I don't actually know where to start... I'm sure that DS4.5 is gifted to some degree. How much? He hasn't been tested. I need suggestions as to where we should go from here. He is in a regular preschool (we found a co-op school with a really great bunch of teachers, but they have no experience with giftedness.) The teachers are beginning to ask me what we are going to do with him next, which is causing me some stress as are other things in our lives right now. My husband may be losing his job in the near future and we are going to be in major trouble if that happens. We are in Reno, the home of the Davidson Institute. I know that they have a program for 5 and up, but require all kinds of tests and take only the top of the top. I don't know the first thing about how and where to get testing done, and if it even makes sense if he isn't that gifted. The school district will make him wait another year and a half to start regular school because his birthday is in October. Also, because of budget cuts, the Governer is talking about eliminating the gifted programs in the schools in Nevada anyway.
Please excuse MY inability to describe things. I am the least verbal person in the family. I am a visual artist and have always dreaded having to express myself with words!
DS is a very verbal child however! His abilities seem to advance in spurts. He started talking around 9 months, but only said a handful of words although we knew that he understood a lot more. The floodgates opened at 1y4mo, and by 1y5mo he was talking in very complete sentences. He seems to have a natural understanding of grammar and has always spoken very clearly, pronouncing every sound and syllable.
He learned the alphabet in order, counting to 10, and all the letter sounds in just a couple of weeks at two when he was given some stick on vinyl letters and numbers for the bathtub. It didn't occur to us to try earlier! His sight word vocabulary grew a lot between 2 and 3. He started writing on his own at 3, and wrote a letter to Santa that Christmas at 3y2mo. By 3y7mos, he *seemed* to be reading his own board and easy reader books, but we also thought he might have just memorized them. During this time, he was reading increasingly complex books with Daddy at night, and had become completely obsessed with spelling and sounding out words.
Then, on his fourth birthday he was given a lot of new books and simply started reading them. The floodgates had opened once again. Now, he reads everything he can get his hands on, for pure pleasure, (out loud) without many problems at all. He learned about punctuation very quickly and reads with such passion. It's really cute! When he gets to a word he has never seen before he sounds it out or asks for help and moves on. He has progressed very rapidly in the last couple of months and is probably reading between a third and fourth grade level now. He likes the Dinosaur Cove books and I just ordered some Captain Underpants for him. The other night, when he should have been asleep, we caught him reading Doctor Doolittle (the original book, nothing "Disney-fied" in this household!) under the covers.
I think what is happening is that he is keeping everything to himself and waiting until he knows that he can do something absolutely perfectly and then he just DOES it. (Potty training happened like this.)
One other unique ability just surfaced. He is writing backwards. He likes to write words in the air with his finger, and started writing out a word for me. I pointed out that it was backwards to me, and without skipping a beat, he started writing backwards so that I could read it. Yesterday he wrote something on paper backwards and was delighted when I held it up to the window for him to read! Tonight DH asked him to read the cover of National Geographic upside down and he did it with no problems.
I call him my little engineer. From an early age he liked to build things with his bristle blocks. We have gears and wheels with the set. When he was 3, he saw someone throwing a pot on a potter's wheel, then went home and built one that turned around, and even included a foot pedal. He builds extremely detailed, very well engineered things. He likes to look at a drawing in a book (the bear's cottage in Goldilocks and the Three Bears for example) and make it out of his blocks in 3D. Recently, he did a series of drawings of the vehicles from Bob the Builder. He sat down and, looking at his set of die-cast models, drew them remarkably well! Maybe some of MY genes are in there after all!
I'm sorry that this is so long. I am truly grateful to have found this forum, and appreciate any input.
