Grinity I completely missed your first post replying to me!

edited to add:

Just popping back to say the concise version of this ramble is the school is saying on the one hand "We take gifted Ed very seriously and we are really excited about your DD" and on the other "Her scores are nothing special and business as usual".

end edit.

We are in Australia, my eldest is in yr4 and this DD in preschool at private school with a population that is certainly biased towards "bright" kids and they claim to have gifted kids in every class (which I find believable as I know there were two in my elder DDs class until one moved interstate at the beginning of the year). I have no way of knowing the LOG of other kids at school but I would hazard a guess that the bias is towards a mix of very bright high achievers and OG kids. The school claims to have kids of my DDs LOG in most/every class which just seems statistically improbable to me (thinking more of how she would have scored if she had agreed to finish the coding).

There are no specialist schools for gifted children here and I would say that while there may be one or two schools of a similar suitability for my DD in my city/state there aren't any that are better.

My issue is that due to her date of birth, and our freaky school start system that happens only in our state and nowhere else in Australia, DD is due to start first year of school (FYOS) mid year and then do 18 months of her first year, having also effectively done an extra 6 months of preschool. She's ready now (well was ready at the start of our school year in Jan) to be in first year of school, she's getting more and more reluctant to go to preschool and although there is only one 9 week term of that remaining there is no way we want her then doing 18 months of FYOS and ending up the eldest in her cohort!

Added to this is the fact that she went through preschool last year with this years FYOS cohort, made friends with the "older" (by 6 months) kids who all went up in January and has been left behind by all her friends. So she's suffering socially as well.

We are pushing so that at the very least she gets moved to Yr1 next year, after 2 terms of FYOS, but ideally that she gets moved on from preschool now and gets 3 terms of FYOS. Moving now would also mean she gets those three terms with the kids she will continue with. If she stays in preschool and moves up on schedule she will be in a separate FYOS class that is exclusively for the mid year starters who will be doing fYOS again the next year.

The schools stance is that a) they have no room b) they have lots of gifted kids c) they will work with her where she's at no matter which year level she's in.

B and C may be true, though it remains to be seen how effective that is. For the two years we have been at school they have certainly differentiated beautifully for my elder DD who is G/LD but was neglected by her previous school who kept saying "She's so bright it will just click, she'll read some time soon" resulting in her being 2yrs delayed by the time we moved... Simultaneously I know the two gifted kids in her class were getting challenging material of their own and their parents seem/ed happy (these are/were DDs two best friends unsurprisingly). So I do believe they can/will differentiate but I just don't know that she needs to be the eldest in her cohort, or to do 6 terms of FYOS, no matter how well they differentiate.

And psychologically my DD is done with preschool, has lost her friends and really is hankering to be challenged more than a purely play based preschool can offer. Its not like I want her to fully skip a year or to enter a full year early. In other states we could have just started her this January if we wanted to, so she'll be young but she'll still in the ball park of her class mates.

Anyway my feeling is that we may need more "proof". We have to wait 3 weeks the principle to get back from leave so we can meet with him, I might be pleasantly surprised.

Sorry for the tome...

Last edited by MumOfThree; 04/14/11 04:44 AM.