My 5yo son is starting kindergarten this fall, and I'm trying to figure out a general approach to his education... but am not sure where to start! We think our son is quite bright and possibly gifted, but not extremely off the charts. I suspect that he will be happy but not fully challenged in school, and he is resistant to any semiformal afterschooling at home.
Background: I was treated as gifted back in school, accelerated to graduate 3 years ahead, ended up with a science PhD at an elite school. I never had to "test" for anything -- I was lucky to have supportive and proactive school environments. My husband was a "normal smart kid" in school, did not have much enrichment or direction, but also enjoyed learning and ended up with a science PhD at an elite school.
Not having grown up in the US, I am amazed at all the opportunities available to gifted kids here (CTY, etc.), and would like to take advantage of them if our son qualifies. This seems to involve a lot of initial testing though. My husband, with his slightly different background, would rather not test this early (if at all), and go with the flow. There are no gifted programs in our district, but we have good public schools. Also, I'm not sure how my son would react to formal tests -- he tends to resist stuff like that, or get very silly.
He is bright, verbally precocious, very social and physically active but also capable of sustained periods of concentration by himself (hours of flipping through books, drawing, mapping and ranking imaginary kingdoms, etc.). He loves for me read to him for over an hour a time (we'd keep going but my voice gives out) -- books at a middle-school level, about history, science, etc. His memory is excellent -- since 2yo, he has been able to memorize verbatim books that we've only read to him a couple times, and he is a font of knowledge on subjects he has obsessed on through the years (dinosaurs, white blood cells, greek myths, etc.)
He is very resistant to being "taught" anything by me at home, though he is happy at preschool. I tried to teach him to read (to give my voice a rest!) and he fought me off -- only once we discovered the Letter Factory videos did he jump all over phonics, and now can read basic words (like "shape"), but resists trying to read full pages or books on his own. We tried some math games which he enjoyed (he can count to > 100 by 2s/5s/10s/etc., do simple addition, loves the concept of infinity, and also tricks like knowing when a huge number is divisible by 2 or 3), but again he doesn't want to look at worksheets or manipulatives -- really, he just wants me to read him books, books, and more books! So without testing, there aren't any real objective markers of "oh my son was reading at age 2" or "he's on singapore math level X".
What would you do? Go with the flow, see how school starts, and not bother with any testing (to distinguish between bright & gifted) unless it still seems warranted when he's older and could qualify for actual talent search camps? Or by not testing on our own (I assume our district wouldn't do it since there are no gifted programs, and I'm not even sure how/where we'd get him tested) are we missing out on earlier opportunities that he could really enjoy and learn from? I don't have any particular goals -- even if he qualified for online learning at talent search programs I'm not sure that I could convince him to do it. But but but -- I don't want him to miss out on anything!
Thanks for your advice -- I'm really enjoying discovering these boards and learning from y'all!
