zaichiki
-
Posts
3,499 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Events
Blogs
Classifieds
Store
Posts posted by zaichiki
-
-
This is ds's first year in school. It's a small Catholic school that has (so I've been told) the reputation for being more academically challenging than the local public schools. Ds has been grade skipped.
Today in the car on the way home from school he told me that he wished they would do quizzes and tests every day! (I was stumped -- I didn't think he'd LIKE test-taking -- until he explained that the quizzes and tests are EASY and when they have them there is no homework!)
Homework has been ds's nemesis: 2 hours a day of mostly mindless busywork. Sigh. The homework takes up nearly all of his evening... to the point where he often doesn't even get outside any more... and trying to squeeze in cello practice is nearly impossible. Chores? Who has time to help out around the house any more?!
Ds falls into bed by 9:30, usually with homework. When he was homeschooled he'd stay up reading until 10 or later.
My child is losing his childhood. :( I *hate* homework!
(Just venting while we adjust to school! Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.)
-
Kuovonne,
Jumping off from the OP's post:
But how do you know that your child (and you perhaps) are NOT gifted?
There are different levels of giftedness. A PG child does not "look like" an MG child.
I agree with you about the left brain/right brain thing. I usually refer to it as learning styles. My son is a very strong visual learner (he also has severe relative sequencing weaknesses, as backed up by the subscores in that area when he was tested), but my dd is a very strong auditory learner. She learns best sequentially, and in small parts, even though she has been labeled as gifted (according to tests), just like ds. She also has dyslexia, though, and if I didn't have "proof" that she is gifted, there would have been many times in her life when I would have severely doubted those other times when I was "sure" she was such a quick learner.
I have *no* idea how the brain works. Really. I've read up on the subject quite a bit -- usually from the education point of view. But, honestly, there are SO many influences on brain development.
I don't think, though, that someone who is gifted can become typical. I also don't think a child with an IQ of 100 can become a child with an IQ of 160, no matter WHAT the environment is.
(I bet IQ scores can be affected by the environment... but I can't imagine a situation where that could happen by more than a small amount. I wonder if any studies have been done on this?)
However, I do know that depending on the day, the tester, and the kid, IQ scores can be *under*estimates... a test is just a test, afterall, and it is limited as to what it can tell us about our children.
BTW :) I'm certainly NOT intending to tell you that your child is not gifted. I don't even KNOW your child. I also don't mean to tell you that you're putting her in a "cage." The "cage" comment was directly related to me sometimes underestimating my child and unintentionally limiting him due to my assumptions that certain things need to be learned certain ways.
-
Why can't a child who isn't gifted, but has potential, become gifted later in life?
Kuovonne,
I like Irene Lynn's response to explain what giftedness is all about. I also think you may be thinking of achievement...
Anyway, there are people whose brains are simply made differently. They think and learn differently than most of the population. The word our culture uses for this is gifted.
Here's an example: my oldest basically taught himself to read. He's a gestalt learner. He can't learn things very well when they are broken down into small, sequential parts. He'll try to memorize them in order, but he will struggle and struggle and just not understand it at ALL. When he sees the whole picture, he can easily suck the meaning out of it. He couldn't learn the phonics rules when they were given to him (really! it was like a foreign language to him), but when he watched me read him a book aloud, he just understood that the e tacked onto the end of those words changed the vowel sound the same way in all the words. Then, later when I tried to "teach" him about silent e, he interrupted me and explained it to me.
Ds learned to read music the same way. He plays the cello and reads bass clef. When the teachers played jumping games with the class, jumping from line to space on a giant staff on the floor... or having the kids recite the notes in order... or all the other fun games that broke learning to read note names down into smaller, sequential parts for the young kids, he was TOTALLY LOST. Instead, one afternoon he looked at a piece of sheet music for a song he could already play, while he was playing it. He looked at each note on the page as he played it... and could "magically" read all the notes on the staff that afternoon. He could even recognize and play notes that weren't in that piece of sheet music because he had figured out the pattern (one letter note higher for each space/line higher in the staff... and two would be a skip, etc.). BUT... try to EXPLAIN the pattern to him, or try to have him recite the notes in order, while pointing to the lines and spaces before he figured it out on his own AND HE WAS TOTALLY LOST.
These two examples show how his brain learns differently. It's not about what he learned when (achievement), but HOW he learned it. These examples also show how quickly he was able to figure out the patterns without guidance.
