Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Elementary School Writing name backwards...Mirror image

Silly teachers... will they never learn?

Heck, I've encouraged my kids to learn how to read & write upside down. While the latter is mostly for fun, reading upside down is an incredibly useful skill.

Shows that she has no clue about GT kids. So many students cannot retain information, but GT students don't forget. They have a high retention rate. I can't believe that some teachers still don't get this.

In 1973, I was in 8th grade. I was in a study to determine if highly accelerated students, who were non-Spanish speaking, could learn six weeks of Spanish - and retain their English. It sounded stupid then and even stupider now.

And yes, we remember English. It was a different time and schools were newly integrated with Spanish speakers.

Both my children have done this, it has never been an issue when it came time to write 'for real', I think it is just a natural expression of this new skill, how far can it be pushed.

Upside down and backward is just a preferred mode around this house...

bit curious about this; my dd4 is working on writing addition problems in kindergarten and executed a nice 3+4 = 7, all the numbers written in mirror writing... Kind of cool looking, actually, but it made me wonder about the difference between knowing to write a sentence or phrase or string of letters in a word from left to right, but not caring/knowing about the direction of the individual letters or numbers themselves...

My son does this constantly! And not just with his name, but other words too, and he knows it is backwards. He seems very proud of himself when he does it.

I think she is looking desperately for an outlet for her creativity.

I wonder ... if she sits across from the girl who writes backward, maybe she was showing her how to write correctly, which would be upside-down and backward from your DD's perspective!

My 9 year old did an entire asignment as a mirror image. It was alphebatizing 20 words that she had gotten all correct taking the PRETEST. But she had to practice the words anyway, just as she has had to all year. So she handed it in and told her teacher to hold it up to a mirror to correct it.

I recently had a meeting with the principal to request skipping 4th grade math next year. I brought the mirror image thing with me. I DO believe that this is a good reason to think that a child needs more!

We will see what her teachers have to say about that one! The principal denied me the request, even with her WJ at 99.6%.

Your comment about wanting to write in cursive yet not being allowed to makes me think she is writing backward as an added way to occupy her brain. The cursive is fun and challenging to her and since she can't do that, she has thought of this as a substitute.

It wouldn't surprise me that when she masters cursive and is encouraged to use it in school, she begins to experiment with different ways to form words. Learning about graphology was a fun past-time for me and I loved to "interpret" my friends handwriting to see if what the books said about their personality was something I had observed.

Just a thought.

we just joined the club today! Ds5 thinks its funny to write EVERYTHING backwards all of a sudden.

All of these stories make me smile ......