My LO is 3Y4M old. Although it's too early for any formal testing, we believe she may be gifted.
At 17 months, she could speak A to Z in sequence, count 1 to 20 in sequence, and speak several simple words. By 19 months, she could sing whole rhymes, and at 22 months was speaking compound and grammatically correct sentences.
Loves reading and if she finds a book of interest, gets us to read the book with her again and again every day for many days. At 2Y4M, she could sight-read a couple of her favorite books.
Has very good memory. Is able to precisely recall events, actions, names, faces, names of dinosaurs etc from months in the past. At 3Y, at a local science center - I mentioned the names of several popular people on photographs on a wall to her just ONCE, distracted her for 10 mins, and then asked her to point out the photo while I called out the name of each person. She got them all right. A whole week later, I showed her the same photographs on my phone and asked her to name the person � she got them all right.
Prefers to play with children much older than her � we think probably because they communicate as good as her, while children closer to her age aren�t as verbose.
Is an extreme perfectionist. If things aren't the way they are meant to be � she gets frustrated. She tries to make intricate connections with her toys, but her tiny hands wouldn�t let her, this makes her get frustrated. If things don�t follow a "pattern" that makes her upset � for instance, she turns on the bathroom light before brushing, if I do it by mistake � that makes her terribly upset. While climbing on a slide, I told her once "Watch your head". For the next several days, as she climbed the slide she told me "Say watch your head". If we make a grammar or pronunciation mistake, she immediately pounces on it, gets frustrated, and is quick to correct us saying that�s not how it is said. Even as early as 2Y old, during a play class, while all kids play with Maracas, she goes around picks up several Maracas, arranges them in a semi-circle pattern and keeps looking at the pattern.
Quite often, gets to ask us complicated questions like � "What do you see as a dragon?" "What happens when banana goes into the sky?" and makes statements like "I want to climb on the slide and slide on the climb" "My nose is not small, my nose is bigger than a small nose" "If ring is rang, why is bring not brang". And to top it all � when I told her "<name> Stop" while she was doing something. She said "I'm not Alexa. Say 'Can you please Stop'" If you own an Amazon Echo, you'd know what she meant.
And above all, the biggest challenge for us is her emotional intensities. She gets frustrated pretty quickly, is deeply disturbed if mom or dad look upset, insists too much on fairness � for instance, she always readily shares her toys and expects other kids to do the same � which they generally don't, and she gets very upset with it. Sometimes starts to randomly look at nowhere in particular into what seems to appear like "an abstract state of thinking" like daydreaming. She remains in that state for several seconds, to sometimes nearly a minute.
If she's being asked to do something that she considers not interesting, she doesn't hesitate to ignore it entirely and do her own stuff � her Pre-K3 teachers observe this at school as well.
Now, considering all this � I�d like to know some tips and inputs you may have to keep such a person constantly challenged with activities that may interest them. Weekends and holidays in particular throw us a challenge as we are running out of ideas to keep her into something that she finds interesting. We live in New Jersey, so any suggestions to places we could take her would help too. She doesn't like Zoos � because she doesn't like to just "look", she wants to "do" things. She likes the local Science Center, we are members there and she goes there once nearly every month.
Any thoughts, advice, ideas, places you could suggest would be very helpful. Thanks in advance.
