Last night, he asked us why the planets that are orbiting the sun don't float away or hit other planets, and if it was due to gravity, was the gravity in their molecules? And why didn't they all have the same orbit? After we fumbled through that answer, he asked how factories make things, what machines are used and how do they put the things together. Then after that, how do brakes make a car stop. How do pistons make a car go? Why does the earth have water? Why are some things solids and some gases? Why do we die? And on and on and on.<<evil grin>>
Oy. We used to say DS was so good at interrogating, he could work for the CIA. Incidentally, having a DS who is also fascinated by physics, to the best of my knowledge, scienctists haven't figured out why things have gravity, but you could say it's in their molecules, since everything that has mass has gravity, and the more mass somehting has, the more gravity it has. WHen the apple falls from the tree, the ground pulls on the apple, but the apple also pulls slightly on the ground. Cool, huh? My DS6 wants to know what gives stuff mass -- there's some sort of theoretical subatomic particle (Higgs Boson) which hasn't been observed yet, which is supposed to do that.
In andwer to the original question, I can tell you as a pediatrician that I see lots of 4 year-olds who can't count to 5 and don't know their colors. The official developmental screening tool we use in practice (the Denver II) has counting 5 objects and naming 4 colors correctly as 4 year milestones. On this discussion forum, that's shockingly late, but it's the truth.
As a parent: DS6 knew all his letters (upper and lowercase) and the sounds they made before he was 2, but couldn't read at all till age 5 (had us baffled). DD5 learned the last of her letter sounds at 4, well after she started sounding out words while she was still 3. And their cousin, almost 6, who does incredible creative art on a level I couldn't have imagined, can spell and write/type hundreds of words, but still doesn't know the sounds of all the letters.
So regardless of intelligence and environment, certainly kids learn what they learn when they're ready. Even the bright ones.
