Short Version
My son tested highly gifted in quantative & nonverbal but not verbal, missing the cutoff for the area HG school. Do I pull him out of the language immersion school to expose him to more English then retest in a year? Or work with the program he's in to accommodate him?
Long Version
We are lucky enough in my area to have a public 'school within a school' for highly gifted children grades 1-8. I had my Kindergarten son tested privately to see if he might qualify. We also ended up having him tested for language. The cutoff for the HG school is WISC IV 139, SB 142, or CogAT 97th centile in all 3 areas. He took the SB IV and scored well into the range in 3 of the 4 subtests, but his verbal subtest was only 93rd centile, dragging down his full-scale. He is turning 6 and has been in a French immersion program since he was 2, though we don't speak French in the house. He has had minimal formal English at school and none at home. He isn't reading well in either language and the testers felt his language scores were below his potential. Per recommendation we are embarking on a program to strengthen his phonological awareness for English over the summer. Which brings us to the question of where to put him next fall for 1st grade:
The proposal of his current school is that we work with him over the summer on his English, and next year the 1st graders get more English exposure, 9 hours a week. He stays in 1st grade for the 1st trimester to master 1st grade concepts in French, then gets bumped up to 2nd grade. Meanwhile he works in math at whatever level he needs to. In a year he may be relatively caught up in his primary language plus he will have learned to read and write in two languages. This is a private international school with many smart kids, they follow the French curriculum, and they are great at working with parents to accommodate their wishes. His class size will likely range from 10 - 14 children who live as far as 45 minutes from us.
To give him the best chance to solidify his English and test at his level, the speech/language pathologist recommends that he be in an English-speaking classroom for a year and continue to take French on the side. He would be at a good public school in a gifted program with a cluster model, but this is the school in the district with the best reputation so the cluster happens to be big enough to warrant its own classroom of 28+ students. The gifted program is heavy on enrichment but light on acceleration. The very smartest kids are siphoned off into the highly gifted school, though I was told there are 2 kids attending this school who qualified but turned down the opportunity to attend. I believe that 80% of the students live in the district.
The issue of friends is very important as my son is intensely extroverted and would as soon play alone as cut off a limb, but beyond that I just want him appropriately placed so that he doesn't think everything should be easy. Any thoughts?
