Signs Your Child is Ahead of Their Preschool Classmates
What are some preschool milestones your child should be reaching? We spoke directly to a former preschool director on her first-hand experience.
According to Maria Larrotta, former preschool director with a M.S. in Early Childhood Education, there are a few signs that lead to advanced development during the preschool phases.
Maria emphasizes that identifying children who are ahead isn’t about surface-level skills or rote memorization, but about how deeply learning is integrated. She notes that even when very young children demonstrate advanced abilities like recognizing letter sounds, decoding simple words, or intuitively adding and subtracting, what stands out most is how naturally these skills emerge. As she explains, some children repeat patterns on their own, retain information quickly, and apply it without direct instruction. Beyond academics, Maria looks closely at curiosity, social engagement, and a child’s intention to communicate. For her, the strongest signals of advanced development are not perfection or performance, but a child’s genuine interest in their environment, their ability to engage in back-and-forth interaction, and the ease with which learning shows up in everyday moments rather than through forced repetition.
“I’ve seen cases of a child that’s barely two, and they know their letters. They know the sounds of the letters (which are) more important than the names.”
Being able to observe images and understand the number amount is also a measurable sing. “I had this client that he could see a group of numbers or a group of objects and just look at it and say, ‘they’re seven.’
Understanding a very early fundamental stage of arithmetics also stands out. Maria recalled a case where a child acknowledged elements of addition and subtraction in their everyday speech.
How Malleable Their Brains are in Preschool
On “Why Babble Sounds Different Across Languages” we explored this further with one of our early language development experts (Cara Tyrell) who stated that “at birth, babies are capable of producing every sound used in all languages on Earth. That includes sounds that adults in a given community never use. Every phoneme. All of them.”
The neuroplasticity of children means they are to be looked at as a future person with more infinite possibilities. Unlike rigid adults, kids absorb early learning quicker. It is advised to give children more responsibilities and trust to carry out proper functions and ideas.
“They’re kind of on a default setting of ‘I can say and learn anything.’” - Maria Larrotta.
When a Child is Socially Advanced- Beyond Academics
Maria repeatedly emphasizes that advanced children are not just “academically ahead” — they show relational and adaptive markers too:
“I really look for children that can socially engage in a group… engaging in back-and-forth play, mimicking, laughing, imitating.”
Particularly gifted children have a general sense of awe for the world around them, and their curiosity allows them to piece things together at a faster pace.
What to Expect from an Exceptional Preschool
Parents like to focus on the hard skills and milestones but the preschool stage is also for growth in:
Social skill development with their peers
Discovery of their emotional awareness and autonomy-supportive practices
Interactive play stimulation and problem-solving skills
And of course, a curriculum that introduces foundational concepts of math, language arts, and science.
Private mentorship (as offered by coaches like Maria) takes off the mental load and create a bridge for parents to track the success of their children.