My 5 year-old daughter is in Kindergarten and recently had the WPPSI IV administered as part of a psychological evaluation for anxiety and sensory issues. Her results on the Verbal Comprehension (VCI )& Visual Spatial (VSI) test components place her (I think) in the moderately gifted range (135 & 132 respectively). Her other scores ranged from Average – Superior, with her weakest points being Processing Speed (50th percentile) and Matrix Reasoning (58th percentile). Her WRAT scores places her in the mid-upper 90th percentile for Word Reading, Spelling and Math Computation.
I already have a post in the Testing Forum where I asked for some help interpreting my daughter’s test results. Aside from this though, I’m a bit confused as to whether we should be looking for supplemental enrichment opportunities for her. My daughter seems happy at school and has developed several age-appropriate friendships (which wasn’t the case in preschool). Her teacher says that she can be shy, but is fully engaged in her lessons, and always knows the answer when she’s called upon. She does receive some math enrichment once a week, but her school’s gifted program doesn’t start until third grade, and, due to budget cuts, will likely be completely gone within the next year or two.
Our first priority is for our daughter to have a happy childhood. So far she seems happy at school, even if the class content is already familiar to her (I know this is the case in Math). She lags a bit behind her classmates socially, so I would be hesitant to try to accelerate her learning beyond her grade level (unless she starts to develop boredom problems). That said, I also wonder if we can provide her with some kind of enrichment which doesn’t advance her grade level, but does give her a deeper understanding of the content she’s learning. From what I’ve read, intelligence can be increased modestly up to the age of 8/9, so it makes sense to me to seek some modest enrichment opportunities.
The 2 options I’ve run across so far, are the Summer Institute for the Gifted (SIG) and the CTY/Johns Hopkins Advanced Math I online course. SIG seems expensive and will probably conflict with our summer vacation plans, so we’ll probably rule that out for this summer. The CTY course seems to be more expensive than similar courses, but the math program manager told me that it’s designed to provoke higher-level thinking, while keeping the content base the same. I think that might make sense for my daughter.
Would either of these options make sense for my daughter, and are there any other options that anyone would recommend? I would appreciate hearing any thoughts you might have.
