One of the things that's struck me having read this forum for the last few months is how many of your children were unhappy in preschool and early elementary school (if they even went) and that so many of you either withdrew them to homeschool or found other solutions such as switching schools or acceleration. As we discuss how to deal with DS7's continuing unhappiness in school, we continue to get comments like "I never liked school and I went." Therefore, I thought it might be helpful for DH to read your experiences in one thread, rather than my showing him many different threads.

So, for those of you who don't mind the repetition, could you please post your children's early school experiences (preschool through 3rd or 4th) here and what, if anything, you did and why?

Thank you!

Don't think i can add much yet to this post, as DS4 is in 3 hours/2-day-week preschool. Except to say he doesn't hate it too much now (his teacher "gets" his giftedness and was the first person to mention to us that he would probably need acceleration at some point). It's mostly a play-based preschool, and teach engages DS in things that will challenge him.

i sent you a pm with other thoughts.

My DS (HG+) was disappointed with preschool when I enrolled him at age 2:9 in a class with 3 year olds. He had been asking to go to school and I think he imagined it would be like Kindergarten (his older sister was in K.)

He was already reading simple words but his class was doing letters of the week and gluing macaroni to them. Several times he said things like, "I'm tired of preschool. I would rather go to medical school." And, "I want to get to Z!" (in reference to the letters of the week.) He didn't seem to connect with any of the kids in his class, some of whom were barely talking in sentences.

The next year I enrolled him in the preK class with "math" and reading pullouts. The reading pullout was good but the math consisted of identifying shapes, ABAB patterns and counting. DS could already add and subtract. His teacher observed that he was not making friends.

After the winter break, he was switched to the K class at age 4:2. At first, he was thrilled but when the K teacher started excluding him and saying that he wasn't really part of the class and was "just visiting" K he became very unhappy. He refused to do any work and he developed phobias. The teacher's handling of these behaviors just exacerbated them. The teacher's attitude was picked up by the other kids in the class and none of them would play with him. Nevertheless, he finished out the year there.

Due to his age, he was enrolled in K again at the public school the following year at age 4:9. At first, he was happy to sing the songs and do art projects but even these began to pall when they sang the same songs every day and did coloring and cut-and-paste every day. He didn't really play with the other kids, but he did interact with some of the older girls (age 6). The kindergarteners have recess separately from the older kids. He began to ask me if he could go to second grade so he could go to science and music classes.

In the spring, we made the arrangements for him to attend first grade in the afternoons and it was so successful that he was accelerated to first grade full time at age 5:4. This is a much better placement for him although he is starting to tune out during the more repetitious parts of the day. For example, his teacher does a calendar lesson every morning where the kids recite the days of the week and months of the year. DS has known these since he was 3 and I'm afraid he doesn't participate much during this exercise. He is not disruptive, however. He is very happy to be able to go to the "specials" which are science, music and PE. These were not available to kindergarteners. He is enjoying recess more because he runs over to play with the third graders.

Contrast this experience with my older DD (MG). She was an early reader and started school in PreK at age 4:3. She was reading easy readers at that time. She is a very social and highly verbal child and her teachers love her. She quickly made friends with other girls in her class.

She enjoyed K just as much (ironically with the same K teacher who later excluded DS) and was the top performer in the top reading group.

She has enjoyed first thru third grade at the public school because she loved being with her friends. Writing has been a challenge for her so she doesn't finish her assignments too quickly. She has been free to pursue her talent area (reading) at her level in her free time.

Her teachers have recommended her for GT screening. Especially her third grade teacher has recognized that DD is verbally gifted and also strong in math.

DD loves going to school and would hate to miss a day.

I'll try this again...

Here is my first post which summarizes up to my son's 4th grade year.


Originally Posted By: delbows

Our daughter attended a private kindergarten before her 5th birthday and excelled. Even though the school recommended she be admitted to 1st grade at the public school it feeds into, the principle refused based on age. She attended a second year of kindergarten with the public school and was labeled as gifted and a delight to have in class. I was assured that the 1st grade curriculum would challenge her because she was put with the teacher who offers a differentiated curriculum. This often meant that she and a few other students were allowed to read their chapter books while the teacher instructed the rest of the class.

