I am new, read several posts before I wrote.

My daugher is not yet 3.5 years old. Luckily we live in NYC. Last January we had her tested for Hollingworth, part of the application. She was a month past the birthdate cut off and despite being highly recommended after testing, they feel the emotional development at this age is more important.

Because the same tester does the Hunter SB test, we thought we would do the Hollingworth test again, so that she would see the same person a few times by the time she did the SB. She whipped through the test and we got some feedback. It is nice to have a highly gifted child because they are socialable, good achievers and with some acceleration seem to get challenged. You get a child who is more gifted and even at 3 you get behaviors that are confusing. Like word play, like getting bored with tasks becasue they are too easy. Things I did not expect.

And other issues. Despite being small for a 3, her ballet teacher wants her in the class with 4s & 5s. I went to Lucy Moses to get her into a Dalcroze class, they want her to take private piano lessons. They only had one other child her age take private instrument lessons. We are not ready for her to take private instrument lessons (it is actually a big commitment for us as it turns out).

She is not going to start doing derivative equations in her head, though she does sometimes do some math in her head. Usually she will do it by showing me five fingers, take away one and you get four. And she is not reading chapter books but she is reading. There are those moments that you turn and ask, "what did you say?" but mostly it is enjoying that fact that she is gifted.

But the behaviors that seem to be rearing their head: One, because she does get things quickly and sometimes the answer just pops into her head, she rushes. She rushes and gets bored if it doesn't interest her. Preschool television is big on repeating episodes. She can love a program but if she sees it a few times, she won't watch. But if they have a new episode, she will be glued.

Her capacity for information seems very high and she wants it.

Yesterday we were playing with the Little People zoo, she was the giraffe, I was the camel. She told me that her spine was longer and showed me tracing her finger down the giraffe's neck and back. Then pointed to the camel's neck and how his spine was short. How she knew 'spine', I do not know.

She doesn't have any syndromes or ADHD. She is very healthy. But she seems to need something, the challenge. I was troubled for 24 hours that perhaps she needed the piano lessons. And we decided to start in the fall. But it is hard for me to wrap around what she needs.

I know that someone wrote that they had bad experience with Montessori. We ended up at a Montessori and it is great for our DD3 (is that correct?). She can work in the math area. By November, she was using the numbers board up to 100, totally understood base 10. They have math tools that take them into 1000s of units. She is getting great discipline for work habits which we are doing at home. The teachers are working with me to help her take her time and check her work, even when she thinks it is easy.

Ren