Little Learners

I just have to quick take note of my little learners!  

Tucker has shown an interest in numbers and letters since very early on.  He loves any books or shows about them.  He actually knew more numbers and letters than Russ for a while, but don't tell him that.  Now they're pretty even.  Just today he asked to put on a movie and he chose a Baby Einsteins about numbers.  I said, "you want to watch this one?" and he said, "yeah, because it has numbers!".  Lol, then he sat there and narrated the whole thing, telling me what number they were showing and counting the objects on screen.  And it's about the cutest thing in the world when we sing the ABC's together.  He has such a funny, little, low voice singing "Now I know mine ABC's...".  He was in a play group this last year, but we quit half way through because he started hating to go.  Hopefully he'll get more comfortable socially over the next year like Russel did.

Russel has been in preschool this year and it has done wonders for his tolerance level of structure.  Because of that, we have finally been successful with his reading lessons.  We have been using the book, "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" (I'm sure many of you have heard of it).  

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We tried twice unsuccessfully in the past, but I guess the third time's the charm!  We are more then half way done now and though I'm not so good at getting a lesson in every day right now, we are still plugging along.  When he completed lesson 50, it was just in time for the ice cream shop opening for the season.  So we took him there and talked to him about how proud we were of his accomplishment.  He just beamed and it was good to see him feel good about working so hard!  And Russ just tries to read almost everything he sees, it's so cute.  He read "Reese's" off of a peanut butter egg at Easter time.  He's working on reading some Bob Books at bed time some nights, and just yesterday he read "Wilcox" off of our 5 dozen eggs.  It's so exhilarating to see him excited about reading. 

He also loves to learn about animals and dinosaurs.  He asks to look at pictures online all the time.  When we were in Florida, we went to a local marine center and he got a little pamphlet about Florida wildlife.  He studied that pamphlet!  In the car we were talking about birds and fish, etc.  and he says some fact about a shark.  Then he says, "And I didn't say that because I'm such a smarty pants, I read about it".  We all laughed and told him, "But you ARE a smarty pants!".