I know I've mostly talked about my DS6, but I had a question about my DD22mo. Background: DS4 is learning to read, he asked me to teach him so we've been working on letter names and sounds, sounding out words and also some sight word flash cards. I have no idea if this is the best way since DS6 taught himself to read just before his 5th birthday, but he was in preschool doing "letter of the week", I guess that's similar to what we're doing with DS4 just at home instead. So, to put my question in context, there's been an abundance of "reading readiness" going on at our house, lol.
Around 18mo DD started pointing to numbers on the page we were reading, it was a chapter title page and she pointed to the chapter #, then a # within the text and then the page #. Basically, showing me that she recognized that those characters were different than the other characters. Since then she is very interested in letters and numbers. She taught herself to count to 11 and has 1 to 1 counting to 5- granted she only does these things when she feels like it because she's 2, lol. Within the last month she's actually learned to correctly label a character as either "letter" or "number".
Today I realized that she recognizes that written words are composed of individual sounds. DS4 had just gotten done saying all the letters in a random word he saw and DD pointed to a different word and started very clearly enunciating random letter sounds as she pointed to the letters in the word (so I can't even explain it away that she was just imitating DS, he had said letter names, she was making letter sounds). I didn't even know she realized that the letters made sounds.
I've mentioned before that she keeps asking for her own school work when I'm doing school with the boys, she grabs the boys' math workbooks and runs off yelling "I doing MATH!!" and the same thing with DS4's reading workbook "I doing READING!!", so she really seems to want her own work.
I gave her an unfinished pre-k workbook that DS6 never got around to finishing (at 4 he was in love with the cheap workbooks from Target), she did ok with it, but it was too much stuff she just didn't care about- like finding the different object in a series, which she surprised me by actually understanding what she was supposed to do. Are there workbooks for toddlers that would be less reliant on the ability to draw a straight line?
I feel completely out of my league with her, the boys at this age were much more interested in talking and playing with their toys, they had no academic interests. Neither of them really seemed to bloom until about 4 and then they suddenly took off, but she's doing things they just didn't do at not even 2. I don't want to push her, but I also don't want her to stop being interested and curious because I didn't help her.
So, I guess my question is this normal 2yo behavior and are we on our way to early reading or is it just a case of "monkey see, monkey do" since it's a big deal with DS4 right now? Should I do anything to encourage her because this is obviously something she's very interested in? Or should I just let her continue to kind of work it out for herself?
I hope you guys aren't sick of me yet! I really appreciate the collective insight and wisdom that this board has to offer!
Kimberly
