Doing and Learning

Some new things E has been doing and learning:

She's drawing circles and recognizable pictures. Until a month or two ago, it was all scribbles. All of a sudden, the scribbles have turned into actual pictures of whales, dogs, horses, family memebers, houses, trees and other things. I still need her to tell me what they are, but once she does, I can see where she tried to put a nose here or a tree branch there. For a long time she would say she was drawing circles, but they were really lumpy and mishaped. I never said anything though, and never corrected her. Now she can draw really symetrical circles. She asked me to draw some squares and copied them, too. She's also doing up and down lines, kind of like an M over and over, and saying she's writing. She does it from left to right from the top to the bottom of the page- something I've never pointed out to her, but she's seen me do it that way when I write, of course.

She's also noticing that there are letters all around us and wanting to know what they say. She points out big ones especially, like the M on McDonald's and other letters on store front signs. She noticed the sign at our park that says "City of Tigard" and wanted me to tell her all the letters. She's also recognizing some letters and asking me to tell her the ones she doesn't know.

A few days ago, she asked me to write SIGMA, which is the name of her aunt's dog who we saw last week. She asked me to write it over and over- probably about 30 times- and say the letters as I wrote.

She always wants to count any stairs that we go up or down. She likes to count her steps too. There is a retainer wall on one side of our apartment building's parking lot. It's made out of concrete stones, about a foot long. I hold her hand while she walks on top of the wall. We've been doing that every time we go to that parking lot since we moved here. One day a few weeks ago, she wanted me to count the stones while she walked. There are 101 of them, and she had me walk back and forth with her and count them at least 10 times.