Love of Language

There needs to be some documentation of the growth of our girls. The past year and a half has seen so many changes.

With language acquisition, Chloe was much different than Maggie. Maggie's marker for language progress was the birth of Chloe. When Chloe reached the same age of 16 months the word count for Chloe was probably a little higher than Maggie's, but Chloe's vocabulary was almost all signs: 70-ish words but only 10 or so were vocal. At her second birthday, Chloe was still a quiet girl, but she'd put a few two-word sentences together with signs. After her second birthday, Laura said that she felt like living with Chloe was like living with Lassie. Chloe would point, and grunt to get what she wanted. Chloe would display her satisfaction or dissatisfaction in grunts and gestures until she'd get what she wanted, and the rest of us modified our behavior to Chloe's actions.

At Christmas time (2011) Chloe was surprising us with short spoken sentences of two or three words together. You know you have a quiet child when they're almost 2 and a half and two words coming out of their mouth at the same time surprises you.

Now Chloe is almost a couple of months past her third birthday. Sadly the signs are almost completely lost. She has maintained her cuteness by saying 'W's for her 'L's, 'D's instead of 'G's, and 'T's instead of the hard 'C's. A "little guy" who is "so cute", ends up being a "wittow die" who is "so toot". She had us laughing the day she said "Oh, deez".

Chloe is still somewhat quiet, but you can really catch her talking when she has her dolls and toys. During play time you can hear some vocabulary, but it's all of the inflections and tones of voice that really display Chloe's character. Almost any toy gets put into the family, and when left alone Chloe will have whole conversations between "mommies", "daddies", "babies" and the occasional sibling. The babies seem to miss Mommy a lot, but Mommy is quite re-assuring that the babies will be okay.

Singing is another part of vocal play time for Chloe, and she will sing the “ABCs” or “Twinkle, Twinkle” in loops all throughout the day.

Maggie has had her own adventures in language. She continues her love of letters and words. It is fun to watch her mind work. A year ago or more, we were driving in the car and Maggie asked if we too could see the ".... flamingo?" Laura and I were stumped. Then we finally caught on. Flamingos are birds with long necks. Cranes are birds with long necks. We were diving past a series of 4 or 5 cranes doing construction on I-15. Case closed.

Laura and I haven't done anything spectacular with Maggie to help her read. We've just kept words and letters as games to play. Maggie was the one who decided that letters were fun and we got a few DVDs on the alphabet to help her out. Loving the letters has turned into reading, with the help of some picture books from the library. Sometimes I'm not sure how much Maggie is reading and how much she is recognizing word shapes, but I know she does both. She will read a few pages during reading time. If the book is a favorite (and not too long) she might read the whole book. Maggie will make a few mistakes, but if you point at the words she got wrong, she'll try again and then some of the reading kicks in. When I've tried to check out a picture book in Spanish, Maggie has gotten mad at me because she doesn't recognize the Spanish words. She only wants to read English.

The fun part about Maggie reading is that she just expects it to be part of the conversation. If there are words in front of her she will try and read. This is the same game she did with letter recognition, but now she’s trying whole words. I have received series of text messages of "maggie", "maggie", "daddy", "mommy", "coco", "love", etc. as she hunts and pecks at an open keyboard at home.

When I'd take her running, sometimes she'd get after me and I would have to go back so she could read the signs we had passed. She'd ask for help on some of the bigger words, but Maggie gives them a good effort first. Maggie has also surprised her primary teacher when she was reading the words as the teacher was writing on the board, "I can forgive others".

Another surprising example of Maggie reading was when I took the girls to see the primate skulls display in the hallway at UVU. I pointed at a label and told her that it said "chimpanzee". Maggie looked at the next label and read “orangutan” even though the label said “Pygmy Orangutan” – she was skipping the word she didn't know. The display only has skulls and labels. There are no pictures, so I was impressed. Then Maggie found “gorilla” and since she was on a roll she also tried to sound out “Gigantopithecus” (an extinct primate, larger than a gorilla). Maggie did pretty well. She got a couple of “g” sounds in and a “t” sound or two and a mumble to finish off the last syllables. This isn't a species I’d heard of before, and I still have a hard time saying it as well as Maggie did.

I know they've said more cute stuff than this, but I had to get at least a couple of things down. It is fun to live in a house with such bright little girls.

I may have to rename this blog "Faceterest" or "Pinbook" to see if either will help Laura to start posting again.