It is interesting to watch Aidan and Paddy in the early stages of literacy.
Paddy is extremely quick and facile. After several years with Aidan, who attains milestones with difficulty and perseverance and often by indirect “compensation” routes, Paddy reminds me all over how easily things normally “click” with the preschool child.
Paddy loves to do Alphabet Quia because he feels like his older brothers doing math drill and Latin. He used to watch them when he was a toddler and shout: “Crowns! Stars!” He is proud to be able to do it himself, now. Yesterday I watched him do several runs of matching lower case and upper case, and was surprised how many he already knows. I was also surprised by how easily he can look at a square field of individual letters and pick out the ones he needs. This is an important readiness skill and Aidan is not able to do it, yet, even though he knows the upper/lower case letters better than Paddy does.
He is advancing into the “early chapter book”. By this I mean books like Frog and Toad and Little Bear, meant for primary graders just building fluency. But what this means to a 3yo pre-reader is that he can sustain his interest through a loosely connected series of “quiet” stories without a whole lot of color or rhyme or patterning. Not that color, rhyme and patterning are bad. They are invaluable for the small child and he still enjoys those, too. (There is a book called Cushla and Her Books which discusses the different stages of book awareness from the perspective of a grandmother who was a reading specialist and also the grandmother of a disabled child. )
Paddy discovered the table of contents of these books and he thinks of them like a computer “menu screen” of options. He points to the list and asks “Which one is this?” and then selects the one that sounds most interesting.
He acts out stories, as I mentioned before.
Aidan’s approach is a bit different. Books have been a vital road into verbalization for him. It started with a DK early dictionary, with photos of various things. He carried this around and browsed through it until it fell into tatters and I had to replace it. This gave us a basis for talking about all sorts of things.
He has always been extraordinarly hard on his books. Think Velveteen Rabbit here. His books become friends and in the process get rubbed, hugged, adventured and slept with. He usually gets especially attracted to one page which inspires much intensity which often came out in a sort of pre-verbal poetry. “Trees! Trees!”
Laughter and love are always closely related here. When he hears a phrase that attracts him, he wants to hear it again and again until he can recite it. Usually it is something that strikes him as funny, whether or not it IS funny.
In his earlier years I heard this called “perseveration” which I guess is a word used to describe a mentally disabled child’s tendency to fix on something and get into a sort of loop. But Aidan is not in a loop when he does this. It’s a spiral; just a more intense, repetitive spiral. If he gets fixated on a word or a phrase it almost always heralds a real advance in his vocal abilities.
When he was at the pre-verbal stage, browsing over a picture and hearing the name over and over set the stage for an explosion of vocabulary. Then it was simple songs and repeated conversations. He would want me to repeat the same conversational loop over and over. I found that this gave him the patterns in his brain that eventually led him to increase his Mean Length of Utterance. In other words, he got the patterns set by listening over and over to the same thing, then repeating the same thing (I was thinking echolalia, but if it was that, it was not a random form), and then he could fit new words into the existing patterns.
His most recent advance is to hear the simple board book over and over and then “read” the whole thing. Paddy does not do this, not yet. But Paddy will ask questions about the text, “meta-comprehension” and Aidan does not yet do this. Aidan approaches things as artifacts. For this reason he could label letters and numbers way, way, before he was actually ready to count or read.
