Spelling Bee!

We've been in the house since Monday morning....with a 3 year old and a 10 week old, this can get kind of crazy! Andrew doesn't know the difference, but Parker, he starts to run out of "fun" and "new" things to do pretty quick! We've played a lot of games on the iPad and DS, we've watched countless movies, played all of his games, played with his new Play-Doh, made some crafts, and we even ventured out to the front yard yesterday (for about 10 minutes) to see how deep the snow drifts were! Parker's favorite TV show right now is Word World on PBS- it's a great show for kids of all ages, but Parker is at the age where he actually understands what they are trying to teach him on the show. It's a show about spelling and phonics....and we've seen every episode...at least 10 times each! Throughout the past few days, I've been hearing Parker walking around the house sounding out words. He walks past the bathroom and sounds out "towel", "T-T-Towel", "T", and he'll be in his room and see his books and say "Book", "B-B-B- Book", "B". He is doing this with every word he can think of and yesterday when we were making lunch, he was playing with his magnets on the refrigerator and was putting letters together- of course they were gobbledygook, and he wasn't really spelling anything, but he was putting letters together- "RWTR"- and I would hear him say, "R-R-R-ewter." He was reading his made-up words!

So, I stopped what I was doing and went over to the fridge. He asked me, "Mom, what does this spell?" Of course the word he had created did not spell any word I had ever seen before, so I told him to look at the word I was making and to sound it out. I spelled SUN. Parker looked at it and said, "S-S-S," and I encouraged him, he continued, "UUUNNN." He looked at me with the biggest smile and said, "S-S-U-U-N." I asked him, "what word is that?!" He screamed out, "SUN!" Then he laughed and squealed! We tried another one....I took the "S" off of SUN and put an "F" on it. I asked him to sound it out and he did it again with an even bigger smile! Then we tried the word "BED." He got it on the first try! Brandon was in the living room and Parker yelled, "Dad, Dad, I did it, I know what it says!" So excited!!!

Now....I'm not telling you that Parker is a genius (although, I think he is), but I am so impressed with how well he is picking up on sounds and letters and how he knows to put the sounds together to make a word! This also doesn't mean that he can read...well, maybe it does! Ha ha! He is a smart little guy and I am amazed at how much he learns everyday!

So, Parker won the Spelling Bee yesterday and was so happy with himself because he knew he was getting it!

Thank you, Word World....and thank you to the Snow Day for giving us this time indoors to slow things down and do some activities that we normally wouldn't do!!