Well, our school meeting is Tuesday and we've got lots of good samples from DS to bring to the meeting. DW and I have talked, and we're optimistic that this will be a productive meeting. Our primary goal is to talk about getting DS testing (the school is not required to do this until officially entering K but they may choose to make an exception). The second goal is to discuss what we're going to do for next year.

At any rate, in a pure anecdotal, unscientific manner, I'm interesting in your thoughts. I suspect that DS might be in the HG range--but this is just my suspicion. He's currently 5y 4m.

DS didn't read at an exceptionally early age. He was probably sight reading at 4.5y or so but it's really hard to tell (could have been earlier; he's always loved books). He has always had a nearly photographic memory, and he learned counting at a young age. I want to say that he was counting up to 100 by 3, but my memory is hazy. He got negative numbers almost immediately. About the time that he turned 5, he taught himself Roman Numerials up to 17 because they where used in a chapter book that had 17 chapter :-) . He proudly announced to us that "some people count with numbers this way!" At that time, we started showing him a little more about numbers and within about a week he knew all his Roman Numerials and decided that he'd write all of the RN up to some ridiculously high number like 100 or 500.

Not long after that, one night at the dinner table I showed him how to do simple addition. I did about 6 or 8 math problems first starting with one column, then two column, and then three column (no carry-over/regrouping). I talked him through it and then wrote out a few problems for him to do. He got it immediately and from there things just exploded. Fast forward a couple of months and now he knows his times table, does math with carry over, subtraction with carry over, exponents, and roots and some basic algebra. When I showed him how Fibonacci numbers worked, the next day he got out his simple calculator as used it to get Fib. numbers in the thousands. Because MS Word has a lot of neat equation symbols I get asked about things like much greater than (>>), much less than (<<), approximately equal to, and so on... I used to worry that I'm teaching him things out of order, but really I'm letting his curiosity direct things. And by teaching, we're literally talking about 15 minutes at the dinner table or during bath time. Now that we have bath crayons, that's really his favorite time to ask me what the "googolth root of 8 is". :-)

His reading is fairly advanced too, but it evolved over a longer period of time. He can read Little Golden books without problem. At night we take turns reading Harry Potter (2nd book) and he reads very well, including using proper inflection. He'll get stuck on new large words but he does attempt to sound them out. Generally I'm surprised once a night on some large word that he does read (even if he's sight reading it).

He loves using the computer to look up things on Wikipedia. It makes "booklets" about things like all the planets including moons, etc. Generally I can show him how to do something once, and then he'll do it all on his own. For his last show-n-tell at school he created one of his booklets on the planets and brought in one for every student (we had to warn the teacher that this was coming!)

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. This has actually be therapeutic for me! Collecting my thoughts on exactly how we got here. But for those of you who have been there, what are your thoughts on DS?

Thanks.

JB