Thursday, April 30, 2009

Our Little Piano Player

I don't often post videos on this blog, but we have talked about our little piano prodigy, and so we decided to add a video. He has now officially been taking piano lessons for 2 months. It is a lot of work being that mostly he is assigned finger exercises when he would rather just play songs, but we are seeing a difference.

We're so used to seeing him play that we take his gift for granted now a days. We have to keep telling ourselves, "Oh yeah, he's only 6!"



You can always hear all his latest songs if you go to his piano blog by clicking here.

Monday, April 6, 2009

Super Reader, Super Mathmatician!

OK, so funny picture above from a day I told our oldest to document "a day in his life" for fun with my camera, but really, I just wanted to post about what a super reader he is.

Our oldest is 9 years old in 3rd grade and he reads 200 words per minute according to some test thing his teacher does. (How they time that or make sense of that is beyond me.)

We recently went to his parent teacher conference where we got to see all these test scores and progress stuff. She says he was the only one in his class of both 3rd and 4th graders to score above standard on every single section of the state math tests. I was actually surprised that other kids in his class didn't score this high because it is a gifted class. I thought they would all score high.

Then she showed us the test they do on reading levels and I don't know why it was almost funny to me because they rate it on this line and his arrow was at the very end. But anyway, it said he scored 99% or higher than all other kids in the nation for his age in reading comprehension. It also gives you like a grade level to correspond with how well you read and it rated him as being equal to an 11th grader in their 6th month of school.

So, no, these things don't surprise me about him. The teacher seemed all surprised at how smart he is, but we're used to it I guess. Nothing surprises us with our oldest. We know he knows so much. Plus, you can never get a book out of his hands! It's that love of reading!