Schools for Gifted Children (St. Paul, Anoka: credit, buy, top schools)

[anasses]

Hi

I also have a child who has just turned 5 and is gifted/advanced academically. She has tested as reading at 4th grade level after teaching herself to read at age 2 1/2 - 3 and as doing math at a 2nd grade level. So I can definitely relate to the problem of finding a school setting that addresses both the social and academic needs of a young child who is beyond grade level academically.

For the time being, we have decided to homeschool because she would most likely be disruptive in a regular kindergarten setting since she knows all of the kindergarten academic information and missed the cutoff for school this year anyway. I also would not necessarily want her in with 2nd graders in a classroom because socially she is still only a 5 yr old. For homeschooling advice I would check out the Yahoo! group ECHO-MN. It's been a great source for us.

As for schools to send children to, I would check out the list on Hoagie's that an earlier poster mentioned. Also, you may want to check out the site for the International School of Minnesota. It's a private school, and pretty pricey, but seems to have excellent academic standards.

You may want to also check out the book, Losing Our Minds: Gifted Children Left Behind by Deborah L. Ruf. She is actually a MN native and has some good resources for testing of children and identifying whether your child is "gifted". It's actually very interesting in that she breaks down giftedness into 5 catergories from those who are good candidates for AP classes to those who are true prodigies.

The last source I would reccommend is the website for the Minnesota Council for the Gifted and Talented. They may be able to help direct you to a school or a homeschool curriculum that works well for your family.

The best advice I have is to do what works best for your family regardless of what others say. You know your children and their abilities and needs better than anyone else.

[Family_of_four_mn]

[SIZE=3]Well, I was warned by the person who tested my child that I should not tell other parents that my child is gifted because I would get a response like this. I didn’t believe it to be true. Just so you are aware, my child was told by a licensed PhD who specializes in psychology/psychological testing that my daughter is gifted. The word gifted is used by professionals and it people can be told that they are gifted just like they can be told that they are autistic. I know of schools out there just for autistic children and I was wondering if there was something for gifted children (which I have found out that there are schools in MN for the gifted). [/SIZE]
[SIZE=3]So I got my question answered but I am very surprised by some of the responses to this posting.

Deanna[/SIZE]

[Epublius Rex]

Originally Posted by kim825

So does IQ evidence of all four of my children count as them being gifted????? I should have mentioned in my last post that ALL four of my children have been tested with the appropriate IQ tests used by the schools and all four test in the exceptionally to profoundly gifted range (IQ 160+.) I don't like to post this info because I don't want to come off as "bragging" or something but your uninformed response gave me no choice. I'm sorry that your kids do not have the IQ tests to show they are "gifted" but mine all do. They were all tested by a nationally known expert and we've done numerous evaluations because they were so far beyond the norm. I know the difference between a highly achieving bright student and a "gifted" one. I've done hundreds of hours of research, education, etc. trying to understand them better and figure out why they dont' fit well with age peers.

If what you say is true--and that would depend upon what tests you refer to as well, that would mean that the mean intelligence of you and your husband is 160+. This is because intelligence always regresses toward the mean of the parents. Such a score on a Stanford-Binet test would put you and your husband in the 99.999 percentile. Making you and your family one in a billion. My guess is, is that that is not the case. Most so called intelligence these days are dumbed down tests with no actual "IQ" questions in them--particularly those that the public schools use. They want to make sure they measure "all of the intelligences".

That being said. If your children are truly bright and gifted, you did them an extreme disservice by teaching them to read and play on computers. It has long been known that structured play and the teaching of what amounts to wrote memorization in fact dulls children's minds. It seems mother nature had a reason for the traditional mother/child relationship--i.e. the child playing at the mother's feet while she went about her business. A child who is allowed to be a child and utilize unstructured play develops a much finer imagination and in the process builds far more brain cells and neurons than children who have experienced your method. Studies have repeatedly shown that children such as yours lose their advanced status by age 12 or so--when true abstract thinking abilities really come into play, and that is, after all, what a real IQ test does. It does not measure ones ability to recognize numbers and words, it tests one's ability to make something new (so to speak) from other items not necessarily connected to one another. That is, the ability to visualize in one's mind what one wants and make it so. You know when you are in the presence of someone like this when they have an almost magical (to the average person) ability to see things that others cannot--simple solutions to complex problems, solving complex mathematical problems by simply looking at them and knowing the answer, etc.

So, rather than teach your under fiver year old to read, you are better off buying them legos, dolls, etc. In this way, they must use their brains in a creative fashion--i.e. push pull rather than push. So, the worse thing you have done is utilize a computer for anything other than simply reading to the child. Of course the parent reading to the child is better yet.

This explains why, people, all of those Asian wunderkinds of the 1980s failed to become anything special in adult life. Whats more is, is that most children pushed so have a tendency to be quite backward socially and have major depression issues by the time they reach college--these are the people with the highest rates of suicide in college.

