Saturday, July 24, 2010

Two years old: Tot-School Progress

Just a quick summary of where we stand in terms of Basbusa's "education" as she turns two:
  • She knows half the letters of the Arabic alphabet. I'm not rushing on those so much any more - I've seen that she can pick them up quite easily and enjoys it as a game, but I don't want to make a big deal of the alphabet as something she feels she "should" know or is "expected" to remember.
  • She knows all her colors.
  • She knows all her shapes (even more obscure ones like crescent, diamond and oval).
  • She can 'read' (well, recognize the words, not really read) Allah, her first name, her nickname, her last name, Mama and Baba. Oh, and in English, she regularly scares the daylights out of me in the car by yelling out "Stop!" when she sees a stop sign :)
  • She knows that words on the page "say things" and follows them along with her finger as she makes up text.
  • She recognizes the numbers from 0 to 9, more or less. Kind of. Not super-reliably, though, and she doesn't have much clue what they actually mean. She knows what numbers to press on the elevator for friends who live on particular floors of the building, and she knows what one, two and "half" mean, but as for counting larger quantities, she's not quite there yet.
  • She can count to six quite well, and sometimes makes it to ten.
Other semi-educational skills:
  • She's crazy about books;
  • She adores "writing" and drawing;
  • She cuts very well with scissors, not needing any help;
  • She's getting quite good at using a glue-stick and making collages (we haven't tried messier glues yet!).
And a few other tot-school "skills" which I had previously been trying to introduce formally, but which I've now decided not to bother with for the moment in a tot-school setting:
  • Sorting: none of the tot-school activities I used for this really attracted her, and she didn't really get the concept. But she's now sorting spontaneously by color or by size in real life, so that will do fine for now. I'll get back to it a bit later when she might be ready for more complicated kinds of sorts, but for now I'll use that tot-school-preparation-time for making other kinds of materials.
  • Fine-motor skills: these were some of her favorite tot-school activities, but in reality, she does almost nothing else all day long, in everyday life. She loves screwing and unscrewing things (jars, toothpaste, bottles, nuts and bolts), peeling things (garlic, bananas, any kind of sticker), pouring things, and stirring things. That's another area where I'll save the time on making tot-school materials and spend it on other areas instead.

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