Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Pre-school Is he a bit advanced for his age?

My son will be 3 next week. And his reading skills has been made me shocked and other parents in his toddler music group. He never really meet his milestone on time. Could be earlier or later.

Here are some examples:

Crawling at 5 months.
feeding himself a cracker at 5.5 months.
feeding himself with a fork at 10 months.
Walking at 14 months.

by 23 months.
- Can read alphabet both uppercase and lowercase.
- Can recite alphabet letters from A-Z
- Can count 1 to 10
- Knows most simple shapes (square, circle, triangle, oval, rectangle, and star)
- he was a late bloomer I would say. but then he suddenly picked up many things.

2 years old � 3 years old.

- Can recognize numbers up to 100
- Can count to 100 in English
- Can count to 20 in Chinese
- For every letter of the alphabet he can name an object.
- Knows the colors of rainbow in English
- Can read over 200 words in English
- Can spell around 20 words in 3, 4 letters.
- understand left and right
- Knows the parts of the body, even organs ( Liver, Lung, stomach, skull, etc)
- Can read Level 1 reader's book alone.
- Able to recognize advanced shapes in everyday life, such as trapezoids and parallelograms
- Can recognize stop signs and knows traffic light meanings.
- Knows months of the year and days of the weeks. When written can arrange them in order
- Know his whole name and those of all his family members
- Able to use ipad/computer to search for what he wants
- Can recite around 10 chinese peoms including a 24 sentences poem.
- Perfectionist everything must be in a line or in the right order
- doesn�t like when his hands are sticky or dirty.
- Love to be around with older kids.
- Can recognize and name 50 of the Thomas the Train characters.
- Very good observation. He can notice a small change in the house when he came home from outside.
- able to balance on a balance bike. Can't use the pedals yet.
- Can use chopsticks that suggested for age 8+.

I know this could be normal to some kids. but I'm just wondering if he is advanced at his age?

um not normal for my kids! have fun for the next year exploring. I think some of the other parents might be more qualifies to offer opinion on this but I would suggest just making sure you are following DS lead and interests and encourage lots of play too so that he gets a good balanced. Sounds very advanced to me, but that also depends on how much you instructed him, and how much he asked for or just picked up. From my experience it's the traits rather than the knowledge that indicate giftedness such as early milestones (not that my kids were early), observant and perfectionism. Good luck

He's advanced, but what does "advanced" really mean? That probably won't become obvious until later on. I had a child who was doing most of the things on your list at those ages, and people who watched her were "wowed" and noted that she seemed to be very advanced. In kindergarten she was still looking "advanced" - but she's dyslexic, and by the time she was in 2nd grade she was struggling to stay at grade level in school. She has areas of academic strengths, but they are not what I'd label genius-off-the-charts strengths, just strong strengths My EG ds, otoh, wasn't doing any of that at the ages you've mentioned. He wasn't even talking at your ds' age - but once he *did* start talking, he was talking about ideas that were extremely novel, complicated, and deep - and he's my kid who's continued to stand out in terms of where he is intellectually compared to peers.

In any event, no matter *what* - follow your ds' lead - let him explore the things that interest him, enjoy him, have fun with him. I wish my children were still young (at times!) - it is so fun to discover the world with them when they are your ds' age

Best wishes,

polarbear

Enjoy and see what happens. I have known a couple of kids who were like that. But my HG ds5 was far closer to that list than my PG ds7.

My DD was driven to learn academics from age 2 to 3.5. She is almost 4 now and although she still reads and loves math, academics is no longer her priority. Her interest has shifted and those days when she was reading 10+ books a day and only wanted to watch science DVDs are long gone. A year ago, if anyone told me that she'd only want to read books at bedtime and would choose watching My Little Pony over anything else, I would not have believed it. She's still the same child with a very curious mind and has passion for learning but her passion has been redirected to music and art.

If I can offer an unsolicited advice, it'd be that your DS has a lot of unstructured free playtime with open-ended toys to stretch his creativity and imagination.

I think he is fairly advanced for his age. But as others have already mentioned, this is not necessarily a prediction of anything for the future. My son was very advanced from a very early age, but my daughter had been somewhat a late bloomer compared to brother in the first few years, but now at 9 she is more advanced than her brother was at the same age.

I'd just follow the child's lead and try to give him the right condition for him to keep developing, identify and support his interest, and yes, give him a lot of free time/unstructured time especially at this age, let him develop his curiosity and creativity.