Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Is it really that unusual?

It just sounds like she really doesn't know what she's looking for. Growing up I was always more on the math side of things. I remember being very upset at my K teacher for telling the class that you couldn't subtract bigger numbers from smaller ones (I remember thinking, duh, that just means you have negative numbers!) and in 3rd grade the school tried to higher an algebra teacher for me (who rarely showed up... ugh). Despite that I definitely had some teachers who questioned if I should be in the gifted program (even though I had an IQ test in 1st). One in particular kept threatening to have me pulled out because I was always a bad speller and never put any effort into grammar related homework (I HATED grammar). There was definitely this idea that to be gifted you had to be perfect in everything.

I'm assuming verbal kids are just going to be more obvious by how they speak. Obviously, it also depends on a kid's personality (if your kid doesn't volunteer info or ask questions then the teacher just might not notice) or it could very well be that the teacher doesn't notice the kids' advanced questions in math and then the kids shut down and give up on asking them.

However, if she's been teaching 30 years with and average of 80 kids in K every year that means 2400 kids have been through that school during that time. If 1% are gifted you have 240 kids and I have a really hard time believing that ALL of them were verbally gifted!!!! That would mean if your kid is the only kid that's advanced in math that means in your school you have only 0.4% of kids that are advanced in math vs. verbal, which sounds very, very unrealistic (clearly there are always statistical outliers but this one is just insane)! Now I could believe that the kids were not as gifted in math (I have non clue where your kid is at...) so they didn't get noticed because of that but still...

I think this is true. Early exposure to reading is much more common for preschoolers than math, and it's not as easy to take off on. My son as a preschooler understood conceptually multiplication, division, fraction operations etc. You could give him word problems and he'd solve them in his head. But if shown a word problem on paper or mathematical notation, he would have been lost and possibly not tested much ahead. While in reading, the reading doesn't necessarily need to line up with other skills for kids to be able to "show their stuff". He's doing algebra as a 4th grader after I stalled him the past couple years while his writing skills came to the level where he could carry out multi step problems on paper.

My son been to pre-school nearly a year, and today, pre-school teacher just told me how shocked she was when she found how advanced DS4 is, even she knew he loves numbers, time, calender..etc, but last week, DS 4 was talking squre root totally amazed her.

I think the teachers had not much experince with kind of gifted children expecially come with math, and she told me DS was bit slow thinking and has hearing problem when he just entered pre-school, while he was already reading, knew mutipulcation ,divison etc

Mathmatical gifted children have their special way to figure out math problem.

I used to teach DS4 the normal way to do long division, which he hated, then he got his own way to work it out

like:

845 divided by 5

85/5=17, so 850/5=170 therefor 845/5=170-1=169

I guess it makes sense that they don't 'see' when a child is mathematically gifted as easily.

My DS6 was doing 2nd-3rd grade math last year in K and my DD5 is capable of doing 1st grade math with no issues in K. I know many kids who are ahead of the K math here but not necessarily gifted in math just had parents who helped them learn. It seems easy to be ahead of K math at least from my exposure to it anyways.

DS6 dislikes long division -- but he enjoys the short division way they taught him in k12 3rd grade math I have to make him do the long way occasionally so he doesn't forget it.

That's exactly what makes me think that dd10 has a gift in the mathematical realm. While she doesn't likely have all of the stuff memorized that the other kids do, she is really creative in coming up with new ways to do things in math and she intuitively sees things like where the distributive law applies and where it doesn't (multiplication like area of a triangle, which I had to think about myself when she said that it was easier to half either the base or the height and then multiply rather than half the product of the two.)