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my daughter is more advanced for her age group/class but I wouldn't call her gifted.

It sounds like your son is gifted! I wouldn't push, but I think it's great to supplement and explore his interests. We follow our daughter's lead, inquiry-based learning like her school does. There are lots of games, toys, apps, etc. that can help him explore his interests in a fun way.

My daughter is advanced, but I've never thought to have her tested. I am not a fan of academic labels either.

She's very self motivated and I've taken her lead, from a young age, in exploring her interests and supplementing. I think our role is to be their advocate once you've recognized their abilities.

She's in 1st grade now so they've tested her skills and placed her in the advanced class and she gets lots of extra work so it keeps her happy and takes some pressure off me to supplement.

Giftedness is a tough thing to identify. To even qualify as gifted where I work, students have to be referred, a parent and teacher observation has to be given with certain scores obtained, then if they qualify through the initial screener they are given an ability test and a creativity test, both nationally normed.

It always surprises me how many students are referred solely on the basis of intellect (reading 2-3 grade levels or more above grade level) and don't end up qualifying in aptitude or creativity.

I didn't vote. My son has a knack for math and has already finished kindergarten math. He's on grade level for reading. He is behind in social/emotional (we suspect high functioning autism). So he would never be considered gifted because of his challenges. But we do a lot to support him based on his (and to a lesser extent our) interest. I've had him coding since he was 3 because he liked it. He built a computer over thanksgiving and is using it to program min craft. The biggest challenge is he can't read to complete the tasks. We shower him with robots to play with. And he loves them all. He learns in spite of what we do to him.

We also do violin as an extra curricular (as well as two days of swimming and swim team next year). So we push him a little in areas he isn't as talented in.

The biggest challenge is school. So we are investigating other schools that would challenge him more in math and support him more with his challenges. Specifically stem schools because he is very talented in that area.

My daughter on the other hand has no interest in technology and challenges me by being "normal". She is much more artistic and independent. And I hope to find her a school that will work best for her when we get there. But she will also have robots and programming introduced to her.

@irene: they grow so quickly. It's been a whirlwind for sure. Does your school or district have a gifted program? Our district does but not until 3rd grade so I'm not even thinking about it until then. And I'm not sure I would want to do it. It would be at a school that is only until 5th grade. Then I would have to homeschool for middle school. Whereas the alternative schools (charters and school of choice) all go k -8 so I wouldn't have to figure out what is best for him until ugh school.

Going to community college instead of high school is very much on my radar for him. But right now I'm taking it year by year.

I was on the gate program a few times throughout school. It wasn't all that people tried to make it out to be. A good school that meets all students abilities can be just as worthwhile. And a parent who advocates for their child whether they are specially abled or not is all they need.

If my son ever asked me for more rigorous work I would be doing it in a heartbeat and would even contemplate homeschooling. But only when he realizes he's different.

I had a student who was incredible and in my college class at 15 years old. He was a senior in high school and looking nice at colleges. I couldn't imagine my son leaving for college at that age. He couldn't even legally sign forms or get an apartment or a job.

I work in education and was the product of the GATE system. What is will day is the most important thing and what I will look for in programs for my son, is flexibility and the space for open-ended creative problem solving. I want lots of outdoor time and art.

Like a poster above said, reading abilities do even out around 2nd grade typically. My son can read at 4...he has just always been interested and fascinated, but his gross motor is way at the low end of normal for his age. He can barely ride a trike.

I always thought of LO1 as bright but never gave it much pause beyond that. I assumed I was just biased as his mom. Then we did g&t testing because that's what people do here that are planning to send to public school. I was surprised but he scored well and is in a gifted class for K. In retrospect I'm really glad we did the testing because I love his class and his teacher. I wish they would challenge him even more, but now that I see it up close I know we would be dealing with boredom/ behavior issues if he wasn't in his current class.
My LO2 is just as bright and we are struggling to keep him challenged. We (and his teachers agree) that socially he fits in perfectly with kids his own age, but in other aspects he is very much ahead. Not sure how we are going to manage this situation.

@irene: If he is being taught CCSS those are concepts taught in K already! It's crazy but K is the new 1st or 2nd grade these days!

I teach 1st and one Learning Goal isis:
Students will be able to find the authors purpose between two texts and compare/contrast major events

That's a tough call for me. I think DS is gifted but he doesn't naturally gravitate to academic stuff and grasp new ideas on the spot like many gifted kids. When I try to push him on something I get exactly nowhere, and then when I've long given up on whatever it is he aces it because he's ready. I don't think that kind of gifted will be a lot of help to him in school, or with standardized tests. I do think if he finds his true passion he'll be amazing at it, but not sure yet what that passion will be

DD is still really young, but I think she's more conventionally gifted. I recognize a lot of myself in her, and it's nice because I have a better idea how she thinks, and maybe the things that helped me grow will help her too.

My son's only 15 months, so no clue yet with him. And I can't tell you what is right for your kid. But I can share my experience with this and how it worked for me.

I was a "gifted" child, though I never thought of myself that way until I was older. My mom put me in a Montessori preschool where I could explore my interests at my own pace. When I started first grade there were no local Montessori programs, so my mom looked for other programs and found one for Advanced Program kids, starting in first grade. I went and had the testing done and passed and was accepted into the program. It meant getting bussed to a different school but I loved the program. I feel like I got a great elementary education there.

Middle school I wanted to do something more mainstream and it didn't turn out well. I was so bored in classes. And, to fit in socially, I felt that I had to pretend that I wasn't as smart as I was. I hated discussing grades or scores. It was a rough period of my life, but that was about a whole lot more than just being bored academically, middle school just sucks.

For high school, I went back to a program where you had to apply and meet certain academic criteria and that wetn very well. Got an excellent education and also took me down a peg, because I no longer felt like the smartest kid in the school, which was good for me.

