Reply to What age does giftedness show? What does it mean anyway?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Lots of kids are smart.  I'd consider gifted, a child who is reading by 3 and doing addition, subtraction and more by 3-4 as well.  Lots of kids are smart, even the underestimated ones.[/quote]

Dr. Burton White and team studied well developing and talented kids for the Harvard Preschool Project. Over the decades of study, they saw that the kids who were growing especially well by 3 stayed ahead compared to majority for a long time to come.

Some skills of especially well developed 3-6 year olds:
- notice similarities, differences, logic gaps, make interesting observations.
-able to use resources creatively and efficiently. Finds new uses for common objects.
-able to empathize and see others' point of view. 
-active, rich imagination
-able to organize peers and plan complicated plans.
-able to both lead and follow peers

I'm forgetting the rest. Will.post full list when home with the book " new first three years of life "

[/quote]

As someone who was identified as "gifted" early on (for whatever a 150 IQ buys you-- not much), this fits my observations much more closely than a precocious reader or an early sitter (thanks for the laugh, other PP!) There can be plenty of overlap, of course, but giftedness is arguably supposed to be about aptitude and problem-solving more than hard "skills." If you really wanted to use every possible method (and even trick) at your disposal, you could find a way to teach most kids to read semi-proficently by probably 4.5, and a decent number significantly earlier. The fact they could read would probably indicate they were of at least average intelligence AND didn't have a LD, and some of those kids would surely be gifted. But it wouldn't be per se evidence of giftedness. OTOH, if you never actively taught a kid under 4.5 to read, they would be a lot less likely to be able to, even if they were gifted. If they weren't even exposed to reading and printed words, even a very gifted kid could not read (obviously). So skills are a poor measure of something that is (supposed to be) a lot deeper.[/quote]

To clarify the above, I say this as a person who was reading well by my 4th birthday, but whose mom actively taught her to read, flash cards from toddlerhood, etc. If she hadn't, I may have picked it up at the same time on my own, but I'd bet it might have taken another 6 months, a year... or possibly even more. And if I hadn't even been read to at ALL, I firmly believe I would have still been gifted, even though I wouldn't have started reading until much later, if ever (if I had been raised in the proverbial Amazon jungle).   [/quote]

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