Connections

Silas goes through phases where he is making incredible connections between ideas. He makes mental leaps that surprise me.

The other night, as I was putting him to bet, I told him that he should try to get good sleep, because he needed lots of energy for all of the things we had planned for the next day.

“Ender starts with energy,” he said.

It took me a minute, but I realized that he was pointing out the similar sounds at the beginning of both words.

“And car starts with Carlos. And cart!”

He started riffing, bringing up words that rhymed (cat/hat/sat, night/light/bright), words that had semantic relationships (lake/river/pond), words that were opposites (hot/cold). He kept saying “starts with,” but he was trying to tell me that he understood that he could group words by sound or meaning–an unbelievably huge pre-reading skill.

He’s become interested in the idea of a full name. He asks people he knows, “What’s your name?” and what he wants is their full name. I’ve been reading him some Anansi stories, because that’s his middle name, and he has taken on the whole spider thing as his own. Today, he informed my mother that he is “a scary Anansi”…of course, since he still talks like a toddler, it came out as, “a scary Nazi.” Oops.

He was playing with his boat and a little toy man, and started telling us that the man was “Noah God,” and he had to put the animals on the boat (and then the donkey would hug him). This is the first time he’s tried to re-enact a story, I think. He remembered a lot of it from Sunday School!

He loves finding the cover art of a picture book inside the book itself, proclaiming exuberantly, “It matches!”

He finally gets what I mean when I make patterns out of the blocks and ask him to find the next block.

I’m nerding out over all of this, of course, because I know that these things–being able to break a word into its phonemic units, making rhymes, identifying patterns, visual matching, story telling–are pre-reading skills. The other day, we were getting ready to do our pre-bed reading, and he leaned back into the couch, sighed dramatically, and declared, “I love books, Mama.” JC and I practically high-fived behind his head.