You should
definitely be here.
Well-- in any event, there aren't too many people in the world that I think should
not stand to get something out of READING here, but anyway...
I think that you're actually one of the parents who NEEDS to be here. How's that?
My own DD15 didn't learn to read on her own, either-- we had to "teach" her using a set of phonetically-controlled readers. Oh, she was MORE than ready, but she hadn't put it all together. (She was four, btw-- but she had known all of the letter 'sounds' (phonemes) and alphabet for many years.)
She tends to look like anything that the viewer
expects to see, though, and is often reluctant to "show" what she really is.
She learned most early milestones "early" but not
crazily so.... except... sometimes she would do something once, then not again for weeks, months, or in some cases years. Not on demand, not in private, nothing.
She's, um... in college now, after graduating first in her high school class-- at 14yo. With such ease that she's having to finally learn to challenge some of her perfectionism/anxiety/lack of study skills in COLLEGE.
So no. They aren't all looking like tiny Einsteins at 18 months old. In fact, what I wanted to say to you, in reading your post, was that the
arc of skill development has-- in our own experiences with a PG child-- been the most insightful set of observations.
Your explanation of the dizzying rate of math skills acquisition-- that's a tell. Bright and even moderately gifted children
cannot do those kinds of things, usually. Not without a LOT of parental pushing. I'm not sure that it's
possible to master things like "literacy grades K through 7" or "math skills grades K through 4" in a few weeks or months
without being at a higher LOG (level of giftedness).
My DD didn't SHOW us a lot of that kind of thing in math without prompting-- I mean, she learned a year of algebra in about 2 weeks at nine, but only be cause we made her do that (long, long story).
But she did do it in reading. She went from phonetically controlled readers to-- well, we're not even sure, but it was certainly middle school level reading and interest level-- by 7 months later. With
no intervening anything from us. She reads at a
ferocious rate-- faster than most adults I know, and she attained that kind of speed and comprehension within a year of learning to decode. That's a PG learning arc in action. It's like a step function-- I have no idea how it works.
She's also a bit unusual in that she's quite even in her academic profile-- that is, nothing is terribly far ahead or behind anything else, so it was a no-brainer in many ways to accelerate her, since she also has advanced social skills. She found agemates (and their frankly uncivilized behavior) to be nothing short of appalling when she was younger. Heck, even now she kind of finds that to be the case.
Get testing if you feel like it would help you. We didn't go that route because we never saw a reason (and because we also had a number of reasons to expect that testing was going to be inaccurate on the low side, and that therefore her performance level was the better measure).
