NEWS COPY – WITH PICTURES AND VIDEO – by Laura Elvin
A three-year-old child genius who has an IQ of 145 can count up his mum’s shopping bill, do the 14 times table and count to ten – in FOUR languages.
Brainy Michael McBride has never had any formal tutoring but started to teach himself numbers and words from his mum’s iPad before he was just 18 months old.
He quickly learnt how to read eight-letter words and now corrects mom Emma Greenwood, 39, if she misreads his bedtime story book.
Little Michael can work out her total bill on a trip to the shops – including how much change she is owed – and knows his times tables up to 14.
He can also count to ten in English, Spanish, Russian and Japanese.
Yet his family say he also loves riding his bike and splashing in puddles like any other young boy.
Tests by an educational specialist recently revealed he has an IQ of 145, officially above genius level and a few points short of the Mensa requirement.
Mum-of-two Emma, a postwoman from Yate, Bristol, said: “We don’t push him because we are just kind of content to let him be himself – but he just teaches himself.
“He is quite fascinated by numbers, and also loves big words.
“He’ll say ‘mummy how do you spell this?’ and I’ll have to say ‘Oh, I’m not sure’ and we work it out together.
“I’ve never been very good at times tables but those are his favorite game – he can go up to 13 or 14.
“His English is very good, but he is like a sponge and his retention is brilliant.
“He has taught himself to count in Spanish, and a little bit of Japanese and also a bit of Russian. It’s amazing.”
Emma and husband Anthony, 33, a chef, first noticed Michael’s extraordinary talent when he was 18 months old as he started to learn from educational games on the iPad.
Soon he was speaking different languages, counting, reading road signs in the car, and asking questions his family couldn’t answer.
He learned his alphabet before he could walk properly and started reading by himself before he was three.
Emma, who is also mom to Ashton, 16, said: “Just the things he was doing for himself and saying were surprising.
“He was watching things on You Tube – the educational videos – and teaching himself Spanish and counting. It was amazing really.
“He will spell out words that he has never seen before. He knows how to break them down without being shown.
“He reads his Mr Men books by himself all the time. With his older brother, he couldn’t read those books that early on, not by himself.
“He will spell out fairly long words, with seven or eight letters in. It is noticeable that he is further on than he would normally be.
“He has the cognitive skills to work things out. When we went to Birmingham for the tests he was pointing at signs and sounding them out – he read the sign for ‘Solihull’.”
She added: “Shopping on a Sunday takes forever because he likes to add things up.
“He will ask how much something costs, and I will tell him the price, and he will work out the change from say #1.
“If it’s a small shop, he’ll try to add them all up too.”
A few months ago Michael’s grandmother Jenny Greenwood took him to a specialist in Birmingham who works with intellectually gifted children.
Tests found he had a reading age of eight years and three months old, a spelling age of eight, and an IQ of 145.
Proud Jenny, 60, from Cadbury Heath, South Glos, said: “We haven’t really been pushing him at the moment.
“It’s more a case of him wanting to learn himself, he is always asking about things. He asks us questions that we can’t answer already.
“In the last few weeks he has been obsessed with the planets, learning all the names and where they are, and he loves his maths.
“Sometimes I get maths questions wrong deliberately to test what he knows, and he always catches me out. He tells me I’m wrong every time.
“It is difficult to know what to do with this little person when he arrives. Hearing that his IQ was so high was such a shock.
“The rest of the family are just normal. His mom has a double degree and was reading before she went to school, but not on Michael’s scale.
“Obviously we are very proud of him.”
Michael’s parents have not submitted him for Mensa membership yet because they feel he is too young, although the youngest-ever member was just two-and-a-half.
Membership of the society is reserved for people with an IQ in the top two per cent of the population, around 148.
Dr Peter Congdon, who performed the intelligence tests, said Michael was “in the very superior range” for his age.
He added: “He is a very mature child and is very socially mature too.
“It would be much better for a child like him to jump a year at school and not be held back, because he can relate to older children.
“When he starts school, he will be taught words and sounds he is already familiar with, and he may get bored.
“Looking at his scores for logical thinking, he hit the ceiling, and he needs to be given the proper support.”
ENDS
