Slip 'n Slide

What a scorcher this weekend has been! Sunday morning we had all the doors and windows open to let in some air, with temps rising in the upper 80s, even low 90s predicted! Not too bad on the surface, but for Santa Barbara, and its humidity, it was record-breakingly HOT! Little man got a visitor-- one of the neighbor kids, a little boy almost 8 years old (who has a 2-year-old brother, so he plays the caring big brother role very nicely) stopped by to see if Todd wanted to play on the slip 'n' slide they set up in the backyard. So Todd joined the fun and got to cool off while Mommy and Daddy did housecleaning.

Here he is during one of his forays down the slide... his expression is priceless! That grimace (click for larger pic) accurately reflects his initial hesitance.

As you can tell from this video, however, he quickly warmed up. After lunch, he went back out and played with squirt guns, the hose, and the little plastic wading pool. All in all, a nice way to cool off on a hot day :-)

Okay, Blogger is annoying me!!! Everytime I go to edit this thing, the video shows up in the preview and in the code, but when I publish the post, it is nowhere to be found. What gives!? Here is the Photobucket version, hopefully it shows up better. If Blogger decides to finally kick in and update this thing, you'll have 2 of the same video to enjoy. My apologies in advance for any possible duplicates...

Math whiz

A month ago I blogged about Todd teaching Pistachio how to add using his beads. He's continued to practice his addition since then.

We use flashcards that have an addition problem on one side, and a subtraction problem on the other. Last week, as we were doing the addition exercises, Todd turned the card over and noticed the subtraction problem. He wanted to know what the minus sign was. So, I decided it was time to start teaching him subtraction!

We started off with some simply ones. 4-1. 5-3. 6-2. He quickly caught on, and our nightly study sessions now included subtraction as well as addition.

He is always eager to do his arithmetic, mostly, I suspect, because he simply enjoys playing with the beads. Whatever-- as long as he's getting some learning in with the fun, why not? Beats having to struggle to get him to sit still and learn!

I started to wonder, though, if he truly grasped the concept of arithmetic or if it was just some bead-sliding game to him.

So today, I got out his box of mini tangram puzzle pieces, and got out the flashcards. I set him in my lap, and gave him the first assignment: an addition problem. He dutifully got out the requisite number of pieces and worked out the sum. Then I gave him a subtraction problem. He hemmed and hawed for a bit until I explained that subtracting means "take away". He got it after a few moments and was able to work out the rest of his arithmetic problems with the puzzle pieces... and nary a bead in sight!

Next up: using his fingers! :-D

Todd learns to read

Little man has, for a while, been able to identify what words correspond to certain sequences of letters, as I wrote about earlier:

http://toddsdiary.blogspot.com/2008/01/words-so-far.html

Well, this week we added several more words to the list, but not by the usual route. I got Todd's deck of ABC flashcards and decided to try to put some of them together to form short words. He knows his ABCs down cold and he knows his phonics, at least in terms of the sounds individual letters make. Figured it was high time to put those two skills together.

I started off with "A" and "T", forming "AT". After Todd understood how the "at" sound was formed, I added another letter to the beginning. C-A-T. And then M-A-T. A light bulb went off in Todd's head. The next few letters, R, B, and H, came easily. 5 new words!

Couple days later I tested him to see if he remembered it. He needed a bit of prompting at the A-T stage, but once he got it, he was able to fly through those 5 words. I added a couple new letters just to make sure it wasn't rote memorization, and he was able to get the words "pat" and "sat" without any trouble. In fact, he even went on to further define "sat" for me, explaining that it came from "sitting"!

Later that night, I quizzed him verbally: "What does C-A-T spell?"
"Cat!" came the immediate response, and likewise through all of his -at ending words.

Our ittle man is reading! :-)

Stop Hitting Yourself...

Do you remember when you were a kid, and you'd grab your, say, brother's hand and smack him in the face with it, repeating: "Stop hitting yourself!" and laughing at his consternation? Well, Todd adds a new twist to it. Observe... Todd and Daddy's hand:



Oh, and if that wasn't silly enough, Todd figures he can do the job just as easily and efficiently all by himself:



So if Child Services ever gets called on us, this is our evidence that he really did "do this to himself", honest!!

Guess who?

In case you're wondering, that Spongebob bucket is part of the Easter gift baskets that Todd got from Aunt Debbie and Uncle Ron when we all went to Grandpa's house to celebrate Daddy's birthday... which fell on Easter this year!

Happy Birthday, Grandma!

Happy Birthday, Grandma! Here's a little hand-drawn greeting from your little man. The picture at the bottom is a cake with a couple of candles on top :-)