Children's Giftings

It is so neat when you discover a child's giftings. One day when the children were doing puzzles I discovered the Briton had done this 48 piece puzzle in only a ridiculously short time. Previous to this I had only seen him working on floor puzzles with Savannah, and those he had just done like any preschooler.

This opened my eyes to something interesting. I love it when I see where a child's bent is! He began pulling puzzles off the shelf and doing harder ones. One day I found him working on this world puzzle. He had already begun the one in front of him and then he decided to work on the second one.

I have watched how he does the puzzle. He does not match up the shape to the outline on the cardboard background. He looks very carefully at the colours on the pieces and looks to see where they go. Even so, he is able to do these odd shaped puzzles in record speed.

A 100 Piece Puzzle - 30 Minutes

This time he did a 100 piece puzzle and didn't bother looking at the box. I think he found it easier to do the puzzle without the distraction of the box.

Another day he sat down with a logic puzzle and blew me away when he did this puzzle without even thinking about it. It was like he was already aware of where the pieces were going to go before he picked them up.

I decided to see if he was really as good as I thought he was, so I let all the children have a turn solving the puzzle. They all got their moment to show off and had their 'well done' at the end, but at the same time I was able to see that he used 1/3 the time of two of his older siblings.

So we may have another hand/eye coordinated child. That is what Dane is - and he was only 9 seconds faster than Briton at the puzzle. Maybe he is not so extraordinarily fast. Maybe some of my other children are slow. lol. But he seemed like a genius to me! :o)

And the interesting thing is that we have pictures from way back when he was 15 months old. He would stand for 30 minutes at a time at the edge of the couch. He would push a couple little cars back and forth and just be so serious about what he was doing. Or other times he would sit for the longest time looking at the pictures in a board book. We always thought it very focused when he was little, but now we can see where his learning strengths are. So now we get to see what other things he is good at that require hand/eye coordination.
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