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I think you'd get as many answers to this as there are kids. I have two kids with all scores >98th and at least one index at the test ceiling of 155. Both learn well. Both learn fast. Both are very curious and motivated to learn. They are not the same in creativity, deep thinking, intellectual motivation, or capacity for intellectual work. They've required different educational paths.

I really see a big IQ as having big intellectual capacity but not implying much else. I think some big IQ kids are social butterflies and into many different activities and having oodles of friends and others struggle to make themselves understood well by others. Some crave college work very early and others want to stay with age peers. So many things depend on personality and drive.

I don't. I don't find these very useful distinctions and I think it's much better to deal with a given child and that child's needs than to worry about what artificial (with numbers that will change on next version of IQ test) box he/she fits in.

I don't think Grinity's way works either (sorry, Grin! ) because at any level you choose, a child might require much more or much less. There are "PG" kids doing college work at 9 and those kids aren't satisfied with a grade skip or two or five. There are also PG kids who are quite happy at grade level. Sometimes those kids have better schools. Sometimes, they focus on other interests and spend 30 hours a week doing gymnastics or violin and don't much care about math. There are kids content to daydream in their own heads while boring discussions occur and others who throw desks over in the same situation. There are kids with 98th percentile scores in schools with oodles of high achievers who fit in great and don't need much accommodation at all. There are kids with 99.9 percentile scores in schools designed for such kids who don't fit at all despite identical IQs to the other kids. I don't find much benefit from the categories.

Apologies for not totally following you--so you mean that on paper, they look the same all around, but in practice you notice that they think and function quite differently? How interesting.

Exactly. It makes me much more skeptical of any claims made about what a kid with IQ of x should be like. The major thing my kids have in common is testing very well, but that doesn't tell me what they need in their educations. Similarly, in groups like DYS, there are kids doing a huge variety of educational options that work for them.

I started wondering about this when my son was your son's age Lukemac. I was exceptionally curious about the differences and for the past 3 years (DS is now 8.5) I have been conducting a little experiment based on observing as many HG, EG, PG kids we know. We live close to a college community with a high concentration of gifted kids and we know which parents have had their kids tested because it comes up so often in conversations among us moms. Although I don't know the individual scores and don't need to, parents have dropped enough hints for me to guess where their kids scores fall.

And this is what I see. My son has not been IQ tested but looking at what others have said about acceleration and PG, he is at least 5+ years accelerated in math and 8 or more years accelerated in two of the main sciences. I say this based on the materials he turns to most to get his learning fix and the type of questions he asks and how he analyses problems. But he is right smack at grade level for writing although his spelling and reading comprehension skills are easily at high school level.

He fits every description I read about PG EXCEPT for descriptions like "PG kids will be super bored in a class with MG kids" or something similar. My kid loves and just loves working with anyone because he just loves and craves company. He doesn't like to complain about anything. And he will not say working with someone else is boring because he cares very much about not hurting their feelings. He is very different from many of his very outspoken EG/PG friends in this respect. He would have very easily "covered up" his abilities if he was in a public school.

So I ask myself this question a lot. Why is he so different? Every PG kid I know is very vocal about his/ her feelings and very quick to speak up. Mine will first analyze if someone's feelings will be hurt and if he thinks they will be, he will just go with the flow, adapt, let himself be pushed around.

These kids are each very different and quite likely a combination of different 'G's too if I may suggest. That's my conclusion for now. And am realizing that I myself probably am PG in only ONE area but possibly HG in one or two and MG/OG or just plain vanilla average in most others. It's extremely interesting and humbling!

Amen to that!

Dottie, that IS a relief to know .

While I'd hope DD7 was sufficiently well-mannered not to describe her classmates as incomprehensibly stupid, yeah, this. Last year, I was really struck by how her same-aged friends wouldn't understand the words DD used, and I attributed it to her picking friends who were kind of at the margins of the group, both socially and academically. After a grade skip, she seemed to fit right in with the older kids. And then last week, she had a friend over, and that little girl (18 months older than DD and gifted-identified) was asking DD to spell things for some project they were creating, and was asking DD to define the words she was using.

DD is interested in additional subject acceleration, but we have parental disagreement as to the wisdom of that, and I'm not sure I want to go to the mat for next year or bide my time. (My partner was the kind of kid who preferred to blend in, and was successful in doing so, so she sees skipping as making DD more-obviously freakish. I was the kid who never managed to blend in, and see the skip as making her less-obviously freakish. DD does not consider herself freakish, but chafes at the level and pace even with a skip.)

I have two children, but only one has been tested (the other is only 3yo). I suspect that they are within 10 points of each other (though I think they would have different strengths on subtests), but they certainly are different. It's come to me all of sudden recently that DS would probably a great candidate for a single-year skip and might need little else, whereas we would never consider that for DD, nor would it be enough. It's startling to me that I can already see this, but I do think it's the case. So...I certainly take your point, but I suppose I was attributing the difference to personality...

See, I guess that I am seeing it work if you look at her deliniations as something separate from a number, which was what I was reading into her post. Yes, there are kids with similar IQ scores who have totally different needs based on personality and a whole host of other things. If one is saying that all kids with IQs from ___ to ___ are HG and therefore need the things Grinity listed for a HG kid, then, yes, you're going to run into a lot of kids for whom that doesn't work.

However, if you say HG is as HG looks in action rather than how it looks on a test score, her definitions work -- at least for me . Granted, that does become a slippery slope where you get what our local schools do which is have parents fill out "behavioral characteristics" scales which are then used to call a kid gifted even if ability and achievement scores don't support that.