My Two Pence Worth: The love of learning

Andrew loves to learn new things. And he is really taking an interest in reading and writing. He has been working on writing his letters for awhile now and he can now write all of his letters. Some of them are not perfected yet but he has been practicing all of them. He also has shown an interest in reading with a constant question around our house being "What's that spell?" And he spells out the word and I will either tell him what it says if it's a hard one or I try to get him to sound it out. Sometimes he likes to guess what it says based on context. So he was holding the remote and he says "Mommy, this spells ON. P-O-W-E-R" He now knows that it spells power but only in the context of the remote. If I spell it on a piece of paper, he says that it spells Peter. But when I said that it spelled power, he said "Oh yeah I forgot."

So my mom was talking about some of the things that Christopher was doing in Kindergarten and she was mentioning about how they had worked on Chris writing his name but in his school class, they were working on getting him to write all sorts of different words like parrot and money. What a great idea! Here I was letting Andrew write his letters a million times but I hadn't thought to write out a word and then get him to try to write out the word as well. The only thing we had done (just like my parents) was to try to get him to write out his name but it usually involved me telling him which letter to write next one at a time.

So Andrew has a white board easel. Best $10 ever spent. Because he is not the greatest at writing all these letters, it is very useful to have this wide open canvas to write on. We will work on confining it to writing paper later (Did I mention he's only 3?). So he spends a lot of time writing letters on his white board. So I decided to write out Andrew and then Peter and then Daddy and told Andrew to write the same letters in order. And he did a GREAT job! He spent 35 minutes writing out these three words. He had the hardest time with Es. But he really wanted to do a good job so he kept erasing them and asking me "Is that only 3 lines?" I never mentioned that his first E in Peter was not right but I did work with him on second E and he was very excited when I told him that yes, it was only 3 lines.

We have one more year before Pre-K and two more years before Kindergarten and I am so proud of him. I hope that he always enjoys learning this much and doing new things.

As a reward for doing such a great job on his school work, I let him use my camera and take pictures of the family. This also was a great reward for him. He had so much fun going around taking some pictures. He also needed some coaching on how to know if his subjects were in the picture or not. You can see before and after coaching pictures below. =)

This is when he was holding the camera up to his eye.