Adding up

A while back I noticed that Lucy was starting to understand that if one kid left the table, only three kids remained, and other such scenarios. Eager to encourage any burgeoning math skills, I started occasionally creating my own word problems in the midst our daily life to introduce the kids to the the idea of addition, subtraction, fractions, and the like. Apparently this approach is exactly what Lucy needed to learn to add without any formal instruction! Check out what she can do:



Isaac may be our numbers guy (he taught himself to count to 100 well before any of the others could reliably count to 20!), but it looks like Lucy's the first to understand what you can actually do with numbers. Girl power!

Numbers (and letters) guy

During the kids' first semester of preschool, Isaac's occupational therapist worked with him on tracing and imitating various shapes and lines. We saw his fine motor skills improve dramatically, and he's putting those "pre-writing" skills to good use with lots of, well, actual writing!

Yesterday, for example, he brought me his magnadoodle and drew the number 10. He has done this before, so I was getting ready to walk away when he drew an 11 next to it. Okay, easy enough. Then he shocked me by writing a 12, a 13, a 14 ... all the way up to 19! I knew he was doing very well with counting, but I had no idea that he could write every single numeral from 0 to 9!

Isaac writes his numbers on the magnadoodle

I also didn't know that Isaac could write "balloon." I have never instructed him in how to write any letter of the alphabet, yet he is slowly figuring out how to write more and more of them himself. He proudly showed me his new word several times yesterday, and I was lucky enough to catch his excitement on video:



Of course, right now Isaac can still spell much more than he can write, and he shows us his stuff by using his beloved magnetic letters. For example, a couple of Sundays ago he spelled out "god sun" and said, "Mommy, God made the sun!" Turns out that's what the kids learned in Sunday school that morning:

Isaac ponders his Sunday school lesson

We are so proud of Isaac for teaching himself to count, to read, to spell, and to write. Since he is still learning to talk, however, I have started trying to use his abilities to his advantage by writing relevant sentences for him to read (such as "I love you" or "Chase me" or "Can I have that?"). I've noticed that doing so is really helping with his understanding, articulation, and self-expression. We are excited to see how else we can help our boy learn to communicate by using his love of the written word!