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Originally Posted by alegna
 no kidding. Aren't we supposed to get to talk about things above their heads for a couple of years at least? At this rate within a year I won't be able to spell "secret" words without her knowing.... |
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Originally Posted by Charles Baudelaire
Probably not. Mine went from being able to figure out N-A-P at about 2.5 to F-A-T-I-G-U-E-D a little later and now understanding what I mean when I say, "She's ready to swim in the river Lethe."
Damn D'Aulaire's Greek Mythology. |
I did this when I was a kid and my mother thought that it was perfectly normal, so she'd forget to warn people about it. I still remember being at someone else's house when I was 5 years old; the other mom was having my mom over to watch her 7 year old daughter, and mom brought my brother and myself along (my sisters were at a birthday party, iirc). The other mom said, "Now, the kids are not allowed to have any C-O-O-K-I-E-S OR S-N-A-C-K-S before dinner." I frowned and said, in my lovely, piping voice, "Why can't I have a cookie? I want one!" She about fell over. "Um, your daughter can spell?" "Yeah, she can *read*, she's been doing it for nearly three years now..." It was the first time I thought there might be any use to spelling words out loud, which before had just seemed like a stupid thing that grownups did sometimes... 
I said, "The whole point of spelling it was not to say that word!!! Anyway, I've long since given up on spelling to them. I still try it with Mike on occasion, but the kids get it if I don't go really, really quickly. My mom gets it, and we drop vowels/consonants all the time and spell very quickly over the kids' heads, and that still works on occasion. Even my sisters, we can start spelling a word and not have to finish it because we know what we're talking about, and that's helpful too when your kid memorizes the sound of the words before they can recognize all of their letters...
Not that it's a bad thing, but it might be a bit strange for him. We haven't done any math at all, but BeanBean has been obsessed with hexagons lately. 
He draws them and I'm pretty impressed that they actually have six discernable sides most of the time. 
They're not regular, but they're better than my hexagons were before I started organic chemistry and went home to practice drawing hexagons for my notes (I spent three hours on it, much more time than I needed to spend on equations or any actual freaking chemistry!). It's pretty cool. He absolutely loves his art class, and I think he'll be sad when we go to the last one. 
What a doll. I counted "Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five" once and she just fell over laughing, she thought it was the silliest thing she'd ever heard. 
ChibiChibi's depression is now becoming obvious even to her (and she's totally oblivious to such things) and a family friend who works in the school system has been pressuring her to take them the hell out of there; he says things just get so much worse as you deal with higher levels of the administration. She can see very clearly that BizzyBug has made almost no progress forward this year, and that ChibiChibi doesn't actually learn things in school but when she comes home she can learn the same things on her own quickly and easily. Mom says that she regularly goes to school, then spends an hour and a half in an after school tutoring program with only 5 or 6 other children, and comes home and still doesn't understand her classwork. My sisters both seem to think that this is a failing of Chibi's (they swear that she has ADD; she doesn't.) but it's fairly obvious to me that this is a failing of the teachers, particularly since Chibi is totally capable of learning the material when she's left alone with it for a little while, to say nothing of when she has help that's geared towards *her*. Mom's also ticked off that she doesn't understand how they're trying to teach math. That's a different story, though. She's like, "I know how you learned math, I know how I learned math," and I reminded her quite bluntly that I learned math *at home*, so I have no idea how math was taught in school until I got to calculus (which my mother couldn't teach me) and that was in college, where things are different (better). But yeah, Chibi is very close to being safe from school next year, thank God for small favors.
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Originally Posted by alegna
Aren't we supposed to get to talk about things above their heads for a couple of years at least? At this rate within a year I won't be able to spell "secret" words without her knowing....
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We are going to be looking hard at all kinds of schools. I have my fingers crossed.
Maybe one of these days, I'll try to start a charter school... I dunno. For now, the easiest way to go is definately home education. I'm unwilling to trust anyone else with my kids' future. 
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Originally Posted by inezyv
I have lurked on this thread from time to time, but now I feel scared. I *think* my daughter is reading, really reading, sounding out the words. She is 30 months old, just turned two and a half. So that really doesn't seem possible. But my husband and my four year old dd think she is reading, too. In fact, my four year old is trying to withhold books from my two year old because she doesn't want her little sister to figure it out before she does.
Am I crazy? Am I delusional? She takes books and makes the sounds the letters make and says them aloud together until she figures out the word. Even books she has not seen before. If she were six, I would be sure she is reading. I'm not talking chapter books, I'm talking little picture books that have visual clues. Maybe she's just figuring out the words with the pictures? My husband said that since we are not teaching her, and she's picking it up on her own, we should just stay cool and not make her feel self conscious about it. |
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Originally Posted by eilonwy
ChibiChibi, for example, would probably thrive in a school that was set up simply to have high expectations of children of color. That's all she needs by way of motivation-- someone to expect the best of her. As far as I know, there are no such schools where my mother lives.
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I'm sorry. I can't say that I totally understand as I am white, but I feel for you and your kids. We were offered ESL services for dd#1 when we first signed her up (before she had actually started and they had time to see what she could do) b/c my dh is Italian and dds have very Italian sounding names along with dark brown hair, olive toned skin and brown eyes. Somehow that adds up to "hispanic" in the school's eyes as well as some idea that dd couldn't speak english 
: .
. We've all had those days. 
I think I read a book about it once, though... onder:
mv That's one fiery dragon you have there. He's feeling wound up probably. Hopefully he settles down for the night.
. I somehow doubted that given that the kiddo was reliably potty trained at 18 months and screamed her intent to do it before commencing!
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Originally Posted by eilonwy
I seriously want to collect data to graph. Data on *anything*, like, start a poll over in Toddlers: How old was your baby when they started to walk? and then break the data down month-by-month, 6-18 (which would cover most, I think)...
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You are not alone!
| I was wondering if you (as in the plural "you") believe that is is possible and/or likely to have one gifted child and one average child? I know that I have read that giftedness is often a characteristic of a family not an individual and it is likely that, if one of the family member is gifted, others are as well. |
I think gifted is how your brain is wired, I couldn't be 'average' if I tried my brain needs food constantly. Just the way someone how is artistic might be thinking of ways to change their environment, to pretty up an object.
