About This Blog

In 2011, the art teacher told me that my son was gifted and I should have him tested.   A few months before the test date, I searched for advice and found nothing but snooty parent forums complaining about people trying to cheat into GAT programs and websites for gifted and talented that said the only thing you can do is get a good night sleep.

After an 8 week crash course that I created myself, he got reasonable test scores.  Between the February test and the beginning of the school year, 5 people turned down the last seat in a gifted program due to a variety of reasons. My son had a seat.  We walked into his new first grade classroom two weeks into the school year and I was shocked to see 3rd grade curriculum.  We just finished board books.  What had I done?

We spent about 2 years catching up.

The second child would be different.  I started a research program into cognitive skills, early education, early childhood development, and of course cognitive skills tests.   I wrote software to reverse engineering the tests, chugging away at question permutations until the bell went off (ding) and I had my answer.  It's not about manipulating shapes, it's about thinking skills, academic skills, and grit.  The research pointed in the same direction, although it's not clear from the research that cognitive skills experts have actually met a actual child.  Almost every paper and book points out that intelligence is at least partial genetic.  This is ridiculous.  This stuff is highly teachable.  A parent simply has to do the exact opposite of what school does to produce a gifted child.

When I started this blog, I figured no one would read it, because no one reads blogs.  It would just be a good place to organize my experiments and findings.  Then it became a place to answer questions and point other parents in the right direction.  When I started, I routinely cornered parents at parties and on the street when researching how they created such bright and successful children.  Now parents corner me on the street and ask how to do it. I've been coaching children and their parents ever since.

The curriculum page lists the best books from the shelves of thinking skills books and cognitive skills training  that I accumulated.  I have 4 feet of math books. There critical gaps in this material that I filled myself. The material for Pre-K, which I like to think as pre-test-prep, was missing the two most important steps in the learning process - a phonics book that emphasizes the cores academic skills that will be tested and similar phonics book for math.   I think I invented phonics for math.  These were the keys to a  99% on the test without anxiety for the Pre-K and Kindergarten tests.

My specialty is catching up.  It was far more rewarding to get from slightly above average to GAT at a later age than simply produce a profoundly gifted child who's ready for 3rd grade at age 5. Producing a 99% child at age five is a recipe.  Producing a 99% child at age 10 or later is something else.

There is a big gap for 2nd through 4th grade in both material and guidance for a parent, and very little test prep material.  With a 3rd grader still trying to catch up to his gifted peers, I created the Test Prep Math series.  The questions build in reading, logic, reasoning, grit, and some math into 100 word problems.   These books put the child so far ahead in thinking skills and academic skills that the child can go ahead on his own, which is much more appropriate for older children.

The biggest gap of all is training for the parents.  Gifted and talented preparation, aka thinking and academic skills prep, is mainly focused on the child, but parents like me have to change the approach and the learning environment dramatically.  This is a constant theme in all of my articles.  From the beginning, www.getyourchildintogat.com is not a place for gifted parents to go to feel good about their special children, it's for the rest of us to get our acts together.

In January 2016, I've got two major projects underway.  The first one is the Chicago Project, which I'm going to be writing about extensively.   The second one is the 7th Grade Project which you'll hear about in a couple of years.  The Chicago Project involves the recipe I mentioned above with underprivileged parents and their children.  The 7th grade project doesn't have a recipe yet.