Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments New, with K questions - and language immersion?

Hi, everyone! A friend pointed me to this forum. Sorry if some of this has been discussed here before.

DS is 5 yrs 2 mos. We suspected he was gifted because he was an early reader, and there is a charter school for the gifted in our town; so we had him tested. My friend has told me that based on his scores we might have some trouble finding the right place for him, even with the charter school. Her son is a year ahead of ours in school and scored a little higher, so she has the voice of experience. I don't want to go looking for trouble, and my DH thinks any of our options will be just fine, but I'd appreciate your feedback.

Here we go:

** Scores edited **

Now, here are the schools I'm looking at right now (all public):

1. Zoned neighborhood school. High-scoring, everybody loves it including a friend whose DD reads 2 grade levels above; literacy coordinator told me they could accomodate DS (this was before I had test results, but I showed her some of the books he was reading; they were at least a 3rd-grade level I think). Nice place. No foreign language except as an after-school "play Spanish" program.

2. Language immersion magnets. Now, I really like this idea. I've seen the research on foreign language benefiting cognitive ability yada yada; we are not worried about his English skills; DH and I are monolingual and this is his best (only?) shot at becoming bilingual, which I think would be a great gift; and most importantly, DS is very interested in learning another language. I've looked at two schools. There are some differences but both teach about 85% of the K year in the target language. Both principals have told me that gifted kids do fine there, but they have no official gifted program until 3rd grade and they were both upfront about their mission being to teach the masses, so to speak. But I got the feeling that both (especially at the smaller Spanish-English school) would be open to going outside the box for DS. This was also before I had official test results.

3. Charter school for the gifted. My first choice at the moment, though the grapevine warns me that highly gifted students might not be served adequately there. Still... it's for the gifted, so he'd (presumably) have more peers in reading and could possibly learn even more excruciating detail about dinosaurs than he already knows, instead of doing letter-recognition worksheets. And they teach both Spanish and Chinese starting in K.

4. The magnet schools I didn't tour because I ran out of steam, including IB and learning immersion. I mention them in case one of you says "You have IB kindergarten?!? You MUST tour that school, it is WONDERFUL for gifted kids" or something along those lines.

Caveat: All of these schools except the neighborhood school have an admission lottery, so there is no guarantee he'll get a seat in any of them. They all have wait lists.


So... my questions are: 1. Do you all have any thoughts on how we should choose among these schools? 2. Does anyone have experience with language immersion? and 3. If our son ends up anywhere other than the gifted charter, do we warn the principal and teacher in advance?

Sorry this is so long -- I seem to be obsessed with this. Thank you for any advice you can give!