Hi there,
I'm wondering what experienced parents in this forum think about or have wisdom about reading under the age of two? It took us until fairly late in the game before we learned about giftedness for our older son who is 7 (then 6), and now it's looking likely that our 19 month old is as well. I've learned to let them take the lead when it comes to learning, following their interests, but when it comes to toddlers, I'm wondering how far to take it.
Our little one was interested in numbers and letters at 13 months and quickly learned to identify the digits up to 10 within a month, and many letters as well. Now it's at a point where he identifies all the letters of the alphabet easily in miniscule and capital letters, quickly assembles them in order on a puzzle, and today he sang the alphabet to me! I've been just going with it, and I decided to see what he could do with this, so within a week he's learned to recognize his own name in writing, 'mommy', 'daddy', his brother's name, 'zoo', 'baby', 'pappa', 'nanna','book', 'Koko', 'Ikea', 'Teija', 'alligator'. I only seem to need to show him two or three times, and then he remembers. He also understands and declares that 'd' is for 'daddy', 'm' is for 'mommy', etc. And he's talking now in general all the time, often repeating what we say - often multisyllible words and sentences.
He's really blows my mind! He's also counting through the teens (with some mistakes) and into the twenties.
I know about hyperlexia, and I don't see any indication that he's on the autism spectrum... he looks in our eyes often, and picks up on social cues extremely easily.
This partly feels like gushing and bragging (I know there's another thread for that), but I want to know whether I should continue showing him numbers and letters and words, or if there are theories out there that say not to. I'm really not pushing him!
