Gifted?

[gracesteacher]

How would one know if their child is gifted? Or does things even out in the end? I ask because my dd will be two at the end of this month and everyone is telling us she is a genius. I really dont think she is more advanced than most kids however she is my only and I spend 24/7 with her. She has about 400 ASL signs that she can do and or recognize. She can say the whole alphabet and recognizes the letters small and lower case and knows most of the letter sounds. She can count to 15 with out help and up to 60 with help she recognizes numbers up to 100 and knows the day of the week and several months. She can point to several states on the map including the state where she lives (on several different maps) she knows her shapes and colors. She loves to read and now is always want to do Spanish we play a spanish cd in the car and now anything with spanish she is soaking up. I think she is no more advance than any other child she just has the verbal skills that some kids dont have at her age. Thoughts? Opinions?

[Laura Corin]

She certainly sounds very bright. My favourite site for working out these things is hoagiesgifted - lots of good advice on there.

 

Best wishes

 

Laura

[Desert Rat]

I agree with Laura and would add that I'm very skeptical of the even-out theories. I don't believe kids even out in their abilities. I think some kids have to sit and wait while others catch up. Just my 2 pennies FWIW.

[gracesteacher]

Never thought about it that way! This kid is constantly on the move and why mama. She is very hands on and wants to do more school like the girls mama (our friends daughters) She wakes up asking for milk and projects. The kid doesnt seem to hear me when I call her five million times to come and take a bath but can pick instruments out when we listen to classical music (her uncle noticed that last night) I had already planned on home schooling her but I didnt plan on starting this fast. I thought I had a few years more before I figured out this stuff. It seems like I may be on a wild ride.

Thanks

[purplecow7]

I too would check out hoagies website for advice. My children were all advanced verbally. I guess I would ask why do you want to know if they are "gifted". We have only tested one child because we needed too to get him into the program he needed at public school, but it was not until he was in second grade. We will be probable testing number 2 as she is in second grade and GT placement begins in third grade in our school district.

 

For me when my children were little the hoagies site was very helpful. Gifted children are not just ahead educationally - they think differently, the processes information and the world around them differently. It is true most all children will learn to read by third grade so in some ways they all do catch-up, but a child that has been reading since 4 has a different take on the world. But not all gifted children are alike. I would suggest reading as much as you can on gifted children and how to help them deal with the world around them. I know my son did not always fit in with his friends, were my dd she fits in anywhere and with anyone, but she is my overly sensative child. For me, I just assumed my children were gifted and did my research on how to help them and me adjust to the world I found myself in.

[gracesteacher]

I was honestly wanting someone with experience say sorry your kid is "normal" I am not gifted I struggled in school and I dont know how I am going to keep up with her. The school districts where we live are not very good and she can do most of the things that kids need to know by the end of kindergarten anyway.

Off to go and read the hoagies site

[Storm Bay]

She may well be gifted. Just because you struggled in school doesn't mean you weren't gifted with special needs on top of it, or someone somewhere in either family is. It will be an adventure. I regret holding my eldest back when she was little. I did it because dh was opposed to homeschooling at that time and I thought it would prevent her from becoming bored if I didn't teach her to read (she taught herself anyway) or do math. By the end of K she was bored anyway.

 

I have 3 gifted dc, but they weren't all verbally precocious by gifted standards. My eldest certainly was. By 2 she knew 12 colours, counted to...wait, I've forgotten, spoke full sentences, knew her alphabet, had started recognizing shapes in her environment at about 14 months (within a couple of weeks of me starting to teach them--just memorizing the toy shapes that young isn't necessarily gifted, but when you go outside and she's saying "circle" when she sees one painted on the ground at 14 months and you haven't showed her is a good indication she might be.) Dd also had very good fine motor skills for her age all along. In fact, a female chiropractor who was filling in for my regular one told me she was extremely bright when she was only a few months old based on how she used her hands (not that I think that's a good enough test, but in hindsight). There were other things, too, but honestly I never seem to remember them all at the same time.

 

My later ones have expressed their giftedness in different ways, but all of my dc think & process things differently than the "norm." I wasn't surprised about my dds since I can't think of anyone on my mother's side who isn't at least moderately gifted, and same with my dad's (plus, we have some profoundly gifted folk in there). However, ds surprised me because when he was 13 months he was labelled behind in EVERYTHING. He had hyoptonia (low muscle tone) &, unbeknownst to us, was far sighted with astygmatisms so couldn't see well. He'd caught up in all but speech by 2, & in speech by 2.5. Fine motor skills are just catching up to his age now when he's 8. But he's a very, very deep thinker, very musical, mathy, physics kind of kid. The questions he was asking were way beyond his years, etc, etc.