Book Smart

Last night, we read Kate Tom's "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" before bed. Of course, we read up to as many as 7 stories a night, but this is one of my personal favorites that was given to us by the church choir. Almost each page has a sparkly, bright blue, raised-texture star of different sizes on it.

Prior to two days ago, in all her textured books, I manually took her hand and rubbed it over the objects in the book. Then, all of a sudden on Thursday, she started pulling the "duck" hairs off the books!

All this to say that---last night she reached up voluntarily and scratched a few of the stars in "Twinkle." Seeing that she seemed to understand "star," I then asked her, "Where is the star?" She found all the stars larger than my pinkie nail! (The smaller ones are still a challenge) I don't think it was coincidence.

So today, I quizzed her again. We have a "Colors" book that the Ws gave us. She loves it; chews it to pieces almost and we read it often and take it with us on trips. It goes something like this:

Yellow features a soft duck and lion
Green features a bumpy frog and I forget, something else green...
Red features a furry bird and a cat
ETC...
Duck and frog are on the left hand pages; cat is on the right and it is flat.

I posed this question on each of these three pages: "AK, which one is the duck/cat/frog?" She put her hands on the duck right away.

For the cat, she looked left, right, left and then put her hands on the cat on the right!

For the frog, she studied it very, very carefully, again looking left and right, left and right, then she stared left for a while, did not use her hands, but looked at me as to ask "Is that right?" I, of course, smiled, patted her and said "Yes, frog!"

So, one might think....coincidence. But no!

After lunch, I said to J, ask her the questions. This time she did almost the same thing, except when she got to frog, she used her hands because she knew it. (It still took her the longest) What a serious, studious child she is!

Makes a lot of sense, we have a lot more books and animals that are ducks and cats, than frogs!

Cool, huh?