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This is wonderful news! I am so pleased to hear that he has had happy years in middle school, and has things to look forward to in high school. It sounds like he has really blossomed in multiple ways, and also found his people socially.

Since it’s been a few years, I thought I’d come back with an update:

My son just finished middle school. He was subject accelerated in math and science in 6th grade and has several high school credits on his transcript already. He was on the honor roll every year in middle school and finished 8th grade with above a 4.0 gpa. Even though writing is still a relative weakness for him, he has improved tremendously with intervention and accommodations. He’s had no behavior problems since he was in elementary, and he even started participating in clubs, sports and team activities. His current passions are DnD, swimming, violin/viola, video games, chess and riding his bike. He and his friends meet once a week to play DnD and other board games, and he’s planning on joining the high school chess club next year.

I just wanted to give an update to show how much everyone’s advice here helped. He has made tremendous progress since 3rd grade and I don’t know how to thank everyone who helped us when we were struggling with the school district.

Nice to hear from you again, perse! And also good to hear that your older one eventually did get what he needed in school.

As to #2: Her Lexile is indeed quite high for her age. It's also not crazy for a GT kiddo, hyperlexic or no. That's about where one of ours was at that age--reaching what Metametrics would consider college-ready around third or fourth grade. And that's starting from simple decodables just after the fourth birthday. The Lexile is about where the median entering-7th grader was in the MetaMetrics studies. the iReady score is about where the median entering-8th grader was in the relevant studies. So they match up reasonably well, all things considered. (iReady is more focused on decoding at this age, and Lexiles are about comprehension.)

And math being only a grade or two ahead is likely not only a function of the differential impact of instruction on math (vs reading, which is gated in a fluent decoder mainly by vocabulary and socio-cultural context), but also on the ceiling of the grade two tests. On top of that, there are differences between percentiles (ordinal performance versus age-peers) and grade-level expectations. Consider that the majority (69%) of USA fourth graders read below grade-level on the 2024 NAEP. Most programmatic standardized testing scores reported to parents are taken from tests designed to identify at-risk learners, so the spread below grade-level also is quite a bit more detailed than that above.

Regarding advocacy: If this is the same district, you have the advantage this time of your older child's experience. (I'm one of a sibling group of GT learners, and the younger sibs definitely benefited from parental advocacy for the older sibs.) (And btw, it actually speaks well of your district's commitment to at-risk learners that they are using Fundations as their tier 1 reading curriculum. It's relatively expensive, and labor-intensive training teachers, but it's also highly effective at catching and remediating readers at-risk of dyslexia early, when implemented correctly. This also suggests your district may have some resources to work with...) And on the advocacy front for Fundations, it does include unit assessments at the higher levels (grade 4 & 5), which might be one way to demonstrate to the district that she can move on from it.

And if it's a different district, then you can talk wistfully about what a struggle it was to get the past districts to support your son, and how happy you are to be working with this one instead, since they are so much more student-centered.

For our own children, we haven't had to deal with much of this, as we've homeschooled most of K-12. I have worked in schools for longer than I care to think about, though, and can say a few things, in no particular order:

1. Having a key school staff member as an ally is extremely helpful.
2. Come prepared with win-win solutions-- these respect teachers' time and expertise, and are also presented as strategies that will help them display their own strengths better.
3. If the conversation starts to slide toward how this may affect other students, respecfully but firmly re-focus the conversation on your child.
4. Consider and prioritize the functions and needs that are most impactful for your child, and be willing to compromise on lower-priority items as an act of good faith collaboration.

indigo has a rather comprehensive roundup of crowd-sourced advocacy tips from over the years. Search for "advocacy roundup" and I think it should come up. I know there are links connected to the "advocacy as a non-newtonian fluid" thread.

As it happens, the scoring program(s) that nearly everyone uses for the WISC-V (including in the UK) generates a GAI automatically along with the FSIQ. All of the subtests necessary for the GAI are included in the FSIQ, so no additional testing or even table-lookups are needed (since, unless the psych is in the tiny minority of professionals still hand-scoring, the publisher's software will have done all the work already). Formally, there are not VECI, EFI, EGAI or extended index scores for the UK norms, so those would have to be derived from US norms and interpreted with caution.

But I understand why she does not want to report an FSIQ, as her professional opinion is that it is not a good representation of your child's overall cognitive ability. (In those circumstances, I typically include it in the document somewhere for reference, asterisked, but deemphasize it in my analysis.)

With regard to the GAI, it may be that the spread across just those five subtests is also large enough that she does not judge it to be a good representation of overall cognition. You report that four of the five primary indices were in the Extremely High range. That is not incompatible with a large magnitude of intrasubtest scatter. As a back-of-the-napkin example, consider that a score in the EH range can result from two scaled scores of 16 in the same index. But what actually generates the index score is the sum of the two subtests. So instead of 16, 16, they could have been 13, 19, which is a pretty significant difference. Many evaluators would consider the resulting index score to be a poor representation of the domain, and choose not to report it.

Your child also has a marked relative weakness in processing speed, which may be motor-based, or may be cognitive-based. Or both. Consider that even the GAI includes two timed subtests, which means it can be subject to score-lowering effects in a child with significantly discrepant speed. Consequently, the only index-level score that may not be affected by his known area of weakness is the VCI, and possibly WMI, depending on how weak his fine-motor efficiency is.

Bottom line: there may well be an entirely legitimate professional reason that the evaluator, in her clinical judgement, does not choose to report a composite score (either the FSIQ or the GAI). Have you identiifed a key advocacy use for a formal composite number? If you have, you might try leading with that in your communications with the psych, possibly wrapped in, "I know this may not be the best indicator of his real ability, but it's what the (school, program, etc.) demands in order for him to access this opportunity". It may also be that some resources would respond to presenting the relevant primary index scores for focused advancement.

