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Pre-schooler Skills

Things a Clownfish can do at 3 and a half:

• Cuts with safety scissors, uses glue, and prefers blue paper to all other colors.
• Identifies all his letters, both upper case and lower case.
• Gets mad at me when I refer to lower case letters as "little" because his teacher said they were "lower case."
• Writes "upper case" A, B, N, W, M, H, O, Q, Y, P and R and occasionally D; lower case r, n, o, i, l, d (but only d, and not b, p, or q). Maybe a few others. Definitely not e. He has an aversion to e.
• Happily substitutes upper case when he can't do a lower case to create most of his name, Papa and Mommy.
• Like to "couple up" his letters -- which is a term he got from Thomas the Tank Engine meaning "join together." This process quickly makes his writing illegible when he does it.
• Counts to his mid-20s. Has the number/word/quantity concept up to 10 at least.
• Counts items with one-to-one correspondence (not sure what else to call it... like if you have a picture of 10 gumdrops, he counts each one only one time. In my teaching days, I knew first graders who couldn't do that.)
• Learns the words to songs pretty quickly and does a mean impression of Billy Joel singing the Piano Man chorus, complete with totally out of tune harmonica playing.
• Prefers broccoli to french fries.
• Given the option, he'll put A-1 steak sauce on any meat . . . including Chinese food.
• Go down the "scary tunnel slide" at the park.
• When the mood strikes, carry on a short phone conversation.
• Pick out his clothes and put on underwear, sweat pants, socks, and shoes. (I still do shirts).
• Put on and take off / throw away his bedtime pull-up diaper.
• Reads all individual letters, but sight-reads only his name consistently, and often Mommy and Papa.

Things I have learned from him:

• If you pretend your hand is a lobster trying to take his snackie, two hand-shaped orcas will exact their vengence. Beware the orcas, they look like dolphins but are black and white and have teeth that will eat you.
• Told me today he wants to be like Austin from Backyardigans and have a pack filled with all the things he needs to race around the world, including a water bottle and band-aids. "But first mommy, we have to find a desert."
• A-1 steak sauce does NOT taste good on Chinese food.
• Apparently, in those first few seconds of peeing, it is really hard for boys to not to hit the wall, floor, or the back of the seat.

________________

This may not have been the most interesting blog post of the year, but this blog has become my baby-book in a way. I am terrible at keeping up with the scrapbook, so I'll probably eventually just print a bunch of these posts and stick them in there.

It'll provide plenty of ammunition for his therapist.

Full post as published by Butterflyfish on February 17, 2008 (boomark / email).