I love the emails baby center will send b/c they have information about what kinds of things Alice should be doing and other developmental landmarks both for her and for Jack. I just got this one though, and it cracked me up:
"By 30 months, your child can name a few body parts, some colors, and even a friend or two. Her memory and speaking ability work in tandem. Help out by expanding on what she says. If she says, "Dog sleep," you might say, "Yes, Spot is curled up and fast asleep in his doggie bed." She can't imitate your complex language patterns yet, but her brain is absorbing them. Every time you repeat her words or expand on them, you're giving her memory practice. "
I know that Alice's language skills are advanced, but most of the kids she hangs out with speak at a similar level to her, so I forget sometimes. She has been putting together some complex sentences lately, like "Katie took the ball and I really want it" or "Watch out for the scary ghosts, Daddy!" (while he's playing mario game). The other day, Sarah was rocking Pepper and Alice came into the room with her. Alice saw the breast pump and asked "what's that?" Sarah told her, "It's a pump". Alice then put the pieces up to her little boobies and asked "Can I try?" When Sarah asked her how she knew that's what the pump was for, Alice replied "People just learn these things".
I love listening to her talk and seeing her grow. She's so much fun and such a sweet little girl. She is starting to get an argumentative streak though. For example, I will tell her "I'm making soup for dinner" and she'll say, "It's not soup for dinner. It's soup for lunch". I have no idea why she would argue something like that, but she will...
I know it's a ways away, but we're looking at a preschool for her to start up in the fall of 2011. It's a Spanish immersion preschool that I think looks really cool: http://www.mckeeschool.com/ It is a lot of time each day, but it's mostly narrated playing, so I'm not worried about it overloading her. I think that with her language skills, it'd be really nice for her to learn another language at a young age. We'll see when the time gets closer if we do decide to put her in, but for now I'm pretty sure that I want to :)
Brothers On Maps
1 week ago
Spanish immersion would be pretty cool.
ReplyDeleteI know it seems like arguing to you, but I think what she's trying to do is make sense of her little world and keep things in order. In her world, lunch is at a certain time, so if you're cooking it now, she is processing the information and it makes more sense to say it is soup for lunch. So you can say, "Yeah, I'm cooking it now and this is lunch time, but we won't be eating it till later, when it's dinner time." Or something like that anyway. Anyway, it's really typical for a two-year-old to try to make the pieces of their world fit they way they make the most sense in their little heads, which is not always the way they make the most sense to US, so the explanations help. And then there are the times they just want to push our buttons and get the reactions. :)
ReplyDeleteLove you! I loved your visit, too, and hopefully I'll make it to Utah for the 4th.
Mom
Well the only thing is that it was dinner time when I started making the soup, so maybe for some reason she thought it was lunch time, but it wasn't...
ReplyDeletei dunno. She does it a lot so it might just be that she is trying to figure stuff out. I try to explain it to her and sometimes she gets it, but then sometimes she just keeps pushing. :)
Anne and I really thought Natalie did well in Spanish immersion, which she did through elementary school. Smart kids are easily bored with the relatively slow pace of class. The foreign language adds another dimension to help keep it interesting -- although it can also add frustration. Natalie had several teachers and they did not agree on pronunciation -- Spanish in Chile is different from Spanish in Mexico is different from Spanish in Spain -- and she got annoyed at being told she was pronouncing things "wrong" by the new teacher. After preschool is there an immersion program you can keep Alice in? If so, I think it's worth it. Good luck.
ReplyDeleteI know a couple of the elementary schools in the area do a spanish immersion program. The McKee school also does an after school and summer program. By the time Alice is done with preschool, I'm not sure where we'll be living, so I haven't looked into it much at this point.
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