Should I be doing more for a very bright Year 2 child?

[lemoncurdcupcake]

Posting here for traffic.

DS7 has been repeatedly described as bright. I've not really thought too much of it before but today a new neighbour whose child joined DS's class this week said 'I told the head I lived on your road, I hear you have a very clever boy, I almost got the impression he's too clever for the teachers!'. I didn't know what to say 🫣 But it got me to wondering if I should be taking more notice and perhaps doing something about it?

I think when I was a child he'd have been described as precocious. Not sure that's a term used often anymore. He's mature for his age, articulate, logical, LOVES reading and goes through books faster than we can find them. He's interested in an array of topics and I match/encourage/facilitate his interests with books, games, podcasts, he loves the horrible history and other non-fiction yoto cards, nature and space documentaries, that sort of thing. None of it feels forced or chore-like, we just both enjoy discovering new things and chatting about what we've learned.

He questions everything (which can be absolutely exhausting both for us as parents and sometimes I think his teacher 😅) and has an incredible memory for detail. I feel like I'm living with a mini barrister. But being my eldest child I just thought this was normal for his age.

I guess my question is, should I be doing something with this?! Or are we fine to just continue as we are doing, keep providing him with resources and information for the topics he's interested in etc. He loves a trip to the library as much as skateboarding or climbing trees in the park and that feels right considering he's only 7.

I don't think we're talking 'gifted' (though honestly how would I know unless someone put it in those terms?). I just think he's quite a logical, articulate little boy with a good memory and interested in a lot of different topics. However, I am someone who isn't particularly ambitious and I don't want to inadvertently let him down by coasting along if I should be doing something additional with the information that he's particularly bright?

YABU: you should be doing more (if this, then what should we be doing?)

YANBU: he's 7, let him discover the world at his own pace without making it too serious.

Does he play chess? Sounds like he’d probably like the challenge.
Good points about supporting him to develop the things he’s not good at and to encourage friendships and social skills. I wouldn’t over think it. School will let you know if he’s difficult in class.

Thank you for your reply. A few people have mentioned this now. We had a muck around with my old recorder a few months ago and reading some music which went well. Think I'm going to get it back out and see if there are any other instruments that he's interested in. Would love it if someone in the house played guitar 😍

Arrogant is absolutely what I'm hoping to avoid. I rarely failed at things growing up and I think it's why I'm not ambitious. If there's a chance of failing I'm not that likely to try. It's not a good trait!

Yes an instrument would be great and perhaps coding maybe.

@Xmasallergies he loves chess, he just doesn't have anyone to play with. I try but I don't have the patience to sit there as long as he would and play back to back games. Plus I have another child so 2 player games don't work often (she'll sit on my lap and be on my team for a bit but soon gets bored. DH works away a lot. Makes me so sad we don't live closer to my dad as he's a bit of a whizz at chess and would be the ideal competitor, takes no prisoners 😂

Your DC sounds quite similar to mine. Luckily, the school he attends are able to identify children’s strengths and stretch them further. Same for the ones that need more support. its not my job to prevent boredom at school.

I second this as well as emphasising social and sporting activities. I was very smart as a kid but also desperately shy and with my self esteem was and still is less than zero. I got 4 As at A-Level and got went to Oxford but completely "failed to launch" and was back home by Easter and have never really got going. I have a decent job but could have done so much more with a bit of parental encouragement.

Don't praise him for "being clever". Praise him for trying hard. This is key.

I also have an 8 year old smart arse who is frankly bored stiff at school doing her times tables when she learnt them all off by heart when she was 6.

But I don't really care about "pushing her". She's a kid and just needs to enjoy life and learn how to hang out with her friends, how to manage her friendships and fail at things.

She is very busy outside school and does lots of activities. I can recommend ice skating as an activity to fail at as it's bloody hard! That's what my daughter does 😀

When you say you're currently working on teaching him tact and when not to correct people, surely you can't be referring to adults!

A sharp response would soon cure him of that but I'm sure you must mean he corrects other children.

It won't make him popular with his classmates if he acts the schoolmaster with them!

