Little Einsteins

The title of this post does not refer to the Disney cartoon by the same name. Nope, prepare yourself...I'm about to brag about my little Einsteins, Aidan and Delainey.

Aidan:
He started reading, really reading when he was just 3. He is now almost 6 1/2 and in grade one. He reads entire novels in one night. Judy Moody is his current favorite series and he read 2 of these books last week. One on Wednesday night and one on Thursday night. Each book was over 140 pages long.

He can also do math like a demon. He'll come up to me randomly during the day and say things like "345 + 63=408" or "did you know that 10 divided by 5 is 2?" or "a pentagon is called a pentagon because penta means 5 in Greek". I know some of this he's learning at school, but some he just figures out on his own. I often see him just sitting and thinking something through in his mind, then he says something like that. Then he moves on to build some Lego thing.

He's also a pretty darn good writer. Considering fine motor skills were never his strength and he's a young first grader, I was pleasantly surprised when I looked through his writing journal at school last week. He's got multiple page stories written with 90% spelling accuracy. I think when I taught second grade I had a few kids who could do that by the end of the year.

On all of his spelling tests this year he's gotten 100%. And his words are not "dog, the, and, cat". Nope here are a few of his spelling words so far: breakfast, healthy, dreadful, breath, please, exciting, elephant, and people.

Delainey:
She doesn't show much interest in reading, but can write every letter and number. She's been writing her name since she was 3 and it's not an easy one! Last week, she wrote a book to give her friend. She told me what she wanted to say and I spelled it for her, but she wrote every single letter. She worked on it for an hour.

Anytime she draws people, they are fully accessorized. Girls have not only arms and legs, but wear bracelets and high heels. Eyes have eyelashes (but only if they are girls).

She's quite quick with numbers as well. She struggles to count to 20 because she skips 13 (because coming from her 13 and 14 sound the same), but she has a lot of number sense. She can look at a group of items and instantly say there are 3 or 4 or 5 without counting. She recognizes these amounts easily and when I asked her how she knew there was 5 in a certain group (which was arranged like the 5 on dice) she said "Because there is one in the middle. If there wasn't one in the middle it would only be 4". Aidan likes to teach her addition facts so she'll now say out of the blue "Mommy, 2+2=4" when she sees 4 of something. Or she'll separate her peas at dinner into groups of 5 and 5 and then tell me "5+5=10".

She also has quite a mature vocabulary. She hears a word once then can use it properly in a sentence. For example, Aidan was reading his homework book to Lainey and me last week and didn't know what the word "reluctantly" meant. So I explained the meaning to him and used it in a sentence. A few days later, Lainey says to me at bedtime "Mommy, I am reluctantly going to bed now."

OK, I'm done bragging about my little Einsteins for now.