My poor Miss 4 has had a shocker of a week. She imploded last week in a spectacular fashion and has been having major, MAJOR meltdowns for a week and has generally been hyper sensitive for about a month. She's so not herself. She's normally a happy, resilient, curious and sweet little thing but not so at the moment. Her mind is racing a million miles per hour. Everyone in the household is exhausted.

Yesterday, she was unable to complete a written assigment given to her by her teacher (a letter to santa). She ended up underneath the table in tears and the teacher noted that she just wasn't able to complete the task independently. She cried that she hated writing, was unable to do it, etc. and the teacher felt that the assignment was putting her under way too much pressure. And now the principal has called asking me to re-think Miss 4's acceleration plans next year. She doesn't think she's up to it. And I'm ready to crawl under my bed and have a good howl...

Thoughts/advice welcome... jojo

My first thought is get her ears checked because whenever DS flips like that, he usually has a double ear infection that nobody knew about. It's happened to us at least 5 times!

Other than that, I'd say put the principal off until after the holidays. Our kids are so sensitive to changes in schedule, people coming to visit or not, stress in the air, the weather changing! I don't think making any decisions in Nov/Dec is ever good for anyone!

Sounds like you have a bit of a perfectionist. I have one of those and I am one too... I wish I had great advice for how to stave it off quickly but I don't. I just try to talk to DS a lot about mistakes and learning from them and talk about famous mistakes all the time. Sometimes I mess something up on purpose (like burning toast) just to say "Oh well" and start over.

If this all seems a little random, you may also want to consider (as CAMom said) an illness or a growth spurt. DS was mostly happy, but would have these really un-resiliant days/weeks and then would shoot up an inch or suddenly be able to do things he couldn't do before. I think some days the body just has other plans for the energy that might otherwise be devoted to learning.

Resist the urge to ascribe all negative behavior to academic pressure. Kids go through these phases, gifted or not. Since she was not herself for the past week, I don't think you can blame that particular assignment for the problem.

I'll second this! GS9 has been 'off' the last few weeks. He's grown an inch during this last 4 weeks, a whole shoe size in 2 months, and gained 5 pounds-all muscle.

Yup. First thing I think of when DS7 is throwing out-of-character fits for no good reason is something physical: hunger or illness being the top two candidates. I can't think of a time when a really weird tantrum wasn't one of those two things, actually.