Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion What's normal vs gifted in Math?

Whoa.

It does explain why my son's jeans fit him fine one day and not the next...

Yes, well, many of us adults are familiar with that phenomenon too.

Unfortunately.

Yes, but rarely due to length! LOL! (Said the woman who missed her treadmill time for the past week...)

My DS6 loves math, he can do carrying, borrowing w/big numbers, multipication he is starting double double we call it ex 24*13 division up to 24/6 but not double double. So sounds like our sons about the same age are doing same math.

Math GT is more about using what is learned and expanding it. My daughter has always paid attention to addresses and remarked that the last two digits are the first two digits doubled or something like that (when I really want her to be looking for the address). Anyway, whatever she has learned, it is applied - everywhere. And the questions...

She is 11 now and is an amazing estimator and always has been. We were serving at a benefit dinner and when we were leaving, she estimated the number of people there and how much money they had made so far. This is just so natural for her. I don't ask her these things and most 11 year olds don't think about that.

She remembers numbers and uses them. She is not as interested in letters, except for code type things such as translations into foreign languages. I doubt she remembers the wonderful girl with which we served last night. But, she would be able to estimate the cups of lemonade and tea we served. That is where her memory (or her head) is.

Math GT for us means that I can teach DS6 something and he can follow it through to extremely hard concepts. I never had to teach him how to borrow when learning subtraction he just knew.

His math teacher has commented to me that she teaches the beginning and he follows it to the end. It's an amazing thing to watch.

Reasoning out the answers is something I think my verbally gifted son is good at and why he is able to come up with his own way of figuring out answers to math problems faster than I could do it the way I was taught. When he explains to me how he gets the answers it often doesn't make sense to me. At 10 he still isn't that interested in math but he likes it more now that he doesn't have to do long division or multi-digit multiplication without a calculator and I let him work on what he wants to work on.

My son was homeschooled for first grade and we didn't spend much time on math. We sometimes used Singapore math workbooks but I had to be his scribe because of his handwriting issues and he often just played free online math games and we counted that as math for the day. The math games let him choose the level of difficulty and I know he liked to challenge himself and his handwriting issues didn't hold him back. By seven he had most of his multiplication facts memorized but there were five multiplication facts that he would sometimes get wrong if he had to answer them quickly. It was like he had some kind of mental block on just those five and if he went too long without doing multiplication he would have to relearn those five multiplication facts. I remember wondering why the school couldn't figure out how to make accommodations for my twice exceptional kid when all I had to do was let him play free online math games and I think I even said something about this to the special ed director when we showed him my son's WIAT scores. If my son had been forced to work on simple addition and subtraction at that age and had to do all the writing himself I don't think he would have seemed gifted in math at all. He would have hated math just as much as the coloring in the lines they wanted him to do at the "rudimentary elementary" as my son called it because all they wanted him to know was rudimentary skills and no more.

This sounds like my son. He liked the game Capitalism II and
all the Tycoon games. He liked estimating how much profit a store was making and what changes could be made to increase their profit. He would like to have his own home business but there is just no way because we have too much going on in our lives right now.

The games you mentioned would interest her. And yes, it is fun to watch where kids interests lie naturally.