We�ve known our youngest, who turned three in December, was bright for quite a while. She continuously surprises us. A few recent examples:
-My inlaws took her and her sister to the beach, and on a whim asked her if she knew what a marina was (they had expected her not to know and were going to explain it to her). She gives them a detailed description. No one has any idea where she got this information.
-At Christmas, she is describing the contents of her stocking. In it she had two rubber duckies. But when asked, she said there were three. I asked her to tell me again. She said, �4, 5.� Then when prompted again said, �6, 7,� laughing at us. This went on a few more rounds, and then I said, �How many duckies are there really?� and her response was, �There are a lot of duckies in the world.� So I asked, �How many are in front of you right now?� and she puts them to the side of her and says, �There are no duckies in front of me.�
-She tagged along with me to the gradeschool creative writing group I lead once a week (3rd-5th graders) and pretended to be writing her owns story while they were writing. The students each read their work aloud, then she announced that she had a story to read as well. She gets up confidently in front of the older children with her piece of paper and proceeds to deliver a detailed story about how her cat farts a lot and smells bad. Of course the other children are laughing, and she pretends to be stern, admonishing them for laughing, and continues the story, knowing full well she�s being funny, but trying really hard to keep a straight face.
-She expressed an interest in learning to read last week, and then picked up a dozen sight words in two days.
-She seemed to have all of the kindergarten prerequisite skills (and we�ve never pushed academics on her�only shown her things she was interested in, and let her play educational games), so I decided to start homeschooling her through kindergarten curriculum. I found some curriculum online, and on Sunday I did the �day 1� material with her. She burned through it in less than an hour, then demanded a dozen more worksheets (tracing and matching and etc), then requested mazes (as far as I knew, she didn�t know how to do mazes), and proceeded to complete four mazes that were designed for 5-6 year olds in less than five minutes. She did another half dozen before I got tired of printing things out, and then I let her play on the educational site starfall.com, which she did for hours, and then the day ended in tears because she had to stop to go to bed.
-Yesterday at dinner we asked her if she could figure out how many eyes total me and her and her dad had. She initially responds with �I have two eyes, daddy has two eyes, and mommy has two eyes.� We ask her again how many that makes in total, and she refuses to answer instead giving all sorts of information about the different shapes and sizes and colors of our eyes, suggesting that all of us had different eyes, so they shouldn�t be grouped together. We ask again, and she answers �7�, then she answers �5� then keeps alternating between 7 and 5 while laughing. Much, much later she finally comes clean and tells us it�s 6. Then I ask her how many eyes total if we include her sister�s eyes, and she immediately answers �8�.
She frequently does this sort of thing when asked questions we�re pretty sure she knows�she skates around the answer, or takes the question too literally on purpose, or does any number of other things to avoid giving you the correct answer because she finds it entertaining. And I suppose I can see that making her regurgitate things she knows�like we�re quizzing her�might seem pointless to her, maybe? So my concern is�how do I go about teaching her? It doesn�t seem like standard kindergarten curriculum is going to cut it. But at the same time, she seems impatient with some skills that are pretty fundamental (for example, she likes writing capital letters, but refuses to write lowercase�she will trace them, but not write them. So we need to slow her down so she can develop the dexterity needed, while her brain wants to zip on ahead because the task is boring.)
