Hmmm, that would change things, but the school only goes through age 11, I think, so I probably just made a mistake in what I wrote. :)

Ha ha. Maybe THAT'S the real secret - she can only find those magical powers when under severe abuse, and so the fact that she moves up to the 6th grade has nothing to do with her powers going away; it must be that her happy ending with a happy home and a peaceful school makes it so she can no longer channel the magic! :)

So I re-read Matilda with my kids for the first time since my kids were old enough for me to realize that they're pretty bright. and I now find the ending completely laughable. Her magic went away because her extraordinary brain was sufficiently challenged by doing 6th grade material? Really? It just made me laugh because it always seemed like a perfectly logical explanation to me... until I had my own kids and realized how briefly moving up like that would actually keep a mind like that occupied.

Ahh, I remember stumbling across this as an adult and feeling like someone *finally* understood!

Nope. I paid the $5 and downloaded it, but it won't let me use if offline. It could be user-error, but it's a simple enough interface, that I doubt it. It just tells me it can't connect when I try.

Any recommended resources for kids who want to learn coding but won't have internet regularly? Is our best option something like the Usborne beginning python book and just downloading python? Or are there any good programs you can download that will help you learn? We already have the downloadable scratch, but would like something that gives you projects to work on or challenges to solve. We're looking for something on a computer that we could download (some cost is ok) and then just use offline.

Thank you all so much for all the great ideas! We'll get started on them!! :)

I must have downloaded a dozen different math apps in the last week. None of them are exactly what I want, so I'm looking for advice. I'm looking for a math fact app that (a) is available for kindle or ipad (though kindle is preferable), (b) can be used offline (after the initial download, of course), © no-nonsense (I really don't want 60% game and 40% math - I just want math facts without all the games for motivation), (d) allows multiple users, and (e) allows the kid to input a number (instead of a multiple-choice option of choosing the right one off a list of four). Is this asking too much? Xtramath has it all, except for (b), and we've used it for years and like it but need to transition to something offline now. I've tried too many others to list. Most of them fail either (e) or (d).

He got through those because we made sure he knew the adults were jokes before he even started them, so he viewed them more as comedians than villains. But the Little Princess about broke his heart and he gets too worked up over very stressful things (we tried those extreme adventure ones at one point... don't recall what they're called). This kid can't watch a Tinkerbell movie without tearing up (I'll probably delete that later, lest it come to haunt him during his teenage years, so please don't quote it...) It's hard to say what exactly bothers him - he can't really verbalize it. The idea of an adult disdaining their spouse, for instance (as came up in 39 clues and a few others) is very upsetting to him, and the inner turmoil of divorce/losing a parent in Spiderwick was also too much for him.

My husband just bought the first book for a read aloud! :) This was one that we just found in the read-aloud handbook today and were going to check out for him. Thanks! :) No, I didn't! He reads those Ron Roy mysteries in half an hour or so, but he still enjoys them. thanks for the other tips! We got him the first boxcar kids one 6 months ago, and he enjoyed it but it was just slightly too advanced for him at the time. I think those will be perfect for him now and wish I'd thought of them sooner! :) Thanks! We'll check those out. Our library doesn't have any 3rd grade detectives books, which might be why I've not heard of them, but I'll look up the others you mentioned this week.

I have a kiddo who really enjoys mysteries and adventure books but is relatively sensitive. He's read all the Encyclopedia Brown books and all the A to Z mysteries (multiple collections). Recently he's been wanting more new ones, and checked out 39 clues, but I read some of them and I feel that they're not really appropriate for him right now and told him to wait a year or two to read them. I have a whole list of "classic" books that I offer him to read; he loves stuff like Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, The Little Princess, and the Great Illustrated versions of a bunch of classics (Peter Pan, Moby Dick, 3 Musketeers, Journey to the Center of the Earth, etc.). He's just not quite ready for the content in series like Harry Potter and 39 clues but he wants something like a fun series, so I'd love some more ideas! Thanks in advance! :)

WOW! Thank you so much for all that information, Mike!! That's super helpful and interesting to read!!

