Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Gets the challenging, more complex concepts

but struggles with the easy, simple concepts.

This is what my 2nd grader's teacher told me recently at our conferences in reference to dd's math ability. I'm finding this to be true. For instance, she was doing long division problems such as 370 ÷ 41. But when it comes to 490-489 she will want to do the problem by writing it all out and borrowing instead of just looking at the numbers and realizing that there's only 1 number difference between them.

The teacher thinks this is a gifted thing. Is it?

My DS7 is this way too. I've seen this type of thing all over this website, so I'm guessing that it might be a 'gifted thing'. He has been accelerated 3 years in math. He eats up the curriculum - doesn't struggle a bit (actually it is starting to get boring for him). BUT when it comes to something simple like 14-9, he has to work it out in his head. It takes a few seconds sometimes. Sometimes he is still counting on his fingers!

I had recently posted similar observation about dd4.5 on another thread. It is almost like when she is doing harder stuff, she is able to pull the math facts out if her head without much problem. But when faced with simple math, she has to do it in her head which takes time. The funny thing I have noticed is that irrespective of the difficulty of the math problem, her speed (problems solved per minute) remains the same.

DD gets advance math concepts easily but today, she couldn't figure out 7 + 5 in her head.

It doesn't seem like a gifted thing to us. SO and I looked at each other and he said, "you know, at least she's good at music and dance."

She won't turn 4 for a few more months but I am tempted to put her on a curriculum to start filling some of the gaps. Tempted, but probably wouldn't until she is 5 or so.

ETA: Apparently, yesterday was an off day. She knew her math facts again. I'm not going to make sense of her anymore.

My ds definitely would have done the same thing on the math problem at that age. He loved, loved, loved algorithms and was less interested (at that age) in "number sense" or eyeballing the numbers to see if there was a shortcut. I don't know whether it's a gifted thing, but it might be -- if they can use the algorithm really quickly, they may not care for the common-sense, number-sense shortcuts that would save a less-proficient child the work? Just a theory…

By age 9 or so, though, ds had lots of number sense, so it may also be developmental -- what they notice at different stages.