Thursday, May 14, 2009

s-p-e-l-l-i-n-g (aka my kid's a genius)


Noah has for some time now been able to tell you the first letter sound of a word that he heard. He would spell his name "N-x-p-y-t-q-n-n-b" (or some other variation) because he knew that it started with the "n" sound and then had a bunch more letters. He's recently begun hearing more sounds in a word and is now pretty decent and getting most of the consonant sounds correct. Anyone care to guess what word he "spelled" in the picture?*
He also has quite an extensive sight word vocabulary. It's pretty impressive for an almost 4 year old, even if you don't take into account that the only print he has access to is 24 point font or larger (just the title in most books). He's also pretty good at guessing other words based on words he does know. So I did a little test with some refrigerator magnets, and here are some of the more interesting results. (the word-what Noah said)
just - jump
we-Wednesday
you-thank you
down-brown
up-SuperWhy
she-share
this-think
them-come
so-socks
like-bike
little-light
some-sorry
they-tree
be-bear
with-white
I didn't include any of the words he actually got right, which was basically any animal or color that I could think of plus the days of the week, months, etc. As a general rule if it's on the calendar at school, on any of his movies, or in the title of any of his books he knows it.
Since Noah loves spelling so much, yesterday for part of "new ear" time I got out scrabble and had him spell words that I said. He was so focused on finding the letters to spell that he didn't notice that he was listening. I might have to try that with the ling sounds too, since I'm always looking for new ways to trick him into repeating them.
* Hint: Noah's life revolves around his favorite activity, shopping.

3 comments:

Billie said...

Fun??? He's SO smart...and cute too:)

quizzling said...

Oh oh oh! Do I get a guess?

Kimberly (Anthony's Mom) said...

WOW! He is sooooo smart! Thats just amazing!

Kim