It is possible that she is gifted AND she is not developmentally ready to read and write yet. This was part of why I started homeschooling DD7.
Yes, exactly. DD15 is
now among the best writers in her college cohort, but man, was that ever a white-knuckle ride. We'd hoped for a median outcome there, as little as four years ago, and when she took the ACT/SAT just 2y back, she was still on the up-going side of the arc, so her scores on the writing portion were not anything like as impressive as the rest of her profile. At your DD's age, she could
barely manage to print a few words before it was just too much for her, and she avoided writing. She could reliably write her name, and not much else, because-- asynchronous development, see. So in the space of 11 years, she compressed about 16 years' worth of development, and even that isn't really an accurate look at what it looked like. Writing was her weakest link. It was a real struggle developmentally until she was nearly 14 years old, and then suddenly she WAS ready, and she spread her wings and it was almost as though the previous struggles had never existed. So she spent 3rd grade through 11th grade being "about average" for grade level, and that only reluctantly-- and then suddenly it happened within about 18 months-- she jumped from 50th-70th percentile to 95th and rising-- among her academic peers, I mean-- those seated next to her in classes.
It was developmental-- and idiosyncratic.
I agree wholeheartedly with MegMeg that you can 'tune' homeschooling in a way that allows for that kind of developmental arc, but it will require some fortitude to provide some "push" on skills that are non-preferred. DD was too stubborn, so that's why after 2y, we put her into a cyberschool. We retained
some flexibility, but she also had to answer to someone besides me, and to meet minimum standards.
One word about the "socialization" part of homeschooling-- this is generally something that people who
have actually homeschooled tend to LAUGH at.
Nowhere, in my own opinion, is this more true than with HG/HG+ children-- because when you compare the value of interaction with a fairly uniform(-ish, anyway) group of children in an
artificial setting like a classroom.... which is tightly controlled, and reflects pretty much nothing resembling the entire rest of a person's life....
versus interactions with a wide variety of people engaged in a wide variety of other pursuits--
seems pretty easy to note which of those is MORE likely to give such children an opportunity to forge genuine connections with others, and to learn how to communicate with a range of people.
Just remember this-- as a parent, it's really not your goal to help your child become The Most Well-adjusted Fifth Grade Student Ever.
It is a long road, to be sure, but the goal is to produce an
adult who is independent, capable of emotional self-regulation and genuine, caring relationships with other people in a variety of settings. Right?
So consider the child that you have in front of you, and listen to your heart.
Not all of them NEED peer interactions the way educators have been conditioned to think of them.
