This may be a little long, as there have been a lot of developments that I’ve known I should be writing down somewhere, but haven’t, so I’m going to do it now. For as long as I can remember, at least from when he was 15 months old, Jonah’s been very interested in letters and words. At that time, he could identify about a dozen letters and their sounds. He’s always had a great attention span for books and loves having stories read to him. By 19 months, he was speaking in sentences and by his second birthday, he used hundreds if not over a thousand words.

Most of the first words he learned to recognize in print had something to do with trucks or the names of the people in our family. He knew what ‘dig,’ ‘dump,’ and ‘stop,’ looked like in specific places, like on a red stop sign or on certain pages of his favorite books. Then, back in December, Jonah started pointing out ‘stop’ on our clothes dryer or other street signs. He picked out a library book we had never read before and told me it was called, ‘Dig!’ (which it was). He also started trying to write his name, and happily personally signed about forty of our Christmas cards.

About two months ago, Jonah started talking about what letters he thought words started with. He’d say the word really slowly and then say the letter that made the sound he heard. I asked him to bring me Nora’s diaper once and he was saying ‘diaper, diaper, diaper,’ and then said, “Diaper has a D, and a P, and a R in it!” When we’d read him a book, he’d point to a word and try to figure out which word went with one of the things we said based on the first letter. The alphabet refrigerator magnets started getting a lot of use while I was making meals, and he loves making really long ‘words’ with crazy strings of letters and asking me what they say, while he laughs hysterically. He also really started to play around with rhyming words, noticing them in songs and in things he said. With Mr. Potato Head, he said, ‘That’s where the nose goes. Hey! Nose and goes rhyme!” – things like that.

Then over the past month, he’s moved from just recognizing words to figuring out how to sound things out on his own and has just really taken off! The first time he really surprised me was when we were driving and he said, ‘That sign says ‘bump’ because it looks like ‘dump,’ but it has a B, so it says ‘bump!'” I usually try to read some of the newspaper while we eat breakfast (yeah, good luck with that, Mom) and he constantly is pointing out words and phrases that he knows – “That says, ‘End of the Road!'” “f-o-r says for” “A Bark Bark Sale! That’s pretty funny!” (an ad for a mulch supplier) “Ducks win!” “That says ‘Hiker’!” and on and on. When we get new library books, he helps me read them the first time through, both recognizing words and sounding out new ones.

He asks questions all the time about what words say – everywhere we go – and what unfamiliar words mean when he hears them in conversations or on the radio. He’s noticed things like exclamation marks and wants to know what that ‘funny looking upside-down i is.’ Now whenever he sees them in his books, he tries to yell the words. The other day, he sat in his room with the ukulele and made up a song that said, “The E at the end of the word doesn’t make a sound. No, no, no, it doesn’t make a sound.”

Every time we go somewhere, it’s like the letters and words are just jumping out at him. He picks out all sorts of words he knows while we walk around the grocery store, drive in the car, and notices all sorts of little things that look like letters, like the lines that mark parking spots on the side of the road ‘look like lowercase t’s.’ Jonah points out random swirls on our carpet that really do look like lowercase e’s. He likes to bite his food into letter shapes, make letters out of stick pretzels, and just tonight was writing ‘Hi’ with spaghetti.

In this video, he starts off making some words with letter cookies. Then I caught a little of him drawing letters on his chalkboard (his favorite place to write) and had him show off his word spinner which I copied from a similar wooden one I saw online. Finally, he labels a fire truck I drew for him, something he did totally on his own a day or two ago, and I asked him to do it again for me.

It has been so fun to watch how his brain works as he tries so hard to figure out this big reading puzzle. The kid loves words!