When did you know...

[SeaConquest]

...that your child was... um... different?

I mean this in a lighthearted way, and just to share fun stories.

I remember a time when we had some neighbors over for dinner. My oldest son was on a space and butterflies kick, and proceeded to tell the neighbors about 25+ species of butterflies and the composition and characterstics of every planet in the solar system. He was not even two.

As the neighbors were leaving, the wife stopped me at the doorstep and, gesturing to my son, said, "You know that's not normal, right?"

When did you know?

[Mrs.Mom]

Oh gosh, I knew early on that mine would be trouble. One particular moment was when my son was in a time out - it's hard to articulate, but... he was no older than a year, sitting on his little "naughty stool" and counting along with the timer on his fingers. 1....2.....3.....4....5...with this little grin on his face. He was so amused with himself. Placating me. ;)

 

The expression on his face was hysterical. In fact, I had to hide behind the corner because I couldn't keep from laughing. He had a great attitude about it, was completely unfazed by the "punishment" of it, and was giggling as he counted. I don't know - it just was so, him! "You're cute, mom. Sure, I'll sit here for you."

I knew when he was 6 mths old, and would crawl over to my bookshelf to bring me one of my books. He'd flip to a random page, point to a word and have me read it. Then another, then another. He was obsessed with letters and language very early on. People accused me of forcing him to learn the alphabet. I don't know how you force an infant to learn the alphabet! ;)

[SKL]

Call me crazy, but I could tell from the referral video when Miss E was 19 days old that she was more "with it" than the typical child.

 

It's hard to point to specifics.  She just always knew how to communicate what she wanted and what she thought, with or without words.  She knew what stuff was for and how to use it.  When she was about 21 months, I was assembling a mini trampoline and she walked over and put some pieces in the right places without having a clue what it was even going to be.  She remembered how to get places and she would give directions to help adults navigate.  When she was just under 2, she was given paper and crayon to "scribble" and after a minute she pointed out that she'd written the letter "M" (never having been shown how).  By 2 she could understand grown-up movies and draw parallels with real life.  She was a bookworm from infancy, but she wasn't very verbal as a tot, so I was still surprised when she started reading and within weeks went from reading her first sentence to being able to read a children's Bible with almost no help.  ;)  That's when I went a little nutso and started insisting that she needed to be accelerated in school.

[Embassy]

Different?  I knew something was different at a couple months old.  I didn't know what that different was for many more years though.  He was an extremely high need baby that needed lots of stimulation to be happy.  Sleeping was difficult and he was very sensitive to sound and movement.  Life was interesting :)

 

For my other kids I knew something was different around age 1-3.

[ebunny]

*I* did not know until DD's first grade teacher told me "She is very advanced and does not belong in the first grade". (I began homeschooling shortly thereafter)

 

Everyone else apparently knew long before. By everyone, I mean grandparents and extended family and friends and neighbors.  

 

Being a first time mom, I attributed everything DD did to "Don't all children do that??" and reasoned away the compliments. In hindsight, there were signs (precocious development), but I really was clueless  :o.

[Uff Da!]

nm

[Dmmetler]

DD was different almost from birth. At about 6 weeks, she "woke up" (she'd been born prematurely so that was right about her due date) and simply required a lot of stimulation. She wanted to see and experience a lot. We spent a lot of time walking in various places (which, given that I'd been on bedrest for months with her and had baby weight to take off was a good thing) because she had a high need for stimulation. She was an early talker and was carrying on conversations before age 1, which didn't seem terribly odd to me in my sleep deprived state (where I could either go places with her with things for her to see and talk about, read books to her and dance around with her, or I could deal with a cranky, fussy child. I wasn't thinking too logically at the time)

 

DD was 11 months old, and my parents were in town for an ACS meeting at the Peabody hotel in Memphis. We were in the gift shop, which, given that it's the Peabody, was full of ducks. My mother asked DD if she liked the ducks. DD pointed to the biggest stuffed duck in the store and said, quite clearly "I like THAT duck!". Mind you, DD was born prematurely and has always been small for her age, so she looked even younger than she was. The poor clerk behind the counter seemed about to faint.

 

Around 12 months, she'd start sitting in front of the bookshelf and flipping through books, reading them to herself. I assumed she'd memorized them since I'd read them so many times to her. About 15 months she started reading signs out loud and commenting on them. Apparently, she'd been teaching herself to read.

