Father and Sons

My little Matthew is 22 months old! He’ll be turning 2 this coming March 1! Time flies!

During the past couple of months he learned lots of things. He learned them so fast that it never cease to amuse me every time I think about them, and every time he shows them off to me.

I was so excited when he learned all the letters in the alphabet. Mind you, he did not memorize the alphabet in order nor did he learned the alphabet song, when I say he knows the alphabet, I mean he knows all the letters in the alphabet. We couldn’t have done it without the aid of the gang from Sesame Street and other educational DVD.

Now, as much as would like to restrain myself from ostentating my son’s new skill, I can’t. It’s one of those ‘proud father’ moments.

Not only does my baby can identify or know every letters in the alphabet, he can identify numbers zero (0) to nine (9)!

But he can not count yet. Yes, identifying numbers is different from counting. Write number ’5′ on a paper and my son will tell you it’s number five. Write a ’9′ and he’ll tell you ‘nine’. But how many is ’9′? He doesn’t know… yet.

With that, I found out that the technique in learning the ABC may not be the same technique as learning numbers. In the alphabet, it’s ok if you don’t know the correct orders of letters (not yet anyway, no hurry) but in numbers, it is important to know which one comes first.. that’s counting.

But it’s alright, he’ll learn it eventually. What is important is that my baby knows what those numbers looks like and that he can write it on paper.. yes he can, just like he can write letters.