Rishu amazes us by his spellings - May 2008

Like any other parent, I started my first step in my first born's learning
journey. He was 2.5 yrs old then. I wanted him to be able to recognize the uppercase English alphabets.
And like any other child, he wanted to be stubborn, got easily bored and I could
not just get beyond 2 letters.
Rishu was a child with great obsessions and I use that many times to make him
do what I want (yeah, manipulative, I know ;-)) So I decided to start off with favorite
stuff - belt and car. I would draw a car and spell it, draw a van and spell it
and then draw a belt and spell it. This was the routine for a week and that made him
familiar with 9 letters. And then I found that he was veru easily able to remember those spellings. And then spellings became our past-time. It was educative,
entertaining(I could easily make him finish his dinner by spelling some words),
relaxing for him.
Slowly I started teaching him homonyms with 3 and 4 letter words like cake, bake , rake etc and cat, mat , pat etc. He was very easy on pronouncing if I changed a letter and it was a pleasure to teach him. Otherwise with a 6 month old and the house chores and an ultra-busy hubby there was no way I could have spent more than the few minutes I had for him.
Once he mastered those homonym spellings, we wrote them and thus finished all the uppercase alphabets. And now I got bored of this same exercise and sought out for an easier way for the lowercase ones. Also he refused to allow me to write the spellings in lowercase.
And then my eyes fell on a book that my sister gave(which was just idling).
It was a book with dogs and numbers from 1 to 10. So each page would have pictures of dogs and the count and the number spellings in lowercase.
So I set out to teach him the spellings from one to ten. In no time, he learnt it.
And then I gave the book to him and he would just read initally based on the spellings. Very soon he was able to map the lowercase letters and my joy knew no bounds.
And once he could identify the uppercase and lowercase letters my next mission was to try to see if he could read easy words, thereby making him read independantly.
That way my lack of time or energy would not hamper his learning..
And that my friends is my next post ....