My 3.5 year old son does nothing by halves. He is always in the grip of some kind of extreme passion. First it was musical instruments - he memorized all major orchestral instruments, including their parts and variations, at age 2.5 (random dinner table remark at that age: "Piccolo trumpets have 4 piston valves, but trumpets only have 3".) He was using screen time to see the instruments demonstrated and learn how they play. Later, baseball became an obsession and he watched a lot of game clips on the Ipad. Soon he understood all the rules of baseball. Next came a solar system obsession. This one was more book-based, but he also used a an app called "solar walk" to get a better visual and spatial sense of the solar system.
Now, his obsession is an online game called Letterpress. It's more for adults, so he picked it up from my DH. Now DS(3) wants to play it nonstop. You have a grid of 25 random letters and you try to make the longest words possible, while also capturing territory in certain areas of the grid. So, both vocabulary and strategy come into play. DS is totally fascinated. Over the course of two months, he has gone from playing just a few simple words (aka "sun") he happened to know, to memorizing several large words such as "nonsteroidal" and "listeners." He has also become quite adept at spelling 3-5 letter words phonetically, as well as lengthening words by adding prefixes and suffixes. This has gone along with him starting to really read as well. So he's clearly learning a lot. But I feel bad that we're letting him have so much screen time and may be allowing him to neglect other areas of his development. He has been playing this game for maybe 2 hours a day (and he's only home, on weekdays, for about 5 hours).
I think that when it comes to young children, maybe especially young gifted children, it's good to follow their lead when it comes to what they're interested in learning. But when it involves an excessive amount of screentime, does this still apply? I'm curious to hear others' thoughts on this.
