Wilson, our reader-in-training, read the newspaper to me yesterday morning. Okay, maybe not quite… “read” is a relative term when you’re talking about a 2.5 year old who can point out a few letters on a page. Still, I was pleased by the progress he’s making with alphabet recognition. Letters that he didn’t know a few weeks (or even a few days ago) are now in his vocabulary. We started with the weather. “Hey Wilson, I asked, “what’s this letter?” “W!” he shouted. “And this one?” “e!” and how about this one? “Um, I don’t know.” Or this one? “Number one!” Overall he knew four out of the seven letters in “weather.” I went through the letters once more one by one, slowly pointing to each letter, saying the name and giving him time to repeat back each one. Then we looked at the word weather again. This time he was able to get six of the seven letters right before the weather suddenly changed—our dear student dumped over his cup of milk all over the paper. Time for a new activity!
One of Wilson’s favorite books is Chica Chica ABC by Bill Martin Jr and John Archambault. He loves the rhythm and repetition in this book, and for some reason—perhaps because of the “chicka chicka BOOM BOOM” reference, he has begun calling his owies “chicky boom booms.” As in, “I fell and I got a chicky boom boom on my knee.” It’s become part of our family vernacular. The fact that the book has an ABC theme had not been of much interest to Wilson but I did ask him to point out a few of the letters to me when we read it most recently. He gets letters like e, r, s and v correct nearly all of the time whereas lowercase letters with round shapes (like a, c, q, n and m) are harder for him to separate.
Later in the day we spent some time with My First Bob Books: Alphabet. Wilson happily sat on my lap on the carpet as I read the books “EF,” “GH,” “VW” and “XYZ” (not in any particular order – these were the books that he personally selected after dumping them out on the floor.) For some reason he was fixated on the illustration of the vacuum in the VW book. That and the watermelons on page 6. “Watomelwon, I like watomelwon!” He started to get wiggly so I stood him up in preparation to put the books away. In his socks, Wilson jumped onto one of the books and started to slide. I got an idea. “Put your foot on the letter A,” I instructed, and he did. “Now, put your hand on the letter H”… and he did. We both started giggling. “Now… put your nose on the letter I” and we were both in hysterics. Who knew alphabet games could be so fun?
Let us know if you have any fun alphabet games to share.
-Allison
