My son is 13 months old. He has a vocabulary of about 50 words, and he picks new ones up by spending about a minute or two working on it with him. He associates these words with objects / pictures, which is how we teach him. His pediatrician says he's advanced, I'm wondering just how special is he? What else can we do to take advantage of his abilities?
Sounds as if you're doing the right thing. As any parent should do - talk to your boy, play with him, read to him and delight in who he is.
Everyone has different experiences of course but ours was such that the giftedness wasn't really an issue until somebody else (teacher) was doing the caregiving. Only then did we find that our child's needs were not being met. Parents know their children, they know how to engage them. Trust that you will be able to do the right thing for your child.
Recognise that as your child gets older he might get frustrated with the asynchrony that sometimes accompanies giftedness. Sometimes I think that as a parent it's hard to remember how young our children are when they are so advanced in other ways. It can be tough for them. When your child is 3, he may talk like a primary-school kid - don't expect him to behave that way.
Our child were extremely advanced with their vocabulary from a young age. They could readily absorb information and I think one thing that helped our kids when they were so young was that we did not 'dumb down' what we said and talk baby-talk. I'd walk around the supermarket collecting vegetables and chatting about what I was getting - eg, "I'll just get this cucumber, that looks long enough, what a lovely deep green color it is" cf. pointing at the cucumber and saying. "Green. Green". It was unnecessary to make an effort to 'teach'; learning just happened when they were exposed to language. In saying that, I've no doubt that associating pictures and words in books helped build their vocabulary immensely as well, of course.
Remember not to focus on these displayed abilities to the exclusion of other things kids need to learn. One of the biggest issues we've personally had with giftedness is the accompanying perfectionism and risk aversion. Give your child challenges. Teach him it's okay to find things difficult, be wrong.
Emotional intensity can also be an issue. He's very young now but be careful to build up his 'emotion' language as well. It may make it easier when he's older if he's correctly able to recognise and label different emotions, etc.
Might be worth checking out the 'early childhood' section on this forum and having a read of the posts. www.hoagiesgifted.org is also a great starting place, although I'm not sure how much information they have on children so young.
I concur with Anon. Expose him to lots of different situations and experiences. I used to have my son in his highchair when cooking (for everyone's safety) and chatted to him about what I was doing, gave him things to touch, smell, or do, as appropriate. When about the same age he would hold himself up on the washing basket and pass up pegs, helpful as I was pregnant with #2. I would ask for pegs by colour or number (I didn't know this was expecting a lot for the age) and he was very engaged by that.
HTH
