What school is best for my son - he's very smart!

Since you're looking at preschools, I'd like to plug the Evanston Child Care Center, where kids get weekly visits from Roving Readers and Roving Musicians, visit the Art Institute, garden, bike, and celebrate a variety of religious and cultural holidays. There are several classrooms, and one is Montessori. THe CCC is housed in a lovely Victorian mansion and has a wonderfully homey feel. See www.childcarecenterofevanston.org/

Thanks again both of you. This has been very reassuring and helpful. I should look into these enrichment programs of course. My initial reaction was protective of weekend family time, but I'm sure he'd love the programs. It's still a while until he starts school of course, but I'm happy to hear that there are some good options in the areas we're looking at moving to.

I'm guessing your last comment, about not sending him to school on Saturday, is in reference to some of the Worlds of Wisdom classes? My logic was that when my son was younger and attended regular public school Mon-Fri., he really thrived on being with similarly-gifted kids for "enrichment." After he got into a gifted program Mon.-Fri, I didn't feel as much need to have him in the weekend programs. (They do offer summer programs, and he continued to participate in those.)

Either of those areas should be fine. Those are both very good areas of town. All of the schools follow the same curriculum, so it doesn't matter too much which school your son goes to, except that the schools in the less wealthy areas have lower aggregate achievement scores while still having some very high performers. The wealthier areas have more high achievers to bring up the school-wide scores. The further north in Evanston, the more expensive the housing is. You're looking at some nice areas.

The TWI program is a magnet program,so you can enroll your child in a lottery for open slots wherever you live, but he'd be bused or you'd need to drive him to whichever location had an open slot.

All the schools offer rotations of art, music & drama. All kids have gym and recess everyday. PTAs are very active in all schools and the schools are generally responsive to parents' ideas on extra PTA sponsored programs. So,for instance, our school offered an artist in residence program. Parents also went into the classrooms and did "picture person" presentations. Knock yourself out with creative ideas.

There are many fine pre-schools in the area. I sent my kids to School for Little Children. There is also a Montessori school that's popular for pre-school. Barbereaux is supposed to be good too.