All of this is a long way of saying something we all used to know before the liberal feel good nonsense that we could all be what ever we wanted to be--which of course we cannot. Your children will (almost) never be smarter than the sum of the two parents. If you want gifted children, then you must mate with a gifted individual. More often than not, this was the person that most kids thought was a screw off or a bit odd--it is almost never the class Valedictorian. That has been known since the late 60's. The reason is, is that the truly gifted person has an active imagination. They are bored with entry level anything and find even "gifted and talented" programs to be trivial. It is usually the child who appears to be disinterested in most of what is going on in the classroom--never does homework but passes anyway, and usually does very well on tests. To see what I mean, read about Albert Einstein's early life--a man who was thought to be retarded as a child because reading and learning entry level math bored him--and no, he didn't already know how to do it. What he was doing, was analyzing the world around him. Studying the cell structure of plants, for instance, rather than doing his multiplication tables or practicing his writing skills.

How do I know all of this? I was one of those kids. In 1974 I set a record for taking the Stanford-Binet test here in Minnesota--highest score, fastest time ever clocked. As I recall, I finished it in less then 25 minutes--every question. I did it again in 1977. As a child in grade school, they wanted to flunk me or thought I had ADD. Thats when they gave me the first one--1969. They never bothered me again, after that, but did send a social worker out to my home.

MY parents? My father was capable of reading a half dozen books or more at the same time and tracking them all flawlessly. I remember people trying to stump him when I was a child by coming up with obscure facts and testing him--he was never stumped. Not only that, but he could expand on these topics in great detail--his mind never failed, even in his very old age he was sharp as a tack. My mother? So intelligent she ended up with schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is closely related to genius level IQ's--in fact, no one who gets it is not one. See the movie "A Beautiful Mind".

As far as your own intelligence is concerned, if You took a SAT test prior to 1995, you can go to Mensa's website and they have a chart for equating SAT scores to IQ's. Since 1995, there are no longer any IQ type questions on it, they are, instead, questions which merely note your ability to handle wrote memorization. Very different from abstract thinking ability. You and your husband should then be able to figure out the mean of your intelligences and that should give you (or anyone else) a rough idea of what your children are capable of. No, the ACT does not count and never did, ASFAIK.

And No, no one ever told me how high the score was--it was felt, at least back then, that it could do harm by allowing the child to "get by" without working hard or thinking they did not have to. This isn't true, but the problem arises in that most schools have no such ability to challenge the truly gifted mind.

What is it like to be gifted? Well, frustrating in every day life. As I said, you just see things that others cannot. And most of the time it seems that no matter how you try to dumb down the explanation for the right answer, they just don't get it. Or, in college, it means having to repeatedly prove that you actually do know that answer to a math question that took everybody else two pages of scrap paper to figure out. Even very bright people (doctors and lawyers, say) seem slow. But I had a wonderful mother. She bought me old wind up clocks when I was three to five years old so I could take them apart and make new "engines" out of them. She let me spend hours and hours building things out of nothing and making a wreck out of her home in the process. I remember, as a young man, having a tractor engine blow up on me--I mean a four cylinder, 600 CI 85 horsepower motor. Without a manual, with only 4 boxes on hand, I tore the engine down completely, had a few parts machined, replaced the rest with new and put it all back together again--without a manual. No left over parts. The neighbor predicted it blow up again, if it ever started at all. It didn't. Ran like a clock and was still running so three years later when I sold it. Think about it, thousands of parts, thousands. No manual, only didactic memory. And whats more--the icing on the cake? I didn't put it back together until six months after I tore it down. You try it. The people that saw me do that decades ago, still bring it up when talking about me. You see, the thing is, is that the average person sees what the gifted is capable of, but they cannot wrap their minds around it, so they will even claim the person cheated somehow or had someone else do it for them--simply because they cannot do it.

Wrote memorization is not intelligence. The online Atlantic Monthly has several articles pertaining to unstructured play and high intelligence at their website, I would suggest you read them.

[Epublius Rex]

Originally Posted by anasses

Hi

I also have a child who has just turned 5 and is gifted/advanced academically. She has tested as reading at 4th grade level after teaching herself to read at age 2 1/2 - 3 and as doing math at a 2nd grade level. So I can definitely relate to the problem of finding a school setting that addresses both the social and academic needs of a young child who is beyond grade level academically.

Try NOVA classical Academy--they have a long waiting list and it is not in the North, but South. Take a look at their curriculum. There is a reason for it all, though it is not likely going to be what you think it should be. For instance, most people have no idea why learning Classical Latin is good for the brain, but it is.

For 7th and above, Trinity at Riverridge, Blake or SPA are good choices. Sorry, there is nothing in the public sphere that can touch them.

