Moomin, your situation seems similar to mine... my DD is now 7, and things are MUCH, MUCH better now, but age 5 was the WORST, and I would never want to live through that again. I read your previous post w/ your daughter's profile:
http://giftedissues.davidsongifted....ting_with_local_public_p.html#Post140937"She hit the ceiling on three subtests, and her tester believed she could easily go higher on the SB-LM. She reads (chapter books) and writes fluently in English, Spanish, and French (she particularly loves the Rainbow Fairies books in Spanish). She loves reading picture books on math, geography, and science, and generally seems to want to learn everything she possibly can."
Based on that profile (which sounds somewhat similar DD), and the fact that she's not eager to be a teacher pleaser and fit in with the other children (also similar to my DD), kindergarten -IMHO- is going to be like putting a round peg in a square hole. Painful for everyone!!!!!
We suffered through kindergarten, but midway through the year, they decided to move her to the combined 1st-3rd grade class (Montessori charter school), where she did much better, but still needed a lot of support due to her emotional immaturity/volatility. They only had a full day option, which was too much for her at age 5. I volunteered every afternoon as her 'teacher's aide'. The next year, she stayed in the same class and qualified for special ed (the teachers thought she's autistic, but doctor after doctor has said that she's not, so she qualified based on ADHD - which the teachers DON'T think she has!LOL!). But because she got into special ed, she was allowed to spend about three hours per day in the resource room where it's much quieter and has fewer kids (which she loves). By the end of the year, she could spend the whole day in her regular classroom without any problems, and she even started to form some warm relationships with the other kids.
Looking back at where we were 2 years ago, she should never have gone to kindergarten. We even had a note from a developmental pediatrician saying that kindergarten was "more likely to be frustrating than profitable" for her and that "she should not spend the majority of her day with children who are much younger than her cognitively." Of course, schools are against acceleration, particularly for a non-compliant and emotionally immature child, so we just had to suffer through...
... but looking back, it would have been ideal for her at age 5 to be placed in 2nd grade, half-day with a full-time aide.
Since it's extremely unlikely that a school would agree to that, homeschooling would also have been a better option than what we went through.
This sounded so familiar to me:
"Here's the problem. I'm not sure that the evidence is "leading" anywhere. The response that the FIVE psychologists/neuropsychs who have worked with DD give is basically, "We don't get it, she seems totally normal and in control... then at school she just isn't AT ALL... then she is again." And her maladaptive behavior takes SO MANY random forms. And none of it adds up to anything."
It sounds like giftedness and asynchronous development to me! It's not easy! But it my case, it's getting better as my daughter matures, learns more and more self-control, and internalizes the values and virtures that we're working hard to teach her.