It's not *bad* when kids need more instruction or repetition to learn things. It's normal. It's typical. And ALL kids learn at different speeds: some more quickly than others. Some kids will achieve more than others, across the board. This is not giftedness. Giftedness is a different animal, though many who are gifted will achieve and be successful with the proper support. Most require a *different* kind of support than typical kids.
Hi. I'm Kate. My kid's a cheetah. I don't always know how or when to get more room for my cheetah to run. Sometimes I have trouble finding the right type of prey. (Sometimes I even PUT him in that cage.) Every once in a while I want to stop and appreciate how fast those cheetahs can run: it's really amazing to watch. I'm glad there's a place I can come to talk about cheetahs. :)
-
The thing is that although children, themselves, *are* gifts and all people/children have strengths, and some are amazing...
the *term* gifted has a definition. Maybe our language has chosen the wrong word, and people will give it different meanings or whatever, but it IS definable. There *is* something being defined when a child is found to have an IQ of 180 or 200 or 50. Of COURSE this is not defining the child's VALUE or whether or not they have strengths or abilities in other areas.
I agree with MamaSheep who wrote about asking oneself "what is this child's gift" rather than "is this child gifted." We should not be looking to define a child by just any one aspect of what they can/cannot do.
Nonetheless, there *is* something called giftedness. (I dislike the word, too... maybe we should call it high-IQ-ed-ness or something instead. Then there would be no confusion or offense. It could be like saying a person has red hair or is tall for his age.)
-
I don't view giftedness as a yes/no type of thing. Neither of my children are gifted right now. My six year old is currently accelerated/advanced. In a few years, who knows? Maybe she will remain advanced. Maybe she will become gifted, although I doubt it. Maybe she will become average. Or, maybe she will drop down below average once she hits harder material, and start struggling because of undiagnosed learning disabilities. I fully believe that any of the above are possible, and I worry about the last case the most.
If you don't view giftedness as a yes or no thing, and you think your child could "become" either gifted or average... then....
What do you think giftedness IS?
This is a great website, BTW.
www.hoagiesgifted.org and http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/gifted_101.htm
Here's a great analogy: http://www.stephanietolan.com/is_it_a_cheetah.htm
-
What I'm hearing now is that it's all about the culture in which you live. I'm guessing the OP is in the Carribean? My dh is from Russia, and we've been there with the kids: the culture is SO different. People really do come up to you on the street and offer unsolicited advice. And you're supposed to take it gracefully. It would DO ME IN to live in a culture like that full time: sharing personal information and seeming to appreciate advice from strangers who do not know me or my child!
Anyway... the OP may not be able to escape the comments within earshot of the kids. If that is the case, I'm so sorry. Really. I don't know what to tell you. I'd move. heh heh You'd find very supportive, intellectual communities in the suburbs of major US cities! Of course... I'm just kidding with you. (I'm not REALLY suggesting you move away from family.)
:)
Why are people gushing about your son all the time? It's natural for you to delight in his accomplishments, but could you persuade your friends and acquaintances to tone down the praise while the kids are listening? It's not good for your daughter, and neither is it good for your son to be constantly hearing about how goshdarn good he is? You know that life isn't just about be good at stuff. So maybe you could change your responses, and next time somebody says your son is awesome at x, you could just say "yeah, he does really enjoy doing x" and move on to the next topic of conversation. If your daughter doesn't seem to be getting the positive comments, could you find something else to say about how honest, kind, funny etc she is. And if your friends make negative comments about her compared to her brother in her hearing, just tell them it's not on. -
My view of normal is wrong. In my case horribly horribly wrong.
I think many of us here have that disability. :D So... do you think the OP might consider that her dd may actually have the not-yet-revealed type of G&T?
I know that I didn't have *any* idea that oldest ds was advanced in any way until he was 4. If people made comments about him I really assumed they were just trying to be nice and said that kind of thing to everyone. Then, when he was 4 and "suddenly" hit a ton of milestones "way early," I was kinda shocked. Interestingly, my ds(3) seems to be following in his older brother's footsteps. heh heh He's closing in on 4 and I'm starting to see the signs...
I agree that it may be easy to overlook the signs if our measuring stick is "off."
Still... to have strangers comparing/contrasting my kids... within their earshot?!?!?! I think I'd be seeing red. I'd probably say something not-so-nice. Good thing this *hasn't* happened to me!
-
Other people compare your kids to one another??? That's really shocking. I've NEVER had that conversation with people IRL. I mean, it's obvious my kids have different strengths, but NO ONE has EVER spoken that out loud to me -- especially in front of the children.
