The Alphabet is Boring:)

Here is another recent question:

In your blog you mentioned that your daughter knew her alphabet by the age of 2.
What program or strategy did you use to teacher her this skill?

To be honest, I did not teach her the alphabet & did not plan to teach her until she was close to school age - but K had her own timetable & taught herself!

K did watch the Love & Learning videos  on & off from when she was about 1 to 2 years of age.  We also had the Leap Frog alphabet fridge magnets on our fridge & a set of letter fridge magnets & probably a few other toys with letters that allowed her to learn them on her own. She surprised me one day in the hardware store, when she started pointing out letters on the signs.  I still remember my shock & amazement when she toddled over to a  Shamwow display rack, pointed at the M & said M,  mmmm.

As I stated earlier, I did not plan to teach her letters & don't see the point in purposefully teaching this to a very young child.  The alphabet really has no meaning to a toddler & won't be much fun to learn.  Because sight words are the most effective way to teach a toddler (teaching phonics is really important, just not at this age - click on this post as well as this one for my reasoning for this), I don't think that teaching the alphabet is helpful.

Sight words are so much more fun! Put yourself in a toddler's shoes.  Would you rather learn that A says aaaa, or that M.O.M. spells Mom? We focused on the most important words in K's life first.  Family & pet names, favorite toys, foods & animals. Reading needs to be fun at this age in order to foster a lifelong love of reading.

If however, you have a school age, or almost school age child, letters will probably be more beneficial to help them keep up with what the other kids are learning.  We did intend to teach K letters by about age 5, before we realized that she had taught herself the alphabet.

Some good resources that I can think of off the top of my head are the many iPad/iPhone apps available.  We like LetterSchool lately for printing practice, but I think it would also help a child learn the letters.

There are some good DVD's out there but my tired brain doesn't seem to be able to come up with a title tonight!  I'll try to edit this with an example.

This is a similar product to the one that k used to teach herself the alphabet: LeapFrog Fridge Phonics Magnetic Alphabet.

Alphabet letters are everywhere, making it so easy to incorporate fun games into everyday life.  There are big foamy bathtub letters & letter stickers to do different projects with. Our local Dollar Store has tons of different types of letters in the toy aisles -you could do so many projects with them.  Pictures, paintings, make one of those find the letter I Spy bags or put the letters in rice or popcorn for a tactile experience.  Use tweezers to grab the letters to work on letter recognition & fine motor at the same time.  Look for letters on signs, etc when going for walks. 

................and lastly, of course good old flashcards - They are tons of commercial ones available, or I'm sure BrillKids has some too.

Answers............ Why don't I use K's name on my blog?

I ended up having a number of questions on a wide variety of subjects, so I thought I would  do a series of answers posts.  Here is the first one:

"I am curious as to why you don't use your daughter's  full name on your blog.

The biggest reason is that I question whether or not I have the right as K's mother to take away her privacy by sharing her life publicly when she is too young to fully understand.  I have thought  about this often, but have decided to share some details because I feel that the good that can come from sharing her accomplishments & our experiences out weigh the negatives.  When K was a baby, I hunted the far corners of the internet to try to find others who were doing the same sorts of therapies as I was & only recently have I been able to find a few others.  I do try to be respectful of K's feelings & consider how she will feel about what I am posting in the future.

Perhaps I shouldn't worry about this so much.  Lots of bloggers share so much more information, but I just feel more comfortable erring on the side of caution.  I do share more information at times, of course with moms that I meet in person, or those that I am in contact with often.  I have done a couple of public talks about my experiences too, & off course I've shared a lot more with those audiences as well.

For the record, I have asked my older daughter's permissions before sharing videos & stories about them publicly & will continue to discuss it with them & K as they get older & understand more.

Last Call for Questions!

My next post will be a post with my response to questions from our blog readers. so far, I've just received a couple of questions via email, so if anyone has any other questions, please feel free to send me an email at jtkkmom@gmail.com or just leave it in the comments on this post.

Any kind of questions are welcome, more about what we do with K, what K or the rest of our family is like, or anything else you can think of.

Thanks!

OK, I have to confess, the other reason for the 2nd call is that we have been so busy with family events & ski races, that I've been too busy to finish that post & this is about my limit for typing on my phone while traveling on a bumpy highway. I'll get to the question post soon, I promise!

It's Our Anniversary! My First Questions From Our Readers Post!

I just realized that the first anniversary of this blog was on February 1st, although I don't think I announced the blog publicly until around March. Here is a link to my first post telling how our journey began.  I am truly humbled by the response we have had in the last year.  K & I have had almost 40,000 hits & 109 followers!  Thank you so much everyone for joining us on this journey. I really appreciate all of your comments & thoughts along the way too.


In honor of our first anniversary, I thought it might be fun to do a blog post which answers questions from our readers.  So, if you have questions of any kind, please ask away.  Ask lots of them OK?  I would hate to put a post like this out here & have no response :)

You can leave your questions in the comments, or just email to jtkkmom@gmail.com

Thanks everyone!

My Reasons For Teaching My Child to Read

 The question "If you had only the length of an elevator ride to explain why you are teaching your child, what would you say?" was asked on a forum which does have some other parents of kids with Trisomy 21, but is mainly composed of parents of typical children who are keenly interested in all areas of early learning.

My reply is probably going to be very different than many of the parents here.  When I first started teaching my daughter, my goal was for her to be able to read at a beginning level by grade one.  She has far exceeded my expectations & taught me so much more than I have ever taught her.

