Last week the kids did some testing. Apparently, the boy was one of two kids in the school to have done well enough to be considered gifted. They sent home a permission slip to do some more testing and they will be sent to a committee for evaluations.
I'm pretty stoked about it. Does anyone have any experience with this?
Not from the parental end, but I was one of those kids 
. If your school has a gifted program, definitely take advantage. It'll give him the mental stimulation he needs.
All of my kids are part of it. They get more stuff to do, more opportunities. As they get to Jr. High they'll probably get tested to skip ahead 1-3 grades in math. Depending on districts they can group all of the GT kids in one or two classes and then give them the best teachers. This is a gift to the teachers because the kids do better, can learn more and are generally better behaved that the general population. In high school they get more chances to take AP classes and earn college credits early without you or them having to pay $$$$$ at university for them. The biggest advantage is that the teachers and administrators and to some extent the rest of the kids treat them as someone who does well. This puts a bit of pressure on you to reward them for working hard instead of just being smart, but in general, if you tell a kid they're smart, treat them as smart, and expect them to be smart, they will genuinely do better independent of how smart them might actually be.
Sane here, I was a problem at both ends of the spectrum at the same time. Tested top one percent, didn't pay attention in class, and never did my homework. I was in TAG (talented and gifted), and in "resource" classes at the same time. I tested into the Super Saturdays program, did well enough on the PSAT in seventh grade to be in the Duke Talent identification program, and nailed a high enough SAT on my first sitting to be offered a full scholarship to Mississippi State. I also squeaked out of high school with a 2.8 GPA, and floundered around in college for way too many years, eventually graduating with a 2.0 in a useless major.
In short, one good test won't tell you E36M3.
You now know he has a chassis with some potential. It's still up to you and his teachers to set him up for the race.
Yes, I was in gifted and my oldest is now in gifted (they now call it "advanced" instead). It's definitely more challenging and more demanding. Make sure your child is prepared for that and also that they're motivated to do it. Other than that, it's all good.
Can't say it as well as mazdeuce did, but, yeah what he said .
If you're lucky, he'll end up being the next Keith!
My kids were both pegged as gifted in grade school. My son (16) does well, but my daughter (12) is very self-motivated to get all she can out of school. As one example, she recently asked to be moved up to work with the 7/8 graders in her creative writing group because the kids her age don't give enough critical feedback on her stories 
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That's really cool.
These are the kind of letters my kids bring me home:
To Nick: You may already be aware of this, but personal experience makes me encourage you to distinguish between "gifted=ready [and eager] for more schoolwork at a higher grade level" and "gifted=has a brain that works differently, and needs less conventional schoolwork and more grade-appropriate work that makes him think." You'll know what your kid is driven toward, but don't miss an opportunity to actually ask him what HE wants. I have personally known gifted kids who opted out of gifted classes because they were perfectly happy coasting along as the smartest students in their normal classes. I have also known gifted kids who joined a gifted class and blossomed like a garden in spring because they could FINALLY talk to peers who got their jokes.
Also, do the math: if your kid is in the top one per cent, it follows that a teacher who sees 25 kids a year and teaches for 20 years MIGHT see five kids like yours, total, in his/her entire career. Trust me on this: teaching gifted kids is a specialized skill, and not every teacher either wants to do it or has the right attitude to pull it off. If your school board has the resources, by all means take advantage of them, but be ready to do a bunch of research yourself too.
PM me if I can help. It's a subject I know about.
I was one of those gifted students.. I am in the 99.9999966604% percentile range (IQ 181) and did miserably in school. I was literally bored to tears and rarely did any work or studied because just being in class would get me a passing grade.
Keep the kid challenged, and he should do well, let him get bored, and his gift will be sorely wasted
I too was one of the TAG kids. When the program was running I was engaged, interested and had fun with school. When budget cuts axed it I was miserable. My curious and questioning nature which was nurtured in TAG was seen as troublesome and out of line in regular classes. I struggled for the next 4 years.
By my sophomore year I wound up dropping out of high school with a 0.60 GPA.
I enrolled in the community college taking college level courses to finish high school and managed to actually graduate 6 months early with a 4.0gpa.
In my case it was a fantastic but short lived thing for me. I knew I wasn't a dummy, all the teachers thought I was an idiot troublemaker. I wonder what could have been if they hadn't cut that program
Excellent responses and lot's to ponder. Of course they may decide that he does not meet the requirements but he very well may.
