A love of reading

I love that my boys all love to read :).



Dh and I love to read, and we've always made sure to have lots of age-appropriate books around for the boys since the time they were babies. I love that they look forward to new books as much as toys or games.

Bitty has a bag that he always keeps filled with books to take with him wherever we go. Here's a video of him reading one of his new ones, "Martha Speaks: Farm Dog Martha." This was taken the first time he read it, so some of the words were new for him.



(If you're familiar with the book, you'll notice that the video skips some parts. The whole thing was around 8 minutes long so I edited some parts out to make it a little shorter.)


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Random Updates: Singing, Spelling & Scouts

I haven't had a chance to do much blogging this week, but I do have some updates (as much for my own journal as anything else):

We've seen some new talents really emerging lately from Little Bitty - singing and spelling. And with the spelling - reading! He wants to spell out pretty much every word he sees, and he's committing a lot of them to memory. I showed him a list of words today to see how many he could read (I was curious how many he'd get without a visual picture / cue, just the letters) and he got about half of them. Not bad! Among the list of words he knows:

Train
Pokemon
Dog
Cat
Cow
Goat
Coral
Milk
Wave

And singing! He is constantly singing something, and I'm amazed at how many songs he knows and remembers. When we saw a spider outside, he started singing "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" (as he packed up his toys to go inside, because when the song was over, he was anxiously repeating, "No spi-uh... no spi-uh"). When he was happy about something, he sang, "If you're happy and you know it." He sings the cleanup song, 5 Little Monkeys jumping on the bed (sometimes with the doctor saying "no more monkeys sitting in a tree," not sure where that came from?), and some other songs that I don't recognize that he must have learned at school. Sometimes he'll just sing to himself as he plays. I've tried taking video of him a couple of times but he stops singing when he notices me :(. I'll try to be more sneaky about it.

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We've decided to let Bearhug take a break from Cub Scouts. He had fun that first week, but since then he's been stressing out about it, progressively worse each week. Honestly I don't really understand why it's so stressful for him - he says it's "boring" but how can you be bored when you won't even go in for the first 30 minutes? Anyway, I don't want to get into all the details but after this week we decided it just isn't worth him getting this worked up, it's supposed to be fun after all. He did manage to earn his Bobcat though, so I'll make sure he gets his badge for that. We left it open for him to go back later if he wants to give it another try.

Meanwhile Cuddlebug is the most gung-ho Cub Scout I've ever seen, he is really into it! (And with him being so nervous in the beginning it was actually him that I was worried about, go figure). He was so excited to finish his Bobcat requirements, and he's really looking forward to getting to work on his Wolf badge. So it looks like it'll be just me and him at Scouts for the time being.

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And a not-exactly-newsworthy update about me:

I decided to color my hair (red) this weekend. I don't post pictures of myself that often, but in case anyone wants to see it here it is. Oh yeah, and for my family who haven't seen me in a while, I cut my hair too, a few weeks ago... which you probably guessed without me pointing it out (thank you Captain Obvious, lol).







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Try This Tuesday: Happy or sad?

We've been trying to work with Bitty lately on recognizing emotions / facial expressions, using his Thomas trains. The good thing about this is that he loves Thomas so it's easy to get his attention using the trains. I'll hold up a train and ask, "Is James happy or sad?" When he wants to play, he'll bring me a train and ask "Iss Jayss happy o' sah?" At first I thought he was asking me the question, but have since figured out that he not only repeats what I say, but will often say what he wants me to say, in hopes that I'll repeat him. (example: when he asks me "you wah yo' cup?" what he really means is I'm supposed to ask him if he wants his cup, lol.).

He doesn't always get the "right" answer, and I haven't been able to figure out yet if he really doesn't know them yet, or if he's doing it because he thinks it's funny to answer "wrong." (He does that with other things, but when I know that he knows the answer, then I know he's just being silly).

The not-so-great thing about using his trains for this is that most of them are smiling so we don't have as broad a range of emotions there as I would like. In brainstorming ideas to work on a wider range of facial expressions, I remembered the emotions chart that Julie made a while back for her son. I think I'm going to make something similar using Thomas character faces.

Another tool I came across recently for teaching how to recognize emotions through facial expressions is a game created by Autism Spectrum Australia (Aspect) for the Thomas the Tank Engine website that asks players to choose which engine's face is happy, sad, scared, etc. You can find the game online here (it's a free, web-based game). My only issue with the game is that the instructions are not read aloud so unless the child playing the game can read, they won't be able to play independently, but they can play with an adult helping / reading instructions to them.

I tried playing it with Bitty but he doesn't like being read to and likes to play at his own pace in his own way, so he quickly bored of me trying to help him read the instructions... I'll have to work on teaching him to recognize the words happy, sad, angry, etc. so he can play on his own. He's not really reading yet but he does recognize some words, mostly the names of Thomas characters (of course!). He is more interested in them than in his own name.

What other ideas have worked for you in teaching your children how to recognize facial expressions?


Related: Thomas & Friends have their own video channel on YouTube, here's one about identifying happy or sad engines :).




For more Try This Tuesday, visit 5 Minutes for Special Needs.




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