The 'Aha' moments.....

So when does any parent really start to wonder if their child might be gifted? There are little signs that make you wonder a bit. She knew her alphabet before she was two. We thought....'that's kinda cool' and somebody mentioned that that might be more than 'cool' and perhaps moving into the very bright arena. We thought she was fairly bright but that perhaps we were seeing more potential that was a bit more obvious because of extra encouragement. After all, Sophia had had more exposure to computers and educational TV than the average child.

There was another time, I remember pretty clearly, also when she was two. We're sitting in the lounge one day and Sophia marches up to me with a little stone pyramid that normally sat on a small bookshelf. She said, "Mamma! This is a pyramid - it has four sides!" I said, "That's nice dear, now take it out of your mouth." It was funny and cute but we just did the whole...isn't she a clever wee thing!

It really sorta dawned on us that perhaps it was a little more than 'fairly bright' when we were at the library one day when she was about two and half. In fact it more bowled us over a bit. I got hold of a book that I thought she might get a kick out of. It was different arrangements of food cut up to look like different objects like planes and people and see-saws etc. I put it down in front of her and she announced the title of the book - 'FOOD' - very clearly. I kind of looked at her and went, 'really? no way! she must have figured out what it was by the pictures on the front.' So we start going through this book and she's carrying on her little trick and that's when I noticed she was naming intangible things that she might not have gotten from the pictures.

The first book at 2 and a half

I did a bit of a double take and then I thought, 'ok Missy Boo-boo - lets just have a look at what you can really do then.' I rummaged through till I found a fairly simple level one reader and I gave it to her. She read it cover to cover on the spot. I just about fell over backwards. I knew damn well that this was very different to what I was familiar with and I knew that I had never known anybody who could read at two and a half.

I went home and told her father.

Then we went and asked a few people what they would do, how they would handle it and just how far outside of the box is this? One thing in particular that was mentioned to us was the issue of comprehension. One teacher said that she had come across children learning to read early (although none so young as Sophia) but most of them could read the words but didn't understand them. Not only did Sophia understand them but by the time she was three and half, she was using conceptual words in the correct context. I do remember having a wee debate about the usage of one word (unfortunately I can't remember which one) that could be applied the way she was using it, if you took the literal meaning of the word, but it wasn't quite the way that word was used - the context wasn't correct. It was quite funny trying to explain to her the why's and in the end I just said that the English language was a bit silly sometimes because most of its words were borrowed from other languages.

The thing is her age never really impacted on us until that moment when we actually took stock of how old she was. This is because it is very easy to forget how old they are. It's only now that I'm writing it all down and taking note of things happening at certain ages that I'm sitting here thinking.... holy crap - well duh! lol