One of the best experiences I had was going to a 3 week sleep away camp for gifted kids. It was run through the TIP program. Basically standardized test scores get you into a next testing arm where you take the SATs as a 7th grader and then if you score high enough you qualify for programs/camps. It was truly a transformative experience for me. I really felt like I had found "my people". I made friendships there that I still maintain as an adult. It really helped me be comfortable with who I am.

Overall, I'd say mainstreaming has lots of merits, but shouldn't be done if a kid is really bored. Boredom at home can lead to creative play but boredom in an academic setting can lead to kids becoming disengaged, unmotivated or socially ostracisized. At least, in my experience.

@irene: I think this discussion is a little bit at cross purposes, because I think your main question is not the one in the poll. I think what you're really looking for answers to is "what do you do with him/her?" Here's why: as a matter of substance, the label is not important and quite possibly harmful, because it’s what you do that matters. I resist labels because I think they present problems for the labeled child (a la Carol Dweck's commonsense theory on fixed and growth mindsets...) and the unlabeled ones (who in many cases give up way too soon even though they too are capable of high intellectual achievement). Also, I suppose it’s worth pointing out that you might not get the label you think you’re going to get, or you might not keep it, and I think it’s a bad idea to put a very young child in that position.

I want to be clear that I do not advocate ignoring a child's abilities or not endeavoring to fully cultivate them. Entirely the opposite. I just don’t think that a label is at all useful to the substantive work of cultivating abilities.

Think of it like this: You come home one day and your child is in the driveway with your police officer neighbor and his radar gun and your child is throwing ball after ball at 90mph. You might give your child a t-shirt that says "Major League" on it, or you could continue to help him practice and get better. But clearly you don't need to give him the t-shirt to help him cultivate his skills.

I also think it is very possible to kill a child's gifts and interests. But "gifted" schools, particularly for young children, involve a terrific amount marketing designed to make parents feel good, and I'm not sure that such a place is any guarantee against squashing a child's gifts. You’d have to look at what the specific school is doing to make that determination.

Like I've said repeatedly here, I think the main thing to do is to nurture your child's interests to the fullest extent possible.

I think our boys are "bright," but whether they are gifted or not, who knows. I wonder a little bit about one of the twins. He's my kid that says things like, "I want to grow up and be a science teacher so I can teach kids about the atmospheres on the different planets because that's what makes the difference in their weather." He just thinks a little differently about some things, particularly science-related things. When I was teaching, I took a fairly extensive training on what it means to be a "gifted" child. I thought it was interesting that a truly "gifted" kid usually excels more in certain subjects but may not do well or only be average in others. I think there's a lot of confusion between a kid being a bright, smart kid and being gifted. In my three years teaching, I had one student out of 225 that I taught that I would say was truly gifted. In fourth grade, he would read the encyclopedias when he was done with his work. He had an almost photographic memory for scientific things he had read. He was incredibly brilliant in that area. He also didn't follow directions well because he usually had a different idea about how something should be approached or needed to know more about why we were doing something than just being willing to put down a "right" answer. He also really struggled with some social skills, which I don't think is entirely uncommon with kids that are extraordinarily gifted.

That said, I think it depends on a kid's age whether I would "do anything about it" or not. For little ones, I think the best thing they can do is just have lots of opportunities to play, explore, and read. With the twins, because they love science stuff so much, we make sure we buy more books, toys, take outings, etc. about those things, but other than that we just let them do their thing. For kids that are older, particularly mid-elementary and up, I would want my kid to have an opportunity to do more higher level thinking activities if they were gifted in a certain area. What I absolutely wouldn't want is just putting a lot more pressure on my kid to perform at a much higher level than they are emotionally or socially ready for or for them to just end up with a lot more work/time spent on academic work that isn't beneficial to them developing critical thinking in that area. If any of my kids turn out to be truly gifted, I want them to have a chance to explore that and develop it, but I want them to feel like regular kids, too.

@yoursilverlining: I was thinking the same thing!

Maybe people with gifted kids are just more likely to click on this thread, though.

I think my son is advanced in terms of his verbal ability. Gifted.... not so sure about that. But he is only turning 3 in February so he's a bit young for us to even know. I will say that I was in a gifted program in school and it benefited me greatly not only academically but socially (my classmates are still my friends today).

My kid is bright but she is not "gifted." Her dad is, I am smart but not "gifted." The chart posted above is definitely true for her dad and me. Honestly I was actually worried she would be- seems like a tough path. But it's clear to me she is special and bright but not "gifted."

I wasn't challenged enough in school but my mom made sure I was involved in a lot of other stuff. I think this made me more well rounded and less intensely focused on academic performance than if she'd pushed me to skip grades or something. I went to an Ivy League undergrad school and then transfered to a top ranked New England college when I didn't like it. Also earned my masters.

@Silva: Yes, everyone has their own success, with or without that label. Although I had the label and the advantage of gifted classes, my mom didn't do anything to support or enrich me as we were a low income single parent household. Public school kicked in with the only outlet. I went to state college (couldn't pay any other application fees), selected a mediocre paying but highly satisfying career as an educator. I've had awesome opportunities to flesh out my life that may/may not have had to do with 'giftedness' but the school/enrichment opportunities are definitely something I as a parent don't want to miss, with or without a label for LO.

Neither of my boys (ages 4 and 2.5) are gifted or bright, they know how to have fun I am excited to see what areas interest them when they are older.

@yoursilverlining: agree!

@lilyann: Having fun is high on my list of important skills to have!

I didn't answer the poll because I don't know if my children are gifted or not. It seemed like Irene wanted to know what other people have done in her shoes (and not just - is your child gifted, yes or no) so that's how I answered.