We had a rough spell with his behavior about a month ago. He has been diagnosed with sensory processing disorder. He has actually been diagnosed with sensory delays since he was about two years old. He has a tough time in the classroom setting. But, after a meeting with his teacher, principle, vice principle, counselor and the school system OT specialist, the last month has been terrific. Getting them to realize that he has an actual diagnosed disorder versus thinking that he was just a troublemaker has been a challenge but has been trans-formative. They gave him a set of earmuffs to block out the classroom and allow him to take breaks when he gets overwhelmed.
He is a 2nd grader who reads on the 6th grade level. The kid has been writing books with illustrations since he was four years old. He has said that he wants to be an author since he was four. He gets bored with the work in his class. He's one of those kids that once he has something, he has it. When the teacher does the reviews of what they worked on the previous weeks she has been giving him third grade work to do and he breezes through that.
We'll see what comes of it, but given the struggles we've been through with him, we'll take any chance that we can get him out of the regular classroom and into a more focused setting.
I am so nervous about what the future of his schooling will be like.
mad_machine wrote: I was one of those gifted students.. I am in the 99.9999966604% percentile range (IQ 181) and did miserably in school. I was literally bored to tears and rarely did any work or studied because just being in class would get me a passing grade. Keep the kid challenged, and he should do well, let him get bored, and his gift will be sorely wasted
Similar deal. My poor parents...I blew away every standardized test created. Always at the top of the charts. But starting around 7th or 8th grade, I just stopped giving a E36 M3. I got into the party crowd, and wound up getting suspended repeatedly, skipping school, etc... It got really ugly before I had a wake up call at 19 years old and turned my life around.
I don't know if it was the fact that I was bored as much as at that age I just simply didn't care. Nothing my parents or teachers could have done to make me care. I don't want my kids to follow my path, it was a hard one which I chose for myself. At the same time, I realize that they're going to have to find their own way and make their own choices. All I can do is try to give them advice and help them think things through.
Stealthtercel wrote: To Nick: You may already be aware of this, but personal experience makes me encourage you to distinguish between "gifted=ready [and eager] for more schoolwork at a higher grade level" and "gifted=has a brain that works differently, and needs less conventional schoolwork and more grade-appropriate work that makes him think." You'll know what your kid is driven toward, but don't miss an opportunity to actually ask him what HE wants. I have personally known gifted kids who opted out of gifted classes because they were perfectly happy coasting along as the smartest students in their normal classes. I have also known gifted kids who joined a gifted class and blossomed like a garden in spring because they could FINALLY talk to peers who got their jokes.
Bingo. This all this. Had this problem with my youngest on this. When we were in Louisiana he was tested for first grade gifted in Kindergarten, missed it by 3 points. We were in the #1 school district in the state. Him skipping a grade was already on the table when we left. (that brings a whole new set of problems)
When we moved to the DC Metro area we deliberately sought the best schools. When they tested him he came in as a remedial student. Went from first in his class to should be held back. He was crushed. I had to explain to him that there were different standards here and if he wanted to be first he needed to work harder and get caught back up.
He is first in his class in all but 1 area. He caught up in 14 months.
Kids are amazingly talented when nurtured and pushed properly. Congrats your really intelligent kid (got it from their mom right?) Take all the academic development opportunities your school has to offer and even look to other sources to develop their "cool" subjects they have a passion for (summer school for gifted kids, special programs through the local college early development, ect.)
Again congrats, parenting a special kid ain't easy.
Stealthtercel wrote: I have personally known gifted kids who opted out of gifted classes because they were perfectly happy coasting along as the smartest students in their normal classes.
This was/is me. I wouldnt say I was the smartest kid in my classes, but was smart enough to be classified as gifted and qualified for the AP classes. I had no desire to go that direction. I was happier taking shop and drafting classes, trigonometry instead of AP calculus, etc...
Absolutely support the choices that will interest your kid, not every opportunity may be something they will take full advantage of.
If you ask my wife, she'd probably say I'm the type of person that's content where they are and doesn't have much desire to push myself further. For instance these days I don't eat/sleep/breathe my job, I like to leave work at work and not think much about it when I am at home. Its food on the table and a steady paycheck to me, I like the work but I am not passionate about it. No desire to add additional layers of commitment and stress to my life by getting much further up the chain of command.
Slippery wrote: That's really cool. These are the kind of letters my kids bring me home:
I wish my teacher had the desire to help the kids by communicating with us. Even after asking, we do not get this kind of communication. After trying to work with this teacher, I am done. I'm not happy about it and getting ready to act.
Did I mention that I am the School Board Chairman?
Have you seen any of the XMen movies? "Further Testing" is not something you want. I suggest you pack up your family and run. They are coming.
