While Charlotte has a few reservations about this "child-led" learning – "There's a bit of me that thinks it's a nursery, you're teachers, you could be doing something more with her" – she plans for Karina to attend her local primary school, along with her friends. She shows off a chocolate tray, decorated with tissue and paper: a butterfly feeding table. I don't think any adult is ever going to go, 'Damn, I didn't do my GCSEs aged nine'." So Karina goes to a local nursery and spends much of her time "junk modelling".
"What every parent wants for their children is to give them a happy, balanced, enjoyable childhood. Stories of home-schooled geeks scare her. She does not know from where her linguistic precocity comes: Charlotte was adept at science, she says, and Karina's father, Nick (from whom Charlotte is separated), was good at physics and maths. Shown a picture of a glove that was lacking one finger and asked what was missing, she said the other glove.Ĭharlotte found it "reassuring" to discover that Karina was not suffering from some "really weird way of thinking". Shown a picture of a teapot without a handle and asked what was missing, she said the picnic mat. "Karina has an unusual air of maturity in one so young," said Professor Joan Freeman and, in a careful report pointing out the shortcomings of IQ tests in very young people, suggested that she had an IQ of 160 – said to be the same as Stephen Hawking's – which placed her in the top 0.03% of children of her age.Īsked in these tests what we do with our eyes, Karina said we put contact lenses in them. But after a helper at the church creche noticed Karina's "incredible" imagination, Charlotte found a child psychologist on the internet and, a year ago, took her daughter to London for an IQ test. "Everybody she came into contact with would say, my goodness, how old is she?"Ĭharlotte thinks it is "a bit rotten" to compare Karina with friends' children "because they all develop in their own way and you don't want to be this competitive mum".
"As soon as she started talking, it was like this massive word explosion," Charlotte says. They live, the two of them, with Truffles the cat, in Surrey. Now he's come back to play with his friends." I'll give him some special horse medicine," she says. Karina places Sandy in a bed she has made from Fuzzy Felt. Except for Sandy, that is, a small plastic creature with a wounded leg. "All of my horses are called Athena," announces Karina.
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