 

Kind of hard to deny something strange is going on at that point. Her daycare teacher (she was in 2 days a week so I could teach at the college) was taking special ed classes and was concerned about hyperlexia and autism (and that it just wasn't NORMAL for a child that age to spend the day sitting and reading books), so we had her tested. So I officially "knew", in the sense of having a GT diagnosis and label (along with borderline gross motor skills and borderline sensory processing disorder) at age 2.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Tracy]

I suppose it might have been a clue when, after being born by emergency c-section, she was laid on her stomach, and she lifted her head and looked around the room.  

 

I guess our next clue was that by 6mo, she demanded we read to her all the time.  

 

And then her first ten words after "mom" and "dad" were counting to 10.  

 

 

[Cheriwe]

I knew something was different when he was a baby.  He was so demanding. And stubborn.  And curious.  When he was 2 he knew all of his colors in English and Spanish.  When he was 3 he was helping the preschool teacher pass out papers because he knew how to read the names of all of the kids in the class.  When he was 4, he read to the kids at naptime. 

Beyond the typical "advanced signs" (early reading, etc.), the biggest clue was his personality.  He was always so strong willed, always knew what he wanted.  Always aked questions and never stopped talking. NEVER!

[Crimson Wife]

When my oldest was 14 months, we were sitting with my extended family around the dinner table and my brother started playing a game with her by pointing to family members and asking, "Who's this?" DD started to lose interest mid-game so to get her attention, my dad asked her, "What's my name?"

She shocked everyone by referring to him not by "Grandpa" but by his first name. She knew the difference between his title and his actual name. So then my mom (who'd been earlier pointed out as "Grammy") asked her "What's my name?" and DD matter-of-factly answered my mom's first name.

About the same age, when she was learning colors, she didn't just learn the primary and secondary colors but more unusual ones like "turquoise" and the difference between "gray" and "silver".

With DS, it was that he could stack blocks really high and complete puzzles designed for much older kids. He also was fascinated by machinery and you could see the wheels turning in his little mind trying to figure out how the machines he saw worked.

[Slache]

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[Crimson Wife]

Funny story about youngest DD: at 3 1/2 she was in a research study at UCSF medical school on methyl B12 injections as a treatment for autism. As part of the screening process, the researchers did some of the subtests of the WPPSI to rule out mental retardation because the study was only for autistic kids of at least average IQ (40% of kids with ASD also have MR).

Partway into the block design sub-test, youngest DD got bored with the task. The tester had built a 3 x 2 x 1 checkboard pattern. DD decided to build the exact same pattern only rotated 90 degrees so that it was 2 x 1 x 3 and then proceeded to rearrange the tester's blocks to match her pattern. All faster than I think I could do it (I always struggled on those spatial rotation questions on standardized tests). The tester just laughed and said that it was quite clear she did not need to continue the IQ test as DD's IQ was obviously well-above the cutoff.

[jar7709]

SImilar to PPs...DS was only a few hours old, he opened his eyes and looked right at me with recognition, like "Hi!  What are you going to show me today?" 

 

And he hasn't slowed down since. 

 

I thought at the time that was fairly-normal newborn behavior, but it wasn't until about 9 mos that I realized that might have been a sign of something different.  He had learned a heap of "baby signs", and as we were walking through the grocery store we stopped at the fish counter and looked at the tank of lobsters.  He gestured to the lobsters and signed "fish bug", and I thought I'd better stay on my toes.

 

DD was much slower to "bloom", not as precociously verbal as her brother, as an infant and toddler she was usually self-contained and fairly content to observe the goings-on, so when they were both little together her gifts were harder to see.  *Something* was obvious to her daycare and ballet teachers when she was about 4.5, though.  Within a couple weeks of starting, they each said something like "she's so imaginative, I never know what she's going to come up with next!"   Soon after that I realized she probably needed some new tools to show off her ideas, and she took to making little movies and sculptures like a duck to water...particularly memorable was a little movie using her dinosaur models called "How To Make Meat Soup".   :)  I think that in those earliest years she was just watching, absorbing and waiting until she had words and skills to express her ideas.  

[nmoira]

These are so funny. People always tell me how advanced my son is because he uses words like "actually" at 3 and is beginning to read. I have yet to find a polite way to tell them he's not advanced, we just... um... parent him...

 

Be cautious taking credit for anything other than genes. Being in an enriched environment is good for any child, but there are plenty of tremendously bright kids out there not ready to start reading at 3 and plenty of children who are brought up in enriched environments who do not appear to be gifted.

