Hi TBMom, welcome!
My DD#1 went through this too, her private pre-school agreed to test her and determined that she could just skip kindergarten and go straight into first grade...some loophole, apparently in Texas, you couldn't start Kindergarten early but you could skip it completely(!) With the test results, we were able to get DD#1 tested for the public gifted magnet school that started with first grade. She went from being a bored bully in her 2nd year of preK to a perfectly happy 5 year old first grader. She ended up skipping 10th grade and graduated from 11th grade with a full academic scholarship.
DD#2 tested higher than her big sis in every school achievement and aptitude test, but she was not as social and was physically very small so we decided not to accelerate her, despite the fact that she wasn't learning anything new in school...she didn't complain, just sort of drifted off and eventually checked out. We are dealing with the consequences now and I keep wondering how things might have been if we had gone ahead and skipped her too. She has recently been diagnosed as ADHD inattentive, I wonder if we would have discovered that much sooner if she had been placed in a grade that actually challenged her so she couldn't skate by for so many years based on already knowing all of the material presented in class.
I guess my new perspective is "if in doubt, skip" its much easier to take a year off down the road than to make amends for extinguishing the spark or letting your child slide into lala land.
