Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Gifted or Not?

Yes you are right about the scores not adding up. The psychologist is updating her report and I should have another copy tomorrow.

I agree 146 is a very high score and should qualify for gifted program in most school districts. Just to clarify though, our school district uses NNAT2 too, and the ceiling score is 160. For old NNAT a couple of years ago, it was 150.

Yes, we took the NNAT2. The highest score was a 160.

Oh ok - our NNAT was the NNAT 1 evidently. But regardless, you definitely have some VERY GT scores there.

What a shame. The fear is that the extreme emphasis on reading skills in the first couple grades of elementary end up causing your clearly gifted son to identify himself as not smart, or just average, and have that attitude become ingrained. Will the general attitude of "I'm so so" or "school's not fun", learned now, affect how he feels years from now even in subjects he would naturally excel at (like math and science).

What do you think is the root cause of the competitiveness? Does the competitiveness extend to the pull-out groups in which its harder to finish first? I guess I am wondering if he finds the pull-outs more stressful than regular class, for some reason which then has to be figured out. The pull-outs ought to be fun and interesting. Do the rest of the pull-out kids happen to be advanced readers so that the group teacher assumes a reading level that makes him the last one finished?

Polly

You might want to review this information. Wrightslaw

[/quote]
This road led to homeschooling for us. I know that option is not available or desirable for every family. But look at all your options and choose what you think will work for a year at a time. You can always re-evaluate later! [/quote]

It lead to homeschooling for us too! The very best decision we've ever made.

Your son is in 1st grade -- full day. A whole day where he gets feed back from a teacher who doesn't understand or know what a gifted kid is like.

Gifted children are asynchronous. Not everything develops at the same speed.

I've heard many parents on this board and other places, Jan-Feb is when things start to fall apart for a lot of kids. They may have been excited to go to school and learn in Sept, Oct, but then they get negative feed back about their work and they aren't really learning much. It is really tough on the kids at school who are advance.

Just a thought for you. My kid scored better with the Gr. 3 reading material and answered comprehension questions better because there was more meat to it. The Gr. 2 material, my kid only did so-so. Good thing our psyc-ed tester knew to keep going and see what would happen.

Try it. Give your son at home something more challenging and see what he thinks.

Do also read up on perfectionism as that is often an issue with gifted kids and it starts early. Gifted kids often judge themselves harshly expecting themselves to perform at a higher level.

Best wishes! Let us know how it goes...

We're facing an almost identical issue with my son (5, in Kindergarten in a Spanish Immersion program). He is reading fluently, but didnt do well in the "retelling" and especially "making connections" part of the reading assessment. I have been advised to work on these with him since the school can't advance him to a higher reading grade till he passes the comprehension tests.

We tried a few simple readers at home, and I think I noticed a couple of problems. For one, my son reads so fast that details don't really register in his mind (this is a kid who reads a 150 page book in an afternoon). He is a perfectionist, and unless the book seems to make an almost perfect connection in his mind he tells the teacher he can't think of anything. And the main problem is that the first grade readers are so, well, boring, that it is hard to remember the sequence of events

FWIW, my son tested as EG/PG and does not present as exceptionally curious either. He is really quiet and uncommunicative and tends to clam up when the teacher asks him anything. In the earlier grades its the verbal, assertive, confident kids who the teachers consider smart, not the quiet/introspective/shy ones

OP here: Well we did end up moving my son to the private gifted school.

Our thoughts are that we would try the public again if he is accepted into the full-time gifted program in 3rd grade. The psychologist and the private school had both said that they will help/fight for us to get into the program.

Interestingly, the private school assessed his reading level at high 2nd grade. This has made me relax a bit and I am not as worried about a disability or a discrepency between his achievement versus his ability. Obviously I cannot completely rule out the possibility of a disability without more formal testing.

However, right now I believe that my son was extremely bored by reading the "Dog ran to the store" when he is capable of reading so much more. It makes me very mad that the public school was not identifying him as gifted and not offering him the GT pullouts that might have been able to spark his interest in things a bit. There reason - because of his reading level which was low because he was not retelling the story in a certain way. Agh!!! So upseting.