Could you give me an example, please, if you have one available? I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around what this actually looks like.

Can you expand upon this please? How would a lesson plan making things more seem more legitimate than just providing the course book and explaining that your child worked their way through it?

😂 this cracked me up! Been there!!

Huh. I just found this on the Hoagie's website (I'm not sure how I missed it the first time this conversation came around! lol), and I thought it was interesting and somewhat relevant to this conversation: "Given the much lower scores resulting from the newest generation of tests (WISC-IV, SB-5 and WJ-III cognitive), professionals who work with the gifted are suggesting a new set of scores and descriptive levels of giftedness, beginning at 120 to 125 for "moderately" gifted, and progressing to 142 to 145+ for "profoundly" gifted. But these levels are still under investigation."

I wanted to add that this group has also been super helpful in helping me identify things that I didn't even realize were related to giftedness and that is been treating like disciplinary issue. My most recent example is summer break: kids lost it within two weeks and were just getting in more trouble each day for bad attitudes, mean behaviors, etc. And I'd tried dealing with it in "normal ways" that other friends suggested, because obviously it's a heart issue, right? And I just need to discipline and train them better, right? And nothing is working and I'm at my wits' end from fighting with them all the time. Then I read on here how lots of gifted kids don't do well with downtime and they need to stay busier, and a light bulb goes on, and I start my kids on "school" again, and they grumble about it a little, but then return to their normal selves and stop the horrible attitudes and spitefulness. It's this mixing of #s 1 & 3 (that Mike mentioned) on this forum that really helps me, and held me to have more confidence that I'm not just crazy or a bad parent. :) Edited to fix auto-corrects in-corrections...

I'm not sure my kids fit in the pg crowd, but I so identify with this. I don't know that I could've said it myself, but thank you.

No it doesn't! It's cool. I went back to check posts I made from years ago, and even posts where other people quoted me from years ago, and it's all in the new name. :) Private messages, everything.

You can change it! I only discovered that this week. :)

Lovely! Thank you very much! :)

I don't know what a private group entails. I do so appreciate this group as well, but I'm never certain if/when non-academic talk is ok (so sometimes I post things on the chat board that I really think have more to do with AL-craziness than the actual subject of my post - if that makes any sense?). I like that this group is more private than facebook, but I do sometimes worry about privacy... Hence why I recently changed my username here, actually - I realized that I had used the same one in too many places and I wanted to afford my kids a bit more privacy if someone local ended up on the board and recognized my name from something else. I don't usually discuss either E of my 2E kids with local folks. I just don't feel like it would be helpful to me or them... My oldest will be 8 in August, and I benefit so much from the wisdom and experience of folks on this board!

I agree! My younger, sensitive kid who reads well at this age just loves picture Books. He can read five or more long ones in one sitting, but just loves the pictures still. And I find the sentences and vocabulary relatively complex and rich (depending on Rhett book, of course! ) - more so than most early chapter books, at least.

My son really likes the book Matilda and reads it easily, so I thought I'd check its reading level and try to find other books near that level for him. The results I got seem ridiculous to me: Lord of the Rings and Fahrenheit 451? Really? They don't seem anywhere close to the reading level of Matilda to me! (Matilda has *pictures* every few pages, for pete's sake!) Matilda is a 840 but the Little Princess (with all of it's accented speech from Becky) is only a 810? That seems so much harder to read than Matilda! Can somebody explain to me these measurements, please? I've tried what they say about them, but still don't understand.

Yes, my (oldest) sensitive child (almost 8) could not read this book. I wanted him to, but he couldn't. We have a lot of issues finding appropriate media, because my children will cry over Tinkerbell movies (yes... the ones with the fairies...) My children had nightmares from me reading them a picture book of the little mermaid. So perhaps, my kids are not the best barometer, but they definitely are not ready for HP.