Last week Daniel started signing and Josh started reading. Really signing, really reading. It's odd to try to impart knowledge when the subject matter must be repeated in order to be retained. Mostly because you never know when they're going to get it, when their brain will click the information into place and suddenly they truly KNOW something. Will it be the 20th time? The 78th time? There's no telling, you just have to wait until it happens.
So Josh has been able to sound things out for a while now, and could read any number of phonetically spelled words. He could figure out what the simpler books were saying. He knows loads of sight words. But last week was the first time he really started reading things around him and got really excited about reading them. He started sounding out words on signs, in the supermarkets, etc. Then suddenly the books he's reading seemed to become more of him reading a story as opposed to him sounding out a bunch of random words. I'm not sure I'm explaining this correctly.
The first sign of this was when he was staring at the refrigerator case at the store, and kind of muttering under his breath. Finally, he asked me, "What kind of juice is POG juice?" After that things really took off.
So, yay! Progress.
Daniel just hit 7 months and we've been randomly signing to him, but I hadn't really started to teach him in earnest. We were mostly just signing "milk" and "water" when he was going to nurse or drink water. It was pretty hit and miss, though, because we forgot a lot. Then the other day he was really grouchy, and I picked him up and said, "What's wrong Daniel?" and he signed "milk." He was so excited that I actually understood him and gave him what he wanted. He's been doing it ever since.
Now that I look back on it, I can see he's trying to get me to do things but Mommy is a bit too dim to figure him out. I can occasionally see this look of utter exasperation in his eyes as he tries to get me to understand him. So we're going to be adding in signs for "tired," "diaper," "eat," and a couple more.
Two "clicks" in one week. Maybe it was something in the water!
5 comments:
"All done" was also a good sign for us. As well as "different."
Yes, we've got to do that one too. Except we also say "all pau." =)
Change of topic -- I spelled refrigerator wrong and blogger won't let me change it. Grrr.
Wow! 7months and signing? That's great! I didn't reach any progress in this department until 11 or 12 months. Its so encouraging to see those "clicks", isn't it? I remember that when I was teaching.
I love teaching babies to sign! We did better with London, but it saves them so much frustration and I'll take a hand signal over a grunt or whine any day!!
We sign with jack too...it is so fun! he does "all done" "milk" "more" "please" and "eat". he still screams and points but it has helped with his frustration. plus, it is so cute to see his little hands sign for more as he screams "MO"!
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