I read about another Mom who said she did some thing where the ran through the house with her then toddler and did a rapid fire naming of objects. I laughed so hard. That's me and my son every morning. He wakes up, nurses, and then we start in the bedroom and he names everything on the way to the kitchen. At least I know I'm not alone!
That's me! If you can believe it, that was our settling routine before bed and naps.
A few things we did:
- Expand our catchment area for naming. I'd put DS in a carrier and walk downtown with him for 1-2 hours in the morning, with a running commentary of our surroundings. It had the dual benefit of being excellent exercise for me! (Hooray for progressive overload!)
- Get a membership to a local museum and visit for 1-2 hours a few times a week, with running commentary. (I'm sure you're detecting a pattern.)
- Watch orchestral concerts online and try to re-create the melody or rhythm with little instruments
- Borrow about 100-150 books from the library each week. We literally would read for the full time between naps, such was DS' demand for new media. Our library allows us to make online reservations, so I reserve large sets of books en masse and am able to pick them up in a grocery cart from a dedicated shelf. This saves times and helps me make a wider variety of high quality selections. There are some book recommendations under the "Recommended Resources" section, and this thread that I started.
http://giftedissues.davidsongifted.org/BB/ubbthreads.php/topics/154238/Favourite_toddler_media.html- DS liked the basic Starfall alphabet app around 12-14 months, and two little apps called "Bugs and Buttons" and "Bugs and Numbers". The touch interface is infant friendly and gives young children access to new material when they need it.
- I started writing the names of household objects on index cards and leaving them around the house. Then DS would toddle from word to word reading them.
- Around that age, we started doing more "experiments" with simple things like buoyancy, colour mixing, prisms, magnets, gravity, measuring (water and small, pourable objects like beans and marbles). It sounds silly, but he started to really enjoy Snap Circuits around ~18 months.
- DS likes collections, so we began accumulating little kits of collectable items: polished stones, coins, animal figurines, minerals, models of the planets, etc. There is a company that makes a product called "Toobs" that your son might enjoy investigating and collecting.
- DS is a truck aficionado, so we amassed a large collection of die-cast Siku trucks, which are priced ~$5 apiece. A set of toy tools from Black and Decker was a hit at Christmas the year he turned 1.
- Time in nature is something DS has always appreciated. A simple ramble through a garden can yield a lot of opportunities for discovery: entomology, botany, the water cycle, weather, ecosystems, food chains, etc. Don't feel you can't delve into these topics, because your son will understand them and soak up the knowledge. (A great series of non-fiction books that DS enjoyed at that age was the Let's-Read-and-Find-Out level 1 books.)
- Around that age was when DS started to like spelling. We have a little set of magnetic letters that I organized in alphabetic order in a tackle box. I'd give him a few letters at a time, and we'd arrange the letters to make real and nonsense words.
Hope this gives you some food for thought! Fire away with any questions. It's an exciting and exhausting time, but you won't regret investing some extra time up front planning some activities.
Welcome to the forum! You've found your tribe!
