Hi,
I'm new around here and trying to figure out what to do with our 5 year old son. A little backround - We have a nanny who has a degree in early childhood education and she's been with him since he was around 1, so much of the credit goes to her. She spends probably 2-3 hours per day teaching him. He also goes to a play based preschool for a few hours 3 days a week and apparently behaves wonderfully and is a leader in the classroom. I guess he only argues with his older sister.
He learned all letters/sounds and reading Bob books a little after 2. Progressing from there to now, he's read many magic tree house and goosebumps books.
Knew his subtraction/addition facts by 4 including regrouping. Now knows multiplication/division. He just loves math. He has papers everywhere filled with numbers he's been adding up for anything he does - how long he's read for the past months, Rummy scores, uno scores, just anything he can keep track of.
We have a second grader who has weekly spelling tests and he pretty much aces those without studying them. Handwriting is fine and is currently learning cursive. Could use some improvement here because he just kind of mixes caps and lower case in his words.
Excellent with games, puzzles, word searches, word scrambles, etc. Overall, I really don't think I could come up with an academic weakness if i tried.
He's currently scheduled to go to kindergarten this fall. He's fairly small but is also right at the cutoff age so would be one of the older kindergarteners. Remembering our daughter's kindergarten curriculum we thought that just might be a waste of time so we spoke with principal about a grade skip. In order to do that they required an IQ test above 130 and a woodcock-johnson. We weren't really sure how he would do on an IQ test. Didn't know whether it was natural intelligence or just someone working with him a lot at an early age. Anyways, the Psychologist came out and said He's going to be an engineer and start saving up for MIT
. Here are his results:
Verbal IQ 135
Performance Scale IQ 150
Processing Speed Quotient 128
Full Scale IQ 147
Verbal Subtests
information 17
Vocabulary 16
Word Reasoning 14
Performance Subtests
Block Design 17
Matrix Reasoning 18
Picture Concepts 19
Processing Speed Subtests
Symbol Search 13
Coding 17
Woodcock-Johnson III
Academic Skills 191
Academicc Apps 169
Letter-Word Identification 183
Calculation 187
Spelling 169
Passage Comprehension 151
Applied Problems 157
Writing Samples 168
Now, I'm just trying to figure out what all of this means and what to do about it. The pschologist recommended a few gifted schools in the area that cost about $20k per year each. While both my wife and I do fairly well, that's pretty much out of the question. Our school district is very good, but recently cut the gifted program for cost savings.
I just turned in the results to the school and they need to take it to the board for approval to skip to 1st grade. Now, I'm starting to think that isn't enough. But, I don't think it would be wise to start him out any higher due to his age, size and no full day school experience.
