Spell it out: Part II

I can't believe all the things I have missed posting recently.

Two weeks ago, we were picking Zeke up from school and we ran into his teacher. She said she had a really cute story for us and then quickly said, "but not a bad one!" (This, of course, made me immediately think it was a bad sort of cute -- like poking a friend in the eye while saying "eye" or painting another child's hair.) She said that during circle time she was sharing word/picture flashcards with the the children and encouraging them to say the word. My baby Zeke was talking, but she couldn't quite make out what he was saying (not unusual) and was wondering why he wasn't saying the words with the other children. She realized it was because he was spelling the words.

Ms. C. told the story with great enthusiasm and worked up some excitement by the time she got to the announcement: "Zeke knows his letters!" Unfortunately for our role as an audience, we already knew this and she seemed a little disappointed -- deflated, really -- not to be the bearer of amazing news. The school director met us at the door and got out excitedly, "Did you hear about..." before Ms. C. stopped her with, "They know."

But, what was good for us spoil sports, though, was to find out that this is not expected behavior in the one year old classroom and that they have not been emphasizing letter recognition -- both answers to questions we had. One of Zeke's talents for the past few weeks or so, is "reading" letters. His reading letters appeared sometime soon after he starting reading numbers in mid-January. It started out with just a few, but he can now name any letter that he sees. He does not have a clear pronunciation of all the letters ("i" "q" and "w" are the ones that come to mind), but gets ones that I wouldn't expect (like "x"). He really has a few favorite letters that he gets really excited to see ("y" and "k"). He can even say the first few letters of the alphabet in order. He can identify both upper and lower cases, though he still frequently sees "p" as "9" -- a mistaken deciphering I can understand. As I mentioned in my previous post, I don't know when children typically develop this skill set, but it is just so astounding to hear him say "c-h-a-i-r" as we look at a box that a chair came in.

We honestly attribute much of this to all the time that he has spent on his little toy laptop, though we now reinforce frequently with the daily dose of Sesame Street, letter puzzles from Christmas and letter flashcards that we "read" together. Though I would not have predicted the situation, it is a fun little game to point letters out for Zeke to say or to write letters and have Zeke spell them. He's pretty good at reading the letters in his name now and it made for a good game today on the drive home from Florida.