I was one of those kids identified as "gifted". Bugged the E36 M3 out of me. It meant they just wanted to give me more, fancier work to do, but didn't get me out of doing the boring mundane crap that was required. Jumping a grade seems like a nifty idea, but really isn't. It's not that I already knew the stuff that was being taught at my grade level, it just meant that it took me about 1/2 the time and effort to learn and understand things as my classmates.
I'm also happy that I didn't get shuffled into AP classes. I had more fun in the "regular" classes. I wanted to learn and debate and figure out. The AP teachers said that the AP students all just wanted the grade and the credit to get into a fancier college, but didn't actually care about the knowledge. The regular classes got me the chance to be the most engaged student who had opportunities to interact with the teachers and do things like... debate what was happening to light waves when you put 3 or more polarized lenses in a series.
I ended up getting mediocre grades anyway, because I would just skip the homework, and usually get B+/A on tests. But of course the homework was part of the grade, so that pulled me down to about a B- average, which I didn't care about because, I knew the information; who the hell cares what the grade is if I'm solidly passing?
I didn't want to have to work harder because I was smart, I wanted to be able to work more quickly and then spend my time playing with things that interested me.
Let you kid decide what they want. Be sure they get solid grades. As long as they do that, allow them to figure out what they want to do to challenge and be engaged by what interests them.
mad_machine wrote: I was one of those gifted students.. I am in the 99.9999966604% percentile range (IQ 181) and did miserably in school. I was literally bored to tears and rarely did any work or studied because just being in class would get me a passing grade. Keep the kid challenged, and he should do well, let him get bored, and his gift will be sorely wasted
That was me. I was very bored and ended up putting very little effort into school. When I got to college I assumed I would coast along the same way and when it didn't work out that way I couldn't keep up, got frustrated and after three semesters I stopped going.
Edit: I don't remember getting an IQ test just that I tested highly in our gifted program.
Good luck and I hope things get figured out for your little guy.
I can assure you, I was not "gifted". Then about the 8th grade its like a switch tuned on and I became pretty good at math and the sciences (except calculus, it cut my ass). Too bad I took my eye off my target, but boobs will do that.
My son was gifted in elementary school. It didn't last and its not because we ignored him. I blame it on the weed.
Slippery wrote: That's really cool. These are the kind of letters my kids bring me home:
at least your son isn't like me. i learned to forge my dad's signature on the "please sign and return" notes. in 5th grade i was so far ahead in math that i was bored and felt that if i knew things and got 100% on all my tests that homework was optional and i shouldn't waste my time. this caught up to me at the parent teacher conference with "i thought you knew patrick wasn't doing his homework, look you signed all these notes..." oops.
do your best to keep him motivated. i was put in 4th grade math classes in 3rd grade, and continued that trend through high school where i was in the only class that was in full on calculus junior year. when college came i tested straight out of all math and english required for my degree, but they still made me take the highest class for some reason. i could not fathom why they did this, and in my anger i just quit showing up because i was bored. all issues i had in school(never with grades, more with just not wanting to show up) stemmed from boredom in sitting through things that i already knew or picked up so quickly that i felt i didn't need to sit there while everyone else caught up. i missed 14 days my first semester of senior year(at a very prestigious private prep school) and was threatened with summer school. that just motivated me enough to not blow off any more days until the second semester started.
Do it. I was in gifted classes from 1st grade til high school graduation. While the words "wasted potential" were often used by my other teachers, my gifted teachers understood our weirdness. In my normal classes I knew EXACTLY what I needed to do to get a B, nothing more, nothing less. I usually had a 100 test average and a 10 homework average. I never studied.
My gifted teachers didn't let that crap fly. If the bar was set too low, they'd just move it up til you had to stretch to reach it. It isn't necessarily "harder", it just forces you to hone the skills you have. It also helps focus your skills.
Went through some of this mill myself-- got pushed ahead a grade (1st to 3rd) and saw some of the early days of GAT in high school. Skipping a grade was OK, but there were some social impacts, because kid that age are vicious little E36 M3s.
Like some of the others have said here, the GAT high school program really just got me more work I wasn't interested in, along with pushes into "independent study" programs that seemed much more aligned with teacher's expectations than my own.
In retrospect, the independent study stuff probably was a good college prep opportunity, if I'd taken advantage of it and pushed it in directions that interested me, but it was mostly science fair prep. I had an after school job and other interests outside of school that I preferred to spend time on.
Most memorable portion though was organizing a boycott of the GAT program by dissatisfied students. Teachers and school administration absolutely freaked, and they did follow up with changes to the program, but I was done with it-- one of the things we got out of the program was the option to not participate.
P.S.
I wrote most of my college entrance essay on the GAT program and putting the boycott together.
It got me into the honors program at the university.
Life is full of irony.
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