Left-Handedness, Mirror Writing, and What?

You probably have seen my recent rant informative post on the educational challenges opportunities we have in our family in which I may or may not have expressed my disdain concern for the nonsensical stupid irritating interesting policies that impact the educational future of my children.  That post started out as this one and then morphed into something different but I wanted to come back to the original topic.  So here it is.

My super cool son writes pretty well. He can spell really well. He can sound things out phonetically and though in the English language that doesn't always work for you he gets pretty close most times.  And as sweet as he is he usually writes things like "Mom(heart)dad(heart)Logan(heart)dad(heart)mom" or similar really sweet things.  He writes in his notebook.  He writes on paper we give him.  He writes on a writing board or even those little magnetic little board things.  He loves to write and now that he's getting the whole spelling/reading thing a little bit better I think he's really starting to enjoy it more.

He's gone through normal stages of childhood writing development.  You know - writing the letters in all sorts of different places on the page, writing some capital some lower case without reason, writing some letters backwards or upside down at times - normal stuff.  But this weekend he threw me through a loop when he wrote in complete mirror image.  Everything.  with perfect writing skills but everything was mirror image.  I realized what he had done right away and it intrigued me.  I didn't even point it out to him...though I have an education background it's not as focused on preschool writing skills so I had to do my research to figure out what's going on.

I'm so glad I did.  For starters, it's probably completely normal and most likely related to his giftedness.  Interestingly, as I read they gave several examples of giftedness that I, as someone identified as gifted early on, never realized weren't "normal".  Mirror writing (and reading) is a great example.  I honestly didn't realize that this wasn't a skill most people had - I just figured that everyone could do it.  And, I can very easily read upside down, backwards, any direction pretty easily, which works out when reading to others. I  can sit like a teacher in front of a group of kids and hold the book at my tummy, then just look down to read the words (upside down and backwards) to the kids while they look at the pictures without hesitation or difficulty.  Apparently this is a challenge to most folks.  Or, another example they used was pictures of hands...there was probably 20 drawn images of hands in different positions and the challenge was to figure out what hand it was (right or left)...apparently most folks have trouble with that or really have to think about it...I didn't need to I could "tell right away".  Very interesting.  It said most people who have "mirror writing abilities" (?) have a parent with the same ability.  Gotcha.

In any case - I was lead to a website about left-handedness which apparently is also highly linked to mirror writing.  Our son is left-handed.  In case you are wondering, I am not though I am left-hand/foot dominant in sports with the exception of throwing and due to a broken right arm in 4th grade I can write with my left-hand.  In any case - this website was fascinating and proposed all sorts of things I never thought of before.  So, I'll be more considerate of my lefty moving forward.

One thing stuck out though - about peeling vegetables or fruitt (scroll down on the link) - seriously? You're supposed to cut toward you and not away? I never knew that...