Yay! New Harry Potter movie coming out! I have a date with my son to go see if Friday - I was shooting for opening day, but decided that was too crazy.

We did pursue some additional ability testing for our son, turns out he is pretty smart, like we thought. He should be in the gt program, and will be in language arts. I am a little sad about math being a solid interest of his but his scores, so far, being just off the mark.

The school did indicate that they might be able to do some accomodation for him in math since he comes so close to the outright 'need' of a 98th percentile type child (aka 'gifted'). So, I will try and figure that out in the fall.

Summer is going well, not broiling hot by any stretch, as of yet. Finally found a cool, affordable place to stay at the beach, so I'll be reserving that soon. Also going to set up as much camping here and there as possible!

Sleeping Beauty, the aftermath

SO....for some insane reason we did sign up our daughter for Sleeping Beauty. It seemed like every ounce of her extremely strong will went into bucking every attempt to get her to behave, be good, be like the other little girls while she was waiting in line. When the music started she was usually well behaved and willing to try the steps. She did pretty well considering how insane things looked while we were waiting. I tried to pull out a couple of times, but the director kept stating that she would be in it. So she was. Whew.

My son did a great job as a goblin, he and 3 other boys really got into their roles and very scary costumes they got to wear. Plus the evil 'witch' they got to accompany was an extremely accomplished older dancer who previously worked with the Bolshoi, he was really nice to the kids and they enjoyed working with him. I think they learned a thing or two about expressive dance.

Sleeping Beauty

My son has just tried out for Sleeping Beauty, to be a goblin accompanying the wicked witch. When they were first talking about it, they suggested the few boys be small princes, and there was some ok response from the boys. Then the director came up with the goblin idea and the boys are very very excited about that. There are 3 boys who normally take class and another boy who just joined in order to be a goblin. They will get to have silver bat wings and be really really scarey!!

My daughter is also going to *try* to be in it - she is very very young, so we will see how it goes. But she did audition and picked up on about 80% of the steps (not too complex). At any rate it will be insanely cute.

More on the boy

Cogat results, as well as Naglieri results, are in.
My 8 year old took these tests as part of the usual screening of all kids for the gifted program for our school district.
He did very well in a couple of areas: mainly non-verbal; considering he is supposed to be very verbal, and is already in the pre-gifted sort of program they have for language arts, this was sort of odd to me.
Also his quantitative score was very low and I am concerned about that, so I think I am going to look at having some more testing done, possibly look at a learning disorder. There are other things going on too that make me think this, I am not just going based on one set of test scores...Nothing super major, but enough to make a mom wonder.
And I'm not one for wondering about stuff for years and finding out after all is said and done that I should have found out more, earlier.

He has seen the other kids in his program reading Harry Potter books for their book reports, so he is now inspired to do so as well. He seems to be doing ok with it, so far, fingers crossed. I know he enjoys the stories, but I was afraid it would be too-many-words-on-a-page and sort of discourage him. He loves these wimpy kids books, there is a new one out this Jan, and I guess the humour and pictures are most appealing to him.
He was reading the first chapter of the first H.P. book and was just delighted that there was a good joke it in, so I hope that will keep him going on it. (I found them delightful and very funny in parts). I am going to read along with him in another copy of the book so we can have a chat as he goes along.
He has been doing some amazing drawings lately: robots w/steam and firefly power, in great detail. Detailed plans for clubs he wants to start, plans for armour he wants to build (all broken down into various parts, showing elbow joints, rivets, etc.).
And of course there is Yu-Gi-Oh! (!!)
He is really psyched I am taking him to a yugioh tournament next weekend. It is run by a gaming store and the person I spoke with sounded really nice. He said there is *NO* card trading, losing or winning of cards, etc. He said they try to make it a really fun learning atmosphere for the younger fans (under 13 only). Sounded exactly what I was interested in finding. If interested in tournaments, you can find out more on the yugioh website.