This. I had no problem sleeping through high school but never developed good study habits. I got slammed in college because of it. I constantly reinforce to my kids that in many was learning how to learn and study are more important than the subjects they make you learn in school. You may never think about some of those things again but it builds a foundation you will always use.
Heheh this all sounds very familiar. I did much better at school (which was about regurgitating what you’d be taught) than at university (where you had to apply what you knew to a novel situation).
Of possible interest to the OP, a thread I recently started, in which the SDMB crowd posted a lot of worthwhile observations:
As said, your kiddo isn’t scary smart. That’s really cool she’s advanced, but look at some of our “I was reading at two” dopers and rethink. Not labeling her is the best you can do.
And yes, due to a great memory and a stay-at-home mom with a degree in elementary education, I was ‘reading’ at two and reading at three. My IQ is nice, but early milestones are just that and normally even out a bit as kids get older.
Again, examine the dopers who brag about that stuff as an intelligence indicator. Social ineptitude abounds and significant future accomplishments don’t necessarily follow. But, you’re a smart chica if you can be judged from your posts Focusing on making sure this early advance doesn’t separate her from her peers or make her think she’s a special snowflake is the best you could do for her.
I speak from motherly experience, too.
I think kids learn the things that interest them. When my son turned 3, he had an interest in an iPad game called Stack the States. They ask you a question about a state, you select the correct one, then you get to stack the shape of the state up in a pile. He can’t read a lick (knows all the letters, but doesn’t read words) but if you answer the question for him “Montgomery is the capital of… Alabama” he picks the right state every time.
He knows the shape of every state, knows which ones are big, which are small, if he sees an outline of a state, he’ll name it. Hell, he now plays with states as imaginary friends, or plays his own State Game with random objects, the whisk is California and the toy dollar bill is Rhode Island.
I think he’s a bright little boy, but I think he excels in the areas that he’s most interested in, and not so much with topics that don’t appeal to him. I don’t think I could convince him to memorize our address or phone number, even though it should be easy enough for him.
Wrong. No, you shouldn’t go around all day saying “You’re so smart.” But getting a “gifted” label for your child often means that your child gets gifted services in the school district, which can have a major and lasting impact on their school experience. The OP’s child is only 3, but 3 is not too early to identify signs of higher-than-average intelligence.
This brings me to my other piece of advice for the OP, which is to be careful about who you talk about this stuff to. When you tell someone that your child is gifted, or even just smart, or even just mention some of the unusual or extraordinary things your child is capable of, some people will respond very defensively, by telling you that your child isn’t so special, that they did those things as a child and they aren’t so special, that their children can do more than that, that you are bragging, that you are inappropriately labeling your child, etc. One of the side benefits to my oldest child moving into the gifted program at his school was that I could finally talk to other parents about various scary-smart-related issues without having them roll their eyes and behave as though I were the Braggiest Bragger in Bragland.
I have a smart kid. But there are smarter kids. And three is too early to know much more than smart. It’s too early to know if smart will combine with disciplined, or even obsessive. Or if it will be that absent minded non directed smart (that’s my smart daughter, she can nearly fail classes because the steps of writing down the homework, doing the homework, putting her name on the paper, getting the paper into her bookbag, and turning in the paper 100 times in a semester is doomed for failure at least a few of those times).
In some ways, her bright average brother is smarter. Barring being thirteen and not giving a damn, he has the discipline she lacks. He will never see the 99th percentile on standardized tests, but he is less flighty and better rounded.
Enjoy her. Give her opportunities to try new things. Encourage her. But don’t start planning for the Harvard dorm move in yet. And watch for the downsides of smart, like social challenges. In one ways being a gifted child is just being a different type of special needs kid.
Mozart invented the internet at the age of three.
On the issue of praise, it is easy when someone is continually praised for only one aspect of their life (such as pretty or smart) to learn that this is the only aspect that matters, and from there to “this quality is why I am loved” and from there to “I can only love myself when I am X.” It ain’t pretty.
Praise your smart kids for their accomplishments, and when they try hard, and for their kindnesses, etc. Praise the whole kid, and make sure they know you love them just because they are who they are–flaws and all.
Away from the iPad and onto a real keyboard.
I wish I’d have done more exploring of charter schools for my daughter. I like her public school, but I didn’t even bother enough to learn about the options.
I’m very glad I didn’t push her ahead. As a September baby, she is among the oldest in her class…but despite being smart, she isn’t mature. She is short, she is almost thirteen and hasn’t had her period yet and she is just hitting puberty. Physically, she’s behind for her age. And socially, she isn’t adept either. She wanted to go to school today in black socks while the rest of her was dressed in pastel pink - because those were the socks she could find easily and she didn’t feel like looking (nor did she care). She doesn’t get that sometimes being nice is more important than being right and winning an argument. She does great surrounded by younger kids, or much older kids where she becomes a mascot, but is challenged in her peer group.
I wish I’d have bothered with more enrichment - like classes at the Science Museum or educational camps. The best thing I’ve done for her is to send her to sleep away camp for Girl Scouts, but I probably should have sent her to language camp instead of horse camp. However, really short term stuff - her brand of gifted is not to get too in depth into anything. Well, except Harry Potter trivia and Minecraft.
