these posts are usually about younger kids...and I LOVE reading them!! But, I needed a place to say that I am SO proud of DD12! She scored in the 99%ile on the EXPLORE test with perfect scores in Math and English! She took the test without study guides, putting in any form of preparation other than to put her snack, pencil, caluclator and required paperwork in a backpack.

We are SO proud of her!!

Cricket3 - YIPPEEE for the quiz bowl team!!!
and FIRST CHAIR!! WOW!!


My dd is hoping for more challenging music in band...I am looking for a private teacher...as DD goes too fast for the school band director..so she spends all her time in a practice room with an electronic coach!

Great stuff, everyone! I laughed out loud at "momgos".

This is not a brag, but a deep sigh of relief. DS2 is finally fully talking in fully formed sentences, and his vocabulary seems to be taking off rapidly, or maybe he just had a lot of it already. He still mumbles and is hard to understand for most people, but his pronunciation is improving dramatically too.

This isn't related to giftedness much, but I was happy and a mite proud after his combined tonsillectomy/adenoidectomy last week. As soon as he woke up (fairly quickly at that) he insisted on dressing himself, then walking out to the car. When we arrived at the store to buy ice cream and popsicles, he picked out a ton of different things and insisted on getting each item out of the freezers and putting it into the cart on tiptoe, and even bagged the groceries. Later on he wouldn't take his medicine most of the time, even though he was obviously hurting. I'm liking this new ultratough side of him-- he should get flesh pieces lopped off more often.

He's also taking more of an interest in games and puzzles. When he first started doing puzzles months ago, he did a few of the animal Melissa and Doug ones that were in the 3-5 piece range, and that was about it. We have a fair number of wooden 12 piece jigsaws and up, cube puzzles, etc. but he was never interested in them. At Christmas I looked for a Dumbo puzzle for him, since he loves that movie, but the only decent one I could find was twenty pieces. About two weeks ago he all of a sudden started doing the 12-piece ones, and then the 20 piece Dumbo puzzle, and then started pulling out and doing some wooden 48 piece ones.

He also started doing some Clever Castle puzzles (a Thinkfun solitaire puzzle game), and also started horning in on my backgammon games with DS6. He insisted on rolling the dice for one or the other of us for each game, and then was able to start moving the pieces-- his strategy obviously sucks / is nonexistent, but he's really showing an interest in it.

Wolf just got an award at the county science fair after an absolute fiasco of getting him there (a bunch of adult stupidity and old boys club stuff, that thankfully we'll never have to go through again after this year).

His project was how quickly do rats learn and he found that 75% of the sample learned a series of 4 necessary correct choices in under 6 repectitions.

DS4 read me pages and pages of Frog and Toad are Friends yesterday, needing help only once a page or so. It's always so magic when the reading thing really clicks. Everywhere he goes he's reading words, and he's delighted. The world is full of them, after all!

(I still remember DD's first airplane flight after she learned to read--in tones of great skepticism, she said, "In case of emergency, seat cushion can be used as a flotation dee-vice??")

My 8yo boy scored 16/25 on the 2011 AMC 8, a math test taken mostly by talented 7th and 8th graders, whose average score is about 11 http://amc.maa.org/amc8/2011/stats/statestatistics/_Overall/Grade_and_Gender_Average.pdf . He missed the honor roll (top 5% of scores) by one question but made the Achievement roll for grades 6 and below.

Next year I will encourage him to take the AMC 10 as well as the AMC 8.

That's a fantastic score - congratulations!

Ds12 has really enjoyed taking the AMC exams the past few years. According to him, the 10 is a pretty big step up from the 8 in terms of difficulty -- I don't know whether your son has looked at old exams already, but he might want to before taking the real thing.

One good thing about it, for mathy kids who love competition, is that it's given twice each year, and students are allowed to sit for both.

DD4 just read a Froggy book to me this afternoon and needed very little help! It has been a few weeks since I've had her read to me because of a crazy schedule, but today she wanted to read with me again and wow - what a difference.!

Ultramarina - I too had a plane trip like that with DD9, but her concern was about why we would lose cabin pressure - was an asteroid going to come and rip a huge hole in the plane or something?

DD4 also has started doing pages and pages of workbooks during the day while DD9 is doing her schoolwork. She is matching words that start with the same letter, circling the picture with the correct number of objects in it etc. This is huge for her because up until recently she has refused to do any of these things because "I'm too little to do ...."

Boston, that is a great brag and congrats to your son. Doing well on the AMC is a true achievement. The AMC8 is not a trivial test even for most adults.

Do you go to any math circles in your area?

Well done to your DS, Bostonian!