This....

Miss K (20 months) seems really verbal. I came home on Wednesday and our new-ish babysitter was just full of praise for Miss K and her cognitive abilities. "She's so smart." The new-ish babysitter gushed. (Me cynically thinking... You want a raise....) "She counted to 12 and she said T is for T_____ (her little sister's name)." Me, "Wow. I've never heard her say T is for T_____."

I don't think Miss K has the understanding that letters form words, but she is on her way. She knows what letters are and she does know the names of some letters. Last night I showed her a block with a "C" on it and I asked her what it was. She instantly responded with, "C." "Oh double wow," I thought.

I showed her another one with "M" and she responded with, "ummmmm.... This." I told her it was an "M" and she agreed.

I showed her a "W" She said, "Double." Pretty darn impressive.

I showed her an "S" and she responded with, "ummmmm.... This."

"This" is the answer she uses when she doesn't know the answer. "This" is actually a very good answer. She is correct when she says, "This." She got bored with this "name the letter game" and we moved on to something else. With my random sample of 4 letters she got 50% correct. I would guess she knows and can identify anywhere from 25-50% of the letters (if her mood was good).

I need to look back and see when N learned to count to 10. I video-taped her doing it when she was 22 months old. I know she was starting to be interested in numbers when she was 19 or 20 months old. Miss K watches videos that N (4) watches and I know she's been exposed to the concept of numbers, letters, counting, the alphabet and that letters make words much more than N had at this age. Miss N has been learning at a very quick pace. Miss K may be learning things even faster.

Miss K can count to 6 for sure. I know she doesn't fully have the concept of 6, as in quantity, but she can count to that. I'm sure she's starting to learn the concept of quantity. Some people think that we're innately wired to understand the concept of 1 and 2 and "more" (designating values over 2).

See these two web sites for more info about how innate numerical concepts may be.

http://web.media.mit.edu/~stefanm/society/som_final.html (This one is pretty cool and talks about experiments demonstrating that infants between 4 and 7 months can discriminate the quantity of 2 from 3, but not 4 items from 6 items (Starkley, Spelke, & Gelman, 1983). It also talks about skills necessary for counting.)

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/Press/prnumbers.cfm (This one shows that individual brain cells represent the concept of numbers and that neurons, in the part of the brain, where reasoning occurs, pick favorite "numbers.")

The new-ish babysitter said she heard K count to 12. I've heard her say the names of numbers up to 13, but I'm not sure if they were in the right order. She definitely has the concept of counting. She says unique names for the different things she is counting (most of the time) and she touches the items as she says the number names. She tends to only count when there are multiple things of the same kinds of objects (e.g., blocks) meaning she hasn't quite abstracted that counting can be used on mixed types of objects.


Oh, another accomplishment Miss K has made is the potty. She's not potty trained by any stretch of the imagination, but she knows what it's for and has used it about 6 times in the last 3 months. I'm pleased with this. When N was this age, asking her if she wanted to sit on the potty resulted in screaming and crying--most emphatically she did not want to sit on the potty.

I'm hoping that over the summer we can get Miss K potty-trained. She'll be 2 in May. I'd be perfectly happy if she were just day trained and still wore diapers at night. Miss N was successfully potty trained by 2 years 10 months for wetness (even at night)... It took a little longer for the other, but we got there fairly close to age 3. I've got no complaints! Okay before this turns into a potty training post I'll stop.

It's so much fun to watch them learn.



(File under this is such a mommy blog!)

Starkey P., Spelke E.S., Gelman R. (1983). Detection of Intermodal Numerical Correspondences by Human Infants. Science 222, 179-181.