Your dd certianly doesn't sound like she is having fun, does she?
She really vacillates.
For the most part, she enjoys the academic part of school - she aces all her tests without trying, never has homework, has lots of class time to read her books, etc. The stuff that grates on her is being required to pass time doing something uninteresting: listening to the reading passage on tape, sitting through the math lecture, reading lower-level books to earn higher-level books, waiting for the other kids to settle down. Today was a good day from her perspective, in that she read 50+ pages of The Girl Who Could Fly in her spare time.
From my perspective, she's socially better as a 3rd grader than as a 2nd grader. Her third-grade friends are more socially-integrated (not necessarily popular, but not marginalized, either) and higher achieving. Her now-second-grade friends were both socially marginalized and uninterested in academics. But that means that her friends are sometimes off playing with other kids, rather than patiently waiting for DD to deign to play with them. And she has some weird-kid-ness, which we're trying to explicitly teach social skills to combat. Other than that, I think her social woes are much more melodrama than misery.
not just by any old 'I've tested plenty of gifted kids' tester
How do we find a good tester relatively close? I looked at the Hoagies' list, and the nearest one on it is a 4.5 hour drive. "I think we'd get something useful out of an IQ test" is going to be a relatively hard sell; "and the nearest person qualified to test her is a half-day drive" is going to push me into "crazy parent who has spent too much time falling into the internet" territory. The educationaladvancement.org website is broken, and the link to search for testers goes nowhere.
The local gifted school recommends a couple of testers, who presumably have experience with gifted kids. Are those people likely to be better than nothing, or worse than nothing, or unknown-and-unknowable?
((I'm not convinsed that an additional skip wouldn't ease both the social AND the academic problems, with the idea that you can always creativly decelerate later when 'neatness counts.'
Yeah, I'm not entirely convinced it wouldn't, either. But I've got no evidence that it would, you know? My partner is very much of the "I went along with the first skip even though I didn't see the need, and now you're not happy with that and want something else, but there's never going to be anything good enough for you to be happy with, so she might as well suck it up and deal just like we did as kids" mindset. DD sees the nice green grass back in 2nd grade.
If you aren't already in YSP, maybe the test scores would open up that and other social opportunities, yes?
Do you get a list of the members, so you can find people close to you? We don't travel much, other than to see family.
