Being 3 years old

I think turning 3 years old is a big milestone for many toddlers. Somehow they seem to grow up so quickly.

Sean's speech is more and more fluent everyday. Sam has been encouraging Sean to tell stories to get him to think and talk. So Sean would go, " One day... watch Mighty Sasquatch..." and proceed to tell us a story from one of the episode of Animal Mechanicals.

Yes, his current favorite character is Mighty Sasquatch. His favorite color is blue, his favorite letter is the letter D, which he associate with being blue in color. Letter B was yellow. We went through letter C very quickly, so it didn't get a color of it's own. And his favorite number is number 3 this week.

We've been playing 'I spy something blue' when we're in the car, and he'll go, "More.... more blue!"

He's been playing more and more imaginatively. I got some 2nd hand toys from the library, bits and pieces of McDonald's toys or free toys that people donated to the library. They then sell them for fund raising. I paid a few ringgit for a few packs of toys. We got small Mickey, Minney, Donald and 2 Mickey faces, a rocket, an airplane, baby Shrek and Pinocchio . Sean was immediately attached to Mickey and Minney, and we've been playing Mickey and Minney everyday.

He brought them even to bathe the other day. Mickey and Minnie fly in rockets, drive cars, and go through lots of accidents as he crash and bang them. He really enjoys it, but we have to play with him. Sean is Mickey, Mummy is Minnie, Daddy is Donald.


Writing and playing Lego

I finally bought a box of colored chalk, and we played on the porch yesterday. To make it interesting, I said we could write on the porch floor. Of course, Sean was only interested in words that start with the letter D. So I wrote dog, duck and dinosaur. I told him to try writing too. He didn't want to write dog, duck or dino, but he was ok with writing 'dim' and 'dig' The activity took only about 10 minutes.





Then, out of the blue he decided that he wanted to play Lego. Perhaps it was because we went to Bryan's house and he played blocks there. We bought the copy Lego for him last Christmas, but it wasn't played very much. It was more of him telling me to make something for him.








But this time round, he wants to make a car himself, a blue car of course. =D And mummy had to make a red car, while Daddy's was yellow. He was rather proud of his blue car, and I'm glad to see that his fingers are able to manipulate the small lego pieces. I had to help him a little bit, but he made it mostly by himself.



Reading and Typing

Tonight, he read out the whole book 'Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you see?' almost all by himself. He had trouble reading the word 'looking' and 'black', but once I read it out to him, he had no trouble reading out the whole book. Maybe it's because 'Brown Bear' is an easy book, it's repetitive and has a nice rhyme to read.

I haven't spent much time teaching him how to read. After reading so many books about reading,I've decided that I'm not going to push him about reading now since he's only 3 years old. The simplest way is to read lots of books to him and I felt that is the best way to go for now. But if he wants to know what a word says, then I'll tell him what it says. I've also started to do book reviews. This is just to document the books that we've borrowed from the library. So if we like a book, I don't have to crack my head to remember the title. You can check it on my other blog.

He likes the 'I can sing a rainbow' song. So I put the song sheet on the wall and he'll read out the colors. Sometimes Sean likes to type on the computer. So Sam will tell him to read the colors from the song and copy the colors. So he'll go back and forth between the laptop and the wall to type them out. Sam will help him change the color of the font and he'll type

RED
YELLOW
BLUE
ORANGE
PURPLE

He can type by himself
APPLE
BEE
CAT
DOG

Then recently, he's started typing
RED APPLE
YELLOW BANANA
BLUE WHALE
ORANGE ORANGE
We had to tell him how to type 'banana' and 'whale' ,of course.