Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Pre-school Burning toddler question - shapes / puzzles

I would like to know if this is normal 1.5 yr old behavior or not, and what your experience was with your kids and puzzles.

DD is almost 18 months. She mastered knob / chunky puzzles a while ago and doesn't have the fine motor yet for jigsaw (she gets mad at them).

I don't know if this is a skill that developed because of how puzzle obsessed she is (and I helped by bringing rather a lot home)....

but lately she's been seeing black silhouettes of complex shapes and she knows just what they are. The other day she saw the silhouette of an owl and immediately signed owl. Yesterday, she picked up this fake spy ID card that fell out of a children's spy book we have. It had a small black silhouette of a man's head and shoulders, like a license picture.

She signed "man" and then pointed to her ear and then pointed to the barely perceptible curve on the side of his head where his ears should be. I asked where his nose was and she touched her nose and pointed to the center of his face.

She can do most of the chunky and knob shapes, ABC, and number puzzles we have that don't have any images underneath, but still...

We only have signs for ball and star and she'll point out shapes resembling those everywhere we go. (Not to mention she knows stars aren't always shaped like that. She asked if my diamond earrings and all the freckles on my arm were like stars.) She bit a piece of her banana off a few weeks ago and signed "chair" over and over and pointed at it. It did, indeed, look like a chair.

(Regardless of whether or not this is developmentally on target, I'd love to Google for more information on this stuff. Reading about children and brain development is a sometimes hobby of mine right now lol. Would I be searching for "abstract thinking" or something else?)

Thoughts and experiences?

I forgot what it's called but I've read that it's a later development. The reason I remember is that Walmart had a t-shirt that had a collage whose edge clearly made a drum set. My son has and loves his rockstar drumset. I said Look at that shirt! Look what it is!! And he started telling me all the pictures inside the collage. If he had seen the drumset he would have been excited and REALLY wanted that shirt. That's when I remembered that I had recently read that little kids couldn't see stuff like that. I can't remember what that's called though.

I can't remember, but here's some fun optical illusions I found on google while trying to remember. http://slodive.com/inspiration/optical-illusions-for-kids/

DS1 did that at about that age, or maybe a little closer to 2. I nearly died, though, because the first thing he did it with was an alphabet sticker book, while on a public bus. He did the entire darned sticker book faster than I could have. Trust me, we got looks.

I think it's wierd. I've tried to sound people out about it, and you're the first person who seems to have anything like a similar experience.

I have wondered if his ability to spot certain animals is connected (he is less fooled by camouflage than most), becasue that seems like a more evolutionarily-useful skill that isn't very different. And I wonder if this is somehow an expression of asynchrony or "thinking different" caused by an unusual developmental progression.

He's 3 now, and is not as strikingly good at this as he used to be. He's actually lost skill with it (although only very very slightly).

-Mich.

(Incidentally, sticker puzels were a huge thing that saved us from many temper tantrums, becasue of the problem with handling jigsaw pieces, so you might want to stock up )

I don't know if this is related, but my brother and my uncle are two of the best animal-spotters I have ever seen. Both of them are color blind (as was my grandmother - very unusual). I have read that people with color blindness are better at spotting outlines, because they depend less on color - apparently the Army used color-blind soldiers for this purpose in WWII?

For the record, he ain't colour-blind

He used colour terms like "cyan" and "yellow yellow orange" accurately at 2.5, I remember because it seemed to take him a long time to grasp the compass directions nomenclature, and he got that and the similar colour wheel colour naming at the exact same time . My family has unusually good colour vision. He seems to have inhereted it. He also had all the blue-green hotspots, blue, green, and grue from as early as I could tell, so I think he sees them inately as distinct. When I was talking to him about colour at 9 mos old, I used the term grue with him because he asked about it!

I'm a bit of a colour geek at times

-Mich (who HADDDDDD to wear red this morning)

My DD was like that and did jigsaw puzzles reversed where the only thing she could see was the solid color of the shape beneath. I didn't really think about it, she just started doing it because she was bored of doing the picture side.

It's probably just packaged into the whole visual-spatial skill strengths.

I didn't think to much of this either but other people used to remark about it, that from the time she was identifying letters, words and started reading it didn't matter what type of font it was or whether is was forward/backward/upside down. I found out that there is a little educational science to the whole font thing with learning to read but DD was well past that by then.
It's just part of their package.

Yes, we absolutely saw this very early with DD. She was obsessed with countries and states for a while, and was always seeing state and country shapes everywhere. As I recall, one of our oddly shaped wooden spatula heads looks like Egypt, and some other country looks like Dora's hair, and Uruguay (Paraguay?) looks like a Christmas tree. Her toast was always being bitten into state shapes. Sticks, shadows, and playground equipment were often numbers and letters. This all freaked me out a bit at first. She was under two.

DS did the same thing, but not as much. Or maybe we were just used to it. I don't remember him ever doing it with geography; he hasn't been as precocious with that.

Oh, and I notice DS4 reading books upside down sometimes. He's relatively fluent at a low level now (reading aloud like a pretty well on-track first-grader, I'd say?) I remember DD doing this as well as an emerging reader. She would never do it now. Do all kids pass through this or is it specific to a type of learner?

See, this is totally not a strength of mine. I don't remember ever memorizing maps and even now I'd be hard pressed to identify states based on their outlines... Florida, California, and Hawaii would probably be the main ones I'd get right.

This is just a crazy skill I didn't see coming and DH and I both were pretty shocked when she did that with the Spy ID. Of course this skill, whatever it is, isn't something listed on any milestone table ha.

She's been pointing out the shapes of letters and signing the letters since 16 months. She will sometimes accurately name them when they are upside down. The other day she was analyzing the back of a book I was reading with small print and she picked out an M, pointed to it, and signed "milk" for it (we taught her associated words because many of the alphabet letters look very similar when she signs them.)