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Thanks a lot. We'll see. As my grandfather would have said, either I am or I'm not.

He said last night that a couple of the questions stumped him. Apparently one of them was, "What does the word 'mean' mean?" He had trouble coming up with a non-circular definition, although it's not like he doesn't know the meaning of the word. I told him not to sweat it. He found the first day fun, which was mostly filled with activities like memorizing and redrawing pictures, patterns and sequencing, etc.

Sounds like he'll enjoy the accomodations at least. Hopefully they will give him what you are both hoping for. We are just about to sit down with our school to see what sort of more formal accomodations they can make for DS for our kindergarten year. He is not ready for a grade skip either socially or from a fine motor/writing perspective (they are VERY heavy on writing at our school), but he is FAR ahead in math. I might try to go the EPGY route at school and let him work self-paced (he is really at least at 2nd grade, and in some areas ready for 3rd grade work).

As for "What does the word 'mean' mean?", it's too bad he didn't just stumble onto the idea of "not nice"... :-)

Heh heh. Actually, he did go for that first. Our school is very writing-heavy too, and I suspect that's part of it: though the K teacher marvels at his handwriting, he's still new at it and slow, and doesn't do so well without the three guide lines.

My DS took the DAS-II at 5 and DYS accepted it. That was before it was on the approved list. Last time I looked, the DAS had ben added to their list.

For what it's worth, he thought the test was a blast!

My DS also took the DAS-II lat year and DYS accepted it. It is on the approved list but it was not when I looked the first time (he had taken the DAS-II at 3.5 as well so I was curious if it was an approved test).

It does sound like your school is at least willing to make some accomodations which is wonderful! My son's school last year was not willing to do anything - even after all the testing they did he still had to sit in the K class AND do all the K work though they knew he was reading at a 2nd grade + level and doing 2nd/3rd grade math.

Geez, now I feel like I should have prepared him. Honestly, I feel like "what does 'mean' mean" would have thrown me for a loop at 10, already on the spot during a test, and I got pretty high IQ scores back in the day. Heck, it would probably make me stare blankly for a moment today. But I'm slower today than back then, in lots of ways.

Thanks a lot for the info. I will definitely apply if his scores are up to it. If not, a little hothousing here and Pavlovian food withholding there, and he should be up to snuff before too long.

In case anyone's interested, it didn't go so well. According to the school psychologist and the results she gave us, he scored highly on a number of the subtests, but had a bunch of zeros in other ones, and on some others didn't finish. The written report says that he kept curling up on his chair, jumping down and running to the door, freezing, interjecting off-topic comments at random, saying his stomach hurt, asking if I was there to pick him up, etc. He refused to participate on a lot of the math portions at all, apparently. I'm talking even some simple stuff, like recognizing symmetrical shapes.

The tester said that it's nearly impossible to get an accurate read on ability at this age, and that there is obvious evidence of advancement, but it is hard to tell how much (she didn't give him the whole DAS-II by design, even if he had finished all the parts she did give him). There is some evidence that the tester wasn't good at drawing him out and making him feel comfortable, although it's not important to go into here.

Anyway, at the second meeting, the plan was to give him advanced reading material, and for the teacher to talk to some 3-4 grade teachers to get math materials together for him. Weeks later, when we asked to have input, for him to have better homework (his current homework is still the normal K stuff and he's embarrassed to work on it or show it to us), to get some idea of the progress on the plan, etc., his teacher apologized and said she was going to have to work on it soon.

So I'm not so happy with the local school right now, since for various reasons I feel like even if the whole thing wasn't an intentional exercise in avoiding provision of services, they didn't do a bang-up job, either. (Some of this is explainable by the fact that they really do 99%+ of their testing here to find disabled kids, and so aren't experts on gifted testing, but some of it we feel may be down to the school feeling that we're just pushy parents and acting accordingly. But we weren't pushy-- I really think some of this might be shock that someone would suggest skipping to first grade, as they Just Don't Do That.)

I guess we have to consider several options: private testing and pushing with the local school some more, just letting the situation be, putting him in a different school, or home schooling. We don't want to home school in the coming year, and had been hoping to avoid the cost of a tester. I just can't stand the thought of a full-day first grade where he is learning to read simple sentences and add single-digit numbers. It will just be a big waste of his time.

Meanwhile, he couldn't be happier at home. He is about halfway or more through third grade math, and we will probably finish that up in the next month or two at a comfortable pace. Left unaddressed for the nonce is his performance anxiety. I want him to relax and feel a complete lack of pressure, but I am wondering if he will be able to perform next time he's tested, or if I should just avoid testing for a while (i.e. years or however long it takes for him to unlax).

Bummer. I'm glad he's happy at home, and glad they are checking with teachers of older kids about some reasonable homework. My son was also mortified by the simplisity of some of his homework. When he wasn't mortified by being asked to find his spelling words in word search puzzles.

I think elementary school can be hard on kids.
((shrugs))
I wonder if they would be willing to try some trial subject accelerations?

((shrugs and more shrugs))
Grinity

Ditto to Grinity, elementary can be really rough. I know it's not much of a consolation, but it's taken us three years to get to something that I think it close for our DS7. Each year we'd make incrementation progress at a mind boggling (slow) pace, and it wasn't until about 6 weeks ago that I'd say we're in a good place.

Sorry to not be of more help other than the BTDT variety.

JB

Thanks, people. I guess it will sort itself out somehow. I don't know what the new math work will look like yet, but I think it will be a combination of in-class and homework only. I anticipate maybe some spelling work getting sent home in the short term too. We don't plan to move him this year, so I guess it's "problem solved" on getting more information from them-- we will definitely know more by the time we could potentially move him. In the meantime we will just try to keep him productive at home. He reads what he wants, so I only do some math investigations with him lately and projects.

As I told someone else by PM, I actually mostly feel bad for him that he doesn't have anyone local with whom he could hang out and really connect. Nobody likes building robots and playing games the way he does, or is on nearly the same wavelength imaginationally.