Our 5 yo is going to start kindergarten soon. We just completed private school admission process, and got accepted at two schools. One of them is able to accommodate highly gifted children (we saw it in their classroom) but we are hesitant to send him there because the school seems to be in unstable state. So we are sending him to another one, that is not targeting GT, but is progressive and we think respect the children; however they insist in not doing "vertical differentiation" but will do "horizontal differentiation". Basically it means the same grade level stuff will be given to each child, but more advanced child will receive somewhat more difficult/enriched grade level stuff. I don't know how this works.
We talked to our psychologist, and she estimated he is around 3.5 standard deviations above the mean for VSI (he hit the ceiling, so she analyzed his raw scores), which probably means at least 4 SD in one subtest. And that is when she ran out of materials..
One of my worry is that our child is going to just comply and not show his true abilities, and then underperform over time. I have a few questions:
1) When do you tell teachers that you have a high ability child (especially in an area where many children are GT)? Do you wait until you see problems? How do we avoid being seen as tiger parents (we are not..)?
2) Should we work on more advanced material with the child at home in order to figure out his abilities, or is this just digging a deeper hole for ourselves as he will further diverge from his peers? We are not big into acceleration, but we do not want to put ceiling over him either.
3) How do you work with a school that doesn't offer more than grade level, but willing to enrich grade level stuff?
As a side note, we haven't completely gotten over the shock of the school admission process. Three schools that we thought would be easy to get in, because his scores surpassed their requirements by a good bit, declined us, and one of them didn't even waitlist us. The same school accepted a friend whose score didn't make it into GT range and whose parents were hesitating in applying as they didn't think their child was gifted. This school was marketed as a school for the GT population. That child is a good child, but our son is very even tempered and has no social issues, coming from a great feeder pre-K school, had great playdates and parents interview, and great references. Now some parents (including parents from the GT schools) told us that these GT schools actually avoid kids whose scores were above 2 SD because they would be harder to accommodate. If that is the case, where do our children go? Is this going to be the case from now on up to high school? How do you all do this?
Still figuring how to navigate this...
