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My DD was a (relatively) late bloomer, and didn't enter kindergarten reading. Everyone thought she would. Her preschool teacher flagged her as a "likely to read by the end of the year" kid. DD picked a couple of "how to read better" classes for summer camp (and the next summer, the camp clarified that 5yos needed to have finished K before enrolling...). She asked me to teach her how to read, and we got more than halfway through Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons before the fact that she'd done everything the book told her to and still couldn't sound out a 2 or 3 letter word became too frustrating.

A couple weeks into K, the switch flipped, and she could read. But before that, she couldn't, and it wasn't for lack of either intelligence or effort.

Errrrr..... It's not?

My K's classroom just finished the shapes last week. It took them 2 weeks. For half the classroom this was being taught in a foreign language. And this is a public school with over 75% of the kids on free lunch.

AlexsMom-yes, I'm hearing alot of that in gifted kids too...perfectionism seems to have a lot to do with it and I'm hoping it's why DD8 is still having issues with writing (like she wants it to be perfect the first time, you know?) I just always took it for granted, even when I was a child, that people would read at a certain age. I think I was a teenager before I even heard of dyslexia and was shocked to learn that there are illiterate adults holding down jobs.

The preschool teacher for DD4.5 gives a detailed assesment at the end of the school year and she pointed out to me that DD knew opposites. That didn't seem like a big deal to me, but apparently that isn't "the norm" for her age, that opposites can be sore of ambiguous and most of her age mates can't consistently identify opposites. I never taught her opposites myself, where did she learn that? lol!

My 6 year old son, who is just entering kindergarten, most assuredly cannot read. He's just now getting around to reading "The Foot Book"

I'm pretty sure I was reading chapter books by that age.

We have a list of "sight words" that they are supposed to learn in kindergarten, which are very very basic words. And he's apparently not outside the norm.

FWIW, DD's first grade teacher said that the beginning-of-year reading assessment showed she had some kids who were reading at pre-kindergarten level (i.e., not at all) and some who were reading at 6th grade level. There is a *huge* range of normal for 5-7yos.

My twins who are 5 were given a list of "sight words" for Kindergareten at the start of this school year. They are very basic, but even at that there are a lot of parents only 7 weeks into school in a panic that their kids won't pass Kinder because of the "must pass 70% at end of year" rule here in LA. I keep assuring them that it will be ok, and that they aren't expected to be reading novels by the end of the year. As the other poster pointed out there is a HUGE range of abilities in the K-1st years. DS8 was reading Narnia by 5 but our twins are reading 1-2 lines per page books with fairly simple words that they can sound out, while some of their friends aren't able to read sight words at all, and some are still struggling to read in 2-3rd grade.
I myself was a late reader. I remember very clearly being put in the "slow" reader group in 1st grade because it was with a boy I didn't like. After a few years I was light years ahead of most of my peers in reading/comprehension. Its not about parents and how much they push, expose, don't push, don't expose their children too educationally, some suck it up with a straw and beg for more, some don't, some pretend they know nothing when they are really just digesting it and will spit it back out when they are ready...and that doesn't always happen in Kindergarten (ages vary greatly at entrance to school as well, my twins are very young K'ers turning 5 after school started this year, but they have classmates that run 5-7)

This sums up my experience with the difference in a gifted child perfectly. Dd13 and I have been discussing things like spirituality and the theory of relativity and how the energy that is seen in a person's body on things like EKGs must go somewhere after the person dies b/c energy and mass never totally disappear from the universe, whether that energy continues as sentience or not... for as long as I can remember. It's not so much knowing shapes or colors or when she read that makes me look back in hindsight and go, "duh, why didn't I know what was going on with her?" as those types of things.

I guess that NT kids just may not have the same interest in many of these things and, like others have mentioned, may also have NT parents who aren't exposing them as much b/c they, too, don't think to discuss things like that with their little kids. I guess that things can be hothoused into a young child -- ranging from color names to letters to the meaning of life, but again as others have said a good parent won't do that to their child and nature is smart that way to often place a child with a parent whose innate wiring is similar enough to enrich his/her child with the types of things for which the child is developmentally ready.

Grinity, I had nearly the same book reading experience as you. When dd13 was in K, the kids were supposed to have their parents bring in their favorite short picture book to read the class (the parent read it to the class) on the child's bd. So, dd's 5th bd rolls around near the start of the school year and she has me bring in Who Moved My Cheese for kids. It truly is a quick picture book, or at least we thought so. It only has maybe one or two sentences per page but it is something like 65 pages long, which apparently was way, way too long. Dd was explaining the moral to the story, clearly not getting antsy...

LOL. Mr W would do the same thing in his "toddler class" when they were doing letter and number "familiarization," so they had him hold up the cards and tell the kids what they were.

And some K classrooms go over all the shapes for a week...Then just incorporate them into other things. For example, all the tables are identified by a shape and color. My son would come home and say, "I am now sitting with Elian at the Blue Circle table." And I would say, "Where were you sitting before?" And he would say something like at the Orange Square table.

They would label bins with words and shapes-like Math and a rectangle and would say put your math books/papers in the Math bin...it has the rectangle on it. They had a poster with shapes on it. They discussed shapes as they worked on handwriting and described things in language arts and science.

Then at the end of the first nine weeks they assessed that knowledge and identified the children with further shape needs. I think there was some additional specific work in the math book in the geometry unit but other than that shapes were a non-issue. For those that needed more work there were activities in center time. But I don't think for the majority of the kids that they spent a good portion of the year working on shapes.

I specifically remember blossoming in 3rd grade with my reading. I took off. (That would be 2nd grade now because I went to a true Kindergarten and not the new K today where it is what used to be 1st grade). I don't consider myself gifted but I was the slow and steady 1st, 2nd grade laboring at learning to read and then when I reached the top of the mountain, it clicked.

My older son went along absorbing PreK instruction in letters and sounds and listening to a lot of literature. Then puttered along in K learning his sight words, learning his blending quietly absorbing all that was being taught to him. And boom one day near Spring Break he woke up and the day before I would have classified him as a non-reader...that day he was reading like a pro, like he had done it all his life...and it increased exponentially each week.

My second son about 4 asked me to teach him to read. He was the only one in the family who couldn't and he decided he didn't like that. I sat down with him and did like 7 full lessons from Teach your Child to read in 100 lessons. He didn't want to stop. I told him 7 was enough in one sitting and we could do 7 more the next day. He said "FINE!" and took the book with him (he didn't do all the small print exercises that the parent does orally, just the big print) and worked through the book by himself for another 2 hours, occasionally asking a question. Next thing I knew he could read. We did a lot of books where I would read one page and he would read the next. And he could read ANYTHING and would ask for explanations about everything he didn't understand.

My point is that everyone (gifted or not) has a different learning path in reading and for some it is quietly absorbing and one day clicking (flat line and then a leap), for some it is laborious slow and steady(a line with a steady slope), for some it is I want to read right now and by golly nothing is going to get in my way (big bang before school age).

And I think that it is so fun to watch someone break the code.