Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion The ultimate brag thread

I loooove this thread!

My son is 15 months old, and he is in love with language. He can clearly speak more than 100 words, can identify six or more letters of the alphabet, often speaks in sentences (His very first sentence was "I see a deer"), loves to look at books, and "reads" signs everywhere we go. He also loves music and is starting to sing while playing the guitar, tambourine, or xylophone.

Wow we can actually talk about our kids here. This is great. I guess I'll post something about my son. He is 2 years and 10 months and reading at a 1st grade level. I am very proud of him.

DS 3.8 was curled up on the couch with Harry Potter 1 last night. After spending thirty minutes with his nose in the book he said " this is a great book"! He read a couple of pages out loud without missing any words!
I guess his reading level increased by about 2 grade levels over the summer.

Interesting run of literacy ultimate brags lately! As we come to the end of the long summer holiday, I thank my lucky stars for a bookworm child - it makes life so much easier! My best potential current brag is probably that DS8 has been reading and rereading The Silmarillion with great pleasure. The new stage we've reached in the last year is that it now makes sense to recommend selected not-specifically-for-children books that we think he'll enjoy; other particular hits have been Agatha Christie's Poirot stories (although they don't half lead to interesting questions: "what is a vegetable alkaloid?", "how do you smoke opium?", "what is a pawn shop" - thank goodness I got him to spell the last before answering it ;-) and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

I don't often get round to commenting on the Ultimate Brag Thread postings, but I love reading them!

The literacy brags are interesting. DS7 seems to be advancing fairly steadily in his reading tastes, but it's hard to tell how much his reading skills themselves are advancing because he reads so much squirreled away in his room and doesn't like to read with me so much any more. Giving him a laptop with access to dictionary.com helped to make him more independent. Right now he's reading "Footfall", "Startide Rising", the "Wrinkle In Time" series, and a smattering of science-related stuff including his Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines. He looooves THGTTG.

That's pretty good accuracy. IIRC DS7 played fast and loose with articles and prepositions around that age, especially when reading fast.

She might like this rainforest 48-piece puzzle. It's got a neat layout with well-defined regions. For some reason both of my sons started with the blue butterfly when doing it the first time.

DD4.5 got bumped up to jr kinder this year (youngest in the class). The jr kinder class is the same room as the kinder and based on her level, they are going to have her do the kinder work this year (private preschool). The teachers seem really excited that she knows so much and learns so quickly. I just told them that my main objective was that she was happy and continued to have a love of learning (and that she still gets to act like the 4 year old she is). She is extremely excited about just being in the room with the older kids and said that she was so excited she was crying lol. Not sure what will happen next year when she goes to public school, but we will tackle that when it comes.

There is a store not far from us called "Pawn King."

DS4: "LOOK! That store is a CHESS STORE!!"

Speaking of DS4, he claims to have read The Magic Finger, by Roald Dahl, to himself. I have seen him wandering around with it and apparently reading it, so I guess maybe he did. It has pictures and isn't very long, but still. I'm never really sure what he can actually read, because he hasn't been at the "sit down and read a chapter book" stage. (Till now? I don't know if that's really a chapter book...sort of a long picture book or something.) He tends to be more of an obsessive consumer/rereader/random flipper-through of nonfiction books that are hard to categorize as to reading level.

This is another "Is this a Brag, or... um..." brag.

DS 3:4 has been asking about the 'facts of life.' We've told him most of it, and he seems to be pushing on the "how does the sperm get to the egg" question, which makes us nervous. Anyway, today I drew a pic of him and his brother. He said "draw a pic of ____ while he was inside your body" so I drew a fetus. He said "draw ____ when he was an egg" so I drew an egg. Things got a little more difficult from there. Suffice it to say there are two things I didn't draw. If figuring out what's missing is the hard part... he's got it down.

Sheesh.

Hard to keep secrets from this one.

LOL.

An accomplishmant from June. So, proud of the little guy. At kindergarten graduation, with 8 adults on stage, over a hundred little kids, he was not only the only one to not just get on the stage from the wrong side, but he remained blissfully unaware despite the counter urgings of all the adults as he crossed over to get his certificate. If you are going to be in the 1%: own it.

Seems worth mentioning as I'm sure it will remain in family lore and be retold to all future dates he may have.