About halfway though her 1st grade year, my husband and I began to make appointments with the superintendent and write to and address the school board at its public meetings. Our request was that they adopt a method to access readiness for early entrance and grade acceleration. We knew that our son would not be as compliant as our daughter and feared he would be incorrectly labeled because he would not tolerate being “taught” in kindergarten what he had know since he was 18 months. Our motive was to help other children as well as our own. We were met only with indifference and hostility from every angle on this issue. The exception were a few educators who privately said they agreed with us and a few parents who wished the same for their kids, but said they didn’t have skin as thick as ours.

At literally the last hour-one week before our son was scheduled to begin K at the public school, I called our local Catholic school again and literally begged for them to meet him. At the conclusion of the evaluation conducted by the assistant principle, they had no reservations about putting him in 1st grade. Two months into the school year, we removed our daughter from 2nd grade at the public school and placed her into 3rd grade at the Catholic school. We consider it as a 1-½ grade jump because the curriculum is far more demanding at the private school than it was at the high standardized test scoring public school.

We believed that early entrance to 1st grade was an easy fix, but were rather concerned about actually skipping a grade. It turned out to be so easy it was almost spooky. The only time I became concerned was the next school year when she entered 4th grade. Non of her prior public school experience had prepared her for the organizational skills and work habits necessary to efficiently tackle the homework required in 4th grade. She was over-whelmed for approximately 6 weeks. I understand this is the same problem many under-challenged gifted students face in high school or college when they finally reach a point were they have to study and work at a subject after coasting along with no effort for so many years.

Our son does well in school but really needs to attend a school for highly gifted students. He does not have a natural tendency to “think inside the box” which is what students are required to do in the lower levels of grade school. He could handle the subject content of two or more grades up, however, his hand writing is not fast enough to keep up with the note taking required for six grade and up. He exemplifies the asynchronous profile found in many highly gifted kids. He is a young scholar with the Davidson Institute and we are very grateful for their support. We know it will continue to be a challenge to appropriately educate him.

In conclusion, (if anyone got this far) my opinion is that a single grade skip in combination with a differentiated curriculum in a safe first step. Especially given the fact that your daughter is telling you what she wants. I believe that inattention and frustration are a result of lack of challenge and that as long as the task isn’t unrealistic, children do meet the high expectations their parents hold for them. My caveat, is that strait A’s may be unrealistic in the short term, however meaningful education will replace “excellence without effort”.

To up-date our situation:

Early entrance was not enough and ds did not enjoy the curriculum through 5th grade. Additionally, he has not really found any peers in his class even among the smarter kids although he does enjoy talking with the smartest kids two grades up (21/2- 3 years older).
He has also encountered hostility from a few teachers and been told by one of the kinder teachers that he should not seek math subject acceleration (despite being offered to skip 6th, then offered to skip directly to high school from 6th).

If he had been offered to skip 2nd, 3rd or 4th grade, he may have found a niche.

Since the administrators at our present school could not give assurance for continued math acceleration to Alg1 in 7th grade, as explained to him by an administrator that he is a minority and they had to concern themselves with the needs of the majority first, he will attend another private school next year. This one is expensive, but we received a considerable financial aid/scholarship award and they have also made arrangements for him to take Alg1 with older students.

You know all this, but here it is for your DH...

Pre-K #1: age 3, he was in a half-day, non-academic pre-K 3 afternoons per week. Socially that seemed to work great, but it certainly wasn't stretching him academically.

Pre-K #2: a 5-afternoon per week class, and though the director had promised me that DS #1, who was reading books quite well by then (age 4), would be able to go at his own pace without all the pre-reading things he'd mastered literally half his life ago...they didn't do what they promised. In fact, they thought he was *behind* in reading because he never used the language arts area...never ever! I advocated gently, and they ignored. I was frustrated.

In January, we had our conference and DH was NOT gentle with his advocacy. The school finally (and very reluctantly) agreed to skip the first pre-reading step that DS #1 flat refused to do. Once they skipped that, he did a week's worth of stuff in 20 minutes or so, and they were finally sold. He *raced* through the curriculum after that, and was the sole child in the school allowed to read books only once and get checked off for them. They knew that if he read it once, he could probably repeat it to them verbatim. Still, I felt like we paid a whole lot of $$$ for a school that had really pulled a bait-and-switch on us and just didn't get him...

Even so, he was happy, he loved school, and he did well socially.

K--half-day, non-academic, public--went pretty well because he had the first teacher who got him. She should be the poster child for effective differentiation, because she was able to give him slightly different directions than the norm and yet make the assignments much more appropriate to his needs. He took great pride in his perfect behavior record, and admonished other kids who weren't doing what they should be doing. He continued to enjoy school thoroughly and had friends there. However, he began to say things like "I'm the smartest kid in my class." This worried me.

