The beauty of raising a genetically-enhanced child - not many people can brag that they have an extra chromosome... Follow the journey of our first-born son, Sheridan Michael, as we travel down a path that looks different than what we imagined, but is far more incredible than we could have ever hoped for.
I'm slammed with work and deadlines and blah, blah, blah... so I'm taking a mental health break and posting a quick video.
You'll remember a while back when Sheridan showed off how he counts to 10. He's been counting to 20 for some time now, and just a few weeks ago he came home one day from school and out of the blue he's counting to 30. Now, it's an emerging skill these 21-30... so about half the time he skips around a bit. Turns out, his teacher said he must have picked up this skill from some of the older children in class who are working on more advanced math skills because she hasn't worked with Sheridan on this.
Yet another reason to love that Sheridan is fully included in a multi-age classroom.
Sheridan is super motivated lately by reading, letters (phonics, more specifically), and counting. So, I use that to my advantage to motivate him to complete tasks. Here, I use his love of All-Things-Counting to motivate some self-help skills. Most importantly, it's stinkin' cute!
Sheridan has been interested in letters for a long time now, and one of his favorite toys is this alphabet puzzle:
Because he's doing so well on his letters (can recognize them, knows most of the sounds, etc.) I figured I would dust off his Montessori sandpaper letters and sell them on Craig's List. Sheridan had other plans.
These particular letters have been sitting on his shelf in the living room and he hasn't touched them in over a year - hence my plan to sell them - but I guess the novelty got to him. You'll see in the first half that I just show him letters and he names them (some he says the name; others he says an approximation - like L is "luh," G is a guttural German /g/ with /ee/ tagged on the end, and W is "voo"; and some he has trouble saying - like Q, he says "doh" or "doo").
I'm so proud of the hard work he's done to really learn his letters and letter sounds. He's just thirsty for all things letters, reading, books, etc. so he gets lots of practice because he loves it so much.
The second half of the video I started filming as he was helping me clean up because he went back through them on his own. Very cute :)
I guess I'll be keeping them around, maybe (unless somebody out there wants to buy them? I also have the lowercase sandpaper letters, they make a nice set --> toothy grin!). I still need to buy the cursive sandpaper letters because his school teaches writing in cursive. "Seriously?" you ask me... Yep. (As an aside, how and why the Montessori method teaches the letters in the specific way they do - starting with the sandpaper letters - is very interesting if you're interested in checking it out)
Oh, and here's bonus counting footage. He loves to count to 10, and he's started trying to count to 20 (he can approximate eleven and twelve, then has a bunch of jumbled "tees" - teens - before finally at some point deciding there's been enough teens and proclaiming "teh-tee!" for 20). But, in our house he LOVES his number line - points out every number and says it, so when he wanted to show off for Daddy I grabbed my iPhone. At which point Sheridan decided he wanted to be behind the camera.
Ready for his directorial debut, I suppose. Check it out :)
