Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy my son seems too normal to be 'gifted'.....

I don't know whether this is going to make sense or not but will give it a go.


My son is turning 6 next month, as a result of the sb5 placing him on the 99.8th percentile with a iq of 143, he will be skipping grade 1 and going straight to grade 2.

We got him tested because one day he repeated word for word (almost perfectly) a chapter book that i had started to read to his sister! He had only had this book for a week so memorised it pretty quickly lol! We had always though that he was 'bright' but in saying that i made a concentrated effort to teach him
to read when he was 2, and as an earky childhood teacher have always had a strong focus on education!

He is in preprimary now, one of the oldest in the class and socially he is fine. Gets on well with everyone!

My question, longwinded :-) , is that he seems so normal - how is this possible? Everyone else i have spoken to with gifted kids tell me all about their little quirks, and their struggles, and how different their kids seem etc etc etc. Yes
my son is bright lol but i just don't see anything else there! Of course the memorising th chapter book is huge so i am pretty sure the tester got ut right but how s my son soooo normal? Is he underachieving?, should i be doing more with him? I can't seem to find anything to really spark his interest....
He us struggling a little at school because he hates hates hates writing, and we are trying to work n that otherwise he won't get the grade skip next year... but i am wondering if he even needs that??

Some gifted people are quite normal.

I think it depends on the environment, which means that he probably has a fine environment for himself.

I suspect that most important thing is to find something that requires effort for him to do so that he doesn't find school too easy.

Your "normal" may be different from the "normal" of others. Your son may be displaying behaviors which are normal to you, and quirky to others. If you haven't spent a lot of time around other kids his age, you don't have a proper frame of reference.

But of course, you mentioned you're an early childhood teacher. How early?

Count your blessings. Some gifted kids can be quite challenging. (In a good way of course.) lol

There is nothing so wonderful as having an older sister to grow up with to help a kid feel normal even when they are quite far from average.
Let them skip him - it's a great age for it, and you can always unskip him later. The way I look at it is that now he hates writing, if you leave him underchallenged at school for long he'll had writing AND everything else.

It certianly was true for me that things I considered utterly normal, such as being picky about sock seams, were considered highly unusual by people who had more exposure to a wider collection of kids.

Kids deserve to learn in school. Before my DS let me know that he believed that he deserved to learn in school I thought it was normal for elementary school to be mostly about trying to entertain myself in a way that didn't bug others.

Give it a try. Are you using the Handwriting without Tears paper? You can download some from free from their main site. It's amazing how much of a difference those lines made at our house. I also like their philosophy of drawing a whole page of a letter and putting smiley faces under the nicest ones. No attention to what isn't right at all. I also like their books and 'The Print Tool' if you really need to convinse your child to work on certian aspects of writing.

You many also want to work on other projects that build hand strength, or even core strenght if sitting is making it hard to write.

Ultimately I think it's unfair to ask a teacher to create a whole seperate curriculum for a single kid, so I like full skips. It's also unfair to ask a 6 or 7 year old to self entertain all day while they aren't learning. It's unfair to ask the other kids and the teacher to put up with what your kid is doing while they try and self entertain all day. I know that your son hasn't had any issues with Preprimary, but once 1st grade starts the expectations on kid's behavior rise sharply, and the chances to self entertain decrease, so if the school wants to skip him, and he's old for grade, let them.

Love and More Love,
Grinity

We just had DD5 tested because of some issues with handwriting. I figured she was more mildly gifted give or take a little. She seems to regular compared to her 12 yr old EG/PG brother. Ha I was shocked with a score just 2 points below him. She gets along with anyone. She can read people and situations a 1000X better than he could at 5. She is less intense and goes with the flow better. He is more quirky and walks to a different drummer. He struggled to adjust to school and situations up until about 9 or 10.

Lots of GT kids are perfectly "normal" by outward appearances, but we hear about the quirky oddballs a lot more.


We have been doing Handwriting without Tears all summer. I give her every possible opportunity to write the "list" for us. Sometimes it's a grocery list, somedays it is the To Do List for the day. She doesn't like writing, but the "list" give her a feeling of a role and importance.

I think that with most things (not just giftedness), the people who are going to be talking about it or researching online and talking about it there etc - are more likely than a general population of people to be people who are trying to solve a challenge or problem... which means you're more likely to hear about gifted kids from the parents of challenging gifted kids. For instance, I'm here reading and posting because I'm parenting two 2e children, both of whom are challenging to parent but in different ways. For the most part, for most of their day, in most situations, to most of the outside world, they appear fairly "normal" - whatever normal is! If they didn't have their 2e challenges I wouldn't be here - I'd be out having fun with them!

Best wishes,

polarbear

Keep in mind his "normal" might be dumbing down to fit in with his current peers. DS at preschool paints all over the page (basically a big mess) and at home will paint/draw intricate and detailed pictures of stealth fighters, people with internal anatomy, animals and houses etc. He will flip though picture books at pre-school and read long chapter books at home. He doesn't ask incessant questions in class(but did give himself away excitedly telling the class about the transit of venus when half of them didn't even know what a planet was!). He seems normal to us as he is our only child so he is our "normal". Only when we compare him with our neighbour who is a few weeks younger we realise how not "normal" he really is.

I think this is a good point. I gave up on an ADHD forum (my son is diagnosed) because the posters are all having so many problems it got to the point that I began to doubt my son's diagnosis, lol. With a little digging I soon learned that many ADHD kids are like my son and are thriving, meds-free, with little drama or angst. These are the children of the parents who don't post because they're not seeking solutions or commiseration.