Mumoftwoinprimary

Is there a larger school she could go to? My two are in a year group of 90 which makes it a lot easier as statistically there will be others who are closer in ability. Reading was always done in a group of 3 or 4 from across the three classes so that was fine. Ds (year 3) now does maths in a group of 8 or 9 from the classes.

Dd (year 6) now has clear water between herself and the next strongest in maths (her strongest subject) but all y6 maths lessons are done as a “greater depth” group of about 20. Which means that the teacher starts at gd level and can then set extension for the 3 or 4 who need it and then “Emma section” for Dd. If the teacher needed to differentiate over a class with a full range of abilities then of course the “Emma section” would not get done every day but with a gd class he doesn’t need to.

That's definitely how they used to do it - there was a lot of movement during the day between different groupings for maths, English etc. which DD enjoyed because there were different people to sit next to. Their pandemic policy has been to keep each class bubble completely separate though, so they are all doing the same work with additional extra material if a child needs it. Apparently the year cohort tests are showing they need extra fluency work as a cohort, and they are very focused on pandemic recovery, so DD is still having to do the same work as everyone else (though she is allowed to skip the first "fluency" level and go straight to the second, then greater depth, then what they call "challenge", though even that doesn't seem to provide an actual challenge). I'm going to have to talk to the teacher about extra stuff on top, aren't I...

[goldencrowns]

Oh and as I mentioned previously she's an only child, so she's been basically indoors all winter with just me and DP and we have both had full workloads, no furlough and no support bubble, so she has had to entertain herself, has been lonely and desperate for social interaction. We've been able to do outdoor playdates for the last couple of weeks which has helped, but obviously still aren't yet allowed to have another child round or indoor playdates. She misses friends from the other classes in her year and isn't allowed to see them at playtime or lunch because they are only allowed to be in the playground in their class bubble.

[SE13Mummy]

What sort of learning would your DD like to do at school if it was up to her? I can well imagine that her messing about, chatting to/distracting others will lead on to friendship issues, especially if the people she distracts are then unable to complete their work. As a teacher, I would have no problem with a child doodling/writing stories whilst I was teaching provided they were still engaging with the learning after all, how different is it from adults who doodle or write lists in meetings?

If your DD were in my class, I would talk to her about the sort of learning she would like to do and would try to work with her to make that available to her for once she's shown me she can do the other work I've set. I'd want it to be something she could get her teeth into, could access independently and that has some sort of an outcome e.g. if she wanted to learn about coding, I might get hold of a Raspberry Pi and some books but would take some time to plot out a project plan and timeline with her. That might include things such as learning about note-taking, trying out some small projects, writing them up, photographing them and evaluating them. To provide a platform for her independent learning, I might get her set up on Weebly or WordPress so she can run a private blog about her projects. I would still want her to access the same topics as the rest of the class but if we were learning about Vikings, I might give her a research question to investigate so she has an opportunity to look into aspects more thoroughly e.g. what evidence has been found to suggest Vikings lived in England? I might then specify that I'd like her to include a chapter about place names, archaeological sites etc.

For maths, I'd possibly try to get hold of some old, harder, text books she might be up for working through or I'd make use of the nRich website so she has an opportunity to apply different strategies as well as attempt open ended tasks.

[CovoidOfAllHumanity]

I never really get why it's said that G&T children will get bored and mess about. I think that surely if you are very clever you make your own amusement.

I could always do the set work very easily and get top marks so I would do as your DD does and get it out of the way quickly before going back to my own projects that I always had on the go in my head ie reading, writing, drawing.
No-one minded me doing this at my small rural primary school and even at the start of secondary. I used to get excused to go to the library a lot and when I was there I did actually read!
The other thing I did kind of informally with a blind eye turned was help other kids with theirs. Less good if I just told them the answer/ did it for them (which I did if I wanted them to like me) but often I could explain why as well and that was good for me too.

It wasn't particularly cool at school to be academic and I wished a lot that I could swop it for being good at sports but I didn't try to hide it or deny it because everyone could tell anyway so it wasn't a big deal to be doing something different. I would just put my hand up when I'd done the work and ask to go to the library and the teacher would have a quick check that I'd done it and let me go.

Maybe they can let DD do something like that or otherwise why is it a problem if she works on her own thing or reads her own book in class as long as she does it quietly.

[CovoidOfAllHumanity]

My parents were both teachers so they would kind of direct me into projects, fund extra books etc looking back. I guess they probably agreed it with the class teacher but I did not have much idea at the time. It was not very fashionable to involve children at that time I don't think.

[7to25]

i had one of these 25 years ago now.
School was similar so we got a tutor once a week to do extension work. She was a recently retired teacher from an independent school.
I still see her out and about and she asks about him.
She advised us to "go widthways" with music, sport and foreign languages.
These days she would probably recommend coding.
Your daughter probably is in the wrong school but i realise that is hard.
Son stayed in his year group and all well so far.
It's hard, I know.

[KingdomScrolls]

This is the school's issue. They have to recognise that whilst slowing down learning or repeating things to help others catch up because of the pandemic is addressing the needs of those children, they aren't addressing the needs of your daughter. My school reports would often say Scrolls is working easily at the highest level but often distracts other pupils by talking. I was bored. Then in year 3 and 4 I had two amazing teachers who would have a continuous succession of additional work for me to do, the latter went to the local secondary school for extra work for me to do and worked on stretching the class topics, they brought my parents in to discuss suggested texts and suitability (my mum read them again alongside me so we could discuss and she could support with homework etc). I was then put on the gifted and talented programme at secondary school which included Saturdays at a local independent which I loved. My parents didn't have your experiences and both left school at 14, so didn't really know what to do, they did know to advocate for me and the school supported that. You need to go and talk to her teacher.

[Remaker]

Obviously the pandemic is having a huge effect that we’ve escaped being in Australia. But one issue common to all school systems is that teachers/schools will get hell if kids fall below expected levels, but nobody knows nor cares if bright kids don’t meet their potential because it’s so hard to measure.

We were fortunate to have access to a state school that did off level testing of all students at the start and end of every year. A minimum of a year of progress was expected from every student even if they were years ahead of the curriculum standard. This was something driven by the principal, not an across the board standard as it should be.

I agree that for now the best solution is probably to get her set up with some independent projects that the teacher can allow her to do once her work has been completed. It’s a real shame that they’re aren’t programs available for gifted kids without heading down the private school route. Bigger schools can usually cope better than smaller ones (I went to a small school and ended up teaching the other kids half the day) so perhaps consider that when choosing a secondary school. Is grade skipping a possibility in the UK system? It’s not something I wanted to pursue for my kids but there is evidence for its success if a child is bored and disengaged.

[Indoctro]

Sounds like ADD , I would ask GP for a referral.

[goldencrowns]

Thanks all - she doesn’t really have any other symptoms of ADD/ADHD, though I’ll keep it in mind. Am going to speak to teacher again either today or tomorrow and will report back. What was the deleted post?