 

Now to the OP. Except for attention span, my eldest didn't seem "different" until about 13-15 months when her speech took off. At that point she started demanding to know letter names, punctuation mark names and purpose, to have me write out sentences she dictated, etc. She would literally scream if she had to wait. She had me run my finger under the text as I read aloud so she could "read" along. This stopped at about 24 months. We're not sure when she started to read because she kept it secret, as she was scared I'd stop reading aloud if she could do it herself. Our children's librarian figured it out when she was about two and a half. By five she could read practically anything (allowing for interest of course... nothing denser than the Lang coloured Fairy Books).

[Slache]

Be cautious taking credit for anything other than genes. Being in an enriched environment is good for any child, but there are plenty of tremendously bright kids out there not ready to start reading at 3, and plenty of children who are brought up in enriched environments who do not appear to be gifted.

 

 

I'm referring to people who have 5 year olds who aren't potty trained and 8 year olds who don't know their letters. Many people like that have compared my son to children like the ones listed on this thread. I have a very difficult time dealing with people who sit their children in front of a television all day and then can't figure out why Jr. doesn't know what a triangle is in second grade.

 

Reading this thread really illustrated how average my children are (in the most adorable way possible). I didn't mean any offense.

[SKL]

I'm referring to people who have 5 year olds who aren't potty trained and 8 year olds who don't know their letters.

 

That doesn't sound like a parenting issue, though.  Sounds like those kids have something more going on.
 

[nmoira]

That doesn't sound like a parenting issue, though.  Sounds like those kids have something more going on.
 

 

Exactly. There have been many threads on these boards about parents struggling with exactly those issues, parents not sitting around on their butts all day.

[Crimson Wife]

I'm referring to people who have 5 year olds who aren't potty trained

Children who have SPD often have difficulty with potty training because their bodies underreact to sensory stimuli. It's a physiological problem that has NOTHING to do with how smart the child is.

[Slache]

That doesn't sound like a parenting issue, though.  Sounds like those kids have something more going on.
 

 

 

Exactly. There have been many threads on these boards about parents struggling with exactly those issues, parents not sitting around on their butts all day.

 

I'm talking about people I know in real life who I see on a regular basis. I don't actually know anyone on here. The reason the 5 year old isn't potty trained is because the mother never tried. My MIL babysat him for a week and had him potty trained but when he went home he went back in diapers because it was easier. I'm talking about lazy parents that have no idea what the typical child is capable of. The same mother has all of her children in pacifiers (5 and under) because she doesn't want to listen to them whine. She doesn't understand why they have limited vocabularies and 2 have speech impediments. Every time I see her she tells me how lucky I am to not have to deal with things like that because my child is gifted. It's aggravating. I'll delete my post. I'm sorry.

[Slache]

Children who have SPD often have difficulty with potty training because their bodies underreact to sensory stimuli. It's a physiological problem that has NOTHING to do with how smart the child is.

 

That is NOT AT ALL what I meant. I'm sorry. My post was a vent and it was wrong of me. I deleted it.

[quark]

...

[Dmmetler]

These are so funny. People always tell me how advanced my son is because he uses words like "actually" at 3 and is beginning to read. I have yet to find a polite way to tell them he's not advanced, we just... um... parent him...

I think there's a combination of nature and nurture.

 

One example. My DD was, as a preschooler, playing with DH's rubix-type puzzles while a neighbor and I chatted. The neighbor saw DD holding the megaminx and asked her what the "neat shape" was. DD replied "A dodecahedron".

 

The neighbor kind of turned pale and commented "Wow-smart kid!"

 

My reponse  "Nerdy parents".

 

Since DD had had polyhedra to play with along with more regular blocks since she was little (hey, you have to do something while on bedrest for months. I needlepointed platonic solids and polyhedra), she'd picked up on cube, tetrahedron, rectangular prism, octahedron, dodecahedron, icosahedron, etc. It really wasn't any different than the neighbor's daughter knowing that Belle wears a yellow dress and lives in a castle with the Beast and talking silverware, except that we're more into polyhedra than princesses.
 

The real funny thing came in kindergarten. DD bombed one section of a test on shapes because the test showed the kids solid figures with one side shaded, and they were supposed to circle the matching shape. She wouldn't do it-because those weren't shapes, they were solids, darn it!

[LucyStoner]

Well there was that whole teaching himself to read before age 2. My favorite though was when he was very small in preschool and they were supposed to draw flowers. Instead he drew the entire life cycle of a flower, sequentially. Seed in ground, seed sprouting, growing bigger, budding, blooming, wilting, seed pod from flower blowing away in the wind. On his own from memory and inference.

[quark]

...

[Slache]

I think there's a combination of nature and nurture.

