I don’t know if you, @romanigypsyeyes, are still seeking advice. In case you are, a few thoughts.
I was kind of on the lookout for giftedness with my kids. My father was one of the smartest people I have ever met. The chairman of the Physics department at MIT told me the same thing and when my father was being inducted into the National Academy of Science, he was described as a virtuoso mathematician among theoretical physicists. He apparently was reading the NY Times to his younger sister when he was 3. Like many of his brilliant physics colleagues (lots of Nobel Prize winners etc.), he was seriously Aspergers, so he probably didn’t notice that she was uninterested.
Like @Twoin18, I skipped 3rd grade. My dad had taken a sabbatical at Oxford in my 2nd grade and I’d spent a year in a private English school, where the teaching was “child-centered” instead of “curriculum-centered.” So I remember reading the Iliad and the Odyssey in 2nd grade (I don’t know that I picked up any literary nuances, but it was a great story). I think I returned to start 3rd grade in the US ahead by several years. They skipped me and gave me independent reading using something called SRA. The classmates were no brighter than the kids the year before so it wasn’t particularly stimulating and I was bullied as well all through school. Kids also wanted to fight me because I was Jewish. Later, they skipped me again. I was the smallest kid in my 9th grade class, and again, it wasn’t especially challenging. My parents did ask me if I wanted to attend a private school and I (wrongly) declined on the grounds that it would just be snotty rich kids (which was largely probably true at the time) but if I could have done it again, I would have said yes. I graduated from HS before I got my drivers’ license and had no meaningful social life – certainly no dates prior to college. When I got to an Ivy for undergrad , I said, “There are people like me here.” The first time I felt at home. Years later, I met someone I had not known in college who knew me because I was young for my class.
So, the conclusion thus far: Skipping doesn’t do much. Time spent helping the gifted kid develop social skills would be valuable (I had to teach them to myself in college).
If my kids were going to be gifted in that way, I wanted to make sure they had a better experience than I. [My wife is a very talented artist and so they could have had gifts in that area as well, which I wouldn’t have had a good sense of how to support]. Turned out my son had both the reasoning gifts that my father and I had but also some of the artistic gifts. We had constant reminders of this, but here are a few. He could not walk by age 1 (physical development was slow) but he was speaking full and elaborate sentences before his first birthday. At age 2.5, we had someone over for dinner who married a woman he met when he was studying in Germany. He described how she had moved with him, converted to Judaism, and they got married. The next morning, while I was shaving, he tugged on my pajama pants and said, “Dad, can you change your country in the same way as you change your religion?” So, overnight, this little thing was thinking about concepts of citizenship or nationality and comparing it to conversion to a new religion. Whenever he had an interest, like many of the parents above, we would find ways to support it. ShawWife took him (and friends) and ShawD into the studio. Starting at age 4, I would always let him be the bank in monopoly so he could make change. We read him The Hobbit in kindergarten and the full Lord of the Rings in 1st grade. He devoured these books and I started buying audiobooks by the dozen and then Audible as soon as it came out. I remember in 1st and 2nd grade, he was bored, so I would do math with him. I recall showing him that if you multiply X^a by X^b, you get X^on (a+b). We worked on a few examples. Then I asked him what did he think X^a divided by X^b was. He said, “If multiplication gives addition, wouldn’t division give subtraction?” So he and I had great fun teaching him things as a fun father/son activity.
He had had a lot of difficulty with reading/writing, so we slowed down on some of the math / fun stuff. But, he was in an honors math class at our highly regarded public HS in 9th grade and he said to me, “Dad, we discussed this concept on Monday. I got it completely on Monday. We’re still doing it on Friday. Can you get me out of this?” The Deputy Superintendent of Schools suggested partial homeschooling, so I hired a Harvard grad student to do math with him (he did junior honors math in one semester in 3 hours a week, competition problems, game theory, etc.) and we and others worked with him on writing.
Further conclusions: Have fun with your kid doing enrichment. I am really sold on the idea of essential schools that focus on mastery. So, rather than a kid having to work at level of the peers in his/her grade, they place a kid in the next level when he/she shows mastery. So, one could be three years ahead in math but at grade level in English.
We looked at private high schools, which mostly didn’t have the capacity to handle a kid with his intellectual strengths (his college thesis advisor described him as brilliant or genius in a newspaper interview) or his prodigious deficits. The public schools with a helpful administration were better.
However, I think homeschooling could work really well (though my wife was afraid he would not get adequate social interaction) and partial homeschooling worked pretty well. The issue there is parental time and money. I’m also a big believer in playing to my children’s strengths and teaching them how to do that.