wiredfool

To start with, there are three of them now. Not that I’ve manage to post about the baby here yet. He’s getting to be a charming little alert 2 month old, with occasional cranky patches. Just about what he’s supposed to be like.

Tim has decided that english is an acceptable language, and now has hundreds of words. This started Tuesday, September 22nd. It started with the names of his brothers, and now it’s almost anything that we’ve talked about to him. A switch flipped, totally and completely. His 60-80 words of Timish, with it’s own consistent grammar is mostly gone. There are only a few words of that left, but they may be the ones that take a while. It’s very strange to have a toddler that can talk.

Ben is well on his way to reading. Sometime in September, he decided that other people could actually teach hiim something. This was conveniently when kindergarten started. We’re now 1/3 through Teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons, (Engelmann). It’s a Phonics based approach, with a big section at the front that explains the methodology and what to do. And looking at it, it all makes sense from a psychology and machine learning point of view. And best of all, its working. He’s excited about reading every night, and he’s to the point where he’s moving from sounding out the most common simple words to just reading them fast. He’s trying to sound out words that he sees ‘out there’ — sometimes it works, sometimes it’s not something he’s seen yet.