 

One example. My DD was, as a preschooler, playing with DH's rubix-type puzzles while a neighbor and I chatted. The neighbor saw DD holding the megaminx and asked her what the "neat shape" was. DD replied "A dodecahedron".

 

The neighbor kind of turned pale and commented "Wow-smart kid!"

 

My reponse  "Nerdy parents".

 

Since DD had had polyhedra to play with along with more regular blocks since she was little (hey, you have to do something while on bedrest for months. I needlepointed platonic solids and polyhedra), she'd picked up on cube, tetrahedron, rectangular prism, octahedron, dodecahedron, icosahedron, etc. It really wasn't any different than the neighbor's daughter knowing that Belle wears a yellow dress and lives in a castle with the Beast and talking silverware, except that we're more into polyhedra than princesses.
 

The real funny thing came in kindergarten. DD bombed one section of a test on shapes because the test showed the kids solid figures with one side shaded, and they were supposed to circle the matching shape. She wouldn't do it-because those weren't shapes, they were solids, darn it!

 

That's adorable. I guess you can't blame a girl for being right. :)

[sunnyday]

Well, I still don't "know" anything is different about either of my kids. :) I'm here because they're a little accelerated, not because they're gifted per se. If they are gifted it's definitely not at a profound level.

 

When DS was about 9 months old I thought it was neat that he liked to stack blocks and could stay focused on his task for long stretches. DH and I joked with the pediatrician at his well-baby checkup, "He stacks blocks at a 9 year old level!" The pediatrician seriously replied, "Well, I don't know about that, studies show that it's early verbal ability that correlates with high IQ." Well, DS has consistently been on the low end of the normal curve for speech, so there's that. He still has an unusual disfluency that's getting better on its own, and he's consciously trying to improve his vocabulary but it's still not great. Around the end of kindergarten though, when he went from struggling really hard to read to reading books, and from counting out of sequence to doing very fluent mental arithmetic without instruction; and when he taught himself to ride a bicycle by observing a gyroscope and then determining that gyroscopic effects would keep him upright when he rode; and when his first grade teacher told us he blew his first DIBELS oral reading fluency assessment out of the water, shocking her with a rate more typical of fifth graders -- that was when I looked at the bright vs. gifted charts again and realized he maybe had more column two traits than column one. Jury's still out though.

 

Since DD was my secondborn I didn't pay close attention to milestones, but nothing was crazy early. It was cute when she wanted to do "red word books" (progressive phonics) like brother...I think she was 3.5? I didn't count that as "reading" at all though. When she started picking up advanced picture books with third grade vocabulary and higher, at 4.5 years or so, and reading them with lovely inflection, I was kind of blindsided. She's also not an outrageously good talker; however, she and her brother have almost a "twinspeak" thing going on, where they can talk in shorthand and understand each other, so I wonder if that's why she doesn't feel the need to develop better enunciation and vocabulary? Who knows. Today she reminded brother of the definition of a scalene triangle when he got confused by a Beast Academy problem. I've got my eye on her. ;)

[Kerileanne99]

I love reading everyone else's experiences:)

I am a mom of a seriously exhausting 4 yr old only child, and have a million moments a day where I think, hhmm, that is really cool and shockingly advanced when she comes up with something. And a million and a half moments where she does something so utterly ridiculous I can't believe the other moments weren't flukes😄

We can't go almost anywhere without comments (i LOATHE the 'she is SO smart! comments), looks of shock, or nasty judgemental reactions. So yes, I am fully aware of how the world around us views her...but it just feels like life at this point. Utterly exhausting life, but life.
She is working ahead, by at least several grades in many areas, and has a crazy passion for anything math related, and this is probably my biggest indicator.
I think it is harder in an academic-focused family with an only for the parents to differentiate between really gifted and really exposed in the beginning. There have always been those moments (like at age 14 months writing words on a board for her to look around the restaurant and either point or sign the word-another mom went nuts on me), but I didn't have a lot to compare it to!
And now that she goes to a play-based preschool for 6 hours per week it is painfully obvious. I just thought so much was normal, lol!

