Saturday, December 15, 2007

Adding it all up...

Last week Haley figured out how to do addition of double digits complete with carrying in a matter of minutes. "Duh, Mom, the tens go in the tens column" was her basic reasoning.

A cyberfriend of mine, a college math professor, suggested trying with larger numbers (triple digits, quadruple digits, etc...). I did and she easily applied her reasoning there to add almost any length of numbers given. The next suggestion was working with subtraction and borrowing. I think we'll try that one tomorrow.

Haley's test scores have not arrived yet. I keep waiting for them and researching more gifted sites and reading more books. I feel almost compelled to know what I am dealing with. I feel like I am holding her back with my need to teach sequentially.

I searched Barnes and Noble for more books on giftedness and it appears that I have read them all. The information I have found on websites is all starting to say things I already know but none of it comes close to telling me what I want to know about my own child...real answers. Waiting until Tuesday is so difficult.

I started re-reading A Case of Brilliance. This book comes the closest to telling me detailed information and I thought maybe a closer reading might be helpful. The author tells of small incidents that stand out to her as moments when she should have been able to guess how gifted her daughter was. I have a few of those moments myself. Like when Haley was 21 months old and read the word "Pizza" off a Pizza Hut sign even though we had never eaten there before so she had no reason link the two like kids do with the golden arches of McDonalds. When I asked her how she knew, she said, "Well it says it is really big letters." That sentence alone should have been a clue coming from a child under two let alone the reading that preceeded it.

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