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larryhammerTBD is four years + two months old.
Achievements unlocked this last month: "Are we home yet?", starting pre-kindergarten, tape dispensers, roller skates, washing and rinsing a small dish, putting on a backpack, opening and closing (mostly) an umbrella, recognizable drawing of a cat.
(Lots of fine motor skills there, innit? Hadn't noticed till I pulled this together.)
The past two/three months, there has been a notable ... increase in cohesion is the best word I can find, in both mental and emotional levels. And in carriage. The effect is that it feels like we have here a small person, instead of a tall preschooler. It's startling.
Some ways this shows: Travel is so much easier with a four-year-old than three-and-a-half. TBD is willing to run off, away from us, in company of friends -- among other signs of growing independence.
TBD's pre-K teacher is actively working her kids on the motor skills for writing, starting with straight lines. (Capital A is recognizable more often than not, but not other letters yet.) When coloring, TBD now works on scribbling over an entire figure -- now, finally, not worrying about going over the lines, but rather trying to fill in the area within regardless. Drawings are starting to get more of a recognizable schematic of what's intended.
Media: as soon as discovered, Blue's Clues immediately went into high circulation for the day's screen time. (Dora the Explorer also liked, alas.) Still also watching Chuggington, which is indeed better than Thomas and Friends. More and more library checkouts are superhero early readers. ETA: Dinosaur Train is also popular; saying "Da, duh, DUMMM!" dramatically after identifying something as a mystery or a clue has become a household trope.
The principles of rhyming (and other sound effects) have been internalized, and are being used creatively -- including in improvised songs, as well as noting when rhymes being used. Pronunciation is smoothing out still more, with /th/ -> /f/ still an issue, unless trying to speak especially clearly.
And then there's the talking, talking bits. Didn't get as much down this month as usual:
(after listing several career aspirations)
Janni: "You want to be a lot of things."
TDB: "But I don't have enough arms!"
(points at Wonder Woman in a picture with Superman and Batman)
"Why is she naked a little bit?"
"Do orange and morange rhyme?"
"They do."
"But $adultfriend said nothing rhymes with orange."
Uh, you got us there, kid. As you will, no doubt, continue to.
---L.
Subject quote from an improvised parody of "Great Big Stars".
Achievements unlocked this last month: "Are we home yet?", starting pre-kindergarten, tape dispensers, roller skates, washing and rinsing a small dish, putting on a backpack, opening and closing (mostly) an umbrella, recognizable drawing of a cat.
(Lots of fine motor skills there, innit? Hadn't noticed till I pulled this together.)
The past two/three months, there has been a notable ... increase in cohesion is the best word I can find, in both mental and emotional levels. And in carriage. The effect is that it feels like we have here a small person, instead of a tall preschooler. It's startling.
Some ways this shows: Travel is so much easier with a four-year-old than three-and-a-half. TBD is willing to run off, away from us, in company of friends -- among other signs of growing independence.
TBD's pre-K teacher is actively working her kids on the motor skills for writing, starting with straight lines. (Capital A is recognizable more often than not, but not other letters yet.) When coloring, TBD now works on scribbling over an entire figure -- now, finally, not worrying about going over the lines, but rather trying to fill in the area within regardless. Drawings are starting to get more of a recognizable schematic of what's intended.
Media: as soon as discovered, Blue's Clues immediately went into high circulation for the day's screen time. (Dora the Explorer also liked, alas.) Still also watching Chuggington, which is indeed better than Thomas and Friends. More and more library checkouts are superhero early readers. ETA: Dinosaur Train is also popular; saying "Da, duh, DUMMM!" dramatically after identifying something as a mystery or a clue has become a household trope.
The principles of rhyming (and other sound effects) have been internalized, and are being used creatively -- including in improvised songs, as well as noting when rhymes being used. Pronunciation is smoothing out still more, with /th/ -> /f/ still an issue, unless trying to speak especially clearly.
And then there's the talking, talking bits. Didn't get as much down this month as usual:
(after listing several career aspirations)
Janni: "You want to be a lot of things."
TDB: "But I don't have enough arms!"
(points at Wonder Woman in a picture with Superman and Batman)
"Why is she naked a little bit?"
"Do orange and morange rhyme?"
"They do."
"But $adultfriend said nothing rhymes with orange."
Uh, you got us there, kid. As you will, no doubt, continue to.
---L.
Subject quote from an improvised parody of "Great Big Stars".
no subject
Date: 29 June 2017 07:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 29 June 2017 09:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 29 June 2017 08:09 pm (UTC)"They do."
"But $adultfriend said nothing rhymes with orange."
My favorite treatment of this problem remains Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer's "The River, Where She Sleeps":
"But he looks a bit like Agent Orange / And when he leaves, he slams the door and / Just about that time she phones me up."
no subject
Date: 29 June 2017 09:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 29 June 2017 08:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 29 June 2017 09:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 30 June 2017 06:57 pm (UTC)increase in cohesion
Strikes me as apt, and I hadn't thought about it that way.
Do you know about the PBS-produced show Word Girl? Reason has forgotten it, but I suspect that it underlies a current interest in stomping into the library's Teen section and checking for Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek comics. Each household must decide for itself whether that's good or bad. :P (I did not know till then that Trek comics exist now.) Also of potential interest, though IMO a bit complex and (separately) violent for TBD's current age: Zita the Space Girl. (Reason and I have had what feels to me like the same chat every few months about artificially inflated violence and gun use in comics; I read a lot of things I never implemented or thought were right (notably most of Heinlein's fiction while I was 8-13), but she's not even eight yet.)
no subject
Date: 30 June 2017 07:56 pm (UTC)When we tried Word Girl (available in the PBS Kids app) TBD was too young for it. Now that we're more interested in spelling and words themselves, it may be time to try again. ETA: And yeah, Zita is too complex at the moment. Level 3 readers are stretch assignments right now -- witness the recent rocky introduction of Young Cam Jansen.
I need to bring up the violence in comics again ...
no subject
Date: 1 July 2017 11:37 pm (UTC)Yeah, mostly I meant complex re: comprehension of parts, not only lexicon (but I wasn't clear, sorry).
Even at Reason's age, we've been continuing an uneven alternation of solitary reading and reading with a parent, and we'll probably keep on until she tells us to quit. At the moment it gives her speed of access to narratives whose content she finds interesting but whose words she doesn't always want to slog through, or which she decides to reread on her own before they return to the library. (So much love for libraries. So much ability to sample things, most of which I wouldn't spend $ on (lest we be buried alive by paper or lose our eyesight to backlit screens) but which build a small reader's sense of range....)
no subject
Date: 3 July 2017 02:55 pm (UTC)So much YES