Love Letters

warning: If you are a legit Montessori person, these images might make your head explode.

Silas loves anything with letters. One annoying thing is that most letter toys for kids are all capital letters, but the vast majority of what you see in print are lower case. One exception are the sandpaper letters I bought him a while back. I had tried to introduce a few of them a while ago, but when Silas didn’t seem to get it, I stuck  them up on the mantle and forgot about it. JC discovered those the other day, when he was looking for something else. He gave them to Silas, who enjoyed running his fingers over them. “They feel funny,” he said. Then he started asking for “more letters.”

This is the part where a Montessori purist would probably despair of my ever really doing it right. I got him “more letters.” All of them, in fact, except for the c, which I can’t find. He pulled them all out.

For the uninitiated, what you are supposed to do is just work with two letters at a time, showing the child how to trace the path of writing the letter, while making the letter’s sound. I did try to demonstrate the tracing, but he ignored me. I would have been annoyed, but he was just so happy to touch all of them.

He did learn a few interesting things. He pretty quickly isolated the p/b/d challenge, but didn’t solve it.

When he started throwing them, I put them away. Even if we aren’t using the materials correctly, I’m still being pretty strict about them not being toys.

A few days later, he asked JC to get them down again. I discovered him tracing the j and saying “Juh! Juh! Like juh for James! It goes down and up!”

I might not be doing it right, but my kid loves letters, and that’s a good start.