ABCs of Toddlerhood!

A story of how my son self-learned A-Z in the pandemic.

In the pre-pandemic times, when we were scouting for playschools for Yajur and went to check one out we were advised by the principal ‘NOT to teach him ABCD at home’, as today’s Montessori way of learning is via phonetics. We heeded this advice and kept him away from the rhyme or letters.

But then the pandemic happened, and I sure was not (yet) a phonetics practitioner, but I still did not want to confuse the little boy with how I learned my letters back in the day. But that’s when his curious mind surprised me.

Thanks to his allowed screen time, he had learned all the number rhymes — 5 Little Monkeys, 5 Little Ducks, 10 little Indians, and many more and was able to even recognize numbers easily. But I give more credit to his love for everything cars, which actually got him to start reading the number plates of cars, and while he did that easily with numbers, he wanted to know what the letters were.

Without a doubt ‘O’ was his favorite, just like how the circle shape had been the first he learned. But the interesting 2nd choice was ‘M’ (of course it was part of his dad’s number plate) but he just got a liking towards the letter. And when he first saw a ‘W’ he thought someone wrote M Ulta! And that’s how he started asking us for letters everywhere.

He heard kids sing ABDC and learned the whole song without any help, and that’s when I realized there is no need to keep him away from letters. So we started reading books about ‘Things that move A-Z’, Animals A-Z, Colouring Capital letters & dot drawings of small letters.

His puzzles for a few weeks were all about letters and he knew which came after which quite easily. He started reading the letters on book covers, newspapers, and toy boxes.

Instagram Post on Reading Book Covers

However, he had no understanding of how they came together to spell words. The below incident was one of the cutest, but it also started bothering me because my son at 3 knew the entire alphabet but had no clue why he even learned it!

Yajur — Reading each letter — V-O-L-K-S-

Me — *Standing, Watching & Beaming with Pride!*

Yajur — Continuing…… -W-A-G-E-N ……*a pause* “Appa Car”

Me — Laughing & Worried at the same time!

We then started learning more about using phonetics to get him to understand letters. And his playschool, Klay helped us with songs for each letter which has made the process entertaining.

From making collages out of newspaper to learning ‘N’ to dancing with dolls to learning ‘D’ we sure have our days wrapped around letters at home. We also planned our show-and-tell with objects at home to emphasize the letters and still make it all about play.

I can’t wait for the little boy to read a bedtime story for me on his own and bask in pride, but I am in no hurry for him to read. It will happen when his mind tells him to do it. Until then, we will continue to have fun with letters our own way.

And just to get the concept understood better, we have to make sure to feature him in the videos and make them about things that move!

Originally published at https://yajurchronicles.com.