ABSOLUTELY this. Best advice on the thread.

Get him violin, or piano lessons, or both. He will find these more of a struggle to master, as there are few shortcuts even if one is bright, or musical. It's incredibly good for a child to learn 'ah, here is something I have to actually work at!' - there will be battles - and music has values of its own, eg he will be able to join music groups, hopefully fostering a life-long love of music that will go ahead into his future.

My two 'gifted' daughters both struggled when they came up against the discipline required for music, the inevitable and countless 'failures that have to be overcome and improved. Adults now, they still love music and their instruments - we often make family music together, and both are in amateur music groups, tho in different instruments to the one they learned in childhood. No-one seems to hold those battles to get them to practice against me now!

Hahaha, second vote for ice skating. It was my hobby as a kid and I competed until I was at uni and did a bit of coaching. Can confirm that watching DD who happily worked her way through the entire harry potter box set in year 2 and has never found a day of school hard in her life fail and fail and try again is incredibly good for her. She's determined to be better than me one day and she absolutely will be if she stays interested in it.

But yeah, anything that they find genuinely hard is character building.

@LadyTakingTea usually me tbh, and his little sister, and no it does not make him popular. He has had sharp responses from his teacher, me, DD, his grandparents etc, but ultimately I also want to teach him the emotional intellect of why what he's said is irritating/inappropriate/not winning him any friends. If you read up on 'the age of reason' you might get an impression of the sort of things I mean.

He's often not trying to be rude, he's genuinely picked up on something the other person has said which doesn't tally with 'the truth' and is questioning it. People misspeak a lot, and recognising that people do not always mean what they say/finding the nuance in speech is a skill.

I guess a lightweight example would be me saying 'right it's half 8, time for coats and shoes' and he'll say 'actually it's 8.27....'. is he technically correct? Yes. Does it need saying in that moment? No! Is it annoying to be corrected in that way when most people would have understood that 'half 8' can mean 'close to have 8'....yes it jolly well is 😂 and I do want him to be liked, so rather than snapping at him not to correct me/don't be rude/an insufferable know it all/have to have the last word I want to help him learn how to know when to let it go. Feels like this is the time to learn right? As a kid!

@ApplesinmyPocket I'm liking this more and more. Thank you. The more I'm getting into the thread the more I'm recognising he is already not apt at pushing through when something is difficult. He's quite physically capable, finds ball games, bikes, skateboards, scooters etc easy but seriously could not get the hang of roller skates and didn't want to try. Think getting him into something which is going to test his discipline and commitment will be a very good long term skill!

He sounds similar to my son, I would advise you to look up potential plus uk they have a FB page ‘Parenting high potential’.

He frequently corrected teachers and now at 14 is working at a maths level higher than my husband who did an engineering degree. It’s been a bumpy road to get him happy (he’s at a grammar school and has found it much easier to find friends with similar interests there) and find appropriate challenge to improve resilience.

The most revealing aspect of it has been how it has revealed the insecurities of the adults around him, including friends and family.

@Brainstorm23 feeling very thankful right now to someone who told me before I became a parent to always praise effort rather than natural ability. 'youve really worked at that'/'i can see you've really tried your best' are phrase often uttered.

@Swissmeringue he was actually pretty good at ice skating, at least at moving forward and not falling over which is better than me! Was surprising as he looks like Bambi on rollerskates/heelies! Bet having you be good at it was a real motivator for your daughter 😍 what a great story.

Can confirm that watching DD who happily worked her way through the entire harry potter box set in year 2…

this is a normal age to read HP no? I don’t think she’s an outlier!

He sounds great but as I found out from parenting my two “normal” is a very wide spectrum! I remember our primary head telling me that in all her years of teaching she’d come across only one child who was really really exceptional ie of the level of being taught high school maths early in primary. So although he’s fab he’s probably not that out of the ordinary to teachers that they won’t see every year or so. Just keep on with reading, stuff at home etc and keep
the love of learning going.

