I want to echo what the others have said - he's 6! We used to joke that our DD was profoundly gifted at dress up and sandpit. Still at 7 she'd mostly rather hunt for lizards with the dog (just barely 7) or play on her iPod. She's 99.9th. She DOES think and learn differently, but most often you see it when she looks at the sunrise through the winter trees out the dining room window and says "Look, it's like art in the sky!" or yesterday, randomly while playing Zombies v. Plants "It would be weird if a man loved a girl, no not a lady, a girl." (Seriously where did THAT come from?)... Academically she has risen to every challenge she's faced and then some, but she's so not pursuing any academic area for the fun of it. She comes home with books from the library on snakes and reptiles and when I ask if she's finished reading them yet she says "MUM!" (in her you-are-being-stupid voice) "I got them to look at the PICTURES. I'm not reading them". I know full well she's more than capable, her reading is somewhere between 3 and 5 years advanced at this point, her decoding is about 10 years advanced, but nope, she's looking at the pictures (and reading the snippets that interest her). The fact that she won't stretch herself academically, but will happily do as much as is asked, does make the question of acceleration a more frequent issue than we would like. We don't WANT to accelerate her more but her happy place is just above average for her class and for her that simply is not one grade accelerated... Yes we have our struggles and issues with her but really she's having a happy childhood, it's great!
I guess the other thing I wanted to ask is - do you need to check your yardstick? I would like to humbly suggest it's broken. Do you actually know what truly average for 6 looks like? Do you get that 99th is absolutely well and truly gifted but it's an order of magnitude different from many of the kids discussed here? If you are reading about the sort of way out there gifted kids on this forum and thinking that's what gifted looks like, well it's not really, not at all. It's what HG+/EG/PG looks like.
Coming back to add: I have children 20 points apart in verbal iq, 15 points in full scale, I wasn't trying to be mean at all with the above, just saying most people don't have a home grown example of: "wow that is what a standard deviation between kids looks like!"
Last edited by MumOfThree; 08/11/13 07:28 PM.
