from gratified3:
I'll be honest, "gifted" never occurred to me until I had a kid heading to K and I'm very grateful for that. I can't see that my kids missed anything by not having math workbooks at 3 and two managed to learn to read and add/subtract/multiply from helping me cook and asking questions while driving in the car and watching "Blue's Clues". They learned other things from leappad type games, but they were all just games. Even in elementary school, I provide a lot of materials, but I don't engage with them. I just got a shipment of Horrible Science, Horrible Histories and Murderous Maths that made some people in my house *very* happy. I got some Life of Fred books last summer and one kid learned a lot of math, but the others never looked at them. No problem -- I think of myself as the resource supply, but I have no agenda of things I want them to get through or cover. It avoids any power struggle over learning and makes it something they "own" which I like (one of the benefits of public school is that I don't have to be getting them through a particular topic ever). I don't want them to learn to please me or to learn because I'm invested in it. I want to teach them to find their own passions and for me, that requires being rather hands-off in my approach.
This is were I am at right now. I just wonder if I never came up with the label how different things would be. And then my fear of hothousing is there so I really find myself holding her back. She learned everything from play and what you described is my DD in a nut shell. She goes to the playground all the time, weather permitting. She plays with play doh and through that adds and subtracts as she plays. Talks about colors and shapes, etc. while playing with the play doh. Baking has been a big part of her life and she learned important math out of that. This morning she was all about musical instruments and played the piano for a while and pulled out her guitar which freaks me out. I can take the same guitar and it sounds like tar but she uses it a lot like the movie August Rush where he got hold of the guitar and explored it. Hitting it in certain areas to hear the notes and she already understands the keys and how turning them tunes the guitar and will work on it forever. Her dad plays guitar and his dad played guitar so I am sure it runs in the family. But even my DH admits that her approach to it all is weird but very interesting. So again ... she discovers everything through playing so bringing in workbooks for her to do just feels like I am a pushy mom. I think I decided the best thing to do is leave them on the shelf and wait until she is in preschool and see if she makes that connection.
So I question if I didn't know the term gifted and just kept with her cues would she be even more advanced now? I find myself holding her back partly b/c I don't want her to be bored in kindergarten. But even before knowing she was gifted she was equal to a first grader and some second grade curriculum so really how much can I hold her back when she discovers everything on her own? I have also noticed (big sigh) that her cognitive abilities are even more advanced in the last few weeks. We usually get the giggles from visual reference but now she gets the verbal jokes. She just gets a lot more then she used to and now her complex sentences which were already complex by the time she was 18 months are even more complex. If she was at a 6 -7 yr old in verbal before I have no idea what she is at now. So conversations around her gets interesting to say the least.
