I may have mentioned that I have a child who likes to speed right through all of her work... I may have also mentioned that her teacher had already talked about moving her up a grade.
Let me explain my hesitancy. Not only is this particular child very small for her age, but she is also very emotionally young. My biggest concern was that skipping a grade at this age is NOT the same as skipping a grade when you are talking about kkindergarten or first grade. Yes, she is a little smarty pants, but who knows where her knowledge stops until something vital is "skipped" ?
I took advanced math classes in junior high and in high school... This began in eighth grade when I was in Algebra II.. after that, I took the courses that the schools had an opening in until my senior year when I was placed in Calculus.. I had skipped around so much that nobody noticed that I had never taken an actual Trigonometry class. Trigonometry is absolutely crucial to understanding calculus. It's sort of like going to a new city and not knowing how to speak the language or read a map. I was soooo lost at first.. Then I took a one week crash course in Trigonometry and I was fine.
OK, so this current situation is not about me, but I could not help but think of that dreadful week when discussing the situation with my child. I did not want her to miss an important concept and then be completely lost later when the curriculum attempted to build on that concept.
Teacher to the rescue!!! Again! She suggested a method that would show me that my child knew the material without spending an entire year on math that was simply too easy for her. My little one took the semester test.
In this program, each subject has a semester test that is cumulative. If she could pass the test, that meant she knew the material that was covered in that semester.
In one afternoon, she scored a 100% on one test and a 97% on the other. I made a quick note of the question that she missed so that we could go over the material.. just in case she missed it because she didn't know it, not because she was bored with taking tests...
I emailed her teacher the results, as I knew she was in a parent conference and did not want to interrupt another parent's concerns. That evening, she let me know she had ordered the next grade level for math for her.
Yes. She will be doing this with other subjects also, but not as quickly. There are more tests in the other subjects. For instance, at 20 words per week, that cumulative test would simply have to be broken up or we would be testing for an entire day. My daughter thinks she will be able to complete the entire 4th grade before Christmas. We shall see.
It does make it odd to answer the question, "What grade are you in?" but at the same time, we are so thankful that she is able to do it this way. I would imagine that there are a lot of students who need a little more help in one subject than in the others. Or perhaps, like my daughter, they seem to absorb information from breathing the air. This gives us the opportunity to continue to have challenged children. She can continue to feed her need to learn more with this program rather than becoming a distraction to other students because she is bored.
Ahhhhhh... I think I love this.
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