Letters!
While most two year old boys love bugs, trains, dinosaurs, etc. J LOVES LETTERS.
Where did it begin? It likely started with his "reading movies" teaching him to read at such a young age but we're not entirely sure, but I'll try to explain it's far reaching extent.
- His absolute prized possession is his wooden letter blocks, he takes them out and puts them back in order, all day long. We bought a second set to keep at my mom's.
- He knows the alphabet (easy peasy for him), he's known them all (in any random order) since about 14 months. We had alphabet flip cards I just kept in my diaper bag. He loved to be quizzed on them.
- After that, his favourite game was to tell you what words started with or ended with each letter in the alphabet.
- He sees numbers and letters in everything! He is constantly showing us words he's spelled with his dinner.
- He knows the sounds all the letters make.
- He knows the sounds of compound letters i.e. The sounds of OW, TH, SH, ING ... you get the picture.
- He can pretty much sound out any word you could ask him to read.
- He's virtually taught himself the concept of rhyming but moving blocks into and out of words he makes with his letter blocks to make new words.
- He knows which letters and/or numbers can be flipped or turned backwards to make another letter. i.e. capital P can also make lower case b or lower case d or q, depending on how it is turned. A 3 can also look like a W, M or E if a word calls for it.
- He usually picks a word (or set of rhyming words) of the day and spell it all over the house, with every set of letters he has. The other day is was "castles," the day before it was "robots."
If he needs to have an obsession, I'm glad it's such a productive one. I'm not sure what he's going to do in grade one, I suppose that's yet to be decided.
Here are some photos.
Spelling names
me: "What are you doing in here?" J: "I'm just reading"
Spelling "balls"
Of course, we have bath tub letters too.
Spelling "brush"
Another word of the day was "brush"
It's great to see how much joy he gets out of learning a new word or finding a new rhyming word. For almost 2 1/2, he really is such a smarty pants and it's so rewarding to see him pick this up so whole heartedly. It's amazing to think of where he was at this point last year!!
I'll save that for another day.
Cheers,
Kim
Aww, he is just so amazing!!! I am proud just knowing him! :)
ReplyDeleteI'm glad I'm not the only one worried about kindergarten! Your J sounds *so* similar to mine at the same age with the letter obsession. It's definitely a quirky thing, but incredibly amazing to watch and be proud of.
ReplyDeleteJude is one smart cookie! It might impact which elementary school you choose. Apparently gifted kids are classified as “special needs” and they’re supposed to get extra resources and attention but many schools don’t bother (why spend time on the kids who are already excelling?) I’ve heard that some are better than others – there’s even a charter school for gifted kids called New Horizons in Ardrossan ( most of the students are from Sherwood Park).
ReplyDeleteMy niece is really bright too and her elementary school experience was awful. She went to OLPH and they were so rigid and unsupportive. Wouldn't let her do advanced work or even read a book in class - she had to just sit there bored most of the time. In grade 5 her teacher (with the support of the principal) started refusing to grade her assignments, saying they were university level work and clearly my niece must have copied them off the internet or my sister must be writing them. My niece genuinely loves learning and that school was sucking the joy out of her. My sister eventually pulled her out and is now homeschooling for Junior High.