Letters

During our snow days, Doug (presumably looking for new indoor activities), started talking to Ian about letters. In the last week he's gone from being largely unaware of specific letters to pointing them out constantly. He identifies them based on someone he knows whose name starts with that letter (since that's how Doug originally introduced them). When he came into my room this morning he pointed to the 5 on my digital clock and said, "There's a Susan!" (thinking it was an S). He definitely knows S for Susan (his teacher at school), M for Mommy, D for Daddy, Z for Zrbrt, G for Greg, L for Lilo, J for Janicki (friend at school), and I for Ian. He is learning some others. When we were at a stoplight earlier this week he said, "Mommy, Zrbrt is on that car!". It took me a moment to realize he was referring to the license plate, which started with two Zs.

Thursday night at bedtime he was looking at the letters on his blocks, and we talked about the S for Silas (a friend at school). He wanted to bring the S block to show Silas, so instead we put letter stickers on pieces of construction paper for all the kids at school with the letter of their first name. This was a big hit, and fun for Ian to hand out the next morning. The other kids range in age from 1.5 to 3.5 years, so the meaning was appreciated more by some than others, but stickers are always fun.

This is a cool first step towards reading! There are certain truck books that Doug and I would love for Ian to be able to read himself, because our interest in them was satisfied about 1,000 readings ago :)