“Mommy, your belly is TREMENDOUS!”
Forest isn’t four yet and already uses the following words regularly:
– Tremendous
– Shall
– Fright
– Creature
– Defiant (hm…wonder why)
– Excellent
– Persnickety
– Structure
– Shenagigans (close enough)
– Cantankerous
– Radial Arm Saw
– Pondering
– Gravity
– Ominous
My mom taught me to read when I was three, and she is very proud of that to this day. I’m in my mid-twenties and she still loves telling people I got kicked out of kindergarten because while other kids were learning their ABCs, I was making notes on the chalkboard of what the teacher had said.
Really useful, making notes for kids who can’t read.
After three days of this, the principal called my mom and told her I should go to a different school because I already knew too much.
My brothers also like telling this story, but it’s a lot shorter:
“Enna got kicked out of kindergarten. Heheh after three days!!”
I’m taking a different approach now with Forest. We’ve been going through the ABCs, but he spends a lot more time on the trampoline, digging useful holes and holding ugly chickens. A friend asked him recently what he’s been learning these days and he said:
“I jumped on the trampoline this morning. It was wet in the middle.”
Excellent life lesson right there. Trampolines are wet in the mornings. In the middle.
Here’s another important lesson he learned recently:
He’s almost four, so I will never be able to say I taught him to read at three, but I will be able to say he had an awesome childhood. He makes his bed in the morning (some mornings), we bake together, read books, he climbs trees, helps Graeme package and deliver orders, collects worms, helps with chores, and goes for walks in the orchard. When I think of Forest’s childhood, the word ideal comes to mind.
I am not in a rush to make him learn things he doesn’t care about yet. I taught him all those big words mainly for my own enjoyment, because I like hearing a little boy say:
“We shall have tea after my nap.”
One thing we have been doing consistently is memorizing Bible verses. It hadn’t occurred to me to do this, but then I realized he remembers almost every line of every book we read to him. So I figured we’d give Bible verses a go.
I read John 3:16 one morning, and he learned it after hearing me say it TWICE!! Is this normal? Maybe it’s normal and I just don’t know a lot of three year old boys. I was shocked when I put him to bed that night and he said the whole thing by himself.
He also memorized 2 Timothy 1:7. You probably know this one:
For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.
That’s one of the Bible verses I taped to my bedroom wall as I was getting ready for Baby Cookie’s home birth. Six months later, all my birth affirmations are still there, including Ina May Gaskin’s quote about letting your monkey do it. I should probably take that one down.
We’ve also been working on Psalm 23 and the Lord’s Prayer. I expect he will know the whole thing in a few days. I’ve been teaching him the King James Version, but he likes to make his own adjustments, for his entertainment. Yesterday I heard him say:
“Give us this day our daily lizard.”
And then today he came up with a new (and most definitely improved) version of Pooh Bear’s Stoutness Exercise Song. It goes like this:
“When I up, down, touch the ground, it puts me in the nude.”
What a prodigy.
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