Hi Everyone,
I have a 15 month old daughter, who is my first child. I know, try to hear me out before rolling your eyes at another person who thinks their baby is exceptional!
I will start with my main goal and then explain where she is at, and hopefully you can tell me how I can achieve balance with her. I am hoping to avoid any hothousing while making sure that she feels stimulated and challenged by her environment based on her interests. At this point I am just using my intuition as reaching out to many sources including my pediatrician has proved not very helpful.
At her 9 month appointment was the first time I thought something might be going on. If you asked her, she could tell you the sounds a dog, sheep, cow, and snake say. The nurses made comments about this, and I just thought it was cute. Fast forward to her first birthday, and I was making one of those chalkboard signs with a spot for their words. We along with her childcare provider started writing her words, and was surprised that she had over 100 words before she turned 1. This seemed cool to me, but I was encouraged by our child care provider to start looking into what is average.
As recommended on other posts I have read Dr. Ruf's levels of giftedness and have been astonished at what she can now do as compared to those who have tested gifted in the book.
What has me wondering what to do next is her love of letters and the alphabet. We put those foam letters in her bath and noticed that she knew quite a few of them at 14 months. I showed her all of them, out of order and at 14 months she could tell correctly say the name of every letter in the alphabet, as well as 5 numbers and 3 shapes.
She is now 15 months and can correctly identify all lower case and upper case letters of the alphabet, count to 10 (although sometimes she skips 5), identify the shape star, square, triangle, diamond, rectangle, moon. What is really interesting is that she looks for letters and shapes all over her environment. Signs in the airport, things printed on the wall at a restaurant, numbers on the curb, etc.
As a first time mom, it has been very strange to engage with other moms of kids the same age. Sometimes people ask me what classes/flashcards I have her doing, sometimes people ask why I don't just let her be a kid. It's really frustrating! I am a school counselor, so I definitely work with kids - but high school kids so my knowledge of early childhood education is mostly just from research and instinct. We do let her watch some videos with ABC's and numbers on them from youtube, but they are only a few minutes long. I truly think she just is very interested in letters and numbers - and sees it as a treat to go into her bath so she can visit her letters.
Here are the basics:
Very empathetic - would cry when another baby cried from birth to today.
Rolled over at 4 months
Crawled at 5 months
First word around 6 months - hard to tell because of babble.
At 9 months could say 4 animal sounds...
Walked at 9 months
about 75 words at 11 months
Over 300 words at 14 months
Currently at 15 months - can identify all lower case and uppercase letters of the alphabet
Knows about 6 shapes
Knows about 4 colors (this is the one she is working on the most)
Can count to 10 and identify numbers out of order up to 10.
Flips around numbers and letters to make other things (9 to 6) etc.
Says 3-4 word sentences such as "all done milk" and "oh no dropped it", "off sleep sack please" that kind of thing.
My question is this: should I be exposing her to the sounds that letters make and taking her to the next level of literacy since she already knows all the letters? Is that too much for someone her age, or am I just meeting her where she is at because of her interests? I'm not interested in being a tiger mom or hothousing her, but I want to find the balance of exposing her to the things she's interested in and also just letting her be and explore her world.
If it matters, she will be starting daycare next month at 3 days a week, and will be home 2 days a week. I do think she will get some exposure to early learning there, as well as learning how to be in a group, share, control your body etc. which I think are valuable.
On the weekends and days she is home we normally read, do puzzles, go to outings such as the library, swim lessons, playdates, we have a zoo membership which also has an aquarium, go to the park, etc. She gets a lot of child-centered interaction, I just want to be sure i'm not pushing her too hard.
My mom taught me to read early, and is pushing me to start teaching her - so that's part of where my question comes from.
Thanks so much for listening - this is a lonely business!
