Thank you all so much for the suggestions! I emailed the tester asking her if she can re-norm it based on his age. Hopefully she can and it will give more information in the scores.
Just some background on us and why we're testing, if anyone's interested- it's going to be long, though, lol.
I've suspected since he was a toddler that he might be gifted (my husband and I both were). He spoke his first word at 6 months, and by 20 months we were having regular conversations with him. I was always much more involved in trying to manage his intense personality (tantrums, obstinacy, defiance) that his abilities just were part of who he was, they weren't something we recognized as very different. Then he started Kindergarten and I realized that none of the other kids were reading and that the curriculum seemed insanely below his level (he learned his colors at 2, letters at 3, he could count to 100 by 3.5). He taught himself how to read just before he turned 5 with no instruction beyond letter identification and the sound the letters make.
He started complaining constantly of being bored and the teacher was blowing me off telling me that if he were really advanced he would be begging her for work. But in class he was willing to just coast by, he refused to rock the boat. He actually started dumbing himself down, hiding his reading ability and "forgetting" answers because the other kids didn't know how to do the things he did and he said that he thought that they were doing things the right way. But, then he would beg me at home to make the teacher teach him "real things" (those were his exact words). He would have sobbing fits in the morning, begging me not to make him go to school because he was so bored. When I finally realized that at home he was literally teaching himself basic math (he taught himself to add, subtract and multiply), reading at a 3rd/4th grade level and was sucking up pretty complex science concepts just for the fun of it, while at school he was still being forced to learn to count to 100 with the other kids, we pulled him. The principal and the teacher both told me I was crazy, that I was making it up or pushing him to do these things because for a million different reasons he couldn't possibly be gifted.
I still doubt myself a lot, especially when he has throw down tantrums over multiplication, telling me it's too hard, but when I actually make him sit down and work on it, he zooms through the work in 5 minutes. I was hoping that the testing would make me feel better, that I'm not crazy, that the things I see in him aren't all in my head. I know that the test that we had done wasn't optimal, but the school system won't test homeschoolers and a full scale test is financially out of the question, so it was an inexpensive compromise.
I also have 2 younger children (DS4 and DD21mo) who seem to be following in their big brother's footsteps as far as ability; though thankfully, their personalities are much less intense, lol. I feel like I need to get a handle on my 6 year old so that I'll have more confidence in dealing with my younger children as they get older and knowing that I can trust my instincts when it comes to what they can do.
Anyways, that's the long way of explaining why I think he's gifted and why we had him tested
Kimberly