[madteaparty]

Still waiting

[MASHomeschooler]

A nurse at the hospital the night my daughter was born said that her being afraid of the dark (she screamed, stopped as soon as any light came back on) was an indicator that she was smart. Not sure about that, but I "always" knew she was different. We had a playgroup from when she was a couple months old with 7 kids born within 3 months of each other, so there were a lot of little things I noticed from that. At her 18-month check-up the doctor was asking me things like "how many words" and my answers plus her observations caused to her say, "Well, she's definitely met the benchmarks . . . for a 3-year-old." But it wasn't until she stood out in the gifted K class that I realized how different she is/they are. The lowest reading group was at the same level as her younger brother (who turned 3 that October), as was the whole-class math instruction. He was also a puzzle whiz, and once even did a large puzzle upside-down because right-side-up was too easy. He also asked about the concept of powers as soon as he was taught the concept of multiplication (around when he turned 5), and a number of similarly unexpected questions. They both went (different years) to an in-home Montessori preschool a couple mornings a week, and the teacher told me she was glad she was able to the more advanced activities with them, but she had to remember to keep her notebook with her or they'd start reading her hand-written notes. :) She also said my son would quietly answer questions she posed to other children she was working with - even when he hadn't had that lesson, and without pausing his own work. My youngest is less obvious and I'm not sure yet if she's as gifted as the other two, but she still surprises me sometimes, so my guess at this point is she is moderately gifted. The other two are are in the highly-gifted-plus range - only the oldest has been tested (to confirm what I thought I was seeing in the gifted K class), but I am confident the middle is similarly, if not more, gifted.

[Laura Corin]

Calvin was intensely interested in symbols at a young age.  Before he was 18 months old, he pointed at a 'close door' symbol in the elevator and said 'bank', because he associated it with HSBC.  By the time he was twenty months old, he had learned his upper and lower case letters plus numbers.

 

L

[deerforest]

Ah, we just met with a psychologist this week to begin our testing journey so many examples are fresh in my mind, but this is my favorite:

 

We are an adoptive family, and DD came home from Guatemala at age 7 months. Her foster mother claimed she had a few Spanish words as early as 3 months. I thought she just loved her a lot. But, DD came home, having never heard English at all, didn't like me speaking Spanish, and when we tried baby signs, she would just say the word in English instead. She had a bunch of words by 10 months, and I was in denial, claiming it was too early, etc. DH and my sisters just kept telling me she really was talking, and I finally had to accept it at 11 months that she had a large vocabulary for a native English speaker, which she wasn't. She had only been here a few months. I just found the list we wrote down at about 18 months and she had a lot of multi-word phrases and I noted that I gave up trying to write them all down.

[Jackie]

I remember looking at the milestone charts to see what would come next and finding I had to move at least a couple charts ahead to find more than a couple things she wasn't doing. And doubting the charts - it says she should be doing baby push-ups in a few months, but hasn't she been doing those since she was a couple weeks old? They must be describing something else! She started talking around 12 months, pretty normal. Then around 14 months we made a list of all the words she knew and we stopped about 150 words in.

But the thing that was most different to me was her learning to read. She did not teach herself, like so many gifted kids seem to. When she was about 22 months, she asked - then demanded! - that I teach her to read. She meant it. She stuck with learning to read and was through the first set of Bob Books by 2.5. Now at 3.75, she is reading at third grade level. But it's the fierce determination to learn it that sticks out more than the reading ability itself. I had no idea a two year old could set a goal and persevere through times of frustration like that.

Oh, and she comes up and reads websites over my shoulder now. I have to be a bit more careful what is up on the screen!

[Cottonwood]

With DD13, she was 15 months old when I sat her down in front a fun alphabet set and thought, "Huh.  It's pretty early but I'll see if she wants to play with ABC's."  I just wanted her to look for a few minutes while I told her what the A or B was.  The first time I said "A", she repeated it and pointed to it.  I tried "B", and she did the same, I went all the way to Z.  I named letters and she pointed right to them.  I was dumbfounded.  And that was just capitals.  I tried lower case...she memorized them as we played.  When DH got home, I said, "Watch this" and she named correctly any letter I pointed to ..upper or lower.  And it just went from there.  She was extremely verbal and has always had a memory like a steal trap.  She has won many levels of spelling bees b/c she has a very accurate photographic memory and can study the words and pull them back out of her brain.  We had an IQ test administered when she was 5 and 6 to qualify for gifted classes and the psychologist couldn't believe her scores.  It was an interesting time.

