In case anyone's interested, it didn't go so well. According to the school psychologist and the results she gave us, he scored highly on a number of the subtests, but had a bunch of zeros in other ones, and on some others didn't finish. The written report says that he kept curling up on his chair, jumping down and running to the door, freezing, interjecting off-topic comments at random, saying his stomach hurt, asking if I was there to pick him up, etc. He refused to participate on a lot of the math portions at all, apparently. I'm talking even some simple stuff, like recognizing symmetrical shapes.
The tester said that it's nearly impossible to get an accurate read on ability at this age, and that there is obvious evidence of advancement, but it is hard to tell how much (she didn't give him the whole DAS-II by design, even if he had finished all the parts she did give him). There is some evidence that the tester wasn't good at drawing him out and making him feel comfortable, although it's not important to go into here.
Anyway, at the second meeting, the plan was to give him advanced reading material, and for the teacher to talk to some 3-4 grade teachers to get math materials together for him. Weeks later, when we asked to have input, for him to have better homework (his current homework is still the normal K stuff and he's embarrassed to work on it or show it to us), to get some idea of the progress on the plan, etc., his teacher apologized and said she was going to have to work on it soon.
So I'm not so happy with the local school right now, since for various reasons I feel like even if the whole thing wasn't an intentional exercise in avoiding provision of services, they didn't do a bang-up job, either. (Some of this is explainable by the fact that they really do 99%+ of their testing here to find disabled kids, and so aren't experts on gifted testing, but some of it we feel may be down to the school feeling that we're just pushy parents and acting accordingly. But we weren't pushy-- I really think some of this might be shock that someone would suggest skipping to first grade, as they Just Don't Do That.)
I guess we have to consider several options: private testing and pushing with the local school some more, just letting the situation be, putting him in a different school, or home schooling. We don't want to home school in the coming year, and had been hoping to avoid the cost of a tester. I just can't stand the thought of a full-day first grade where he is learning to read simple sentences and add single-digit numbers. It will just be a big waste of his time.
Meanwhile, he couldn't be happier at home. He is about halfway or more through third grade math, and we will probably finish that up in the next month or two at a comfortable pace. Left unaddressed for the nonce is his performance anxiety. I want him to relax and feel a complete lack of pressure, but I am wondering if he will be able to perform next time he's tested, or if I should just avoid testing for a while (i.e. years or however long it takes for him to unlax).