His K teacher is the one who recommended him for GT testing in the spring of K, and it was when I saw these scores (not until fall of 1st grade) that I realized that DS #1 was not "just" MG.

1st grade: His first foray into a full-day, academic classroom. It wasn't pretty! The differentiation he'd received in K meant that he was well ahead of 1st grade curriculum, yet this 1st grade teacher didn't differentiate. In effect, he was being held back because he'd had a good teacher followed by a bad one.

He came home the first day of school, threw down his backpack and said, "I'm not going back there again. And if you MAKE me go back to 1st grade, then there's no WAY I'm going to 2nd because it will be even LONGER and MORE BORING!!!" He was miserable, cranky, acting out in class and at home. When he didn't pay attention or acted out because he was so thoroughly frustrated, his teacher took recesses away, which devastated DS and left him feeling like he was a bad kid. The change in him was dramatic and immediate. There was no doubt that underchallenge was the cause.

To top it off, he didn't seem to have friends at school anymore. No one wants to play with an angry, frustrated kid. And he was becoming a perfectionist, so anything hard for him--like kickball or basketball--set him off. He was isolated and unhappy, clearly a child at risk.

I e-mailed the teacher expressing my concerns about his bad behavior in school and supporting her. This was my "I'm on your team" e-mail. I got back a long and defensive e-mail that made it clear that she thought I was out of line. She said she felt that I had no confidence in her ability to teach DS. I sent an apology, taking full responsibility for what must have been a misunderstanding...I got no response, no acknowledgement. Nothing. I volunteered in class that week, and she said nothing to me about it.

DH and I spun our wheels trying to decide what to do. Go to the principal? Well, if she felt undermined by me, that would only make it worse. Agitate to get him into a different class? Well, without a grade skip, we feared more of the same, and that wouldn't be worth the trouble it would take to get him out of that class. Grade skip? Well, if the school would even allow a skip--a big if!--we weren't sure that a grade skip was right for him. (I think it might have worked for him, now that I know more about grade skips. But at the time, it looked like DS might want to play football, and he'll need the time to mature if that's the case, especially given the number of red-shirted kids in our area.)

Truly, I felt like this teacher was holding our whole family hostage. We had no acceptable alternative.

Then we considered homeschooling, and the clouds parted. Yes! In this way we could go deeper rather than faster if we wanted to, so DS wouldn't have to be bored, but he also could return to school at age level in middle or high school, when more challenging classes became available, and sports would work fine.

The decision was made easy for us when we (finally!) saw his K scores on the WJ-III achievement test, and we realized that even without any real special attention, either at home or at school, he was performing at DYS levels. That cinched it--our particular school was unlikely to be able to serve him regardless of what we did. And my two brushes with advocacy had been so deeply unpleasant and ineffective that I just couldn't imagine going through all it would take to even make a little progress toward what he needed. Homeschooling was our answer.

And what an answer! His attitude and behavior reverted to their former level literally the day he didn't have to go to that class. It was an immediate change. And now that I have sufficient childcare time so that I'm not going insane (!), HSing is working like a charm. It's been hard sometimes to find ways to go deeper rather than faster at the elementary school level, but I am getting better at it the longer we do it. We're doing things like reading about archeology and codes and engineering, things that he wouldn't get any chance to study in school at all. This seems to work better for slowing him down while keeping him interested than anything else I've tried. It's hard to go deeper with times tables and addition...

He's loving geometry (complete with theorems and a soft approach to proofs, since logic works well with him), and he reads whatever interests him and no one tells him to stick to the "little kid" section of the library. He's back to the easygoing kid who makes friends easily--even kids his own age.

It was a rough road, but we've found the right path at last!

I got lucky with how things panned out in our house. We early started DD13 based on our estimate that she seemed "ready". She missed the cutoff by weeks. After DD11, our "slow" child was in the system and getting the same "top of the class" comments that DD13 had always gotten, we knew that the status quo would never work for DS9. (Both girls tested 130+ in hindsight.)

Because of all the mentality that boys mature later, we assumed starting DS9 early (against everyone's well intentioned advice) would be enough, if not too much, but it never was. Having older kids in the system though validated my concerns to the school. I knew exactly what I was talking about, which was typically more than the behind the scenes admins knew.

Long story short, we've kept DS9 relatively happy with some pretty regular changes, summarized below, split by actual calendar years. He now has quite a few GT "perks" and seems to enjoy the school experience.

