I have a bachelor’s in early childhood education. The program I completed had a high emphasis on the Reggio Emilia theory which basically teaches that children learn through meaningful play and a teacher’s job is to observe and facilitate that play. The environment is also highly important and is considered a “teacher.” Having had this as my background (and a mother who did not take any of her children to preschool) I figured my best bet with Logan was to be with him everyday, take any opportunity to teach and learn right along side him and let the education take us where it will.

And that’s all fine and dandy. He was learning the alphabet slowly (the letters that were more important to him he knew without blinking. Others (like Q and F…) were a little fuzzy but he could get them if given a little context.) I thought, this is great! We’re getting somewhere but he’s not getting stressed out in the process. He was even “reading” in the sense that he would tell me stories relating to the pictures and would recognize symbols as words (a stop sign says “stop” and so forth).

And then it all quit. I had no idea what happened!  He still knew “L” and “O”. But that was it. No longer did a stop sign mean “stop.” I’d learned that major digression was a sign that something was wrong in the environment…but nothing was wrong that I could see. And it wasn’t just the knowledge that took a back-slide. It was his attitude. His manners. His ability to be nice to any moving object. All of a sudden I was raising a BOY!  Some new things he’s doing are awesome – he’s pretending, doing new physical feats (sometimes highly dangerous ones…), and playing on his own more. Which are all great. BUT why can’t he remember the letters he used to know so well???  (And other pieces of knowledge – but for some reason the letters are really bugging me right now.)

SO…..a long story, kept really long…..we’re learning the alphabet in our house. Again. This time I’m taking a more direct approach and being very obvious about my intentions. The last 1-1/2 days were spent on “A” and he gets it again! (I can see the knowledge is there somewhere, it’s just locked in his brain and I have to trigger it again.)

We created an alligator out of the letter A. (I saw it first at Totally Tots.)

And everything we did that included an “A” (focusing only on capitals for now) got talked about until it was beaten like a dead horse. Airplanes, Apes, Apricots, Apples, Applesauce, Acorn, Ants, Anteaters, Arms, Ankles, Angry…literally anything I said that had the letter “A” at the beginning got talked about. A lot. We wrote the word “Arm” on his arms with washable marker. “Ankle” on his ankles. Taped letter “A’s” all over the house. Traced “A’s” on the windows (with window crayons). I put “A’s” under the glass-top coffee table so he sub-consciously saw them as he ate breakfast (Yes, we’re bad parents, we let him eat breakfast in front of PBS shows. It’s either this or stink all the time because we’d never get showers!)  I even got grumpy about reading and would only read books if it had a lot of capital “A’s” in it. (He loves books so it’s not like this is a sacrifice!)  “Airplanes” was the favorite book. Probably read that silly book at least 6 times the first day.

And he gets it! For now…

On to B!

Letter A day:

• Angry Alligator paper craft  (see above)
• Airplanes
• Apes
• Ants
• Anteaters
• Acorns
• Songs: The Ants Go Marching, and Hokey Pokey (emphasis on arms and ankles)
• Label “A” body parts: Arm, Ankle
• Special snacks: Apricots (he loves the dried ones), Apple slices with “A” carved into the skins, Applesauce