Our boy.... who can count to 20, tell you every shape possible, remember things you told him once 3 months ago (he seriously does this... must be his fathers son), explores nature, and can question and reason with the best of them still does not know his colors. Two. Two colors is all he knows. Orange & Purple. Really? What kid learns orange and purple before all other colors? Daniel thinks he's color blind.... but that's another post. I think he's stubborn. We shall see.
But starting out this week I was ready! I was ready to tackle colors head on. We were going to learn those colors and have fun doing it! We did puzzles with colors on them...
we painted and talked about the colors...
and I even swiped come color chips from walmart and played a "drive your car to this color" game...
which he enjoyed.... but could only get orange and purple.
But then he slapped me in the face real hard. There's a show on Netflix that he likes called "Super Why" about letters and this week he got really into it and it hit me.
Stop with the colors... he's not interested.... his window right now is letters!
I was quickly reminded that you have to let children lead their own learning. This is something my classrooms revolved around.... but getting wrapped up in the day to day business at home I forgot to do it with my little boy. So now we're exploring letters full speed! I saturated the house with letters and am pointing out environmental print even more to him. I wrote letters on his dry erase board, put the letter magnets for his name on the door, and changed his table around in the living room to look like this...
He is pointing letters out everywhere now and is naming a few letters and making the sounds for some as well. All in just 5 days. Because he wanted to learn those skills right now. Right this very minute. Not because I wanted him to or because he "should know those by now". We went to the store today and he got so excited when he saw "yetters" (mind you he still cant say his L sound) on the outside of the building. When he's playing independently he is pointing out letters to himself. He even created this game tonight on his own....
(pick a letter and let the train run over it while saying, "watch out letter N! The train is coming!")
And it's amazing. The amount he has grown in just 5 days with his early literacy skills is unreal. We'll keep going with letters as long as he wants and see where it takes us....
one day we'll learn colors.... just not right now.
This is pretty funny! I'm pretty sure that my Evan was stuck on orange and purple for a very long time too despite me constantly trying to reinforce the others. Then one day, literally out of nowhere he started naming all of the colors. Maybe it's a boy thing?
ReplyDelete