Schooling Central

My family actually went against the norm in a big way - my son started Kindy at 4. The decision wasn't taken lightly at the time and we are still reviewing whether it has been in his best interest. Now half-way through Year 3, his reading and Maths are in high school levels so we should be looking at further (subject) acceleration. But it is just too difficult to do that in the school system, so we are looking into homeschooling. Are there any gifted homeschooling families on this network?? Please PM me!!

My husband was fortunate enough to pick my daughters giftedness before she started school. He insisted that I send my daughter to preschool 1 year earlier than expected so that she started school 1 year earlier than everybody else. During her prep year her teacher approached me for my consent to a special assesment because she felt she might be in some way gifted. And the rest is history. She is still gifted for the year she is in however I dont know how we would have coped if she had started school at her appropriate age level.
I was very negative initially however once she started school and it was all confirmed I feel it was the best thing we ever did.
She is probably in the lower section as far as height goes but she is not the smallest in the class so I guess that is an advantage.

What year is your daughter in now, Renaaz? Is starting school early by one year enough to engage her in her learning at school?

It is interesting reading about people's experience with early entry because we also have a daughter who will turn 4 in August, and if we accelerate our son then the obvious question to me is why we wouldn't give our daughter a similar chance. You should have seen her yesterday doing the maths disk that came with a grade 1 maths workbook! She's still such a little girl in so many ways though, and to be honest with everything we've been through so far dealing with our son's current school and potential new schools I'm not sure I have the mental and emotional strength to go through with something that would a) be so hard to achieve (in Victoria) and b) so frowned upon by so many people. Things have kind of deteriorated at our son's current school and I'm feeling battle weary.

Annabel.

Hi Annabel,
Ironically we had EXACTLY the same issue last year; our son was said to be HG/EG and we had had a monster battle with schools all the way along to get his needs catered for. Our daughter was 4 and missed the cutoff for prep by two months. We had her assessed too at the insistence of the ed psych and she did qualify for the label "gifted" even though she was mucking around in the test and not working properly.
We could have gone either way, tried for early entry (which is really hard, you have to demonstrate in Vic that she would be harmed by NOT early entering her, which is a hard thing to prove...) or NOT and have another year at creche. We felt that the fact that she had not really done her best work in the test maybe indicated that she needed a bit more confidence and maturity and in the end we did not seek early entry. She has had a great year at creche and from that point of view I am glad we did not subject her to the testing for early entry process. I am slightly worried (that is not the correct word I guess) as she is I think already above the academic level expected at the end of prep and we have 6 months to go.
At that stage I was also very battle weary.
I feel bad as there is 3 years between the kids and now 4 years between their grade levels as my son was skipped. Later on this will obviously give my daughter the inadvertent message that he is smarter than she is which is not what I want her to believe.
I need a crystal ball to help with decision making!
Have things got worse than they were before at your school?

Yeah, I worry about the 3 years age difference and 4 years schooling difference too. I know this probably isn't the biggest issue she'll face in her schooling, but I think it's natural for a mum to be concerned about how it will affect her.

I met the assistant principal last week to try to sort out a few pressing issues since we are at the school for the next six months (and at that point still very undecided as to whether we'd leave at all). She seems to have written us off as a family and had no interest whatsoever in helping to resolve our concerns. The message I took away was that the school is better off without us (they seem to believe that if only people would stop talking about the problems at the school then the problems would go away). At least she helped us with one thing -we have no doubt at all now that we will leave the school as soon as we are able, and have again contacted the new school to see if there is some way we can speed the process up. I find the whole thing very upsetting. Up until this point I felt no hard feelings at all towards the school and readily admitted that it was a great school that many people are very happy at, but that for many reasons does not suit us. Now I just have an extremely sour taste in my mouth.

Annabel.