Lots of Letters

Noah's relationship to letters started when he was very young. Seth could not think of songs to sing to soothe a newborn Noah so he would sing him the alphabet and then the alphabet backwards. During his first year, Noah heard the ABC and ZYX in English and French without much of a reaction. 

As our old twitter followers might remember, when we moved to Singapore around Noah's first birthday, we got Noah some cute alphabet stickers.

I paired each letter with a sign and a sound A for "abeille" bzzzzzz, B for "bebe" (baby) ouin ouin, C for "chat" (cat), miaou miaou and so on. Noah quickly developed his favorites: B, D (for Dada), K ("kangaroo"), L ("lion"), V ("violon" or violin), W ("walabi"), X ("xylophone"), and Y ("yayi").  A side note on Yayi, which is a sound Noah invented for the "Y" - it also happened to be the name I called myself when I was little; "Yayi" became a nickname for me for a while. Such a strange coincidence. Back to the letters - Noah started pointing at the ones he liked best so I would make the sign and especially the noises he liked to hear. 

When Noah was 13.5 months, he recognized his first letter out of the blue. He took out a random letter from his foam cube and signed "fleur, fleur" (flower) and sure enough - it was an F (we repeated the experiment later on by taking out an F and asking him what it was).  

By 16.5 months, he knew all the capital letters and would excitedly identify letters everywhere. We would be walking in the street and he would sign "flower, flower", "kangaroo, kangaroo" or "violin, violin." I would look around trying to find what he was referring to.  Was there a picture of a flower, kangaroo or violin anywhere? Nope - there was usually some street sign with those letters - though at the zoo that sometimes got a bit confusing!

Once he clearly knew all the letters inside out, he began to lose interest.  I tried to play games with him which involved recognizing DA vs PA vs LA, but that was too much. I tried to teach him the "baby letters," but he was not interested. For the next six months, he took a break from letters.

While on hiatus, other things occupied his interest such as speaking and singing.  Since starting pre-school at 20 months, he has been singing all sorts of songs, including his ABCs (and just yesterday, his first unprompted ZYXs).

After almost 6 months of hiatus, he recently started being interested in letters again. He had forgotten some of the capital letters and had to relearn them; and he quickly picked up the "baby letters."  But he was excited about it again; every time we pass the sign to our building, he flaps his wings, jumps up and down, and points at the letters.  We have to drag him away.  And without much repetition or seemingly effort, he was back to knowing all the letters. 

A while ago, I had purchased a French book for learning to read. I started by explaining what a syllable is, and then showed him examples in the book.  We then looked at pictures of various objects, each of which had the whole word written under it.  Each picture also highlighted one syllable, which he had to match with the corresponding syllable on the opposite page.  For example, there is a picture of a "tapis" (a rug) with PI highlighted.  The book begins with the letter P (i.e., PA, PE, PI, PO, PU), then moves on to T, and so on.  He pretty quickly figured out how to do the textual matching!  Finally, he was able to match the picture directly to the syllable without the intervening highlighted text.

In this fashion, last week, he read his first words: PAPA, PIPI and PIPO. Since then he often brings the book to me and asks to read ("je veux lire"). 

Earlier today, I made a memory game for him where each square is a different French word. I started with seven simple words: papa, pipi, mama, dada, papy (grandpa), momo (name of a character in one of his books), and dodo (sleep). 

We put all the cards face up. Noah chose a card, identified it and then found its pair. Although I was pretty confident he could find the pairs, I was not sure he would be able to identify/read the various cards. At first he was very tentative but he was very excited and concentrated and after a few rounds he was picking up a card and reading it and finding its pair. Here he is excitedly selecting a card. 

                               

When Dad got home, the first thing he wanted to do was to show him the matching game.  He keeps asking for more and keeps bringing the reading book to me. It is so great to see him be this interested in his letters again, and in learning to read.