One of my nieces is highly intelligent (Oh, they both are, but one in particular is off the charts) and in her case, she was 8 months old and sitting in her exersaucer. My brother, her dad, said, “Bouncy bouncy bouncy!” and she bounced 3 times. He then said, “Bouncy bouncy!” and she bounced twice. Saying that 4 times led to just a couple of bounces.
I also briefly dated a man many years ago who was a member of Mensa, and in his case, at the age of 2 years, his parents realized that he had made up his own language. He didn’t remember any of it when I met him.
I visited my sister-in-law and brother-in-law when their second child was 4. He wanted me to read him a story so I did. Then he wanted to read me a story. So I picked out a book of Garfield comic strips I’d brought thinking he could tell me what happened just from the pictures. He read it beautifully including the word discotheque (which I just had to look up to spell His parents said he’d never seen the book before. I told them to keep an eye on him. He did turn out to be quite the student.
I just remembered a woman who worked at the same place I did many years ago (not in the same department) who had an off-the-charts son. Her first clue was when he was just over a year old; he was restless while she was changing his diaper, and she tore the strip the rest of the way off the diaper box and gave it to him. He said “O-P-E-N H-E-R-E. Open here.”
Our older grandkid is 4 years old. Started pre-school last fall. There was soon a talk between the teachers and the parents about the grandkid being gifted. (Or “the g-word” as the parents relayed it.)
We knew the kid was smart but apparently we’re talking about being two years ahead of the classmates in terms of intellectual development. The kid is also as tall as kids 1-2 years older.
One issue is that they missed the cutoff date by a bit for when they can start kindergarten. So two years away. (Hence we sometimes call the level pre-pre-school. Just two mornings a week.) That’s going to be an issue. I’m hoping a grade skip of some form can be arranged.
A note on personality. The teachers also describe our grandkid as the class carer. Lots of empathy for the other kids. Makes friends and shares easily. So not the common stereotype of a smart kid.
Okay, what tipped us off. Lots of things. Learned ABCs, counting quite early. Loves to understand things. I have taken to stuffing something (hopefully) interesting in my pocket before we visit. So I get asked “Grandpa, what’s in your pockets?” soon after arriving.
Lots of complex imaginative play. Loves craft things. Makes up songs on the fly. Etc.
Outgrew and lost interest in Sesame Street quite a while ago.
Several years back, we were hanging with some relatives. One of the kids was maybe 3 or so. Clearly quite smart. We dropped some hints about that. The father is a teacher so I hope some suitable handling is happening.
It’s often reading- or language-based. Sometimes musical ability or mathematical thinking. For my niece, she started reading before age 3 (IIRC) and was reading chapter books intended for 4th-grade and up around age 5. She’s in a specialized program for the “exceptionally gifted” now.
I’m saddened they fell the need to censor themselves. The gifted educators in our district emphasize that stigmatizing giftedness doesn’t help - it just makes the kids feel more alienated than they already do. Instead they try to make kids aware of the differences they experience and how to advocate for themselves and deal with some of the additional stress and anxiety that can come with giftedness.
It almost certainly can. My son skipped first grade for similar reasons (narrowly on the wrong side of the age cutoff for K but clearly prepared mentally, physically, and socially for the higher grade). Research tends to show that ~10% of students would actually benefit from full-grade acceleration but school districts (and parents) tend to be wary, so it happens far less frequently.
You misunderstood why they did this. It was a humorous phrasing plus the kid was within earshot. And the kid is exactly the type to ask “What does ‘gifted’ mean?”
I work with gifted kids as my job–and while I’ve worked with hundreds of kids who were significantly more advanced than their peers, I’ve only worked with one or maybe two that I’d identify as academic prodigies.
Both of them showed their abilities in math. One of them, on entering kindergarten, was able to absorb almost any math lesson I gave to her, and I regularly worked with her on third- and fourth-grade math work. The other of them struggled to understand new games or puzzles, due in part to his autism, but could happily multiply two-digit by two-digit numbers in his head, or glance at a pile of blocks and instantly say how many blocks were in the pile (“33”, he once said, barely glancing over, and was right).
There’s a third kid I’ve taught who was probably a prodigy, but in dance, not academics. Once we invited a Kenyan acrobatics troupe to the school for an assembly, and as part of their show they called kids on the stage for a dance-off, where a kid would do a dance move and the acrobats would copy it. Most of the kids did your very basic Bob up and down, maybe with a little elbow action. I gesticulated wildly at the prodigy kid until they called him up, at which point he immediately flipped upside down and started dancing on one hand. Those acrobats went wild.
Not sure this counts. One grandson entered day-care when he was 6 months old and his mother went back to work. The day-care was divided into pre-2 and post-2. But when he was a year and a half old he was put into the post-2 group because, as they explained, he was essentially running the early class, dominating all the kids between 1 1/2 and 2. Later, when he was in fourth grade, a pastel he had drawn was chosen among all the art work of all the fourth graders in NYC to be displayed for 6 months at the Met. It is now on permanent display at the Board of Education. He is now in 11th grade and, aside from his art, not special. He seriously talks of becoming an artist. Although enrolled at Brooklyn Tech, so not sure what to expect.
