wild about words

I'm not sure if we've mentioned it before, but Kathleen loves letters. She learned her letters and their sounds quite quickly, thanks not to Mama and Daddy's superior teaching skills, but to a DVD entitled "The Letter Factory." (It's annoying but, man, it works!) Once Kathleen could identify letters, she started noticing them everywhere. She'd point them out on street signs and billboards and packages at the commissary. She realized they were on Daddy's laptop. She wanted to "practice" letters, texting on Mama's cell phone.

Not long after that, she started trying to write letters. She'd be playing with sidewalk chalk paint in the backyard (a favorite activity around here) and she'd intermittently shout, "Look, Mama! An X!" or "I wrote a T!" Wanting to capitalize on her enthusiasm, we offered her a letter-writing workbook, which was an enormous success. (We love Kumon's workbooks!) Mostly, though, all we worked on was writing her name. And she can do that. Sort of. She gets all the letters, but generally runs out of room, so they're just sort of scattered across the page.

We hadn't realized just how much letter-writing and letter-reading Kathleen had absorbed until a few weeks ago. While Mama was out for a run, Kathleen and Madeline and Daddy were sitting at the table, coloring and studying.

"Look, Daddy!" Kathleen exclaimed, "I wrote cat!"

"Hmm," said Daddy, "That was a good try! It's almost "cat," but not quite. Here's how we write cat..."

And, with a little direction, Kathleen actually wrote cat.

Emboldened by her success, Kathleen moved onto the next logical word -- dog.

And after that there was no stopping her -- at least not with Daddy to help her spell! Here are tiger and hat.

And then, with the obvious influence of "The Little Mermaid," Ariel and (my personal favorite ) crab.

Watch out, folks! I think we have a writer on our hands!