We don’t believe in forced teaching, or drilling concepts into kid’s heads when they’re not ready or not interested. I know some parents worry if you don’t force a kid to learn, they won’t know anything, but there is so much already that Meredith has learned on her own that I’m not concerned. We’ve noticed in the past few weeks that she seems to be going through a bit of a learning bloom and is picking up some new concepts, and some new words.
She’s showing signs of being able to count a little bit. I have three rings that she likes to play with, and if I only give her two she knows one is missing. She counts them with me sometimes. She likes us to count before she goes down the slide, and then she’ll yell “Gooo” and push herself off. But she waits until we get to three, and if I only count to two, or if I miss one or say the wrong number, she doesn’t go down. I find this a bit funny because it’s an idea she got in her head all on her own, I never told her she couldn’t go down until I counted or anything like that.
She’s known the colour purple for a few months now, but she’s starting to differentiate other colours too. We have some beads I bought, and I got her to help me sort them the other day. She picked out a blue one and held it up and said “boo” with no prompting from me. She doesn’t say pink yet, but when I asked her to grab a pink bead, she knew which one I meant. Orange is another colour I think she knows.
I think she knows a few letters too. In fact, she’s very curious about the alphabet. We bought a foam letter puzzle for the bath tub, and she loves to ask what each letter is. One of her first words was “this?” which she used to ask while pointing at objects, wanting us to name them, and now she uses it for letters. I have scrapbooking letter punches that she is intrigued with and loves to pick them up and ask what each is. Kris and I go walking each night, and we often pass by signs that are low enough to the ground for her to point to the letters, and she will sometimes spend a few minutes in front of them pointing at letters and wanting to know what each is. She seems very interested in the letter “I” especially. I think because she knows where her eyes are on her face and at first she couldn’t figure out how a line on a sign was called the same thing as her eye. She used to point at her eye and say “eye” and then point at the I on the sign and ask “I?” But she knows a few others as well. We were cleaning up the foam puzzle and I asked her to grab the “k” and she grabbed the right one even though there were others that were closer to her than that one.
It’s really amazing watching her learn and internalize the world around her, and how interested she is in learning! That’s definitely something I hope she never loses. There’s so much she can learn and do just by playing and interacting with everything around us.
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