First time posting on one of these! Copy-pasted from last night because MDC is not playing nicely with the only browser I had available to me.
DS1 seems to have moved past a "plateau," so to speak. He gained a lot of skills very early, but then for a few months had been content to enjoy those skills. Then, BOOM. Suddenly...
He has sounded out a few words. Mostly, he just names the individual sounds and doesn't put them together into a smooth word, but occasionally does. He can type his name and a few other memorized words, and like to type while saying the sounds the letters make. He finds it hilarious to say the "wrong" sound for a word. "M for cow! Mmmmmmm... mmmmmmm... mcow! Hey mama! I said cow with an M!" He can write a few letters by hand, but since his fine motor skills are probably pretty close to average, he usually just asks us to write letters for him. Exception: he wrote the letter "P" (for Packers) in green crayon on a bunch of pieces of paper right before the Superbowl.
He can add and subtract conceptually in concrete situations, though he still doesn't understand the abstract language "number plus number," or "number minus number." If we ask him how many he'd have if he had one or two more of an object (carrots, for example), or one less of an object, he can do it. I have a sneaking suspicion he's been able to do this for a while and we just haven't asked. He can count into the 20s somewhere, but usually loses interest and starts skipping numbers or jumping around yelling random numbers at the top of his lungs
. He really seems to GET numbers, in a way that's kind of beyond his ability to express. I'm thinking of getting him one of those charts with the numbers 1-100 on it, in rows of ten, because it seems to fit with the way he conceptualizes numbers. He's been numerating objects since his second birthday and it has all come really naturally to him. It's weird because neither DH nor I consider ourselves math people.
He's obsessed with scorpions and poisonous frogs (Psst... kid... you live on the tundra. Become fascinated with moose or salmon and we will actually be able to SEE, live and in person, the things you're obsessed with). He has asked to look up pictures of different types of frogs on the iPad rather than a bedtime story for the past few nights. He was being an uncharacteristic lump on the sofa last night, so I asked him if he was feeling sick, and he responded, "No, I haven't been bitten by a poisonous animal."
His one, lone 24-piece jigsaw puzzle is too easy for him at this point. Guess I know what he's getting for his tax-return-fun-item. There aren't any at our local store, so I'll have to order.
OK, I told him that if he kept DS2 entertained and not crying while I typed this, he could "type his name for the other computer people to see." Here goes:
isaac