Hi, I'm new to the board. I searched around to see if there was any writing on this topic already but didn't see any...feel free to point me to other threads or articles if you think any resonate.
DD is about to turn 7, first grade, public school. She hasn't been identified as gifted by her school or teachers, and while perhaps she isn't, it seems likely to me. I'm not sure of the exact meaning/scores of G/HG/PG but I myself am quite gifted, as is her dad, and she does show some indicators. She does math for fun on the weekends, and we ran out of web stuff to do, so I bought her a workbook for that--that's one example of how she seems gifted. We wrote a kids' book together and now we're making a website so she can showcase photographs of her rock collection...just stuff like that, that she comes up with on her own, and I just facilitate.
The school recently sent home a generic pamphlet on the gifted program and there was a checklist of traits which was adapted from these:
http://www.ode.state.or.us/teachlearn/specialty/tag/r5brightchild.pdfThe thing that strikes me is how personality-dependent some of these are. My DD is a very well-behaved and sensitive child: agreeable sometimes to a fault. For example, we moved her out of a classroom first semester of first grade because the teacher's very authoritarian style was too much for her. This lady's classroom management was godawful, and DD was bothered by much of how she treated the other kids (publicly threatening them with failing the grade, etc.--really terrible stuff), but in the face of this she became obsessed with making her own behavior perfect so she could help the class get their pajama party behavior reward--so much so that all her weekly goals centered around having perfect behavior and none around academics. She's much happier in her new class and actually talks about learning now!
Anyway, she doesn't like to hurt/upset anyone and is really bothered by anyone being angry with her. I don't ever really discipline her in regular ways, like time out or revoking privileges, because she's just way too sensitive. All I have to do is talk to her--remind her that how she is behaving is hurtful or unfair toward someone else and she stops, usually after crying. And this has been the case since 3-4. Because she is such a people-pleaser, trying to ferret out if she is bored in school is well-nigh impossible. I know she's reading at home at a higher level than they have her reading at school, but I sense immediately when I ask how school is, if it's challenging, that she's trying to figure out how I want her to feel--that if I want her to be bored, she'd say she's bored; if I want her to be happy with it, she'd say she's happy. So I mostly don't ask about school other than to say "what are you learning in school? how is everything going?"--and go from there.
I'm not even sure exactly where I'm going with this post except that a lot of the way some gifted kids seem to stand out--being bored, acting out, expressing a lot of displeasure, being defiant--is just not her personality. I'm not sure she'd be readily identified even if she were pretty gifted because her M.O. seems to be to be a good class citizen, work hard, and help people.
She has a great attitude, is a great kid, outgoing, funny, gentle, and exceptionally empathetic. I worry that she seems to have a lot of perfectionistic tendencies but so did I, in different ways, so I get it. Whether she is gifted or not, of course, in some sense doesn't matter, but if she is I don't want her overlooked. I guess I just wonder if these gifted lists are skewed toward malcontents? Squeaky wheel gets the grease kind of thing? I was more of a squeaky wheel myself... :-)
