ACADEMIC ACCELERATION: NOT JUST FOR GIFTED CHILDREN

Hello!

This blog is about: academic acceleration, including for non-gifted children; homeschooling (part-time and maybe full-time someday); and raising and educating a highly gifted child, including advocacy with schools. I will show you how we have been doing it, from birth, what resources we used, what is working (or not) for us.

My husband convinced me to start this blog.... We have a highly gifted little boy (he scored 151 on the Standford Binet V) who is also academically accelerated and one of the youngest Mensa members currently (and the youngest in our region). At three and a half years old, he is doing 2nd grade math and can read at a 3rd grade level (his comprehension is probably only at 1st grade level though). And that's just for starts, as you will see. He is also accelerated in school: after A LOT of advocacy on our part, he was moved to the next class, so he will be in pre-K this year. However, I firmly believe that even bright and not necessarily gifted children can achieve the same things.. after all, the U.S. is unfortunately behind many countries in terms of education (particularly in the STEM areas), which shows that a lot more can be expected from children than we do here in the U.S. Why does it matter? Because in our increasingly global economy, our children will have to compete for jobs with these other children. However, more than this, doesn't everyone want their child to reach their full potential and to make the best use of their time. And does my son have time to play: yes, oodles of time, as a matter of fact, but we will come back to that. 

Since Joey is so quick to soak up knowledge and grasp concepts, I have been thinking for a while that full-time, traditional schooling is not going to work for him. As a matter of fact, before he was accelerated, he showed signs of definite boredom and disengagement in school, and I was afraid they were going to label him with autism or something. So right now, we are thinking about part-time homeschooling... as we are still not bold enough to consider full time homeschooling. Even homeschooling part-time, I have calculated that he is stays on the same track though curriculum telescoping, he can complete all his high school requirements (including AP classes), by the time he is 14 and start college by 15. Why the rush, you might ask?? To this I will answer that we are not rushing him, we are keeping up with him. Deciding not to accelerate is not a neutral decision for gifted children, it is a harmful one: they want to be challenged, they need it to thrive. 

Again, I will argue here that even bright (not gifted) children can be accelerated because so much time is wasted in brick and mortar schools with what I call 'crowd control' and logistics!

Till later.