Gifted?
So, by now, I figured MJ had all these little quirky things about him--the toe walking, the pickiness, the timidness, the stuttering, but it wasn't that big of a deal. Actually, what we were noticing now was how smart he was. I remember he was barely 4 years old and he was reading.
When he entered Kindergarten at age 5, he was bored to tears. He was reading chapter books but couldn't stand school where all they did was color, sing and learn about the ABC's. The teacher had him reading these "BOB books" which were like "see kit run, Max can jump, Pat is glad" and he was hating it so badly. He was so bored with these books. He was reading Harry Potter at home. Instead of just reading the BOB books, I would quiz him on pointing out the verbs, adjectives, nouns, and punctuation, just to get him something else to learn.
He was also bored in math, which in Kindergarten was counting to 100, while he was adding and subtracting double digit numbers and multiplying a little. Just things he liked to do. I remember him telling me one day what a solid, liquid, and gas were. And it wasn't basic. I can't remember exactly what he said to do him justice, but it was about the molecules and how they were condensed or something. Myself, I would just say hard, like a drink, and ??
I didn't know what to do. He would get up in the morning and say he didn't want to go to school because he hated it so much. It was so hard to see him so sad. I tried to talk to the teacher to see if he could do anything more advanced and she said her hands were tied because she had such a large range of abilities in her class and she couldn't go ahead if she still had kids that would say the #3, but hold up 2 fingers.
But, come February, we got a letter in the mail inviting MJ to be tested for a separate full time gifted program to start in 1st grade. We went ahead and let him test, and when the scores came back at 99%, he was invited into the program, and we accepted.
So, yeah, maybe we had this quirky kid, but he was pretty smart, and starting at 6 years old he was put into a new school in a class with 1st and 2nd graders. So maybe he didn't have problems, maybe he was just gifted? Little did we know that in just a few months we'd receive a letter home from the school asking for an evaluation for special ed services.
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