Hello! Well, first of all, it probably all starts with the fact that I'm a "former" gifted kid. I went to public schools in a rural community that didn't have any type of GT program until my parents helped push for a once-a-week pull-out program when I was in fourth grade. Luckily, I had great early elementary teachers who nurtured my love for learning. As a 1st grader, I got to go down to 4th grade for science classes (my big early passion). My 1st grade classmates were learning early reading skills while my teacher had me writing multi-page reports about bears.
While I excelled in high school and got great scores on all of the standardized tests, I decided pretty early on (much to the chagrin of my teachers and my guidance counselor) that I wanted to be an elementary school teacher, and that I specifically wanted to teach gifted students. So, I ignored all of the people who told me that I could really "do something with my life" and enrolled in our state public university to major in elementary education (with a full-ride academic scholarship).
My husband and I met in college and married soon after. He is also a smart kid who became a teacher -- he teaches high school math and social studies. I got my "dream job" right out of college -- teaching a 5th grade self-contained GT class. I've been teaching for eleven years now, and earned my GT endorsement for my teaching license through graduate work during my first and second years of teaching. The GT program in our district has morphed over the years into a multi-grade program, so I now teach 4th and 5th grade students (still self-contained GT).
A few years ago, I went from teaching gifted students to parenting -- at least -- one of them. I suspected from infancy that my oldest daughter -- now 8 -- was gifted. We are very blessed in that our school district (the one where I also teach) has a single K/1 GT class that she was admitted into. Her K/1 teacher is excellent at balancing the fact that her students are exceptionally talented...but that they're still five and six. So, they still sang a lot of songs like any good kindergarteners...except they sang songs about the water cycle and the planets. They still had "calendar time" every morning where they talked about the weather for the day...and then they converted the expected high temperature from Fahrenheit into Celsius.
Her K/1 teacher did such an incredible job that when my daughter moved to a high ability 2/3 class this fall (there is only one K/1 class in the district, but six 2/3 classes, so the K/1 "grads" are back in with a lot of kids who were in "regular" kindergarten and first grade classes), we pretty quickly realized that she wasn't being challenged, especially in math. We made the decision to go with a grade acceleration. The one "benefit" of a multi-grade classroom is that it makes something like this much easier -- socially, she's already in class with kids one year old, so she has just started working with them in her "same" classroom and will simply move to the 4/5 GT class with those kids next year without the social stigma of being "brand new" to everyone next year. Some friends and family members have questioned our decision -- why would we choose for her to be "different" (one year younger than her same-grade classmates)? Once we point out that "normal" stopped being an option for her when she learned how to identify every letter of the alphabet (independent of alphabetical order) in a single day by playing with a new puzzle when she was twenty months old, they start to see our point.
We also have a daughter who is six and in the first grade. I used to think she was our "blessedly average" one, but she's "blossomed" in a big way in school this year (in a "regular" first grade classroom) and I think she'll be a good candidate to enter the 2/3 GT class next year. I think I was just "thrown" with my perception of "normal" being so skewed by my oldest daughter ("THIS daughter doesn't have a 100-word vocabulary at fifteen months of age? What on earth is WRONG with her?!?") that I didn't really recognize that THIS daughter is probably gifted as well.
The jury is still "out" on our soon-to-be-three-year-old son, but he's extremely verbal and pretty "advanced" with doing jigsaw puzzles (another early sign for my oldest daughter), so I think he's heading in a similar direction. He may just be showing his giftedness in his own unique "boy" way.
So, very long intro, but just wanted to let you know my background if you see me posting around here. I definitely come at gifted issues from a wide variety of perspectives, and I hope I can be helpful to others while also learning a lot myself.
