Hi Phey. I have always homeschooled, and struggled recently with whether to test, so I thought I would chime in.

My husband and I were both identified as gifted as kids, and we attended Ivy League schools. When I had my daughter, I naturally expected that she would be bright, but I wanted to avoid what happened me as a kid. I think partly because I was bullied and socially ostracized frequently in grade school, my identity as a "smart person" became very important to me. I didn't want to get invested in my daughter being anything other than who she was, and so I actually made an effort to actively avoid testing. (We applied for private K here before making up our minds to homeschool. Many of the local privates required IQ testing for K admission, and I made a point of NOT applying to any that had that requirement. It just seemed ridiculous to me!) I guess I was worried about my daughter "becoming a number," either to me, or in her own mind.

The homeschooling community in which I find myself is very wonderful and lively, and the dominant philosophy is an unschooling one. Better late than early, don't push, let kids unfold and blossom in their own time. Since I was homeschooling partly because I wanted to protect and foster unstructured play, this philosophy suited me very well, and we did very little formal schooling for the first several years. When I say very little, I mean maybe two hours per week through about 3rd grade. (My dd is now 10 and my ds is 8.) In this context, giftedness did not really have any meaning. My daughter read a ton, she played alone and with friends, we hung out at museums, etc.

Many people would comment on how mature she was, what an old soul she was, how great her vocabulary was. I always sorta chalked it up to homeschooling, and didn't think much about it. Then my daughter became good friends with a girl who is DYS, and the mom asked me about my dd being gifted, and I was like, huh? I just hadn't really thought like that before.

I suddenly found the idea pretty compelling, though, and have spent waaaay too much time on this board and other such places. I think I pretty quickly realized that, now that the early years of elementary are over, a gifted label could actually make a big difference in how we homeschool, and the community of homeschoolers with whom we associate. And it has.

I always knew that I would unschool less and less as my two got older, so even before this friend asked me about my dd, we were already doing more structured academics. One of the first sites I happened upon was JHU's Center for Talented Youth. I saw that they have some amazing online classes that could really offer a lot to our homeschooling, and so I had my dd take that test. She qualified, and we have been taking math classes there.

Here is one place where gifted identification has been really helpful to us. Before, I could never find a math curriculum we were happy with. We tried several, and she would be so bored within a few months, we always ditched them. I am a little chagrined to say that it didn't occur to me that she might need an accelerated approach. Since starting math through CTY, math has been going much better.

I then began to wonder about getting her formally tested. Well, okay. I became obsessed. Like you, I was just plain curious after doing so much reading. I thought that it might help me to understand her better, and to make decisions about curricula. Also, in a few years, we will be facing the high school decision, and I thought it might be helpful to know what we were dealing with.

After much back and forth, I did test, and it turns out she is HG+. I was really in the dark about how different she was from other kids. It has been helpful to know that. My dd is a lovely, calm, sweet kid who is very easy going, but tends to be slightly anxious. She suffers from task avoidant perfectionism, and it has been good for me to have a sense of her abilities so that I can present her with good, challenging stuff, and nudge her gently forward.

So I am really glad we tested, and we will hopefully be applying for DYS now, too. I will say that I am also really glad that this wasn't a burning question for me earlier. I am happy that we spent the first few years of her school time blissfully ignorant, with no pressure to perform, and just lots of open ended time to explore at her own pace.

By the way, there is a great homeschool resource called the gifted homeschooler's form. They have a website and a yahoo group. (Hope it's okay that I put that in here!)

Sorry this turned out to be so long. Hope it helps.