LOL I love your settling method - that's awesome
Haha! It's laughable, but I wish we'd discovered it many months earlier. On those 3am nights, which were less infrequent than I'd like to remember, I could have used an ace up my sleeve!
He's an intense little man, and very much a lactivore, which helps in our co-sleeping home. He can settle reasonably quickly once he's saturated. At least he naps!
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.
Fascinating! Your DD and DS are brilliant! Isn't it awe-inspiring how these little ones think?
My son seems to be "getting" how numbers interact, too. For instance, if I say "two", sometimes he holds up two fingers on one hand, while other times he'll hold up one finger on each hand. Ditto for three. (Thankfully not the middle one ala "get lost Mama"! That said, he did go through a phase of flicking us off around 1-2 months, but I think/hope it was neurological and not frustration!)
I guess the lesson I'm learning is that I'm more of a gesticulator than I realize!
