Wow, It sounds like you and her grandmother are doing a great job of mobilizing to get her the cultural enrichment which is so important. Which makes me wonder about the 'workbook' approach. How do you feel when I suggest that you go down to the local bookstore and get some workbooks aimed at Kindy or first grade to have on hand for when you daughter needs to be busy and you need some peace? I think Ania was in a similar situation and did that. I'm not saying you should force her, just make them availible and see if she enjoys herself. I've heard stories about children finally sleeping better at night after being introduced to those 'stupid workbooks.'
Many parents react negativly to those workbooks, particularly if their child is advanced and they've already had folks telling them that they are ruining the child's childhood, but I know that you are just trying to keep up, and some children NEED this amount of stimulation or they are just too hard to live with, and also not quite their full selves.
Which school wants to do the screening? What tests do they use? Is it a one-to-one sort of thing? How much information are they willing to give you after the screening? Not all gifted children will 'perform' and 'reveal' their true level of giftedness on any particular day for any particular test - still, there is a good chance that your daughter will do really well and that will give everyone more to information to help her. Advice: Call up the folks who want to screen her - find out answers to the above questions, and schedual her.
More Advice: If the above advice is hard on you in someway, start a topic called "Mom fears early screening - please help" and you'll see that many many of us started off the same way.
My son went to daycare from age 7 weeks, and he was having the same thing you discribe about his feelings getting hurt because one of the little girls 'wouldn't talk to him' - really she didn't talk at all! It didn't enter my mind for him to go up to the older group - but I wish it had. I do think that children are born with particular temperments, but that these temperments get shaped by the experiences we have the whole rest of our lives - and I feel like I am still playing catchup with him at age 11, trying to convinse him that all children have lovely, enjoyable qualities if you take the time to know them. I think that the years he spend with kids who 'couldn't talk' were really hard and isolating, starting even at age 3 or 4. We tried to describe a 'mouth-speaker' which develops in various children at various times, like some are tall and some are short, some flowers bloom in the spring and some in the summer, etc. You can see that our early approach was to teach him how to modify himself to fit in, and that's good, to a point, but I think we really went overboard with it - hey, we were good at it - and neglected the leg where you modify the environment to fit the child.
Smiles,
Grinity
