Ben spells and scoots & video

Posted by spots (Singapore, Singapore) on 21 September 2009 in People & Portrait and Portfolio.

Since Dan got a bike for his birthday from Gong Gong, we've passed on the scooter to Ben. After a shakey start, Ben is now really good on the scooter--at 2.5 years old! I'm so proud of him--now he can whiz along with his brother, although that makes watching over them doubly hard for me!

The other thing Ben has learnt is the alphabet and spelling simple words. It all started way back in May when Dan had HFMD and we had to quarantine both kids for almost 2 weeks. I spent a lot of time with the kids then--as there was no school--and I ended up printing out a lot of alphabet colouring sheets from this website for Ben. He was only 2 years and 2 months then, but his letter recognition was pretty good. In June, there were a couple of days where he was sick again, so I printed out more alphabet colouring sheets. We progressed from Capital letters to small letters. And since about July or so, Ben's been really good with letter recognition!

So since then, I've been trying to teach him short words--like go, no, up, in, the, god, a, it.... I haven't been very consistent-we just try to do what we can when we do our regular bedtime reading. But I hope to be a bit more consistent about it as life slowly stabilises more and more. ^__^

It's a real joy to see Ben and Dan enjoy reading and being read to. Ben's teacher says that he is always the first to sit down when it's storytime, which is heartening. Being the 2nd kid, he has picked up a lot of queues from his older sibling, Dan, who also loves to be read to. And now that Dan is reading simple story books, Ben will also "pretend" to point and read words, so there's always a slight "echo" in the background when Dan reads. It's quite amusing actually!

OK, I will blog about Dan's reading next. Meanwhile, here's a short video of Ben spelling--not the best video, but will suffice.