My Daughter is a Math Wizard

So my daughter just turned four two weeks ago. We let her choose her own learning. When she wants to learn about letters, we encourage her and let her go as far as she wants that day. When she wants to learn about numbers, same thing. Same thing for every "subject".

She is really into letters, writing and reading individual letters frequently. That's cool. She gets excited about it, and watches shows like "SuperWhy" and is really into it (even though my wife and I hate that show, since the characters have absolutely no facial expressions, especially the fairy princess character).

The funny thing is that she is somehow secretly into numbers. A few weeks ago, she suddenly asked us "two and two is four, right?", "three and three is six, right?", all the way up to like "nine and nine is what?". We never told her that, never even really taught her there was such a thing as addition as far as I can remember. But when she asked us that first 2+2=4, we were like "uh, yeah, you're right!" And we answered her questions about the higher numbers, and didn't push her to be like "and 20 + 20 is 40". We let it go as far as she wanted to take it, which was still a few sums beyond numbers she really understands.

Then today, she was making muffins with my wife, and suddenly asked my wife "what's three fours?". Our muffin pan, like most, holds twelve muffins, in three rows of four (or vice versa if you like). She was doing multiplication! My wife called me while I was working to tell me about it, and it is quite remarkable. I was on accelerated math in elementary school, number one or two in the class, going to the next grade up for math class, and I remember doing multiplication in like third or fourth grade. Or was that fractions? But anyway, definitely not in kindergarten, which would be one grade level up for her right now. In kindergarten, I remember things like Mr. M Munchy Mouth - the letter people. She would be totally bored with that after like ten seconds right now in her life.

I think this is a perfect example of how schools work. They have to teach to the lowest common denominator (not to overdo the math thing), or at least to the median (OK I will stop I promise) level of the class. In some cases, even working at a grade ahead, this is way too slow. This to me supports our decision to let our children learn what they want when they want when it comes to traditional school subjects.

On a side note, our almost-two-year-old son is really into counting and letters thanks to our older daughter's interest in it. He shouts letters at SuperWhy and "writes letters" - albeit far less accurately or proficiently than the older one. Even if he thinks every number is "one" or every letter is "eight", he really gets a kick out of it. After all, that's what it's all about - getting a kick out of life, at every age.