When K was born with Down syndrome 4.5 years ago, several well meaning doctors & nurses told me that she would probably be very happy & love music.  They tried to be encouraging, but their expectations were very low.  It wasn't until I got home & started researching on the internet that I learned about a very small minority of parents who were teaching their kids with DS to read.  I honestly found it difficult to believe & more than once I have admitted   that if, 5 years ago, you had told me that your child with DS was reading at almost a 4th grade level at 4.5 years, I would have politely said " Oh, that's wonderful." & probably walked away snickering. As I said, my daughter has taught me a lot!

I really didn't believe it, but I was intrigued enough, that by the time K was 8 months old, I had built her a Doman style crawling track & to that same doctor's surprise & disbelief (he had to see it before he would believe it), she was crawling! I was so excited by that success, that at around the same time, I started showing K the large, red, Doman style flashcards. Of course, ever the skeptic, I really had my doubts, so I was a "closet flash card Mom" for the longest time, but sure enough, just a few months after K's first birthday, she began showing me that she was learning some of the words!  She knew many sight words & had self taught herself all of the letters & sounds of the alphabet by age 2. She read her first commercial print book that we had not practiced at age 3.5.

Back to my goals - I had originally hoped K would read by grade 1.  I had 2 reasons for this:

1. I wanted the teachers to see a little girl who had potential to learn just like the other students in her class & I wanted them to have very high expectations because the higher the expectations, the more success a child will have.

2.  I wanted K to be able to pick up her books & read the directions, so that if she didn't understand or hear the teacher properly, then at least she could read & try to figure it out for herself.  She is already doing this by the way - she reads her math workbook instructions all the time.

Now, at age 4.5, my concerns have changed.  We have always planned to hold K back in school (as we did her older sister who was born in December), to allow her to have one more year of maturing as well as physical growth because she is quite tiny.  Rather than worrying about her keeping up, at least in the early years of school, I am worried about her being bored - it is a funny dilemma & one that I look forward to working on.

My reasons for teaching her are still the same though.  I want her teachers to see that she has just as much potential as any other student & therefore, they need to have very high expectations. Also, although K speaks well for her age, she is not speaking as well as most typical kids her age. When the other kids in kindergarten are learning that the letter A say aaa, & she is already reading novels, I anticipate that she can work on catching up on speech.

I hope it's a long elevator ride, because I wrote a bit of a novel!

Laura

I just wanted to add to this a little bit. When I talked about goals, I missed at least one. I also was hoping that by teaching K to read from an early age that she would become proficient enough that reading wouid be a joy - not a chore for her. All 3 of her older sisters, as well as myself love reading. To the point where my daughters, like their mother before them, often get caught reading in bed. The subject of reading in math or science class has also come up recently during a parent-teacher conference(thankfully, we are not dealing with any worse behavioral issues:), & I turned to my dear husband & told him that he would have to be responsible for speaking with the offender. As a not exactly reformed sneaking a book into my desk offender myself, I just didn't feel I was responsible enough to deal with the situation. LOL! This is what I wanted for K, a true joy & voracious appetite for books & thankfully, I am confident already that I'll be confiscating her flashlights at bed time one day too!

I Love This Quote!

A friend posted this quote on FaceBook the other day:

"I am looking for a lot of men who have a infinite capacity to not know what can't be done"

Henry Ford

Henry Ford's name was a common one in our household growing up.  My Dad - K's Grandpa loves old vehicles & K has had the chance to ride in the rumble seat of Grandpa's favorite car occasionally. I had not heard this quote until recently, but I think there is so much truth in it.  If we don't realize that something is not doable, then we just might try to do it & will often see great success.

 K & Grandpa's Model A

When we first started doing early learning activities as well as a neurodevelopmental program with K, I often thought it would have been great if I had gone to school in the early childhood education or some sort of therapy field.  I often found myself wondering in what direction to go, or trying to figure out what was the next step in development that I should be working on - & I still do sometimes. I do figure out where to go next, but I know it requires a lot more research than it would for someone with some background in this area.    We started K's ICAN program about a year ago & that helps a lot as most of it is all set out for me now, however, I still find that I have to be creative & look for new ideas in order to keep her excited & interested...................so I'm still floundering at times:), but although I don't always know which exact step to take next, I always seem to find more than enough activities to keep K busy & learning.

 .....................and lately................... I am starting to appreciate my lack of understanding! If I had all of that knowledge, would I have also had the perception that my daughter could not do A, because kids with DS don't learn to do A until a certain age, or even that typical kids don't learn to do B until they are _____ years of age?  Would it have held me back from trying some of the things that we have taught K at such an early age?   Certainly, I never would have thought to teach my baby to read right? I will never know the answer to those questions, but I believe that things happen for a reason & I am exactly where I need to be in this journey of life right now - for myself & my family.

Once we started down the early learning path with K, we have just kept wandering on.   I never considered teaching my older kids geography, yet K knows most of the continents & a number of countries on the map & can read many more.  Last week we decided to teach her how to cut with a knife & my current goal is to teach her to tie her shoes. These are a few examples, but I could go on & on, so, until I know better ;)  on we will go, perhaps with blinders on at times, but always moving forwards!

The Funnix Reading Progam is Free Again This Month

 I have heard from a couple of sources that the Funnix reading program is free at the moment - I think this promotion goes until mid February.  Here is a post I did on it last year:   Funnix

Here is a link to the Funnix website to download it:
Free Funnix Reading Program