I can’t remember if I posted this, but a little while ago Meredith became very interested in the ABC games on the Starfall website. Just through playing those, she started to learn letters and could recognize some letters when we saw them in other situations. For Christmas, she had got some alphabet cards which I had put up on her wall and she loved to go into her room in the morning and look at the cards and name the letters and the different animals and objects that start with each letter. One of her favorite books is a book about cats and she even recognized the word cat (from it being written over and over!) and was able to type it out to Kris on her own from memory.
Then, she seemed to lose all her interest in letters. We follow her lead, so we didn’t push it and didn’t worry. She still would occasionally play the game, but mostly went to other games instead if she was on the computer. She stopped pointing out all the letters we passed and didn’t show any interest in talking about them.
Suddenly today she was playing Starfall again, and at the end of some of the games are matching games, like Memory. She clicked on a card that had a picture of an octopus and said “Where’s the o Mama?”. It’s the first time she has played that game in weeks, and previously she’d had trouble with the matching games. She ended up turning over the z card instead, and then the next card was a zipper. She immediately said “Oh, that’s the z”, and re-turned over the z card. The next card was a carton of eggs and she mused to herself “E for egg”. It was pretty amazing, considering how long it’s been since she’s played these games, and that last time she played them she didn’t (to my knowledge) automatically know what letter each picture started with. It’s so cool how their learning works if they’re left to learn on their own time and in their own way. She was also recently playing a different game that showed pictures and the words to go with it, and she turned to me and said “Mama, c-o-o-k-i-e means cookie”. She was reading the letters as she said it, but I found it really cool that she is starting to recognize that the letters actually can be associated with particular objects!
In other news, she is still sleeping in her own bed every night, by her own request, and staying there until it’s too light in the morning for her to fall back asleep, then coming into our room. (Though she often nurses once in the night too in her room.) We’re going to have to get her a black out blind for that room I think.
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That is so cool when you can actually see them learning. Smart little girl!
Those alphabet cards are gorgeous! Did you have to buy them from the website or did you find them in store somewhere?
Buddies sells some of them. We actually got those ones from Sprouts I think. I have another set that we got from Buddies that I’m not sure what I’m going to do with. I might return them and get a growth chart or something instead. (Though it may be way too late to return them since we bought them at Christmas time lol.) Or maybe keep them and put them up in another room somewhere.