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Good luck, MoN! Keep us posted on your progress.

It's probably a lot easier and healthier to go through this in grade school than later on. My first experience with not getting straight As and not being the smartest kid in class didn't come until college. It sounds silly now but to get the first B of my life in college was devastating to me.
Also for my daughter, when she moved from traditional to GT programming, she told me that it was a relief not to be the smart kid that everyone else went to for answers. She liked having other kids that she could go to.
Good luck getting her the grade skip that she wants and needs.

I would take your DD's comment about not wanting to stick out anymore and take it straight to the principal as a reason that you need to work out the details of a grade skip this month, before school ends. If you're nervous about it, you could always present it as, "I know that you would like to wait until next year to deal with next year, but DD is really feeling the stress of having to fit in, and waiting to begin the grade skip process until next year will only serve to call more attention to her among her classmates. If we could get the details of a grade skip down now so she can begin the year in the new grade along with the rest of her classmates, she will more easily be able to blend in." Perhaps it would be good, too, to approach them as if it is a fact that she is going to get a grade skip, not something you still need to discuss further, and instead focus on which teacher she will be assigned to and what, if anything, she could work on over the summer to make the skip go more smoothly.

Good luck with the effort. Hang in there!

Well put, Dottie, as usual.

I've wondered about grade skipping. If a DC is grade-skipped into a class with other ND kids a year ahead, the work will be more challenging, but will the pace be fast enough? And are the peers a better fit for finding a kindred spirit...? I guess it's not a slam dunk, but hopefully an improved situation.

She does not know her limits, yet. Let her find them on her own. She WILL surprise you.


When I was skipped, I found the work more interesting. But not necessarily more challenging once I got used to it. I was able to make friends more easily for a number of reasons - the kids took school more seriously, they could talk about more subjects, and I was not a competitor socially for anyone in the class.

Finding intellectual peers is almost always impossible when in most groups even at college. It is something that she will have to get used to. I liked Ruf's advice - one has friends for different things.


The best analogy I can come up with is this. Some people are born with great eyesight and others with poor eyesight.

Like good vision, High IQ brings a different way to see the world. Because high IQ, it becomes very easy to see things that others can see only with difficulty or not at all. It is like a telescope, a microscope, and all kinds of seeing devices wrapped up in a mind. The possessor of High IQ, just like the owner of a seeing device, has to learn to operate their abilities. You need to learn what you can see, how to filter mirages, and how to use it.

Yup - yup - yup! The social/emotional argument is usually a good way to get the ball rolling.

Sadly, a single grade skip isn't really expected to be the 'final answer' to everything, but it is a lovely step in the right direction. It will help, and it will show the school that your DD does have special educational needs that can be positively addressed. Additional subject accelerations might be needed after the transition phase. Good Luck!
Grinity

I think that it's possible to lose perspective on what a "high IQ" is, especially because people have a natural tendency to compare themselves to others who are more talented/faster/have higher IQs.

As an example, a sprinter finishing 50th at an international track meet is at risk for thinking "I'm not very fast; almost everyone finished ahead of me." In this situation, it's easy to forget that if the whole world had run the race, billions of people would have finished behind him.

Sure, someone with an IQ over 160 will learn faster than someone with an IQ of 145. But the point is to understand that compared to a student population where the average is around 100, and only 1 kid in a grade of 50 students has an IQ of 130, 146 is very high indeed, and requires a special environment, even compared to the special environment needed by kids with scores of 130. A school with a thousand kids might only have a few with IQs over 140.

I don't know about anyone else, but I'm still learning about what "gifted" means. I've taught my own kids, but almost no others below the college level. Most of my other knowledge about learning comes from books I've read and this board. The focus has primarily been on gifted students. So my perspective is skewed.

This translates to a lack of a big picture of how quickly or slowly most other students learn, and makes it easy to forget what 130+ really means.


I like this analogy, and will use it in the future! Good one.

Val

Strategies:

1. Reply to the email with just a very simple message along the lines of "THanks for your message; how about the 17th or 18th for for a meeting?"

2. To be fair to the principal, when we were considering a 2nd grade skip for DS10, the idea seemed kind of radical. We were used to the idea of one skip by then, but two just seemed...strange. This was also at a school that works a year ahead.

It took DH and I a while to get our heads around the idea --- yet I could see quite plainly that 4th grade wasn't a challenge to him and 5th probably wouldn't be either. The idea was just...weird.

The big breakthrough came when we sent him off to 6th grade for a couple of days and talked to the teachers about what he'd be doing in that grade. At that point, it became *very* clear to everyone that middle school was the right place for him.

Maybe you can help the principal see this merit of another skip by developing a strategy to de-radicalize the idea.

Remember what I mentioned above about an IQ of 146 being very rare. You may be used to it, but others aren't, and you might need to help them see how different she truly is.

FWIW, I haven't had my kids tested, but from what I've read here, they seem to be most similar overall to the kids in the low DYS range.

HTH,

Val