Hello Gifted World!
My eldest son is turning 4 this month and I am thinking he is gifted. Since I was formally identified as gifted in grade school this isn't too surprising to me.
His speech is very advanced for his age with regard to grammar, vocabularly, general knowledge etc.
He can count in English, Spanish, German, Mandarin Chinese, and French (up to 100 in all but French). He is conversationally fluent in Spanish (from spending over 3 years full time with his native Spanish speaking nanny).
He can complete a 100 piece puzzle of the world by himself and can correctly identify many of the countries on the map including some along with their capitals such as Cairo, Egypt. He can also recognize many flags, including some obscure ones such as Algeria etc. He also knows many of the US states including some of their capitals and landmarks (Little Rock, Arkansas, Boise Idaho, the Gateway Arch, Mt. Rushmore, Statue of Liberty, Golden Gate Bridge etc.).
He knows all the continents, seasons, months of the year, and days of the week.
He knows the alphabet in English, Spanish, German, and Greek.
He knows all the letter sounds in English and can correctly identify the letter that things start with.
He can also sight read a number of words in English, and can already spell some simple ones on his own.
He is interested in learning Latin and Greek.
He can even recognize some Chinese characters.
His thinking is pretty advanced too, for example he recently told me he "wants to build a rocketship so he can go to the moon".
He is able to use a screwdriver, just yesterday we disassembled an old dvd player to look at and talk about the circuit board and electrical components inside.
He can also play chess including setting up the pieces accurately himself and moving the pieces correctly.
He has a very advanced quirky sense of humor, for example after he quickly learned all the continents playing with a 3d globe puzzle he thought it was funny to systematically mislabel all of them instead of doing it correctly.
I could go on but I think all of the above are already enough indicators to establish at the very least that he is not a run of the mill 3 year old.
Recently I have been so struck by his general knowledge, intellectual capacity, interests, and stamina for learning that I seriously considered quitting my 6 figure job to full time homechool him myself. After bringing it up to my boss, my company really didn't want me to leave and generously offered to let me work just 2 ten hour days a week for 12 weeks in addition to giving me a raise when I return full time.
Currently my wife makes enough (over twice as much as me...) such that we could afford to keep our nanny to help me take care of our other 16 month old son so I could really focus on the 3 year old. The nanny can't really give him the kind of attention he needs while watching both him and the little one and unfortunately she is not particularly academically inclined or capable so her motivation and ability to read to him and challenge him intellectually is rather limited.
He has never been to preschool (other than a German Language Saturday School program) but he is set to start part-time a couple days a week in late August at our Church and we are hoping to get him connected to some like minded peers through a gifted homeschool network in our area that is supposed to be operating a Forest School program starting soon.
He seems to be doing well in Sunday School at our Church which we have been attending regularly since January so I am hopeful that it will work out to have him attend preschool there at least part time, but I am not sure it will be challenging enough for him academically and ideally I'd like for him to establish social connections with some kids that are similarly gifted so I am inclined to pursue homeschooling even if I continue working full time (3 days per week from home after the personal leave is over).
This past week was the first of 12 weeks taking off Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays on personal leave and I have felt like it was so good for him to spend extra time with me learning all kinds of stuff together. Tomorrow he will also start a summer camp music program at our Church, hopefully that will go well.
Any thoughts or ideas on my situation are greatly appreciated. I am thinking about maybe trying to focus mainly on English teaching him phonics and sight words in the near term during my leave time to help get him reading on his own sooner so he can hopefully start teaching himself more independently in the long run but I also don't want to push too hard and risk potentially turning him off since he has reacted so positively thus far to a primarily play based approach to learning allowing him a lot of freedom to choose what to focus on. Unfortunately I don't really know anyone else that has a kid like mine that I can talk to, I chuckled yesterday at a family event when my Dad's wife thought it was impressive when she noticed that my son knew about Asia and I told her oh that's nothing he even knows about Indonesia (not to mention Japan, India, China, New Zealand, Australia, etc.).