[Epublius Rex]

Originally Posted by golfgal

Funny, but I do know very well what gifted means and the majority of people who think their children are gifted are just smart kids. IQ has very little to do with giftedness but yes, the schools do use that as a benchmark. My kids are well above the gifted IQ of 160, thank you, however being gifted is more of the way they process how they learn vs being overly smart. I don't really need to do any research as I do fully understand what I am talking about and as for rudeness, I was not rude, just pointing out that most kids who are classified as 'gifted' in schools are NOT gifted but they are very bright and therefore end up in GATE programs for their accelerated learning-which my kids are a part of, BTW, but I don't consider them gifted.



Again, we were not being rude, just honest. I am glad you have bright children but gifted is another thing.

Actually, I don't think you have a clue as to what you are talking about. an IQ of 132 is entry level genius. That puts you in the 99th percentile. I have no idea what tests you people are talking about, but an IQ of 160 is approaching the realm of a Hawkins--a less than one in a million. Being able to read (wrote memorization) is not a sign of high intelligence and the only tests that measure intelligence are IQ tests--sorry, those silly public school tests are not IQ tests and say nothing about whether or not your child is even bright (above 120 IQ). All it says is, is that they can participate in a public school advanced program--which are usually laughable compared to private schools anyway.

The only tests that mean anything are tests such as the Stanford-Binet, no matter what some PC non-psychiatrist tells you. They are the most accurate tests out there and they cross all gender and racial issues, period. There is no such thing as "multiple intelligences", thats just more nonsense trumped up by the diversity crowd.

[mahanica]

I had a rough time trying to find a school for my 3 yr old son. Now at age 6, after changing 4 schools I have made peace with the fact that no matter where he goes, he will "stand out" enough to get the school's attention.
He is currently enrolled in a public school in the first grade. The school is mediocre with no special g&t program till the higher grades. After advocating and holding several meetings with the principal, my son, now get pulled out of class once per day for Math. He gets 3 & 4th grade Math instruction from the special needs teacher. He reads at 7th and 8th grade level and is free to choose any book he likes in the library. He writes at his own level but is graded at the first grade level due to regulations. He is not given standard homework that is given to his classmates. When in class he is given work to do which relates to what he is learning 'one on one' with the special needs teacher.
Because he loves Science so much, once a week the special needs teacher pulls him out to do "fun" experiments.
So far this scenario has been working out and I feel he is getting a good balance between being a kid and also being challenged to the best of his ability. He still loves school, so I think I am happy for now.
I hope I have succeeded in giving you some ideas for your child's education in a public school setting.

[mwallick]

There is a wonderful school in Burnsville, Cyprus Classical Montessori Academy that caters to gifted preschoolers and goes through 2nd grade at this time. They have several young children working at those same levels. They have ability based groups for language and math, and work individually with children on reading and comprehension skills (up through all levels of reading.) Their highest group (this year) is working at the 2nd grade level for math and language, but has 4 - 6 year olds. It sounds perfect for your child. CyprusSchool.com is their website.

[Minervah]

Epublius Rex, I find your comments fascinating. I grew up in an era that did not have computers and TV was watched minimally. My sisters and I all knew how to read by the time we reached kindergarten not because we were geniuses but because we would sit on my dad's lap while he read the paper and he would point out letters. Then he would quiz us as to what they were. And we had the simplest toys kids have had for decades; toy blocks with letters on them with which we learned to make words and then sentences. We could also take things apart and put them together and converse using proper English. We were taught numbers by cutting them out of the newspapers or magazines. Did that make us smarter than the average kid? No. We had parents who taught us these things hands on rather than plunking us down in from of electronic devices that cause a passive learning rather than kinetic. In other words, our parents developed skills and abilities in us that every normal kid has the potential to cultivate.

At one time my teacher wanted me to "skip" a grade because she thought I was bored. My mom said "No" and I'm glad she did. Excelling in one field whether it's reading, math or whatever does not a genius make. And kids who get push beyond their social skills (being forced to interact with older kids) develop problems carried into adulthood. Perhaps being pushed ahead before they are mature enough to handle social situations is the reason some kids can't get along with their peers no matter where they are placed.

Recently, my sister who is a grade school teacher told me that research has shown that kids who watch Sesame Street actually often fall behind those who don't when they enter school. The reason is the difference between passive learning; sitting/ watching and hands-on learning; physically manipulating letters and numbers. I am not arguing with anyone here as to whether or not their kids are gifted but I do believe that by today's standards, the term is used much more loosely than in the past.

[kuan]

Don't you folks think too that labeling kids puts undue pressure on them?

[mahanica]

Originally Posted by kuan

Don't you folks think too that labeling kids puts undue pressure on them?

My son is 6 and is now starting to see differences between himself and the other kids. He is starting to evaluate his skill set and compare it to the rest of the class. This is inevitable. But it was never taught to him that he was different. He is still very humble and sociable and I hope it stays that way.