Wow! Thanks everyone for your input. I am so relieved to hear about other kids in the same boat as my DS. Thank goodness for this forum.
Our district does use the IAS for the grade skip assessment. Our school did not offer to skip him, we are requesting it. I don't know if skips are common in our schools, but when I spoke with the principal she was aware that it is possible and seemed open to the discussion. Our state also mandates that regular classroom curricula be replaced with quality differentiated curriculum that is complex, rigorous, and demanding for the gifted child.
Like Dandy's DS, mine has spent the last 3 year spinning his wheels, getting all A's, reading 600 page books in 4 days of classtime, and coming home with nothing good to say about school. It was the negative attitude towards learning that prompted us to get private testing. We let his current teacher know about the testing and explained how DS masters things very quickly, but the teacher still insists on having him write spelling words 20 times each!! DS can spell any word we ask, and has been reading most of his current spelling words since he was 3. I don't think the the teacher "gets" it.
Zhian is right too. He doesn't fit in now. The other kids won't talk to him, some call him names, and he gravitates towards older kids, who are generally really nice to him and always wave or talk to him when we go to the high school football games. We do have him in karate, chess club, and robotics classes with a wide range of kids of varying ages. My DH says that if we can get the school to educate him we will take care of the socialization. He is already aware that he is different and says he just can't talk to the kids in his class, he says they don't understand him.
I think I read Grinity's post about having to undo underachievment and it concerned me a little, but that's exactly what we are trying to do. DS8 has never had to work hard for anything. We tell him practice makes perfect in piano, but he has no concept of that being true because he went from beginner to advanced in less than 3 months of lessons...and he never practices, he just memorizes! We are afraid that one day he will come up against a challenge and won't know what to do or how to work through it. What then? Does the learning stop if he won't even attempt it? Oh gosh, I'm projecting too far.
Thanks for reading this post and for helping. I read this to my DH and he's just amazed at the knowledge here.
Keep your fingers crossed for us tomorrow. I'll post an update on how the meeting went!
Mommyj2
