I've been starting to suspect that my daughter might be quite intelligent. She's my firstborn, currently 6 (in year 2). She's addicted to books, some intended for kids at least twice her age (when she was 4 she insisted that I get her the DK Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Life, which is 400 pages long; she read it all and remembers a heck of a lot of it) - but the thing that impressed me recently was a story she wrote (entirely of her own accord). Am I just a doting mother, or is this actually good for her age?

https://imgur.com/a/jdfAe

I started looking back through her old stuff and noticed that it's potentially out of the ordinary. These are from when she was 5:
https://imgur.com/a/hN6Qb
- I'm pretty certain she drew the dinosaur skeleton entirely from imagination..

And there's this gem from her 4th year: https://imgur.com/a/nbPOo

She's been doing this since she was 3 - this is the first piece of evidence I can find: https://imgur.com/a/JT4Cl (my translation)

I'm not sure where she is on the maths side of things, as she is quite introverted and spends most of her time drawing, reading, and imagining. She could add at 3 though; there are a couple of scrawled sums in a notebook she stole from me at the time. That seems impressive. Admittedly the numbers are all backwards. I don't have a reference point for "normal", so can you guys help me out here?

Having some perspective will help a lot with regards to judging what she's capable of academically, and fuelling her passions at the right level. Also since we live in the UK there are a lot less opportunities for gifted kids than in the US, so I'm thinking maybe the online school would be good, but obviously only if she's at the right level.

Thanks!

All of your links point to the same place, which contains the "Hello!" story. I'd be interested to know what technology assistance was available, since she clearly used a word processor, and that might have helped her a lot with punctuation and spelling, but overall I'd say that's pretty good work for a 3rd-4th grader (8-9yo).

Post-edit, I see more of the work, including the hand-written book of poems, so no help there. That does seem to be written output at least a year ahead.

You might want to remove the child's name from the image. Personally-identifying information is a bad idea.

@Dude

She did the story on an ancient version of Word, so the spelling will have been corrected, but I think she punctuated it herself.

I'm sure she can't be identified from that name, by the way.

Anyway, maybe I should give some more detail, seeing as quite a few people have seen this without posting. Something that struck me at the time was the fact that when she was 18 months old, she asked me what this statue was. It was a hatching dragon. A week later, she pointed it out and said "a dragon baby!" - she has a better memory than me...

Another thing that strikes me is that sometimes it takes several times calling her name for her to hear me when she's reading. I think she has a lot of overexcitabilities, if not all. Maybe it's linked to intelligence? Or ADHD?

I think the main reason that people haven't posted is that it is rather impossible to say if a child is gifted or not based on a few samples. Furthermore, most of us have no clue what "normal" is any more than you do. There are kids here that probably did far more at that age and there are kids here that probably did far less. Output isn't always indicative of IQ.

Are the samples more impressive than what my kids did at that age? - yes. Does that make her gifted? who knows, I'd probably guess yes but at the same time if you were to look at the school work for my two, you'd probably guess wrong on which one scored higher on the WISC.

As far as fueling passions - I think most here would say the same thing for any child of any IQ - follow their lead.

I'm not sure which online school you're referring to to comment there. Is she happy at her school? Is she learning? Does she have friends?

The main reason why we ended up testing was because school wasn't working and we needed something to back up our requests for change. In our case there were options and testing helped open doors to those options and provide info on which doors might be the best fit.

If you want to know her IQ wait a little while and get it tested. If she is happy at school then just read and do things with her outside of school hours.

Eta. Since your child is strong in the language area you could try the RUF gifted estimates.

ITA with Chay - the samples you provide don't really supply enough information to determine your DD's IQ, even a ballpark range. There is a huge range of reading/drawing/handwriting/composing skills at age 3 to 7, and the timelines of those skills alone aren't usually reliable for establishing IQ. While it is safe to say that your DD is above average, it is hard to speculate more.

In looking at the typed story, I am extremely impressed with her punctuation and spelling as well as typing/proofreading skills. My kids (DYS level) were much older before they were able to punctuate and type/proofread that well.

While your DD does have a fairly common first and last name, it is probably still safer to remove such identifying info.