Reply to First grader, advanced at math?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
Or neither. Some kids can just add fast. But a kid who comes up with a new way to solve complex problems that the teachers have never thought of ... there's a gift there, I think. My math teacher Aunt says some of the most gifted math students she had struggled to past the fast facts tests (not that they didn't know the facts, but they weren't very fast at spitting them back out), but their understanding of math concepts and ability to do complex problem solving was out of this world. Understanding and figuring out proofs without being formally introduced to them, just because "it made sense." That is the gift.[/quote]

+1. But how do you detect that in a K/1st grader? Or should you even be able? [/quote]

Anecdotally, I think you can begin to see evidence of a mind that works that way. I do know a kid who discovered a new way to multiply multi-digit numbers in 1st grade (new meaning a way he'd never been taught and that the adults he showed it to had never seen before anyway -- not that its was more efficient, but it worked!); but also a kid who butts in and says, "or you can do it this way!"  A kid who can identify many ways to represent a numeral and is talking about negative numbers with understanding; a kid who manipulates objects and shapes in ways that show an inherent sense of geometry, symmetry, balance; or a kid who finds patterns in everything; a toddler who asks questions like "what makes 40?" and then manipulates objects to find hundreds of ways to calculate 40 (and wants to spend time finding new ways to create 40 because it is fascinating to her); or a kid who calculates the Fibonacci sequence without every having heard of it; a kid who asks questions about the beginning and end of numbers and likes to count in patterns; a kid who asks (and answers) "why" questions about math calculations or about shapes and angles; a kid who "gets" that certain math calculating tricks are tricks that work but bear no relation to underlying calculus; a kid who is always calculating something relative to something else (minutes to miles, age to height, cookies to bites to number of teeth), etc. Perhaps a kid who sees poetry in multiplication. With some kids you can tell that they "see" the invisible math world and understand how to manipulate things in that perfect world before they have a vocabulary for it, if you know what I mean (like finding and delighting in the Platonic solids while playing with magna-tiles, but not knowing they are a "thing"). All of that just hints at potential though. The love of figuring it all out needs to be fostered, I think. And you may have to build up resilience to the potential boredom of repetitive school math, so they don't hate "math class" by the time they get to the interesting stuff. Just my thoughts on the subject - lots of math teachers in our family. :-) [/quote]

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