I always appreciate your candour in posts (e.g. OMGYES!! Haha!).
LOL
Re #9: My little man can't shut off for sleep. The learning must.go.on. Like a bad James Cameron film. Until he started to communicate more clearly, he became downright angry anytime we tried to settle him. Our trick is to run around the house (literally) naming everything we see in rapid succession until he seems satisfied. It's as though he resents the opportunity cost of sleep immensely. We look insane doing it, but he seems to love this...err...settling method.
LOL I love your settling method - that's awesome
My DS drifted off fast as toddler, but I think it's because he had a soother. DD slept well, but sometimes I'd be up until 1-2 am waiting and waiting for her to fall asleep so I could too. DS went through an awful night terrors phase when he was 5 or 6 (me too - I had tons of sleep problems - night terrors, sleep wake paralysis, vivid VIVID dreams, etc). DD10 now seems to function on very little sleep (I wish she'd get more, actually).
Re #3: How did your children's math interests evolve?
Thanks again!
They've both always been mathy. As a toddler DS counted everything: his toys, the pieces of his food, the steps as he walked down them - you name it, he'd count it. In grade one he started doing simple equations with negative numbers (DD may have shown him? I didn't - not sure where he got the idea). He LOVED fractions. His grade 1 teacher suggested I move him out of French and into Montessori so his math would be accelerated (which I considered, but then chose to keep him in French instead). He's always been a grade or two ahead. He's currently not formally enriched in this area, although his grade 3 teacher suggested I let him work from his sister's grade 5 text.
DD loved making up math games - for example when she was three she made up this math wheel on the black board that looked like dart board with equations in it. It was cute. She was proud (I was dazzled, lol). At three she had learned to add, subtract and multiply (she just loved numbers) and was always after me to show her things. I wasn't sure how to explain division so I didn't (thought of an idea a few years later, using marbles and cups... by then she'd already learned on paper), but I'm sure she could have learned division then as well. In grade two she was tested by the school and found to be 1-3 grades above age level, and in grade 3 was put in a pilot junior math gifted program for grades 3 and 4 (which was canceled the following year due to lack of funding). Currently she's in the intermediate version of that program and does some math tutoring on the side.
It's funny because at three her math and reading ability were way, way above age level (her reading included compound words, contractions, silent letters, etc), but once she was exposed to school... it was like she "settled" into this lower ability... like cereal sold by weight settling in the bag... because she's the chameleon/anxiety/perfectionist type. I really have no idea what her IQ is, and after the disaster that was DS's testing, I'm steering clear with DD.