I’m glad, however, that some of the enrichment we’ve done has been athletic and not academic. She is NOT a good gymnast, but years of gymnastics have helped.
I should have nurtured relationships sooner with other “geek kids” - her district doesn’t have a lot of “kids like her” - which doesn’t mean there aren’t smart kids, just that her brand of smart and geeky doesn’t exist. This is a girl who watches enough Top Gear to inform her Social Studies class - when the topic came up - that the fastest street legal car in the world was the Bugatti Veyron. Or to correct her Science teacher “there are FOUR states of matter, not three.” Or to use the word melee correctly in a sentence in English class - the sentence had to do with “Fighters and Strikers are melee class characters in D&D, meaning they fight in close.” It wasn’t until she fell in with girls from our church who had similar geek tastes that she really found “kindred spirits” - until then I had Anne Shirley in a different reality stuck with the prosaic Diana Berry living in this one.
I should have pushed when she dropped out of the math enrichment because it was too much work. It WAS too much work, but I should have stood up for her not having to do the regular math program in addition to the enrichment. She had to do both, both were too much for my disorganized and flighty daughter who is really good at math, but doesn’t really like it, she couldn’t keep up with the regular work and the enrichment, so she dropped the enrichment. And not the material, just the homework problems - the material she was doing fine with. When she did drop, the teacher realized how much work the kids were doing and let the enriched kids off the hook for the regular math - but by then my daughter had burned her bridges.
Preach it sister!
I imagine these people trolling round the sports fields, finding the team’s star player and kicking them in the ankle. “Not so fast now, are you? Ha ha!”
I’m leaning heavily toward this. Plus, with your first kid, it’s very hard to judge especially if you’re using those developmental guidelines in parenting books. I used to eagerly read What to Expect: The Toddler Years when my son was small and promptly stopped when I realized that the guidelines listed in references like that tend to set the bar very low.
Just treat your kid like a kid. If she’s interested in more “advanced” stuff, show her how to safely make a volcano in the kitchen or build a birdhouse outside or something. If she needs something more interesting, you’ll know. Oh, yes…you’ll know.
With plenty of jokes already spoiling the thread, I will tell a story of my two children:
#1/girl: fully verbal by 11 months (99+ percentile). Paragraphs and full songs/rhymes repeated verbatim by 13 months. By two years old talked to parents in the park rather than play with kids and by 3 years old, could probably have given lectures about the animals at the zoo. She never really got into reading and probably couldn’t do many of the things you list for your child by that same age.
#2/ boy: age 3 could barely speak comprehensibly to us, but good with blocks (ok not really good with blocks compared to other kids, but it was the thing he was best at!) age 4, finally got him accepted into a speech pathologist to aid his speaking. His preschool teacher insisted that there was something wrong with him. Kindergarten teacher wanted to hold him back another year and get him evaluated for ADHD as he didn’t seem as slow as some of his work suggested. Math, he tests ridiculously high, but viewed as a testing fluke and his ability to type. First grade, #2 discovers a book about trucks/robots/space that somehow clicked with him. By the end of the year, he surpassed most of his classmates as well as #1 in reading, writing, math, etc. within those 8 months. He had a teacher he clicked with and we bought him every book and answered every question he asked (as we had been doing his whole life- so we didn’t change, he did).
The lesson being, kids develop at their own pace and in their own time. Yours is certainly going to be a bright kid, but DO NOT compare your child to others. It is a stupid game and too many parents play it. Encourage her by providing her interesting opportunities, don’t encourage her by showing her off.
Teach her to work hard, and to figure out for herself how to do better next time.
Do not skip grades. I did (rare in the UK), it was a great idea at 7, but by 13 it was a massive disadvantage and too late to rectify. Fulfil boredom with breadth of learning rather than depth. Start music as early as possible.
Being a ‘gifted child’, in my experience, means you are ahead of your peers, and seemingly accelerating away. Those who work harder will, in time, catch up, overtake, and leave you behind. If you work hard too, the sky’s the limit.
I’m going to jump back in after rereading many of the comments and the OP again.
I could see if I were the OP, many of the comments, including mine, could be taken wrong, and as criticism of the OP.
I just really wanted to say, enjoy your kid, have fun with the things she does well and continue being a thoughtful parent. (Of course, I’ve only got 8 months more experience, so I’m not expert. 
)
Hmm… [thinks back when little Shakes was a baby. Remembers when, lil’ shakes came running into the the living room, with his shirt pulled over his head, runs smack into a wall. Desprately needing my help.
The problem? He had accidentally stuck his head and his arm through the head hole of his shirt and couldn’t get back out.
So no, sorry, no help here.
The child’s intelligence will take care of itself. Social skills, however, require constant exposure.
This made me snort, then imagine my own children, each with a bucket over their heads, banging into each other and giggling hysterically. One is 6, the other is 2.5. Both are reasonably intelligent (sometimes the 2.5 year old scares me, but only because she taught herself how to break through all our childproof locks, including the stove lock, but that’s another story).
If they make it through high school physically and mentally intact, with decent grades and manage to learn how to work hard, I’ll be happier than I would be if they were super geniuses.
It’s not an either/or proposition.
God yes with putting emphasis on the social skills. I was a bit ahead of the curve as a young’un and had a real hard time making friends all the way until oh I’d say about high school. To their credit, my parents tried, but anyway, my two cents.