A relative of mine showed a talent for music from a young age and went on to become a concert pianist. His mother said that at the age of four, he’d walk over to the piano while watching television and play a two-handed chordal rendition of whatever ad jingle he’d just heard.
But I’ve seen lots of kids from babies into adulthood in my practice and for me the big tell for the outlier is an advanced sense of humor.
Early reading? Nah. Early math skills? Once in a while. But just as often those both are signs of uneven skillsets in my experience, average on average but not average in individual skills.
But the kids who are telling jokes ahead of schedule? I don’t care if they know their letters or numbers yet, almost every one of them has been way up there later.
I tell anyone who’s considering grade-skipping for their child not to do it. Any benefits they may see in the short term are going to be overshadowed by much, much bigger problems later on, especially when they get to high school.
I’d certainly be interested in hearing your experiences (and @nearwildheaven’s), but perhaps Factual Questions isn’t the right forum.
I find it interesting because my son skipped a grade, but his birthday is actually later than mine relative to his grade cohort (different states have different cutoffs). So while I never skipped a grade I was (relatively speaking) younger than my peers by a greater amount than he is. It never really caused me any issues.
So I struggle to see where the “bigger problems” might come from. Was it related to physical or social immaturity? Some sort of stigma from the grade skip? I’d love to know so I can be prepared as he moves into middle and high school.
There are numerous studies that show long-term benefits of grade skipping, which I’d be happy to share.
Please don’t tell people that. The research overwhelmingly does not support this conclusion. Instead, encourage people to use an instrument like the Iowa Acceleration Scale to evaluate very carefully whether acceleration is recommended for a specific child.
Heh. Pretty much nailed it. I was a bright kid, and I was already young as I had a late birthday. My mother was a teacher, so I already knew a TON of stuff. I skipped a grade. I was then significantly smaller, and developmentally later than the rest of my new cohorts. I did very well in classes, but socially, it sucked. The friends I made in my grade were going through things I had no idea about, and when I started going through them a year-ish later, they’d already moved on and didn’t want to deal with it again. The best friends I made were in the class below me, which then caused further issues as the classes/social things they were doing were exclusionary due to simply being in the classes. Dating was… not optimal. The social detriments were huge, and didn’t even out until college.
An update to my earlier post plus a comment on grade skipping.
Another teacher conference on the 4 year old.
Most metrics have them at 1st grade level with one at 2nd grade level. The discussion of a long term planning for grade skipping is happening. Ruling out next year, maybe do it the year after.
As noted, barely missed the standard cutoff. Quite tall for their age (runs in the family). It shouldn’t be a problem even as a teen. Skipping a 2nd grade would be an issue.
One parent went thru the gifted program as a kid. Ended up taking Math classes at the high school in middle school. Actually ran out of Math classes to take in high school. They know the ins and outs quite well.
I was the kind of parent who had fun messing around with letters and numbers with my kids. It wasn’t until my kid went to preschool that we realized that she was exceptional in that you only had to tell her something once in math and she’d retain it and be able to do it from then on – the other kids weren’t like that. (Her algebra teacher later told me that she was the only kid the teacher had ever met that didn’t need to practice algebraic manipulation at all – she just could do it perfectly when it was first explained to her.) She also read early (around her 3rd birthday), but both my family and my husband’s family are families of early readers, so we actually didn’t realize that was particularly early for a while.
I will also say that I don’t think being a “prodigy” is necessarily all that – my child also struggled a lot with things like socialization, emotional regulation, and articulating herself in writing when it’s not a proof. We’ve worked on it a lot and she’s now at the point where she can do those things, but it was a long road.
As a counterpoint, I skipped 8th grade (already having had a late birthday and already being young for my grade) and it was the BEST THING EVER. I guess I was smaller, but I was socially having a very hard time in middle school, and being able to just skip over a year of middle school was amazing. I had very few friends either before or after the skip (my social life got a lot better when I went to a magnet school later on, but sucked at that time either way), but I got along way better with high school kids who were past the point of being mean and dramatic.
Two more data points:
I absolutely did not even consider my kid skipping a grade (though she is accelerated in math). She would not have been able to handle the socialization issues (see my previous post), and her writing skills are basically on-grade so it wouldn’t have made sense from that aspect either.
One of my kid’s friends skipped 8th grade, and that has absolutely been game-changing for her too. She was bored both academically and socially, and has flowered amazingly as a 9th grader.
What, exactly, does everyone here consider to be the definition of a “prodigy”? I mean, a kid being a little ahead of their cohort with school work? Skipping ahead a grade (I don’t think the OP was asking about this, specifically)? Being able to play a musical instrument very well at a very young age? Chess master at age 4?
I think every parent has moments when they think their child is a genius. I have. But being good at something at an early age seems to be very different from being an expert at something early on.
Yes, this was the analysis framework we used when we were considering it for my son.
The academic aptitude and ability stuff is pretty straightforward, but the areas around physical maturity (Section VIII) and ability to interact socially with peers and older kids (Section IX) are both very important.
His parents said he’d never seen the book before. I told them to keep an eye on him. He did turn out to be quite the student.