So my homeschooled just-turned-10-year-old would love to do math at school next year. She loves group-based learning, at least when it's at her level. Our local K-12 public school has been very good about including homeschooled kids in their program part-time.
She finished ~7th grade math about a year and a half ago (using Singapore Primary Math). For a year or so afterwards I just let her drift with her math being non-curricular, interest driven and unstructured. She didn't do much. She occasionally made use of a book called Challenge Math, intended as enrichment for gifted middle-schoolers, but just in small spurts. Then about two months ago she started talking about wanting to try school for math next year. She wanted to try out the curriculum they use at this school at home to see if she liked it, so our homeschool liaison teacher got her a bunch of different levels to look over and she decided on the level that matched what she had been doing, the 8th grade program. Despite a 3-week break over Christmas she's now about half-way through the course. It seems to me to be at almost the right level: quite easy, but the demands and format are a little more high-school-ish than she was used to in Singapore and Challenge Math, so she's having to get used to that. So far she's not using the textbook at all. Everything is either completely intuitive, or review, or so simple for her that the very brief example problem given before each set of workbook problems is sufficient for her to get it. I have no doubt that she could handle the 9th grade course without needing to do the 8th, but it would be more of a challenge, and at this point she's enjoying the ease.
The question is, if I do approach the local K-12 school about including her in a math class next fall, what level do I ask for? I think the options are primarily 7th grade and 9th grade. (I should say that we're in Canada, where math continues to be math throughout high school, rather than being divided into separate algebra, trig and geometry courses. Every year in the curriculum contains a progression through a variety of mathematical topics. So there's no issue of her meeting up with a mono-diet of quadratic equations next fall or anything.)
7th grade would be a two-year skip, though she's "old for grade," having a January birthday in a place with a Dec. 31st cutoff, so she'd only be 13-14 months younger than the next-youngest couple of kids. She already has one good friend in this grade and a number of casual friends. Of course the curriculum would be an easy repeat of stuff she's already been managing handily for a couple of years. At least it would be a different workbook, though it would be one level back.
8th and 9th grade math would likely be combined in a split class next year. She doesn't have any close friends in that class, though one of her good friends, a homeschooled 12-year-old, may be doing 8th grade math there, but she is acquaintances with most of the other kids, and has casual friendships with a couple of them. Since she will have completed exactly the curriculum the 8th graders will be doing, I can't see asking her to fill in the same workbook all over again. It would make sense for her to do 9th grade. She'd be in with the same group of kids either way. It would mean three consistently-scheduled hours of class a week, plus homework. The combined class would have about 18 kids.
Her social affinities run old. She gets along well with kids her own age and younger in small groups or one-on-one, but has little tolerance for the catty and/or chaotic group behaviour of tweens. Her siblings are all teens, and she much prefers to hang out with groups of teenagers rather than the 10-12 set. Unlike my older kids who were fiercely autonomous and perfectionistic, this kid deals well with structure, challenge, and failure. She's resilient as heck, cheerful and socially gracious.
All logic tells me to push for her in the 9th grade math course next year. How hard a sell do you think this will be? It's a full four years ahead of where she "should" be by age, and she's never been in school before. Her current math work is being overseen and marked by the school's high school math teacher, because he just happens to also be our homeschool liaison teacher. He knows her abilities and understands her social preferences and maturity. But he's a junior teacher in this district, and the principal, although willing to allow subject acceleration in compelling cases, has made it clear that she is fairly wedded to the idea of age-levelled education.
Have any of your kids been accommodated for radical subject acceleration? How tough a sell was it? Assuming I can get the school to agree, are there potential pitfalls I'm missing here?
Miranda
Edited by moominmamma - 1/29/13 at 10:38am
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