Our Verbal Girls

As our recent videos attest, we have two kids who love to hear themselves talk, and usually have some pretty entertaining things to say.  It's been really neat to watch them both experiencing different kinds of language explosions recently...

Athena has moved from words to phrases to sentences to paragraphs.  Though she hasn't given us any stories quite like some of the ones Mazie was telling at about her age, she's hinting toward some similar creativity.  (And she also seems to enjoy talking with her hands like Mazie.) We lost count of her words months ago, but I'm guessing the list is at least 500 strong.  In the space of about 5 minutes the other day, Caleb and I counted 25 body-related nouns, at least as many foods, and then got sidetracked.  (We're pretty busy these days.)  She has a darling little voice and I'm surprised at how clear most of her words are.  Of all her language, I think what I'm loving most right now are all of her little expressions and enthusiasm.  Hand her something and you'll get a cheerful, "Ee oo!" ("Thank you!")  Drop something and she'll offer a sympathetic, "Oh, man!"  Offer to take her outside or make her some food and she'll agree with an enthusiastic, "Yeah!  "Let's DO it!" We've been trying to teach her to say, "I love you," but the you/me thing is a bit confusing, so she'll usually go with, "I uv ME!" or "I uv DADDY!"  Tonight in bed she was saying random little phrases like "Daddy pants!" (cite: an Uncle Ian original song), and then when I laughed she would say, "That funny?  Daddy pants?  That funny?" which made me laugh more, and then she'd ask, "That silly, Mommy?"  Clearly, learning humor is an important developmental phase in this house, and she's already got it pretty well mastered.  She even laughs at her own jokes, with big, forced guffaws that show off her big little teeth.

Meanwhile, Mazie is learning to read and write.  She can spell the names of everyone in our family, most of her classmates, and many of her cousins.  She knows several other words like, "Book," "You," "On," and "Off."  Recently, she's taken to answering questions by spelling, "Y-E-S" or "N-O," or saying things like "I do N-O want to do that."  Her Our School teachers recently talked to us a bit about some research suggesting that kids learn to read from seeing words over and over and putting them in context rather than through more traditional phonics-based methods.  So we haven't been emphasizing letters and the sounds they make too much, but it's been really interesting to see how interested she is becoming in those connections on her own.  She'll say things like, "B-b-bear ... that begins with B!"  Like everything she does, it's a joy to watch her bright little brain explore and create and discover.  And lest you think she's ONLY a verbal girl, fear not: she's also showing lots of interest in math.  We recently discovered this sheet full of equations she had written out on her own:

It took a minute of looking at this before I realized what she had done.  She knows that "one plus one equals four," but we'd never done any math in writing, so she just made up her own symbology for "plus" and "equals."  And somehow, that last row is (we think) 5 + 5 + 5 + 5 =20.  All ready for kindergarten!