Newbie here...My DD starts her testing next week. We went with a private dr. rather than involving the school. DD is almost 8 and in 2nd grade. For K and 1st she was home schooled/virtual schooled. I started noticing that she was having trouble with focus toward the end of the school year, and have always believed her to be a bit "peculiar" in various other ways. I believed she might have ADD/ADHD and wasn't sure how to go about getting her evaluated without a school. After consideration we thought that getting some professional input from a teacher would help us make the determination of whether or not to test her and so enrolled her into a charter school. Boy was I wrong--and now I feel like I've thrown her to the wolves! They seem to be more clueless than I am about the whole thing. We've gotten the name of a good child neuro-psych in our area (specialized in giftedness) and my husband and I meet with her alone in a few days. My question is: How do you tell your kids that they are getting evaluated? She is the seemingly underachieving kind of gifted (if it's that at all) and I don't see telling her that she's getting tested will go over all that well. She detests writing and "work" of any kind, not to mention tests. What if she won't cooperate and the testing doesn't turn out right? I hate to think of spending all that money and not getting an accurate eval. On the other hand, I worry about tipping her off to the idea that there might be something unique/special/different about her and having her use it as a crutch for not doing stuff. Or worse get her worrying that something is "wrong" with her if she doesn't turn out to be gifted and it's something else (i.e. extreme laziness). Did your kids already know or were the tests a surprise? I just can't imagine how to brooch the topic without causing an uproar. Ideas??