We didn't do preschool, so K was our first exposure to school. One DS read well by 2.3 yo and was reading just about anything before K. I was terrifed about sending this kid to K because he wanted to talk about physics and I couldn't understand how he would ever have any friends. I was so wrong. He not only liked K (got lots of differentiated work, although he obviously didn't learn much), but he loved the specials, the interaction with other kids, and also grew a lot emotionally. He learned to fit in socially quite seamlessly and made good friends, something I was so worried about. I don't think the lack of challenge would have gone unnoticed forever, but he's a kid who does well in his head. When bored, he plays chess in his head, reads at his desk, etc., and manages. He's now subject accelerated in reading and math a few years, still isn't challenged, and he's still happy. He's going to a public school HG+ program next year and I suspect he'll do well. He doesn't learn much currently, but that's ok with me. I suspect other parents would find the level of instruction given compared to what he could do intolerable, but I'm satisfied with this year. He gets challenges in other areas and he continues to grow socially and he's happy. I'm quite curious to see what happens when he gets a bit of challenge next year, but I think he's a PG kid who could manage in a regular curriculum, even though it wouldn't be ideal.

Another DS started K (learned to read well before 3, used to calculate the number of seconds until the K bus came for kicks in his head), and never fully got comfortable. By November, he complained about going. By December, he made up illnesses to spend a lot of time in the nurse's office. His teacher didn't "get" him and didn't differentiate for him. He was bored, but also having a much harder time fitting in because he is much less tolerant than his brother. He can't stand kids who don't follow the rules and behave like normal 5 or 6 yo, so he was perplexed about how to fit in. His teacher used him as an assistant which didn't help. The kids asked him questions and to read things for them all the time and that drove him crazy. It was a long year and motivated us to pursue testing and advocate for him. The next year, he got subject acceleration and a much better teacher who found ways to challenge him (and DS liked the older kids better). He's done better socially and found other outlets to provide challenge (he's really into sports and music). He's also going to HG+ public school program next year and I think he needs it more than his brother. I think he'll fit better socially with kids like him and he loves to be challenged. He would not do well with a standard curriculum and I expect he'd completely lose it if he had another year like K.

My DD started K barely reading and learned a lot in K, loved school, and did great socially. During K, I never thought she'd need much besides a GT pullout. By 1st, however, she became really bored with the repetition in math, reading, and spelling. She views school primarily as a social situation, but I think we need to seek greater challenge for her in the future. She's MG rather than HG, but she's really, really tired of doing addition and subtraction facts she could have done two years ago. She's moving to a self-contained MG class next year.

I'm quite sympathetic to the idea that kids ought to tolerate boredom and be able to manage even when they don't have a great teacher, etc. I certainly didn't learn anything in school until late high school, but I found ways to enjoy it and put my energy into E/Cs, science fairs, sports, and music. But our kids show differing abilities to do that and we've found that even minor changes make a huge difference for DS who struggled in K. Subject acceleration so that some part of the day might have exposure to some new concept made a huge difference. Having a teacher not threatened by an HG kid made a huge difference, and even little challenges during the day -- puzzles, brain teasers, math and logic problems to do when the rest of the class was doing something else made a great difference. And finally, after lots of advocacy, the school stopped sending him the "normal" homework with the boys and they do only differentiated math and spelling. I think that also helped the attitude considerably.

I really think you have to make the distinction between "unhappy" and what happens to a lot of our kids. DS8 gets unhappy if he has to go to school and can't stay home and play video games. When DS11 was 7 he didn't just get unhappy if he had to go to school. He cried uncontrollably every morning for three months and the teacher had to come out of the school to get him and escort him to class. There's "not liking school"and there's "NOT LIKING SCHOOL"! Only you can really be the judge of where your son falls on that spectrum.

We've done public gifted classes, curriculum compacting, telescoping, differentiation, subject acceleration, private schools, private gifted schools and whole grade acceleration twice. (and quite possibly homeschooling in that we have a math teacher once a week come to the house.) Honestly, none of it really works on it's own. It's the piecing together of all the options that gets you to a "livable" situation. If I had to single out the options that had the greatest impact I would say the private gifted school, the whole gradeskips, and the private math teacher.

As to when to start trying the variuos options? Well, I was obviuosly slow on the uptake since it took me until the second grade and three months of crying before I did anything. But since you are here asking now, I think it's probably time to make some changes.