 

DS11 .....he refused to say a word until he was three.  He also refused to walk, roll over, etc...and I thought FOR SURE something wasn't right.  Well, it turned out to be some very extreme ongoing stubbornness because once he decided to walk, he was running, once he started talking, he was doing math and reading small words.  Same psychologist tested him at 5 and ......  DS's scores blew DD's out of the water.  We couldn't BELIEVE it b/c he never showed us what he knew.  He skipped Kindy b/c he was reading chapter books already and doing multiplication facts.  Everytime we move (DH is military) the new principal tells me his spring test scores qualify him to skip a grade.  I decline b/c he already skipped one.   He's in 6th grade now and they know I'm pulling him to homeschool next yr and this principal keeps asking me to reconsider.  He finally admitted it's because they need his scores at the school.  What he has in intellect, he totally lacks in maturity though so homeschooling should be fun next yr lol

 

 

 

 

 

[Tanikit]

With my eldest I knew pretty young, but my second child was sort of following in her sister's footsteps and has more speech issues than her older sister did at the same age, so I was actually suprised the other day when a woman came and told me after gym that I have a "very bright little girl" - she had been sitting reading to me and also reciting another story and chatting about general things (I cannot even remember what) on my lap while we watched my eldest doing gymnastics. To me this is what a just turned 3 year old does. 

 

Mummy Daddy Nana Grandma Grandpa

 

3 year olds also take over your typing when you are replying to a thread and type real words - don't they? (I helped with the capitals and removed the names she typed that give things away)

 

My second is however on a very different path to her sister who was far more hands on and seemed to have easier recall of many things. However the second picks up the basics of language more easily even despite the speech issues.

 

My eldest knew all her letters before 18 months of age and told a teacher at her preschool that she had forgotten a child's name when the teacher was writing all the names on a poster - the teacher asked her which one and she told her and then the teacher asked her to point out the name on another poster and she did so - she was 2 at this point and no one had taught her to read those names (she taught herself) - she could read every single name of the kids in her class and see when one was missing.

[Donna]

My oldest was born 6 weeks early and had pneumonia. When he was in the NICU, I stayed at the hospital to attempt to nurse him around the clock (he did not nurse well at all until he hit 6 lb. but that's a story for another thread). The nurses constantly commented on how alert he was and whenever I entered the room and spoke to him, no matter what procedure they were doing, he stopped crying and looked for me. He was an early talker (funny to see reactions to the things he said because he was tiny) and an early reader but not so early with motor skills due to low tone from being a preemie. Kinda funny he is now my most athletic kid.

 

My middle ds also talked early but a funny story about him…one day when he was about 18 months old he wanted to go outside on a chilly day with his Poppop and brother. I told him he had to wear a sweatshirt and we battled about it for almost an hour with him arguing and me telling him he could go out when he let me put the sweater on him. Eventually I got it on him and sent him out. He got a few feet from the house, stopped, worked to get the sweater off, threw it on the ground, and ran off to play. It was in that moment I knew I was in trouble, not so much with giftedness but stubbornness. He walked at 9 months. At 10 months, he would only eat food he fed himself and used a spoon to do it. At 2.5 he worked at learning to tie his own shoes until he could do it and rode a bike without training wheels.

 

My dd did everything earlier than her brothers. She would ask to nurse saying "nin" over and over when she was 4 months old. (Her brothers called nursing "ninny.") She also said mama and dada around the same age and other words came not long after. She spoke in clear sentences at 10 months and used words like actually, supposedly, etc…correctly when she was 18 months old plus knew all her letters by sound. She memorized her first book and "read" it to me at 11 months and the first time I realized she was really reading, not memorizing, was when she read a new page of Little House in the Big Woods to me fluently with voices for quotes when she was 3.5yo. With her music, it took her violin teacher sitting me down to tell me what she was able to do at 3.5yo was "not normal" for me to realize she was different from the typical child in that area.

[WinsomeCreek]

I can't look at this thread without having the scene from The Life of Brian pop into my head. "We are all different..."

[lewelma]

I really did not know.  I just thought all the other kids we knew were stupid. :huh:

 

I only began to see it when my 6-year old started inventing algebra without being taught.

 

Ruth in NZ

[lewelma]

.

[avilma]

I don't think my dd6 is gifted. She is quite advanced in several subjects but I think that is because of the work I have done with her.

I thought my dd5 could be gifted when she was 2 weeks old and started following us with her eyes. At 16 month she was speaking with complete sentences. She is a great communicator. She observes situations and describes them in amazing detail. Quite often before doing something new she will spontaneously describe what she is going to do and how she is going to do it (We love an expression that she uses quite often to conclude her speeches: "And that is what I am going to do").

However in reading, math and drawing she is about 3 months behind where her sister was at the same age. And this is not for lack of me trying. In sports on the other side she is way better than her older sister. Last fall she scored almost all the goals for her soccer team. When she starts running with the ball it doesn't seem anything special but then in one moment she would be surrounded by 4 adversaries and the next moment all 4 of them are behind her and she still has the ball. In one game she scored 5 times. At the end of the game I asked her if she scored many goals. Yes, she said, I scored 2! Not a math genius I think but I still can't shake the feeling that she might be gifted.

