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I just read that list and the ones for 1-2nd grade and I am floored. They do not seem accurate based on my experiences, but maybe I don't know what typical is. My girls are more verbal than mathamatical, but still, my oldest was able to one to one count by 24 months, knows complex shapes by 1.5 years, and add and subtract, skip count, tell time, and that sort of thing at three. I really don't know what her friends can and cannot do. Think of it this way though: your friends probably have a similar educational background and perhaps even a similar IQ to you, so their children may be more like your children. Children with delays may be factored into this number too. It actually makes me feel a little nervous when I read things that suggest my four year old is doing things 7 and 8 year olds are starting to do...

The milestones are guidelines and only guidelines. They are not IQ tests that can determine whether or not child is gifted -but they can be important checklists that parents and caregivers can use to be sure a child is on track.

My very typical dd (read that average), reached almost every mile stone very very early. I was convinced she was going to Harvard. My 2-E son did not know his alphabet until he was 8, could not recite the months of the year until about the same time. He still mixes up his zip code at age 14. Yet, he is the one with high "intellectual horsepower" as measured by WISC IV. These check lists helped us to understand that we needed to get more data about his development, and we learned that in addition to his intelligence, he has some glitches in his learning profile that needed to be addressed.

As someone else noted - toddlerhood is marked by some amazing and uneven growth spurts. The milestones are guidelines and "normal" is defined by the bell curve of a random sample. Parents can be proud and breathe a sigh of relief when their kids are on track, or even ahead of the curve. Sometimes kids stay ahead of the curve, sometimes their peers catch up. But, don't underestimate the abilities of your neighbor who might be slower to meet milestones. Sometimes the turtle wins the race.

That list seems really low. My 3.25 year old is using the soroban I got him. I gave to him because they take 4 year olds into the Soroban class so I thought I get him interested in it.

I don't think the 4 years olds will be counting to 5 in that class. I hope not.

I just wanted to update that my DD who will be 3 in July, and who has never particularly enjoyed numbers, has been counting up a storm. There is no more guessing going on, and there was very little prodding her to take this leap.�

She actually went straight from not really enumerating to (obviously enumerating really well and) adding small sums. It happened almost simultaneously.

She invented a game where she counts objects in a room and then adds two of those objects together.�

This was my language girl tonight: �"There are three pictures on the wall, but if I think the plate is a picture, there are actually four pictures on the wall. And, there are 1,2,3,4,5 lights in the ceiling. So, four plus five is 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9. Nine!"

Still not her forte, but I have to say this is amazing me.

This was about 4-5 yr olds:


Is this some sort of weird David Adam's tribute? Do kids really just stop in the middle of a group of 10 like that? I don't understand why if I child can figure out the way numbers work to count TO 42 that they would just stop there? Got bored and wandered off to do something else, sure, or lost their train of thought (kind of the same thing). But the idea that having gotten that far that suddenly they don't understand past "The meaning of life, the universe and everything" just seems odd?

It might be a Douglas Adams tribute, but it also might be that large numbers of children at that age haven't yet grasped place value and don't realize that 20, 30, 40 and so on are in fact ways to represent 2 tens, 3 tens, 4 tens, and so on, and "forty three" is actually pretty confusing to say, since it has a word that sounds very similar to "four" followed by the word "three", a sequence out of their usual counting order (and this is the first time this kind of juxtaposition occurs in the English counting sequence.)

Those are really interesting points. Never having been capable of rote learning myself it hadn't occurred to me that a child would learn to say them by memory rather than pattern (which is silly of me really). And I also had never considered your last point, which is excellent.

I am glad I asked the question now! It just really leapt out at me as a bizarre point to run out of numbers but what you say does make sense.

That's funny! It does sound so arbitrary but aculady as a good point. DD at the moment has route counted somewhere into the mid-thirties. I think she just got bored after that... She will count by tens, though, so maybe she does get the place holder thing?

I also wonder if 42 isn't just the AVERAGE number at which a certain percentage stop. More likely a bunch can go to 20, a few to 30... but once you've figured it out 30 it becomes less about the memorization and more about the pattern, so it might skew the average for whatever percentage they're calling "most," or "some," or whatever.

I am so glad this thread popped back up. The day after I posted DH ended up doing some counting exercises on the computer with DD 4.5yrs. She was struggling with counting backwards from a random number in the teens so they had a chat about numbers from 1-100 and recognizing the patterns (and drew some charts). Apparently she had a significant pause at 42 and needed to think awhile before moving on!