Lots of pre-literacy updates all in a few weeks!
Those train letters are a heavenly gift!
The other day A- was playing with the train letters (enjoying how they magnetically stick together), and picked up an O and said "O". Then he did it with a P, and later an E. I'm sure that he's learned his letters from us and from the Elmo ABC app that he likes to just have playing in the background. Elmo saying over and over again "O! That's my favorite letter! Trace it with your finger", and then A- resets it to O again so Elmo will say it over and over. He also used to love Endless Alphabet. Plus, of course, we've been pointing out letters, making Pictellos of them (but never these particular letters?).
What's interesting about this to me is we have all the tactile letters - large foam letters, small foam letters, wooden letters, letter puzzles, but the train letters are the thing that captured his interest.Words and train letters
I made the word "SHINE" with the train letters and he looked at it and said "shine!". Shine is a word in his quilt (let it shine), that we've written, and notably in our compound word Pictello...Sight words from Pictello
The other night Daniel was reading the book "I say Blue" to A-. A- was running around, actually making us do ready set go which we do while we read him books. The book has long sentences, lots of words in small print. Daniel read a page "Sometimes ...."
A- stopped Daniel, went over, and touched the word "Sometimes".
Sometimes is in a page in a Pictello we made with compound words, which with Jennifer Cronk's guidance was a first stage that we were focusing on before we got to syllables, breaking down words into letters, etc. The compound words are all words that are meaningful to him, and one of them is "Sometimes".
Also notable here is that in the Pictello I used all Capital letters. In the book, it was written "Sometimes", so A- was able to hear Daniel say "Sometimes", come to the book, and touch that word. He's really into other compound words that start with Some, like Someone, etc. (Really into in that I notice his attention shift slightly when I use those words in sentences too!).Words are words
Lastly, we were reading a book that had a sentence "The snow covered the trains.....", of course while he was running around and hiding under sheets and getting us to play ready set go, and he came over and stopped us. And he started tapping each word one at a time, making us say them. "The" - tap - "snow" - tap - "covered". Going through the sentence forwards, and then backwards.
Just last week he was hearing us talk about the snow in DC, and playing a Pictello in response about the snow in Canada, so it's possible this started out with him hearing the word "snow" and then wanting to figure out which word it was. And THEN maybe going "cool! This is like a video game with words - which have spaces before and after them - and getting Dad and Amma to say them!". It's also possible he was exploring the idea that words have spaces before and after (I don't think that's new to him, but it could be continued exploring!).
What's next?
I made a few rhyming words Pictello with a few of the words that he is showing strong interest in. This isn't his first rhyming Pictello but it may be the right time for it. Jennifer Cronk pointed out that a lot of the words he's interested in - sun, shine, sometimes - start with an S so to do a lot of showing words that start with S that he likes. And I have made a few videos of me reading books, but I'm going to do one with me reading a book a bit more slowly and pointing to the words when possible.