After all the focus on my son, it has put my daughter under a more intense observation about where she might fall on the gifted spectrum. Up until recently, I really thought my son was just a weird oddity because he showed signs of being gifted since he was less than a year old. Siblings are often within 10pts of IQ from each other, but my daughter has been much more stealthy. She has a few indicators that are quite different from my son and it makes it a little less obvious. She is a perfectionist through and through. She won't let on that she doesn't know how to do something and will just pop up out of the blue, make a couple mistakes and then master a new skill. She is quiet, determined, and very independent.
Her fine motor skills are really her strength. She was eating with an adult-sized fork by a year old! She colors in the lines by 3.5 and can draw stick people and faces. She is learning her letters by writing them, and is much more reliant on pictures to make associations with the letters. She is determined to read though. She loves books and will look at them for hours. She sleeps with piles of books in her bed. They sometimes reach 10-12 books high! Her preschool skipped her ahead to be in the 4 year olds' class because she was so mature and a fantastic leader.
She has been expressing a desire to learn to read. I have been waiting for her letter recognition to get a little better, but she sometimes reads words. I have to "catch" her reading, which is hard to do because it's easy to forget that perhaps she shouldn't be saying "What bubble?" when I never said the word bubble, but it is written on the page of the book we are looking at. I suspect that she is actually hiding her ability because there have been a few times that this has come up.
Yesterday, she was home sick from school. I found the BOB Books I got for Dexter to start to learn to read when he was 3. I sat down with her and we went trough the first book together and she did ok. It was a struggle for her, but she did start to recognize the words by the end of the book. Last night, we did another book and she actually started reading the sentences. I think it may have clicked for her. We shall see! I am very excited for her to learn to read because she loves books so much.
She has another amazing talent which is puzzles. She loves puzzles and can put together 48 piece puzzles. We haven't gotten anything with more pieces because her attention span isn't there, but she can put together puzzles meant for 6+. She has an iPad game called Tangrams and she puts all of the puzzles together. I was amazed that Dexter could do it when he was her age. I even took a video of him, but Missy B is way faster than he was!
The other amazing skill she has is that she can already add and subtract on her fingers. If it is 10 or less, she can figure out the answer. I couldn't believe it. I randomly asked her a couple of months ago what 2+2 was. She counted her fingers and said FOUR! I then asked her a couple more just to make sure and sure enough, she was adding correctly. I still randomly test her and she never misses a question. She recently added the ability to subtract as well. Dexter didn't do this until he was in kindergarten, but I think he may have taught her how to do this. He likes to teach his sister. He swears he didn't teach her to add on her fingers, but it's cool to see either way!
Although we aren't planning on having her tested until she's at least 6, it is interesting to see how they can be so different. I am sure she's gifted as well. I just don't know to what extent. She's on a similar trek, but it's hard to remember that they develop so differently. The outcome is that they have the same general ability with completely different strengths.
