I have always found it interesting that parents of normally developing kids are encouraged to provide a literacy-rich and number-rich environment and to make sure that their kids have the basic skills needed to enter schooling, but parents of gifted kids are accused of providing an enriching environment that has overprepared their childrend for schooling. Eventhough our school has seen my kids scores and has subject and grade accelerated them, it is often mentioned, as a way of negating the extreme scores, that we provide an enriching home life to them. All I do is read to my kids and take them fun places, just like everyworking encouraged to do
This drives me batty too!!! I don't know if it's the desire to have everyone at the same level or the fear/guilt that from parents of kids not reading or teachers that we did something they should of, so to make them okay we become hothousers! And I am SOOO tired of reading the whole "what does early reading mean, it means nothing because I know a kid who did and then is having trouble at school or insert some other anecdotal story here" designed to negate advanced skills.
With DS we did letters and read books, he loved them early. And after 2 or maybe even earlier always followed with my finger so he was seeing and hearing. He was also a classifier, 3rd or 4th word - a point followed by a "at is" what's this, so he built an amazing unspoken vocab before speaking fluently. And we did starfall and we sped through it, he loved it. I didn't think we were doing anything out of the ordinary, but he was. He was processing the same intake as other kids much quicker. He learned whole words, so we thought it was memorization but isn't that reading, he loved and still does, signs, so exit in a restaurant and then he spotted it on the highway, this was around 3, but still, I read early and so thought cool, but not "gifted." so he read basic readers before 4 but went from Clifford to sophisticated 6th grade science books in about 6 months. My mom says I read at 4 but not what he reads. He got to chapter books absurdly quickly. He got basic phonics on star fall but that was before really reading and they are doing familiies and stuff in pre-k but he learns whole words,as someone else mentioned, only needs it identified once. But he is now sounding out on his own to match to his vocab and is doing it correctly. I don't think he is missing anything in terms of roots, he is just learning it in his order relevant to subject not lesson plan - we discussed exo and endo yesterday because of his dreamed up exothermic spacesuit.
I actually find this thread and what the kids here do fascinating. I asked a while back about mathy kids who spontaneously start multiplying, because mine doesn't/ or didn't although he is "ahead" in understanding about numbers. His gifts are verbal but also scientific, he makes connections there like the mathy kids do, I think he learned rules for reading by reading and listening, he was able to get them almost instaneously rather than needing drill and separation of topic into parts, same with science topics. It reminds me for any Madeline l'engle fans of the description of the tesseract with the ant and the string.
DeHe