Not really in my experience, lots of her peers would have struggled with longer chapter books in year 2. But anyway, I don't consider her to particularly be an outlier, she's bright and capable but not exceptional (well obviously we think she's exceptional because she's our kid). My point is that she hasn't found anything at school to be particularly challenging, and I see huge benefit in finding extra curricular activities where she has to learn to persevere.

THIS^

We have a highly gifted 3 year old, he taught himself to read at 2 and does math for fun. Social skills do not come naturally to him and we've been in OT for a year now to try to get him the skills he needs to be "normal".

@ZZTopGuitarSolo my DH was the same as my son is now, and it took him enlisting in the army after uni and being in the back end of Afghanistan for years to learn how to to be a functioning member of society. He is successful in life now, great job, has friends and family, but he went to a gifted school program, and it did an absolute number on him growing up.

@Juliadiesalone @Swissmeringue I think this probably fits in well with @StrictlyCoffees point. Feels like there are kids in year 2 who are happily reading harry potter and beyond, and some who are way off that and both of those things are within the 'normal' range for this age group.

From a reading perspective DS read HP1 and 2 in no time at all but I've not let him read the full box set as he has such a vivid imagination that I think a lot of the later ones would cause him nightmares. So also can be intellectually at a level but nowhere near emotionally ready or resilient enough!

It sounds to me more as if another pupil, or maybe someone like a lunchtime supervisor has been passing on gossip about OP's DS than the H/T told the neighbour anything about him.

Exactly. He sounds bright. But lots of kids are bright. You don’t need to do anything!

I would however have a word with the headteacher as it sounds incredibly unprofessional to be being snarky about a child to another parent. It’s awful to be honest.

@Pearlstillsinging 🤷🏼‍♀️ maybe. I didn't question her at the time and wouldn't bring it back up. It's a tiny school, in a tiny village, didn't seem ridiculous in the moment that the Head might have just said 'oh yes he's a clever child' or something along those lines when neighbour mentioned we live a few doors away from one another and then the chat moved on. It's entirely my interpretation of how the neighbour told the story (plus a reflection of my own experience with getting exasperated with DS sometimes) that when she said 'too clever for his teachers' she meant it in a 'too clever for his own good' sort of a way. Neighbour didn't quote the head directly, so don't have much more to go on tbh. I'm going a lot on tone and facial expression from a very short chat.

Someone up thread mentioned that if the head had been saying the opposite (i.e. oh yes, he's not very bright) it wouldn't have been appropriate so it wasn't appropriate to say what she did say. Hadn't thought of it like that. I guess in our society a lot of the time if something can be seen as a 'good' thing it's less frowned upon to talk about it. For example if someone said 'have you seen Joan at #47? She's lost so much weight, she's been seeing a PT and has signed up to a marathon!'...it's still gossip, but wouldn't be necessarily seen as horrible/inappropriate. Whereas 'woah Joan's piled on the pounds a bit since Christmas' would be way less acceptable to say. So yeah, I really didn't think much of it other than thinking about DS and how best to parent him.

The time thing- apparently that’s quite common these days as there are fewer analogue clocks around therefore more specificity. I outright explained to my daughter one day what I meant and it was unhelpful to correct me unless we’re being silly. We do pedantic pretty well in this house… It kind of worked!

Pedantic!!! That word has been evading me all blooming afternoon. Thank you! I wrote persnickety to DH earlier but it wasn't the word I wanted.

Yeah, my daughter did this until fairly recently (now 10) when I told her outright to stop as it was fucking annoying. It’s just something kids do. They like to be pedantic when they can and then utterly negligent and inattentive at other times!

I have a very similar child. I just want them to be happy and healthy and kind (as far as they can be at this age, realistically) really. I also try to ensure they get different types of experiences / nurture different skills but we have 3 kids and a relatively low income so you know, nothing fancy. I did super well at school and it hasn't really been of much benefit to me as an adult tbh. Partly because I developed mental health problems as a teen that followed me into adulthood snd partly because I wasn't 'well rounded' so lacked lots of other skills that would have made me more successful as a young adult. So I want my children to have more balanced/varied skill sets as much as possible rather than necessarily just excelling at one thing be that academia or something else.