The children themselves do notice that they have different strengths/weaknesses, but I think they've been able to handle it gracefully. I think they actually appreciate one another. We *have* worked on pointing out that different people have different interests and/or strengths... and we focus on *that.*
Anyway, I think I'd be irate if someone had that conversation with me. How did you respond at the time?
And can you clarify a bit: who was doing the gushing? Was it the observer gushing about your ds? (They gush about one kid and then go on to compare/contrast the other???)
-
Non-assigned. Just fun stuff --
In the last few days it has been Redwall and Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh for about the umpteenth time each.
-
I did cursive with both of my kids at 1st grade age. We used www.educationalfontware.com and I just made up our own worksheets in the font that I liked from the list. The worksheets started with cursive lowercase letter writing practice, but later morphed into copywork (from books read, well-known poems, prayers they were memorizing, and letters they had dictated to me to be sent to relatives/friends). I think that by making the practice truly meaningful to them (beginning copywork sentences were often ABOUT them), it made it more interesting and the learning was very quick.
Have fun!
-
I hadn't considered oldest ds to be a science-lover until recently. He's not interested in ALL science, but has become intensely interested in paleontology this year. He's also been WAY into everything aerospace since he was 5 or so.
I found that he *loved* the Real Science 4 Kids textbooks (read them like they were candy), even though we didn't do most of the experiments. He likes to read science magazines, expecially those written for adults. Most of his info has come from books and documentaries. We've done a number of field trips centered on his science topics of interest, too.
If anyone is interested in a list of field trips in the northeast/mid-atlantic based on paleontology and/or aerospace, let me know. It seems we've exhausted all the possibilities... (Or if YOU have an "off the beaten path" field trip idea along these lines, PLEASE let ME know.)
:)
-
I think it depends on what they are gifted at.
I don't know... LOG might also have an effect. And what about learning styles?
My two oldest are both "diagnosed as" HG, but ds was *obviously* stronger in reading and writing. He is also a very visual learner. Dd is *obviously* stronger in other things, like music and physical coordination, but she is an auditory learner and then the dyslexia plays a role as well.
It sounds like the OP has already found some tracking issues... and her ds is being evaluated for dyslexia. Sounds like you're "on the path." I have no further suggestions.
Remember, too, that not all slower-reading gifted kids end up diagnosed with dyslexia. I'm honestly not sure why some read at 2 and some read at 4 etc. But... I *would* wonder if LOG is involved in that.
Also consider:
1. interests -- some are more interested in other things and just don't spend as much time looking at books
2. environment -- some kids are read to for more hours a day than others (this is true even among the kids in my one family due to birth order and family dynamics)
-
I used it exclusively then moved onto 1A immediately without any problems. 1A was a lot of review of the later parts of EB.
Ditto. For both kids.
Ds didn't want to write much when we started Primary 1A, so we used number stampers, stickers, or did it orally. By 2A he was doing ALL the writing on his own -- no problems. We didn't have to slow down/ stop math to match his writing stamina.
-
Does strength in phonics rule out dyslexia? She was able to sound out words at age 4 without much difficulty, and she scored well on the phonics part of the test. She's had 3 years of Spalding phonograms at school, plus Phonics Pathways reading instruction from me. Her problems have always been more visual: keeping her eyes on the right part of the page, skipping letters, words, and lines. The notch-cut-out-of-the-index-card idea works well for her when she is willing to do it.
I don't know about any of the other challenges you mentioned, but the strength in phonics sounds like my dd. She has dyslexia. Check out this link. (Did you know there were different TYPES of dyslexia? I never knew.) http://dyslexia.learninginfo.org/dyseidetic.htm Look, specifically, at visual dyslexia. Do the symptoms fit at all?
-
Oldest now goes to school and we've been doing cello practice before bed. BAD time. It's been skipped SO many times in these last few weeks. Always a reason: too much homework, too tired/can't concentrate, dawdles/finds reasons not to practice, etc. Tmw morning we're starting the day with practice. 6:30AM!
Dd practices in shorter bits throughout the day, with an additional longer (30-45 minute) stretch after dinner. It works better for her to do several shorter bits, although she concentrates pretty well in the evening, too.
*I* concentrate better (I'm supposed to be with them during practice) during the day. I'm NO good at night.
-
Oldest read easy readers at 4 y.o. (mostly figured out phonics rules on his own).
Dd could write sentences phonetically completely on her own at 3 y.o., but couldn't read them back to herself. She didn't read beyond short vowel 3-letter words until 5.5 or 6. (She has since been found to have dyslexia.)
