wrote:

I know this will be a very unscientific survey, but I'm curious about
how common Ericka's school's grouping system (see below) is these days.

In the Seattle school system, unless you are in one of the gifted programs,
there is little in the way of grouping. Reading is generally individualized to
some extent -- in my kids' first grade class, the children were all working
through different boxes, you were on green box or red box or black box or
whatever. One of my daughters is in a 4/5 split class and is often in a
literature circle with older kids (depending on which book she chooses to read
-- the specific circles are not assigned as far as I know). There doesn't seem
to be any formal system at all for dealing with kids who are ahead in math but
not in the gifted programs, though I have heard of occasional accommodations
for a child who was WAY WAY ahead (more than two years).

I guess the above wasn't totally clear -- the gifted programs group kids by
broad ability levels in self-contained classrooms, but within those groups they
are taught at essentially one level (supposedly one year ahead of standards for
the lower-level program, and two years ahead for the upper-level).

I have occasionally heard of a particular teacher making an effort to compact
and differentiate the curriculum (see Susan Winebrenner's excellent book
_Teaching Gifted Kids in the Regular Classroom_ for an overview of how this
works), but it certainly is not the usual procedure as far as I can see.

--Helen