[blondeviolin]

In some ways, I'm still only realizing they are different. I think back to what I required of my oldest son at 16 mos or so and I laugh and think how ridiculous it was! But he responded and was capable of even more, so it wasn't too ridiculous...

Just this past month I'm slowly coming out of denial that my littlest is also beyond bright. You would think since he's my fifth, I'd just know it when I see it... There are signs from his first day.

So I guess what it boils down to is that I'm not that gifted at detecting giftedness. I just assume it is all normal because all of my kids are that way to varying degrees.

[PinkyandtheBrains.]

When DS was reading before age three, having never been taught. When he would figure out the percent tip for me at dinner and did his arithmetic in octal (and other base) for fun because regular base ten was too easy. Those are some examples.

He is 2E though.

[CrunchyGirl]

We were thrown by LegoMan suddenly knowing how to read at 3 but I think the moment it really hit me ('that ain't normal') was when at 3 he was able to tell me the number of minutes left until the next hour on the clock instantly. No pause. Just an instant calculation.

 

For ArtsyGirl, she'll spend an hour doing addition problems for fun on a worksheet.

[Dana]

Ruth - Those are beautiful. Thanks for sharing.

[Dana]

Even after having IQ testing done, dh still said, "Well, we give him a lot of opportunities and you read to him a lot."

 

:)

 

He didn't read early. He was (and is) incredibly stubborn.

He pretty much taught himself to read at just about 6 from Calvin and Hobbes (absolutely REFUSED to sound any words out when I tried to teach him to read). As we started homeschooling, every so often he'd say, "Oh... now I get that Foxtrot cartoon where...."  :)  So comics were a strong motivating factor.

 

[SeaConquest]

He didn't read early. He was (and is) incredibly stubborn.
He pretty much taught himself to read at just about 6 from Calvin and Hobbes (absolutely REFUSED to sound any words out when I tried to teach him to read). As we started homeschooling, every so often he'd say, "Oh... now I get that Foxtrot cartoon where...." :) So comics were a strong motivating factor.

I have one like this. Everything has to be his idea. Because most things come easily to him, he struggles with working hard when things don't. Gee, he really is my son. :) But, I struggle with knowing when I'm pushing vs. teaching him the tenacity I wish I had. It's hard for me to know the line when he ultimately gets the right answer (after all the dramatics are finished). I'd love to say that everything we do is interest-led, but I think he'd be content with playing Minecraft all day. :)

[AndyJoy]

I suspect my DS is gifted but I can't say for sure at this point. Some of his personality seems to mask his other skills to the casual observer.

He was intense and super social from birth. People constantly commented on how alert, engaged, and curious he was. His veteran pediatrician said she'd never done a 1-year-checkup with a child who was so engaged, confident, and curious. He didn't speak early but had/has a pretty impressive vocabulary though he has a few speech/pronunciation issues. He knew his letter sounds before 2 and could read 3-letter words before 3 but we've backed off making progress there due to his reluctance at this point. He loves math games and is pretty adept with mathematical concepts and spatial things. He could follow LEGO directions quite well by 3, though he lacked the motor skills to snap them all the way. He makes random leaps without practice like refusing to try puzzles ever then suddenly putting one together without help. He has an amazing memory, active imagination, and constant need/desire to question and/or talk.

ETA: I do remember the moment I knew for sure that I had a class clown on my hands and joked that it was a good thing I planned to homeschool since he'd be either distracted or distracting in school.

When he was 18 months old we were at the park and he been hitting balls off his little toddler batting tee with two older boys who were about 6. They got bored and wandered off across the playground. Instead of chasing them DS scooped up his stuff, climbed the nearest picnic table, set up his tee, turned in their direction, and whacked a ball at them with a look of pure glee on his face. That brought the older boys running back to him and I knew he'd be trouble for sure :). I was so right. I just hope he won't be like the boy in my 7th grade class who licked an elk eyeball then popped it in his mouth when he didn't get enough of a reaction...

[leeannpal]

Well, my daughter was born almost 6 weeks prematurely and weighed on 4.7 pounds at birth. She was in the NICU for 4 days and the nurses were astounded that she could raise her head up by herself. They kept commenting on how alert she was compared to other babies born at that gestation. As a baby, she just never seemed to need the rest that most babies need. She is still a very mentally and physically active child.

