Will and Math

Everyone has stories about clever things their children do.  Most of us believe that our children are gifted in some form or another.  I just wanted to share this story about Will because I think it was really neat.  Will for a while has shown an aptitude for math.  He likes to do his work for the most part, but today as he worked through pages, I could tell he was bored.  And I don't blame him.  He can count up to a pretty high number already and these pages are just practicing counting up to 10 and and then writing the numerals.  We've been trying to go through them as quickly as possible, but it has still been a few days of basically busy work...though, I do like having him practice writing his numerals.

He first tried to make the work a little more interesting by coloring the numbers.  I told him he should just get through the work so we could get to something a little more interesting.  Next, rather than just count the objects randomly displayed, he grouped them together and made the page into addition problems.  For example, there were 7 clowns displayed and he made it into 3 clowns plus 4 clowns equals 7 clowns.  I was proud of that, but the one that made me laugh to myself was on a page where he is just being asked to fill in the missing numbers from 1 to 10 on a chart with pictures that he is suppose to count in order to determine the numeral (if he doesn't already have a grasp on number order).  When he had completed writing the numbers, he proceeded to count all of the pictures up to 55.  For fun.  It just made me think of something I read once in an article advocating inclusion and admonishing parents of gifted kids for being concerned that they would be held back from reaching their full potential.  The parent claimed that if a child was truly gifted, they would find ways to challenge themselves.  While I don't necessarily agree with that, I thought it was neat to see my son find a couple of ways to make otherwise boring work a little more challenging just for the fun of it. Now, that being said, he also had a parent next to him giving plenty of positive reinforcement for his cleverness.  If I hadn't prodded him through those other pages, he probably would still be sitting there coloring in zeroes...