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When a child can look at a set of objects and count each one by pointing...one block, two blocks, three blocks, etc. 1 to 1 counting is more than just memorizing the order of the numbers. HTH.

Mew:

I hear this all the time from my DD even while in the process of doing it. I think this is part of perfectionism. She doesn't want to do something until she is sure she can accomplish it perfectly.

crisc:

Here I equated this to simply rote counting and thinking looking at a set of objects and telling me it is 3 or 4 blocks without counting it out was counting. Boy are my checks red! I even told a friend that what she was seeing is rote counting not counting. I so need to go back and correct my mistake! Thanks for the clarification!

Dottie:


LOL. I did this too but more b/c DD dictated this by asking what this was and what that was. She was collecting the alphabet each letter at a time. She is 28 mths old and still does not really know the stupid ABC song. She will sing a little bit of it but not really interested in it. And IMHO going the other way and having a child sing the alphabet song does not guarantee understanding their ABCs. Experts have argued that they need to know them out of order more than in order.

And we all know my denial from previous posts, such as the colors and the infamous powerpoint in kindergarten!

And lastly Kriston:


I just want to correct this one section since my friend has visited her ped with the ped informing her that by 2 yrs the general public should be able to understand about 50% of the child's words and closer to 80% by 3. When she was telling me about the 2 word sentences and clarity I was a little shocked since I didn't think 2 yrs was the milestone cut off for this but her doctor said it was.

And thank you for the response on the question. Not living in the 'normal' world I just don't think I am the best judge of what my friend is experiencing. I tell her everytime I see her DD that I see improvements and I totally agreed with their wait and see approach. But it took me a while to get there b/c I always make the comparisons which is not fair to her DD but in my defense this was before accepting the GT definition for my own DD. I am now not so panicky about her child and the what is wrong with her game. (of course I never said that to my friend but thought it)

Well, I think LOGs are in play here, too. Not just denial.

A child counting 1-to-1 at age 1 is more likely to be HG+ (though not definitely HG+) than the child who can do it at age 3. But both are doing it early, and both are probably some level of GT.

DS4 is a pretty mathy kid, but he still has to think hard about subtraction. Addition he's had down since he was 3 or 3.5, and he initiates addition problems much more regularly. But subtraction still isn't easy for him and he doesn't initiate that nearly as often. They're doing no real subtraction in his pre-K; it's tackled in late K to early 1st grade at our public school.

OTOH, DS7 had mastered simple subtraction by age 3, and I think well before. I never really knew when he got it--he was just doing it one day. That tendency made it rather hard to know what he was doing when. If he saw it once, he usually knew how to do it.

I feel like my two kids--one clearly HG+ and one probably MG/MG with LD/ND (?) is helping me to see the difference between ND (or at least MG) and HG+.

Oh, and thanks for the correction about the 50%. Since we never had a problem, I guess I remembered wrongly. Sorry!

But I do stand by my statement that kids develop physically at different times, and it pays to be patient if the dr. says that's okay to do.

Meh. From your descriptions of your girls, I'd say you did pretty well the first time around!

(Though I *DO* sympathize with the feeling. I feel much the same way about my treatment of DS7 when he was very small: if only I'd realized he was HG+ instead of MG as I thought...I'd have had books appropriate to his needs! I'd have given him harder math when he showed an interest, since he had mastered the simple stuff. I'd have...I'd have... Ah, well.)

I'm SO with you on the baby talk! We never did that either. Frankly, GT or no, I don't get why anyone does it.

The only exceptions are when our DSs would mispronounce something and they was cute and funny. DS7 was obsessed with trucks, so when they went by, he'd call out "Tuck! Anuna tuck!" and it was so cute that we still do it. Similarly, DS4 called pinapple "apple people," so we still call it that.

I think those are the only two examples of anything other than real words that we ever used with the kids. But how could we not?

One thing I found interesting, and pretty useful, on the development of math skills is Stan Dehaene's book The Number Sense. Dehaene is a developmental psychologist who argues (against Piaget) that kids know a lot more math - and a lot earlier - than you'd think.

The book is interesting in part because of the story it tells about the relation between different number abilities. People have already mentioned the difference between rote counting and 1-1 correspondence. But did you know that even once a child has learned 1-1 correspondence she still needs to learn two extra skills in order to count properly. Initiating and completing a counting task both turn out to be totally different skills from keeping track of the number of items once you've started. Thus, there is a certain stage at which it is so common for children to double count the initial and final items (as in "1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5") that it doesn't even count as a mistake!

BB

So a pet peeve of mine but some people just go to it. I wonder if it is more a personality thing. I could not in a million years baby talk and hearing it makes my blood boil but it comes natural to some. It is the 'cute' factor that I was just not born with and I for one am okay with that. When I pointed it out to a friend that she was doing it she was shocked. She didn't even realize she did it but again sends my blood boiling so I am super sensitive to it. We have always just talked to the babies. My DM is a master at it. She has complete conversations with the infants asking them questions such as what their mommy did to them. She did this with my DD since birth and is probably why she was so verbal since birth. constantly gooing and cooing and quickly talking. My DM visited a friend of mine and her 4 mth old and did the same thing and my friend who never did this noticed her DD cooing more and trying to put sounds together. Right before 6 mths she put mama together but is this due to my DM talking to her and then my friend following the example or was she headed that direction anyway? Who knows but my friend was amazed at how much her DD took to the conversations.

Oh ... also on the baby talk discussion:

Correcting them when they start talking and mispronouncing words. I am such a stickler for this. I never accept the incorrect words and slow the word down syllable by syllable until she says it correctly. A lot of my friends don't do this and IMHO is probably why they have other made up words for the real thing. Or they say 'yes' and then re-pronounce it for the child but again IMHO only reinforces that they said it right. Of course we have a few words that I allowed to stay in the vocab. Such as wawa for water. I would use wawa when asking her if she wanted any so of course it extended the time she used it. Than the cute made up word that I thought was cuter than the real word and so wanted to keep was her umbrella. It was something like abelle. But I still corrected it and sadly is no longer in existence.

My DB and his wife do baby talk to their DD3 - drives me nuts. For the longest time, they had the stupidest names for everything: bottles, blankets, toys, animals, cups... the list would go on and on. My DH and I would just about lose our minds when we heard this. All I could think of was no wonder their DD was not speaking as clearly as our DD. We do not do baby talk, not even with our DD7mo.

Katelyn'sMom, from what I have read about correcting speech, you might be careful about how often you do that. I've read that this can lead to stuttering and low self-confidence. When my DD has incorrectly pronounced a word, I'll do the "yes," and correctly say the word. This has not reinforced the mispronunciation, but rather eventually she will learn to pronounce it correctly without feeling as if she's doing it wrong. After all, DD is only 3 and she's bound to mispronounce words (currently Play-Doh is "tay-toe"). My DD is already so much a perfectionist that I do not want to feed the need for perfectionism any more. Being a perfectionist myself, I don't want my DD feeling like she has to do everything right in the first try and that it's okay to do something wrong (I still struggle with this and it has greatly impacted my life in every way imaginable). Just a thought.

BaseballDad, I will have to take a look at the book you mentioned. Thanks for the tip.

What other kinds of things are considered early math? Block building?

DD is fascinated by the concept of cutting something in half, although she hasn't quite grasped the concept yet. And she's interested in learning the order of things, such as first, next and last. That doesn't seem very "math-y" to me, though.