[pebblesjns]

We actually thought my oldest DS was behind. As a baby, he didn't roll over until he was almost 5 months old. He went both ways the same day. He didn't walk until he was 15 months old. He could have walked at 12 months, he took a few steps but he fell down and shut down. When he finally let go at 15 months, he fell down once and never fell again. He always had a long attention span and could occupy himself pretty well from the time he was a baby. But he wouldn't talk. At 18 months, he had only said mama. Our pediatrician recommended getting him evaluated by speech therapy just to make sure there wasn't an underlying issue, even though he didn't really think there was. During their evaluation, they told me he was behind cognitively and speech wise. We began speech therapy with him, once a week. After a month or so, the speech therapist came out and told me there wasn't anything actually wrong with him, he was just stubborn. Right after he turned 2, my husband and I went on a trip for our anniversary and we left him with our parents, who he doesn't see much because they live 12 hours away. While we were gone, we would call and skype with him. My parents would start telling me all the things he was doing, I really thought they were exaggerating, because they have a tendency to do that. They would tell me, "Oh we taught him how to sing happy birthday." When we left, the boy still wasn't talking much so I was sure he wasn't singing while we were gone. My in-laws would then get him for the day and they told me he was singing in the car and it kind of sounded like Happy Birthday. The next day, I get a text from my dad saying he can read his alphabet. Again, I just assumed it was exaggeration. A couple of days later, we skyped with him while he was at my in-laws and he was playing with some magnetic letters. He was saying letter names but they weren't really paying attention to what he was saying. When they finally started watching him, they realized he was right. He got every letter correct. We had never really sat down to work on identifying letters. At that point I started thinking something was up.

 

Not long after that trip, I decided to see if he could learn his letter sounds. He picked it up ridiculously quick. Before he turned 3, he had taught himself how to blend sounds and was reading. He is now 4 and is reading at a 3rd-4th grade level. We will drive down the road and he will just read the road signs. He has to be the most cautious child I've ever seen, though. He thinks everything through before he does it and wants to know all risks involved in everything. His favorite phrase for about a year from 2-3 was What happened? He had to know everything that was going on. He also picked up on math very easily. He's working through kindergarten math, though I think it may be too easy for him. We taught him the concept of multiplication driving down the road and division at the dinner table. He is also obsessed with geography and history. Before he turned 4, he had memorized all the state capitals, flags, and nicknames. He also knew where every state is located and what is north/south/east/west of it. We could sit down and pick a random state and ask him what was any direction and he would tell us. Part of me wonders if he has a photographic memory. He has now moved on to countries of the world and their maps and capitals. We went to the rodeo last week. Up on the second floor of the convention center, they had all the flags of the world hanging from the ceiling. He had to take us up there and identify the countries. He got 80% of them right, the rest he just didn't know yet. Needless to say, he impressed some people with that. He has impressed his pediatrician and their staff. Last time we went, he was working on memorizing all the presidents. 

 

I really thought he was just normal for a while because he was our first and we didn't have a lot of friends with kids yet. The more we've made friends with families with kids his age, the more I realize he is not normal at all. Of course, he has skewed what I think of as normal, so his younger brother is going to get some unfair comparisons. I know my youngest DS is smart, just don't know that he is on the same level of his brother. He is only 17 months now, so we will see. He is more stubborn than his brother is and following the same speech patterns, though he says a lot more than his brother did. 

 

For those of you who have had formal IQ testing done, where did you do this? I've been trying to find a place to test our son just for our informational purposes but I don't even know where to start. I've asked his pedi but he didn't know what to tell us. Normally the test in the public schools but since we don't plan to send him to school, I need a different option.

[Dana]

 

For those of you who have had formal IQ testing done, where did you do this? I've been trying to find a place to test our son just for our informational purposes but I don't even know where to start. I've asked his pedi but he didn't know what to tell us. Normally the test in the public schools but since we don't plan to send him to school, I need a different option.

 

Psychology department of local university.

Testing was done by a grad student. MUCH more affordable.

Still ran about $200ish but to get someone who has a lot of experience with giftedness, it can be much much more - and travel. Our questions weren't such that we needed more intensive testing (just tested on the off chance that he'd qualify for DYS since his Explore scores were high, so we weren't trying to figure out how he learned or where he might be having difficulty (like if we were looking for 2E issues)).

[lewelma]

Reading all these physical traits stories makes me think that perhaps I should have seen the writing on the wall.  My older ran 6 miles to the river at 16 months.  When he struggled to gain weight, the doc said 'just because he can, doesn't me he should.' So at that point we started to restrict his movement. :001_huh: