What did you say about gifted home schooling in your talk? Not to ask you to reduce an hour's worth of carefully crafted prose to a few nuggets, but if you have anything I could use, I'd be grateful! Thanks!
We're fortunate to be very close to an urban area with a school system that's really big and really lousy. Bad for them, but good for us, because there's a LOT of home schoolers around!
We joined a highly active homeschoolers' group. They do more in a week than we could do in a month! And though it's not a group designed for gifted kids, a lot of them are gifted just by the nature of the bad school/gifted kid combo. Plus he can spend time with kids who are a couple years older than he is, and that seems to help, too. I'm going with the theory that gifted kids tend to do best with a variety of activity-specific friends, regardless of age.
He's got two old and dear friends--B: a same-age buddy next-door who's in half-day kindergarten with whom he plays Hot Wheels and Transformers,
and A: an older (gifted & home schooled) buddy with whom he plays sword fighting and haunted house and Legos,
...plus he's got a handful of new friends that he sees in various groups (and with whom I hope to develop playdate friendships as well) who are within a couple of years of his age. He played football and got on the swings at the playground once, and he just generally ran amuck (in a good way) with another boy in an indoor gym after an art class.
Ironically, considering how worried everyone gets about the socialization of home schooled kids, I'm certain that DS is getting WAY more good-quality socializing now than he did in public school. He wanted to arrange a playdate with only one child at his old school. The message I got: he wasn't clicking there socially.
Of old friends B and A: excepting summers, in the past year he saw the first pretty much only on the weekends and the second almost never! Now he sees B daily (sometimes twice a day!) and A at least once a week. Make new friends, but keep the old; One is silver and the other gold, right? From what I can see, he's doing much better at both right now than he was a month ago!
The social question is always the one people ask. But I think that as long as you make an effort to put your child in social situations, they'll find peers. And from what I've seen, home schooling circles tend to be much richer in gifted kids than the regular school system, making it easier to find peers. That's anecdotal, of course, but it's the truth for my experience.
Schools are all-too-often about sitting down and shutting up. Not exactly conducive to making friendships. (The fact that he was acting out and being punished by missing recess wasn't helping...) And since highly gifted kids tend to be isolated even in a crowd, having a few truly good friends and regularly getting opportunities to meet new people seems like just about the best strategy possible!
My bigger worry is that he only seems to ever see boys. Where are all the gifted girls? There's one in his art class, but that's it. I don't think most of the girls get home schooled...No girls in his life? THAT'S the thing that worries me!
But, then again, he never had anything to do with girls at school if he didn't have to anyway. LOL!
Thanks, Lorel!