Our daycare providers called DS (now 4:6) the little mathematician, and reported that he was doing simple computations at 2:6 (something like single-digit addition). I started keeping notes around this time, and by 2:9 they confirm that he knew how to count by 2's to 20, by 3's to 30, by 5's to 50 and by 10's to 100. Although this indicated his interest in numbers, however, I think it was mostly a function of his extraordinary memory. He solidified his knowledge of simple addition during the period shortly after this, but it wasn't until he was about 3:10 or so, that he really understood what skip counting was about. There was a moment in the car when I told him that the two series continued beyond 20, and he proceeded to count by two's, slowly at first, and then with increasing speed, until he reached 134. At that point he stopped abruptly and said "I prefer the odds". Then he proceeded to count the odd numbers up to 41, at which point he stopped from boredom. At around 3:3 an uncle asked him whether there was a largest number; that generated a winter's worth of discussions that culminated in his obsession with the notion of infinity. At some point that year he also discovered negative numbers on his own. I never really understood exactly what his computational abilities were, but at some point he learned to subtract pretty fluidly. Once, when he was around 3:10, he stopped in the middle of a baseball game we were playing to announce out of the blue how old I was when he was born. I thought it was a fluke so I asked him how old various other people were when he was born. He not only knew all their current ages, he was able quickly and accurately to figure out how old they had been 3 years earlier. Their current ages ranged from 2 to 88.
I don't know if any of this counts as interesting, or if it is relatively typical for GT kids. One thing that is interesting, and which I've mentioned here before, is that his reading didn't progress at anything like that rate during that period. Although he knew all his letters, both upper and lower case, by about 18 months, and he read simple words when he was two, he didn't really start to read beginning readers until around his fourth birthday. Lately, though, he seems more interested in reading than in math, and he has made a lot of progress quickly. He now reads at about a late first grade level.
To be honest, I have no idea how typical any of this is, and I would love to hear other stories. It's not like he does double-digit multiplication in his head, but it seems sort of interesting to me anyhow. Maybe not.
BB
