I'm totally new to this. I'm originally from northern Europe and there we do not not separate kids in schools at any way (huge mistake!!). Sorry this is long.
DD is our only child 24mo. She is bilingual and at home we only speak our language, at the daycare she hears English. She started to talk at 9mo and immediately had 4 words. She also walked at the same age. Two languages have not slowed down her speaking at all. She currently uses mostly 5-6 word sentences in our home language and 3-4 word sentences in English. She is bit behind in English compared to our language as she has less adult interaction and mostly learns from babies her age. At 14mo I noticed she could name her body parts in English, I guess she learned it from daycare. I just once repeated them to her in our language and she has remembered them since.
She has known her alphabets for few months (both upper and lower case letter), I think she knows most of the sounds too but I do not want to test her
She started asking about them at 16mo for example by showing letters from milk bottles for me to name them. At some point I showed her starfall website and she loves to play with it. We do not do it often, not even every month as I work full-time and she goes to daycare. I prefer not to have her play with computer or watch DVDs when I'm home with her. Only way to keep her quiet in restaurant was to draw letters and have her name them. Now she is bored with it and is not interested naming them anymore. She seems to think we are silly to ask such easy questions.
She also can count to 12 in two languages and understands the concepts of numbers. We were really surprised with her dad as at 21mo she commented while we were driving that there are 3 busses next to us. Now she counts everything to inform how many things she has, like 5 markers. She can do all this in two languages.
She loves to draw and at 12mo was able to hold the pen correctly. Now for a month she has been telling us what she is drawing and there is some resemblance to be seen (snake is long and curvy, spider is tiny and has legs, ladybug is black dot with legs, bird has birdshape etc.) She also likes to draw letters like A or I but easily misses he middle line from A and I is often curvy.
She has a huge interest in computers and just by looking what we do has learned to use them little bit. She can insert DVDs and start them, she can also eject them. Increase and decrease volume and light and change songs etc simple things. She enjoys if I open word document and she can "write" on it and she is trilled to change slides on a power point presentation.
She does not have special interest in puzzles but likes to do them if we are following her. She can easily do 4 piece puzzles but needs some help with 6+ pieces. I don't think she fully understands the concept of looking how the picture should look like and then matching the pieces. She mostly just tries if they fit together or not. If pictures are small and only the size of 2 pieces she can match them together.
I'm sure she is not genius as she is not as advanced as some of the other kids I have read from. With language development it is difficult to judge as she is speaking two languages. I want to learn ways to keep her challenged in positive way without being pushy a parent. I do feel that she is smarter than either one of us is like having mine and DH intelligence combined in her. We, me and DH, are both scientist and have two doctorate degrees. I remember school being really easy for me and in subjects that I was not that good I was total underachiever as I did not understand that I should study or do homework. I actually failed my first class in grad school as I did not understand that I actually should study. I'm still struggling with laziness.
She loves to draw and she always has chance to do that. She also likes to build legos and wooden blocks. She loves to read books and was able to turn pages at 6mo when she could sit up. She enjoys playing pretend play but always need us to participate with her. She seems to really enjoy learning but does not like repeat. Lot of the "learning toys" for her age seems bit boring to her as they just teach letters and colors and she has know those for a while. More advanced learning toys are for older kids and usually require skills that 5 year old has and she has not. She is very social and happy at the daycare and most of the kids there seem quite advanced as well (all of their parents are highly educated).
Does she seem gifted or just advanced? What kind of activities and toys you would suggest? Should I help her learn to read (I'm pretty sure I could teach her as she already shows some understanding how words are build) or is it better not to help her with that and let her learn it by herself or in school later. I absolutely do not want to be pushy. I'm contend with my situation and how I have made it in life and have no need to make DD to be more intelligent than we are. The dilemma is that if she is more gifted than her parents I do not want to hold her back. I'm already stressing over her schooling as at some point we will go back to Europe and they don't have any gifted programs there. She would actually start school at 7 years old.
