Gifted Children

silly_moo

Fen1 - English is not my first language so my son already learns two languages (although he does prefer English, probably because he started nursery at 8 months and has been surrounded by it). I never thought about adding foreign words to our "making lists" games, will have to try that, thanks

VfM4meplse

I completely agree with you OP that your son's potential must not be wasted.....but what do you want him to aspire to? Without that objective, I see little point in putting him in a higher learning environment for the sake of it. It's likely that he'll meet some pretty strange kids with even odder parents there.

silly_moo

Thanks VfM4meplease - I just want to keep his brain active and need ideas on how to do it. I'm worried he'll lose his skills if he's not challenged. The numeracy and literacy exercises at nursery are on far too low levels to be of any benefit to him.

troubleinparadise

VfM4meplse wrote: »

I completely agree with you OP that your son's potential must not be wasted.....but what do you want him to aspire to? Without that objective, I see little point in putting him in a higher learning environment for the sake of it. It's likely that he'll meet some pretty strange kids with even odder parents there.

There is no boat he will be missing if he is not "hothoused" from this time onwards - if he finds learning easy that will always remain with him.

Broaden his horizons, expose him to lots of experiences. Teach him to read - then he can learn for himself, and he will never be bored or lonely.

Anyone watch the "Child Genius" programmes recently? The winner, Thomas Frith, had a thirst for knowledge that was wonderful to watch, if exhausting! But it certainly came from within him, unlike some of the other children who were very able but more driven by their parents' ambitions than theirs....

FBaby

But it would be a shame to waste the potential

Do you really think that his potential will be wasted if he is not stimulated all the time at nursery? His potential will not be wasted because he will ask for stimulation.

DS's favourite 'toy' he had at 4 was a sticker book and 100s of stickers hat we found abroad (it was a very old version so very cheap) and he spent hours putting all the stickers, with the fun part of it was to look for the pages and numbers to match. It is then that I thought he might have an ability in counting/algebra. Sure enough, he is especially advanced for his age (13) in Maths. Yet, he didn't do anything different to his friends at nursery.

Person_one

In every group of children there will be a few who are cleverer than the majority, that's the laws of averages! There will also be those who are middle of the pack and those who are at the lower end.

Unless you've got a real outlier (Mozart, Einstein which is highly unlikely!) then people who work in education are usually more than capable of managing the natural differences in ability.

moomoomama27

I was classed as gifted when I was a young child, I could read and write by age 3 1/2 and showed a natural gift for playing various instruments - however I was pushed and resisted - by age 9 I was achieving at the top end of my 'sets' but not any higher than my peers of a similar standard of intelligence.

You need to go with the flow, and follow your childs lead. Once he enters the school system they'll decide if he is G&T and make the appropriate provisions.

Have the nursery actually identified him as gifted or is this your opinion?

jobbingmusician

To those who say 'don't push him ' - I was gifted and clearly remember bursting into tears at primary school because the teacher said we were going to do something new and exciting, and it turned out to be something we had done before. I can so vividly recall the depressing feeling that we were never going to learn anything exciting!

silly_moo

moomoomama27 wrote: »

Have the nursery actually identified him as gifted or is this your opinion?

The nursery keep praising him for being really clever and keep mentioning all the little things he can do that are beyond his age. When he was just two the nursery said he knows more about letters and numbers than most of their pre-schoolers.

Fen1

A game suggestion: word of the day.

Choose a word he does not yet know. Introduce it at breakfast and write it down in his own little notebook.

Throughout the day, both of you try to incorporate that word as much as possible. Use the word in both pedestrian sentences (" The robin has a cochineal breast") and fanciful ones to stimulate his imagination (" The great dragon had scales of cochineal and gold.")
Add another the word the following day, trying to utilize both, and referring back to his notebook. On the third day, use words day two and three. Continue until the end of the week. On the fourth day use day 3 and 4. Etc.
By the end of the week he will have seven new words. On the seventh day try to use all seven words.
See how many words he can build up, both from memory and by reading them.
Add the words of your own language, so that he has one English, one 'foreign' every day.

This game is as much about utilisation as listing and memory.
You could advance it further by having to make the sentences rhyme.