Thanks for the post. Not abrupt at all.
I was lucky enough to be the parent to attend the orientation and between that and the curriculum on our K-school's website, I have a pretty good idea what is covered
academically. Unfortunately, yes, DS has those concepts mastered. He probably has 1st grade mastered too, with a few gaps I'm sure.
One of the reasons that we're seriously considering skipping K (as a starting point) is that at most only one of his friends from nursery school will attend his K-school this year. That is not even a sure-thing either as his friend may be an afternoon child. So one factor we're weighing is if we accelerated after Kindergarten he'd be leaving all new friends behind. DW and I are trying to approach this with an open mind for some of the reasons you mentioned: there are certainly social lessons to learn during the Kindergarten year. We're also not sure if DS is ready for the level of focus required. If it's something that he is interested in, it's not a problem.
At the same time the last three or so months have been phenomenal. After DS (at the time, not quite 5) taught himself how to count in Roman Numerals from a chapter book, I started to show him some things about math in a very informal setting... Usually at the dinner table. He's now up to multi-column addition, knows his multiplication tables, and understands exponents. "Please dad, show me more." All of this happened in a very short time frame and really grabbed our attention. From my perspective, I assumed that all pre-K kids read and hey, DS is just very interested in math. It wasn't until K-school orientation and that I realized that their hope is that entering children are able to recognize their letters and do 1-to-1 correspondence counting to 10. I think DS was 3 or 3 1/2 when he was counting to 100... memory is a little hazy on that.
I think that part of the issue that I have had personally with denial is a lack of reference point (I do not interact with many other children so I don't have a good comparison) and I tend to be very analytical. This is why I'd like to see DS tested and I think both DW and I would like to have that independent validation on what we suspect is true. "We all think our children are smart." I've heard that too.
So--to your point--one of the things that we'd like to get out of the meeting is a plan to confirm that DS is gifted. We'll bring some of his work (we've started documenting it). We do have a framework in PA to work within, but I don't want to wait until next year to begin. Then, we want to make sure that we have a good plan for DS which maybe that means that we start his GIEP now. If we decide to keep him in K for the year then great. But let's just make sure that he is getting exposure to new ideas/learning that he finds interesting.
JB