Was the testing done through the school? If so, there may be different rules ...

... but at least in the US, when you pay to have a private EP run testing, you typically receive at least:

- the scaled score and percentile rank for each subtest
- the composite score and percentile rank for the primary indices (VCI, VSI, FRI, WMI, PSI) and FSIQ

Spikiness and differences of 2-3 SD's (standard deviations) or more between relatively high and relatively low on the WISC-V is not uncommon with highly gifted, profoundly gifted, or twice-exceptional children (some may even say that score profile is in the majority among these populations) ... so I wonder how much experience with those kinds of populations, your EP has had?

In any case, if she has scaled scores for all of the subtests, she can calculate an FSIQ. Whether she is doing it electronically via Q-Global or looking up tables in the Technical Manual, there is nothing about the range of subtest scores that prevents an FSIQ from being calculated. She is correct that the wider the spread among the subtests the less reliable the FSIQ is considered to be. But she has already provided you with that expert overlay.

On a related note, be aware that schools have wide discretion on how they want to identify giftedness. If a school wants to stick to FSIQ and not use other indices such as GAI or EGAI, that is their call (not saying it's the right call, just saying it's their call and they don't have to change it.)

Here is a GREAT use of AI, in my opinion: Ray Ban Meta Glasses (for the blind)!
Useful for the blind and also for their care givers, the glasses respond to voice commands. They have a tiny camera in the frame and can report back to the wearer, answering their questions.

A demonstration during a TV ad includes: "Which is the blue shirt?" 
This website includes the TV ad I saw: 
https://lighthouseguild.org/news/fr...sses-for-every-blind-veteran-in-america/

https://www.ray-ban.com/usa/ray-ban-meta-ai-glasses

It sounds like you’re really seeing the full picture of your daughter, which is a good place to be in.
What you’re describing does line up with developmental asynchrony in some kids—especially when they’re among the youngest in a grade and also dealing with sensory processing and body awareness challenges. In those cases, the issue usually isn’t academic ability, but regulation and physical readiness for long stretches of structured classroom time.
From what I’ve seen, repeating a grade can sometimes help socially/emotionally, but it doesn’t always fix the underlying sensory or impulse-control challenges. Many families have more success keeping the child on grade while adding supports like OT strategies, movement breaks, flexible seating, and clear transition routines.
If the school is open to it, even small accommodations can make a big difference over time.

Apparently, I posted here like nine years ago about my son. You can read the post I guess. He was hyperlexic at age 2. I was only just cracking the book on this parenting thing, so it's weird to read it. He went off the charts a couple years after that. The school says they have never seen anything like him. He struggles a lot too, socially, but he's pretty extraordinarily gifted at language and math.

However, I'm back with a second kid and lessons learned. The public school did not push my son academically because they haven't the resources. When they finally did, he improved in all domains, but that wasn't until 5th grade.

My daughter, who is in second grade, learned almost nothing this year from her teacher and is so catastrophically aggravated. She hates school. Her lexile score is 1050 (which is shockingly high) and her iReady reading sits at 608, well higher than her brother's at that age, despite not having been hyperlexic. She learned to read with everyone else around 5 and 6. She lags behind him slightly in math, but when I say the school hasn't taught her a goddamn thing all year, I mean it. Her lexile scores are pure home-reading and having me for a mom.

I'm looking for two things. First, how reliable is that lexile score anyway? It can't be right, right? She's practically into high school with that score. Is it possible to just be really good at guessing? Her math score is only a grade or two ahead, but it seems like that's a function of math really needing a teacher while literacy is something I can handle with her. Second, what can I do to squeeze some enrichment out of these people at the school? They ignored my son until it was no longer possible to pretend he didn't need acceleration and I want to rectify this issue with the smaller one before she comes to hate school even more. She hides under her desk and sticks her fingers in her ears because she hates "fundations" and now I have every reason to believe she is not just being difficult. It's baby talk to her and she no longer cares to be a baby.

I'm broke as a joke and can't afford much on my own, so I need the public schools to pony up. What strategies have you used to get them to cater to the gifted?

"Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be."
- Abraham Lincoln

This quote by Abraham Lincoln asserts that happiness is primarily a product of internal mindset and conscious choice rather than external circumstances. It suggests that individuals have the power to control their emotional state by deciding to focus on the positive aspects of life, practicing gratitude, and adopting an optimistic outlook.

Key interpretations include:

Control over Emotions: By choosing to be happy, people take control of their reactions to life's events, finding joy even in difficult situations.

Beyond Materialism: True fulfillment is not derived from material possessions, specific goals, or worldly success, but from one's mental attitude.

Philosophical Balance: While the quote emphasizes personal agency, some analyses note that innate predispositions and genetic factors may also influence an individual's baseline capacity for happiness, suggesting a complex interplay between choice and biology.

The quote is widely cited as an encouragement to cultivate inner peace and resilience, reminding us that satisfaction is largely determined by how we perceive and interpret our experiences.

AI-generated

A belated "Welcome" to you, ardenwood!

Thank you for sharing the great article linked at US Career Institute.
The career landscape is changing quickly.

Hopefully in addition to thinking about careers, people are learning and practicing life-skills for self-sufficiency such as budgeting, learning from printed books (to avoid being over-reliant on the internet), a bit of gardening for food and medicinal herbs, and the skill of determining "NEEDS" vs "WANTS." A degree of autonomy and ability to find joy while embracing a minimalist, frugal existance may help insulate one's self from manipulation, whether by AI, humans, or circumstances.