Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion When did your child start to read independently?

Maybe something for another thread, but I am noticing a recurring theme of boys preferring to read non-fiction books. I am wondering if this is peculiar to gifteds or a boy thing? My 9-year-old son has been exploring fiction books, but he still comes back around to DK Eyewitness books and the like. He enjoyed reading the Magic Treehouse books but they are too easy for him now.
He also prefers to watch shows that are knowledge-based--Mythbusters, Beakman's World, Animal Planet/Nova/NatGeo shows.
My brother (definitely gifted) used to read encyclopedias back in the 80s. Any ideas on this?

I agree with cricket3, not just boys, and I'll also put in that I don't think it's gifted-related either - many children seem to prefer non-fiction at many stages. Learning true things is interesting to everyone, why not :-)

DS also adores Theodore Gray's The Elements - I got both the book and the set of cards, wondering whether that was redundant, but not a bit of it; they get used in different ways. Somewhat relatedly, one of the best things about a school we went to visit recently was that they have one of those giant periodic tables that has a sample of each (well, almost :-) element alongside the symbol in the box. We've as a family always been fascinated by those. You can get coffee tables made like it, but they are way outside our price range. Maybe if we win the lottery!

DS10 also watches those kind of shows pretty much exclusively. Mythbusters, Through the Wormhole, Stormchasers, SciFi Science, How It's Made.

Other non-fic books he liked when he was younger: Guiness Book of World Records, Ripley's Believe it or not and his very tattered Optical Illusions book.

Based on what I see in the classroom, I would say not a gifted thing, but definitely see a trend that has boys gravitating to non-fiction significantly more often than girls, and more often than they gravitate towards fiction.

DD10 also prefers to watch those types of shows. Even when she was younger, she would rather watch How It's Made or CyberChase than anything on the Disney Channel or Nick Jr. She'd much rather read fiction though.

DD loves non-fiction almost as much as Harry Potter.

(For the Theodore Gray fans, you might be interested in The DIsappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements. We've been reading it daily-very entertaining)