Wow! Thanks for all of the great feedback! I only know a handful of other parents with gifted children so this has been such a learning experience for me. (Btw, we LOVE star fall!)
I have early childhood education experience, so we�re very, very into keeping our activities light and fun. The formal teaching I�m doing with him is simply in place of him going to an actual pre-school. With my being a stay at home mom now, having the time and recourses, we just didn�t see the need to pay for Early Childhood Education when I could do it -- He�s just blown through everything I�ve tried to teach him at the preschool level, which is how we got here. He�s already beginning to write whole words freehand, and his handwriting is impeccably clean. He�s reading sentences right now that my stepdaughter (and other children I�ve taught) couldn�t until she was six. I don�t feel like I�m pushing him into anything he isn�t ready for by introducing him to phonics (he does have fun with them), I was just surprised that they were taking longer to click than sight word memorization. And I didn�t know if that was typical for gifted children.
I wouldn�t be concerned about it except that I remember taking an Early Childhood Ed. Class and having the importance of phonics DRILLED into us, lol. On the other hand, I know that gifted children learn a bit differently than the average child. I feel much better having heard everyone else�s experiences, so thanks a ton!
(P.S. Oddly enough, it seemed like when we did a new phonics puzzle today, he was making connections he wasn�t before. We have this series of 3 piece puzzles, where there is a picture and the name corresponding to the picture is broken in half to help teach beginning sounds like pl, gl, tr, sc, and so on. Normally, he connects them by the picture and doesn�t take much notice of the word until it�s finished. Today, he was actually picking up the piece with the beginning letter combination and saying it out loud (sp, sp, sp�) while he looked for the other half of the word.)
