My daughter, Violet was just identified as gifted today, she took the WISC, but we only recieved an email so far from the school psychologist so far, so we don't know her scores. She is transitioning from a small Mennonite school with only eleven kids in her class, to a normal sized public high school. There will be 30 kids in her gifted English and History classes. She will be 14 next month. We've always known she was gifted (reading at age three, excelling academically after starting Kindergarten at four, etc.)but her small school did not have a gifted program, and was always willing to keep her challenged anyway. Now I am wondering if that was enough, but we are moving forward. She always has been on honor roll, and everything comes extremely easy to her academically. She carried a 99% average in algebra and science last year, and her other averages were high as well. She also is a talented jewlrey maker (using glass beads, wire) and last weekend was selling her jewlrey at a flea market. My question is how do I prepare her emotionally for this huge shift, that things might not come as automatically easy this year? I am excited for her placement, don't get me wrong, but I'm worried about how she will handle academic challenges in an enviorment where she might not be the star that she's used to being. Not to say that this isn't a good thing, that she might need to experience. But she already has stress in her life with me being sick with lupus, and her brother's Asperger's, and his resulting emotional problems. I am very interested to see the scores of her testing, and anxious for her IEP meeting. She is a very strong, creative, loving girl with very definate ideas how this world should work. She devouers books, and reads everything she can get her hands on. I think my vision of this is colored by how small I felt in Gifted classes myself as a child, too amazed and intimadated by the other kid's abilities. But self confidence has never been her problem, so far at least. How do I keep that confidence built up?
