Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion The ultimate brag thread

A little Christmas cheer from Harpo (7)...

As I mentioned in the other thread, my kids make their gifts for each other. Harpo's writing poems for the family this year, and he's been planning them in general terms for a week or two, but got down to the actual writing yesterday. For Groucho, he wanted trochaic metre and some Christmas-y imagery--bells, dancing, singing, trees, but he was having a bit of trouble getting started. He chewed on his pencil a while yesterday, and then said, "I know, Mommy! I like that William Blake poem about the tiger, so I'll just do that one, except with my words." Half an hour later, he brought me this:

Santa, Santa, coming here
Bringing lots of Christmas cheer;
Trees and presents, toys and books,
He eats the treats that <Groucho> cooks.

<Groucho, Groucho,> happy boy
Laughing, clapping, Christmas joy;
Games and dances, carols sung,
Glad tidings told and bells are rung.

Christmas Wishes to Groucho by Harpo.

Thanks for the explanation. It's neat and I was able to follow the Wikipedia explanation until it got to converting fractional binary numbers. I'll have to go back to that after a good night's sleep. DD6 likes puzzles so if I can grasp it well enough to explain it to her, she might enjoy doing some conversions.

I love it! Very sweet.

JB

I like it, too--he's a sweet boy, I think! I really like that he picked up on Blake's shift to iambic metre in the fourth line of each stanza.

I have to go check on that Wikipedia article you recommended, too--it sounds interesting!

minnie

I'm not sure if this a brag or just really cute...

I tucked in DD2 and asked her to choose a book to look at while she fell asleep. She chose a ducky board book (I thought - oh, that's cute - she picked the ducky book over the older books that she had been interested in). I peeked in 2 minutes later and she was looking at a book about the International Space Station which we had read the night before. A while later when she had to get up to go potty, I asked her if she had been reading about the space station. She said very matter-of factly, �No I was looking at the picture of the man who was upside down and the man who wasn�t upside down. Why was the man upside down?�

And.... you're over my head on metre... (we have mom for that). :-)

And very cute LadybugMom!

JB

I had a happy moment tonight: DS4.5 appears to be reading words at last! (That would be dumb to say on any other forum, but I knew you'd all understand!)

The back story: DS4 has been obsessed with stories and has been verbal since he was just a few months old, but he hadn't been able to read. For several reasons, I thought there might be a problem with his eyes or with vision processing, so we saw a developmental optometrist. He confirmed that DS4's vision is "immature" and gave him reading glasses. Things have greatly improved since then.

Well, I was wearing my Junior First Lego League shirt that says "Coach" on the front, and he read it aloud, saying, "That 'o-a' says 'oh,' so that says 'coach,' right?" Yes, he even read something not easy to sound out! I made the shirt away from him and hadn't shown it to him, so I don't think he had heard the word before in relation to the shirt either. I think he really read it!

He read a couple of other words tonight, too, after that, so it just seemed like something had clicked for him. Yay!

It would be so nice if reading is for him like writing was: he just gets it all of a sudden. I'd be very relieved if he just outgrew whatever vision or processing issue he had!

Oh, and love the math and poetry! So cool!

Kriston, that's great! (Our younger DS is really into "Between the Lions" on PBS because he really wants to read, but he's not quite there yet.)

Can't wait to hear more about your DS4 over the next few months.

JB

He's been really into it the last few months, and the glasses appear to have really helped him. He's been wanting to sound things out for over a year now. That's one of the reasons I worried that there was a problem. A kid who writes words and sounds things out orally, but doesn't like to look at the words on the page? Something's not right there...

His not reading has contributed mightily to my GT denial with him. I am a big believer in letting kids develop as they will--however that is--so I have had major qualms about stepping in on this. I'm fine if he's not GT. (Oh, wouldn't life be easier if he fit in perfectly well with the speed at public school! Ah!)

But he does show many other earmarks of GTness, and I worried about 2E issues. So if he picks up the reading ball and runs with it the way he did with writing, I'll be so relieved! it would make things make so much more sense with him!

Go, DS4, go!

High fives for Mr. 4, Kriston! That's great news--a nice early Christmas present, in fact!

minnie