On the milestones listed in the link, she is often in the middle maybe a little closer to the early side. A few of them she beat. A couple of them she was normal. She sat up on her own at say 6 months, and her first social smile was right on at 6 weeks, so normal. But I can tell you that by 6 months she was meeting the 12 month milestones at the dr (all of them). But generally she missed the gifted cut offs in the milestone link by a couple of months.
I'm a work from home mom and playing with the toys and doing the voices is not my cup of tea. What I do instead is I play kids games with her and I set aside 1 hour when I get off work where we have planned activities. This is when we do a lot of the educational stuff. She asks me usually first thing in the morning if we are doing those things today and when I ask if she wants to she says yes. We build castles and try to build them to look like a picture on a box, I have a math type game that teaches preschool math concepts with farm animals, we learn letter sounds (she taught herself quite a few of them from a TV show when she was younger. She skipped learning their names though so I just go with what she wants to remember-sounds). We have little toddler sciemce kits where we mix food coloring and water to make colors and then she can mix them with the pipette. She would do the activities in these kits all day every day if I let her and shows everyone who comes over her most recent "science experiment." Or with the letter we do, I teach her the asl that goes to the letter (the program wants her to body spell but it made more sense to me to do the asl) and if we go out to eat with someone she happily starts hissing letter sounds at them and holding up the sign. It cracks me up.
I also picked a few things she did not enjoy that I put on a shelf and quit doing with her. I only keep the projects she enjoys.
Or she taught herself to count to 10 well before age 2. But she would skip letters. So I would practice counting to 10 with her because she was ALWAYS counting to 10. And she did the same with counting to 20 next.
And if I had to pick her topic of interest--anatomy. She has to know what everything is. Not just this is the eye: what is the pink thing (tear duct) what are the hairs? What is the part that closes over the eye? What are the hairs in your nose? What is the hard thing (bone). What are bones made of?
And then she is intense with books. From under age 2 she will sit for HOURS. If I say storytime it is a STACK of books. Some longer some shorter. If it's shorter she will have me read it 2 or 3 times then she has to "read" it to me. She started that a little younger than 2, and it has grown. I'm nearly positive it is memorizing and telling back and not reading though.
So some of it is child led and some of it I introduce to her and if she likes it we keep doing it. So I guess that stuff would be parent led? Should I stop introducing new things? I'm guessing I walk a balance between enriched since i follow her lead too and hot housing since I do introduce concepts to her as well to see if I inspire an interest?
(And we get zoo memberships to go to the zoo. I try to get us out of the house as much as I can. Amusement parks, playgrounds, walks on trails in parks, beaches, science centers.)
She recently started talking about when we fed the giraffes at the zoo over a year ago so we are gearing up to go soon and see if they have the giraffes out to be fed again.
I might sound crazy: I have looked into a lot of what was mentioned. Ohio has to identify gifted learners but that's it. District has no differentiation until 3rd or 4th grade. I am in a highly rated district and there are not a lot of charters. 45 min away there is a gifted school, buuut it might be problematic getting her in the winter as it is in snowbelt. I would love to homeschool but my ex would have to give his blessing and the odds are low. I've been thinking about afterschooling if she doesn't seem challenged and I can't get teachers to budge? I know I can demand her be tested from the district at anytime but I don't think they have to give her a unique education plan if she is identified.
We have early entry kindergarten and I will look into the school board meetings
never thought of that one.
And I Def will stay on the forum!
