Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy no grade skip due to immaturity or gifted traits

Have you had them do the Iowa Acceleration Scales for her? Maybe that would help clarify what would be best for her.

I did that... in Kindergarten. I literally chased after them. I still remember the feeling of power and control it gave me when they ran away (I think that's why I did it) - I could herd them like they were cattle. I outgrew it pretty quickly and wasn't doing it in grade one.

Well, I ran around chasing the boys (literally) until I got to high school. Girls were boring with all their relentless banal chit chat. I preferred to be doing something active when not in class and I was HG but didn't know it. She sounds gifted,intense and active. Put her in sports! Actually, she sounds just like my DD8.

Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure my daughter and her posse played chasing games with boys in Kindergarten, and maybe somewhat in 1st. The girls were cats, in her game, the boys were dogs. They don't anymore now that they're in 2nd.

Thank you polarbear. Your posts are always so thoughtful and I enjoy reading them.
Truth be told, DD is a very social creature too so I was initially surprised to hear her teacher say how she has some trouble making deep social connections.
My DS is a complete polar opposite of her. He is introverted and at her age was extremely so. During his preschool years, he didn't play with ANYONE. and didn't seem to be bothered by it and has really blossomed at his new school and made so many friends this year. I remember seeing many of his female classmates in Kinder forming close friendships and holding hands, etc and I was expecting this of DD.

Girls do talk to her but many choose not to play with her at recess. Perhaps they are uncomfortable with the intensity of her personality and also feel that she is different because they have observed that she has always done work ahead of everyone (and used to get in trouble for it) and now they see her going to 2nd grade reading and 1st grade after her class finishes. I hope she will also find companions at her new school. In fact she often chats to my DS classmates when she sees them. Time will tell.

Principal is great and eager to do the right thing, but not wanting to do skip due the ever popular thought, do you really want her to be younger in the middle school years? I see his point, but she is older so she won't be much younger unless many of her classmates are redshirted. My DS is actually one of the youngest and while he is a bit immature, he is doing well academically and now socially. Thanks for the well wishes.

I wish you luck with getting your DD into that new school! Our current school will not skip her either; the compromise was to let her go to 1st after her kinder class finishes for the day. So in a sense, she will be repeating 1st at her new school.

Aufilia, I called the new school and asked if they had the scales, and if not, I can buy it and then donate the copy to them. The secretary told me no, and asked if I was thinking of advocating for 2nd. I said yes, and she told me that she doubts that grade skipping will happen as the district is very much against skipping and she has not experienced it happening whilst she has been working here.

Thanks all for your thoughts regarding the boy chasing lol. So funny, I asked DD after reading your posts if she likes being chased or chasing them. She told me definitely chasing; she likes feeling like a ferocious lion chasing her prey and the feeling of the wind in her mane. So CCN, made me chuckle!

Don't worry about chasing boys until she hits her teens.

This sounds like classic over excitabilities (OEs) caused by the asynchronous development seen in some gifted kids.

Be warned, many educators have been brainwashed into thinking that school is about the Whole Child and will see these OEs as a reason NOT to skip.

We went through this with DD's school but prevailed after a hard marketing campaign for the skip. My DD's FSIQ is 5 points lower than yours but her GAI is the same so I strongly believe that your DD and her school are going through the same thing as my DD did with hers.

Many school districts fear allowing a skip because they dread the thought of a torrent of 'Me too!' requests. Showing them that the Iowa scales are a very hard series of bars to leap and that they would be morally obliged to skip or subject accelerate *any child* clearing them helps with this.

You have been forewarned so go into the meeting forearmed. Here is what worked for us:-

1. Read up on gifted policies in our State e.g. we live in NJ and we found a state report showing that skipping should not be ruled out.

2. Use the information put up by Davidson elsewhere on this site.

3. Joined the DYS program as we thought it would be useful to have a gifted advisor at times.

4. Scoured the Internet for articles on OEs and how they can be misinterpreted as immaturity.

5. Bought two copies of the Iowa Acceleration Scales one for the school so they could get familiar with it and one for us to work through for our DD.

6. Got a cognitive therapist to assess our DD using the BASC test. The psychologist basically told us that our DD's profile matched that of kids after remediation not before, in other words our DD was normal.

7. Made it clear that we had these results on our DD and wanted to *partner* with the school to put our DD in an environment best suited to her needs. Used words like teamwork, collaboration, partnership at every opportunity.

8. Kept our points data driven - shared copies of reports, papers on gifted education, positive outcomes post acceleration etc.

9. Showed that our Iowa scale scores revealed that our DD was an excellent candidate for acceleration even factoring in the lowest scored input from the school.

We got our DD a full year's skip and the school board voted to use the Iowa scales to evaluate future kids too. Further, the OEs have really diminished since the skip.

Good luck

PS

Sorry for the length of this post - just trying to give an example of one approach that worked and my mind is racing with no one to talk too right now - LOL

thank you MIUK! Thanks for the bullet points..really helpful! I haven't thought about OE's being misinterpreted as immaturity. I will do some research on that.

I'm so glad that you were able to manage a grade skip for your DD. Hope that is going well. I think I am going to go ahead and order the scales today.

one thing I was wondering about was a comment made by the new principal. He said that once a child is in a pullout class such as math, then she must test and be reported as that grade level. Is that true? This doesn't make any sense to me at all!