Words, Words, Words

I try not to do too many of those "look at how smart my kid is" posts, because every parent knows that his or her child is the most brilliant perfect creation in the history of the universe, but I'm going to indulge a little here anyway:

A few months ago when I took Fiona to the doctor for a checkup, the doctor started running through the list of things that a child her age ought to be cognitively capable of doing.

"Do you read books to her?" he asked.

Andrea and I laugh about that, because, while we've never been flash card type parents, I started trying to read to Fiona when she was about 3-4 weeks old. That wound up being a little soon -- she didn't like to sit still at all when she was that age -- but by the time she was three months old we'd developed a bedtime routine that began with me leaning over the crib with a book and reading it to her while she crawled around. Before long she'd figured out how to turn the pages, and since then there's been no looking back.

Recently, Fiona has started "reading" her books to her stuffed animals. She can actually do her entire book of Mother Goose rhymes word for word, and she also reads a book with the Knick Knack Paddywack rhyme, a book on opposites, and one or two others.

Now, obviously she's not reading just yet, as proud a parent as I'd like to be. She's memorized her favorite books because she's heard us read them so many times, and she can recognize the pictures on each page and know what's going on.

However, she has made two big leaps recently when it comes to reading.

First, she's developed an interest in longer books. Where we started out reading board books that might have a sentence or, very rarely, two sentences per page (and when we got to long pages we'd wind up abbreviating the text in order to finish before Fiona insisted on flipping the page), Fiona can now sit still while we read Dr. Seuss, Little Bear and a slew of other books that contain whole paragraphs of text on each page.

Obviously we're still reading picture books at this age (although we did read all the way through a version of Little Red Riding Hood that had four pages of solid text and only one page with a picture), but Fiona has developed enough of an appreciation for narrative that she's pretty much left the basic board books behind. Now, that's not to say she won't return to the short and simple stuff when she's learning how to sound out words, but it's fun to see her progress to more complicated material. Although it does mean she's had to come to terms with cutting down from two books before bed to one book (you'd think she'd understand that she's getting just as many words as ever, but a toddler doesn't think that way).

The second big leap Fiona has made recently is that she's started understanding that letters are put together to make words. She can identify all of her letters in upper case now (although she sometimes confuses "M" and "N", and occasionally she'll get her "B"s and "D"s confused). She can take her refrigerator magnet letters (or bath magnet letters) and spell "FIONA", whereas before she just knew that Fiona started with "F" (and she got upset when told that other words started with "F", too).

But she's also started showing an interest in words other than her name. She can tell you that Mommy starts with M, Daddy with D, Pop and Poppa with P, Nana with N, and Aunt Kathy with K (we're not worrying about spelling "Aunt" right now). When she plays with her letters, she's constantly asking me to tell her what letter comes next as she spells her friends' and families' names. And when she sees a letter, she likes to ask for words that start with that letter (she can tell you that zebra starts with Z, for example).

Finally, she's started writing letters as well. She can write Fiona so that it's pretty recognizable. She writes words on her doodle pad, or in the morning condensation on her bedroom window, or anywhere else she gets a writing implement and a canvas. Sometimes you have to know which letters she says she's doing -- the M and N don't always have connecting lines, the A sometimes looks like an H, and her P gets a straight line with a circle at the top but the circle floats all over the place depending on the day -- but there's no question that she's writing words.

So we don't use flash cards, but we've wound up with quite the little reader despite our negligence. Pretty soon her parents are going to have to stop using the trick of spelling words to each other that we don't want Fiona to hear and get overexcited by (e.g. "Do we have any c-o-o-k-i-e-s in the kitchen?")