I would feel foolish posting this anywhere else but many here have experience with 2e kids so I'm going to take that risk. I have a three year old who is obviously very bright but cannot count past four. It's so odd and incongruous with his other abilities that I can't help but think there is something going on. I will keep an eye on it but wanted to write and see if any of you have seen something like this before and what, if anything I should be looking for.
My son is almost 3.5. He has a gifted older brother (probably highly gifted but we don't have an accurate score because he didn't cooperate with parts of the WPPSI when he was four). Like his older brother, DS3 started to talk at seven months. He was speaking in sentences by the time he was 14-15 months old. He loves puns and makes up his own. His speech is so precise and his vocabulary so large that almost every day people comment on how "advanced" he is (even in the Bay Area, where there are lots of bright kids!) He is starting to read and spell on his own with no assistance from us. He is obsessed with puzzles and can quickly do 100 piece puzzles that are for kids twice his age. He does Lego sets for nine year olds (following the directions with little assistance). At the age of two he was able to run up to maps in public parks and find where we were and locate objects and then show us where they were in real life.
BUT. He cannot remember how to count past four. We don't go over it a lot or push it but it's so odd that we will count an object together and he always says, "1,2,3,4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 6, 7, 8, 9. . . " He can never remember that five comes after four, no matter how many times I tell him. Yesterday I was curious and we counted objects to ten and after a few repetitions, he got it but the following day he forgot it all over again. I don't think his memory is poor. He tells elaborate stories about past events and has parts of fairly complex books memorized. He just cannot seem to remember what comes after four.
The other fact that I find odd is that he has recently started to spontaneously do addition (adding up to five). He'll run around telling us the sums of various numbers and sometimes he says "3+2=5" or "4+1=5". This causes my older son to wonder aloud how DS3 can add up to five but cannot remember that five comes after four.
For context, my husband is a highly gifted mathematician and my older son seems to be, also. He was counting to twenty at fifteen months, multiplying and dividing in his head at three and doing factorials at the age of four (but is just starting to really read now in kindergarten). So I don't have a good way to gauge if this is normal for a three year old but it seems so off for this particular child that I wanted to check in for some perspective. Have you ever seen something like this before?