Youngest (3.5 y.o.) can spell 3-letter short vowel words with fridge magnets. He can also read them. (Yay!)
Two oldest were identified as gifted. No super-early readers here, but we do seem to have the general correlation (gifted kids read early).
-
he wrote 8=20÷2.5. She didn't mark it wrong, but she wasn't pleased.
Doesn't that just beat all?!?! I wonder if, perhaps, she didn't understand the answer. (After reading Liping Ma's book, I finally realize that this is a distinct possibility! And isn't that SAD?!)
Ah well... he was obviously thinking outside of her box. Maybe THAT is what made her uncomfortable?
It makes *me* uncomfortable that elementary school teachers can be uncomfortable when kids are capable of *more* than they expect. It also makes me uncomfortable that an elementary school teacher might not understand that 20/2.5=8. Sigh.
-
So in other words, learning isn't really the most important goal of schools. :glare:
I think schools' most important goal is the status quo: keeping everything going as it "should." Any deviation from that needs intervention -- to enable that person to "stay in the box." Thus, kids who need additional support and help in order to "keep up" will get it, because the goal is that they end up back in step with the others. Kids who are ahead are already out of step. There is no motivation to encourage them to be further out of step, so... what motivation do they have to educate them?
If your goal for your child is somewhere in that school's "box," even for just that year, then things will probably go well (at least for that year). If your (or your child's) goal lays elsewhere, well...
-
Could the interest/motivation somehow be tied into genetics? I've noticed that my children each have a specific drive/interest/motivation toward certain areas... but where did it come from? I wonder if it is somehow innate... they seem to have had these interests from a very young age.
-
I think this depends on your relationship. If my father came for the afternoon and didn't know he could stay for dinner I'd be offended (he doesn't need an invitation). However, if this was a friend or relative that I didn't really know well, I'd assume they'd leave before the dinner hour if dinner hadn't been part of the invitation.
-
they all think when she hits K they will psuh her into a second grade class to work on reading ect. i tried to say no
Subject acceleration (going into a higher grade class just for reading, for example) is not unheard of either... but it IS hard to come by. And... it's not always the best solution anyway. (Sometimes it's not a "reading" class, but an "English" or "Language Arts" class which includes writing. Often a child who can read grade levels ahead of age cannot necessarily write a three paragraph essay like the kids in that grade may be learning that year.)
In my experience, public schools and pricey non-religious private schools are very stingy with grade and subject acceleration. (Several have told me "no" in no uncertain terms.) We have had an easy road to hoe getting a grade acceleration out of our local, small (and I think that's key), religious school.
Yay homeschooling!
-
In school? They don't learn anything new that year... or the next... or possibly the next. Soon, they learn that nothing is challenging. If they are ever in a situation where they *do* need to buckle down to learn something at their challenge level, they don't know how to do that. They usually refuse to even try anything challenging. Some have behavior problems. Drop outs, drugs...
I know a few families who have pulled their kids to homeschool before it gets too far.
Cheers!
-
We do a dialogue journal. I will write a short note in their journal and they will reply. Ds still loves to look back over what he wrote about when he was 6 and 7. Dd and I are doing one now. She looks forward to it every day.
-
he brought up the whole grade skipping thing again. However, ds is already one of the smallest kids in his class. I took ds to an informational meeting to join cub scouts last night, and the pack leader had all the 1st graders stand up front in a row, and ds was at least half a head shorter than all the other boys. I'm not sure putting him in second grade is the best plan, either.
The height thing is certainly an issue to consider. I *do* really love homeschooling as an option, so *I* would probably choose that over a grade skip.
Something to chew on though... a friend in another state has a gifted and academically advanced child who is very short for his age. She and her husband were conficted about the idea of a grade skip because of this. However, due to genetics, the child will always be very short... They finally decided that it didn't matter if he was the shortest one in first grade or the shortest one in second grade. They were able to get the grade skip for him and she is very happy. (They only homeschooled for Kindergarten and first grade --when he was 4 and 5-- in order to have more "proof" that he could handle a grade skip. Her intention had always been to put him back in school.) I guess it's working out well for the boy so far.
My kids are tall for their age, so I've never had to face this issue. (In fact, my ds is still the tallest in his class, even with the grade skip.)
I hope everything works out well for you and your son.
:)
when do you know they're NOT gifted?
in Accelerated Learner Board
Posted
Well, that makes sense! I can imagine that the IQ tests we use here in the states (and in most Western countries, I'd imagine) would certainly underestimate children from very different cultures. Aren't most tests (standardized, especially) tied strongly to certain cultural experiences?