Smiley in July

During the last month Smiley has reached several developmental milestones.

Memorization

His memorization of stories has greatly increased.

He started small, of course: in early May he had memorized Where Does it Park? and parts of Inside Outside Upside Down.  In early June he had mostly memorized The Foot Book and could sing the alphabet, although we did not capture that well on film until a few weeks later.  Since mid-June his favorite books have been the Little Bear stories, which he has not memorized verbatim but can retell in his own words.

During the past week he has shown two memorization milestones.  First, memorizing longer stories, such as the Little Bear stories, and then retelling them without the book: especially in the car seat he tells himself the stories as best he remembers them.  Second, he now memorizes more quickly.  For example, today at the library I read him the board book How Kind once, and in the car driving home he was already able to recite quite a few of its sentences.

Since he is now retelling stories without the books in front of him, it's time to start familiarizing him with Bible stories.  We got a few at the library today.

Play-Acting Scenes

Related to memorizing books is play-acting scenes from stories.  At the end of June he invented the games of pretending to be stuck like Pooh and pretending to find a baby robin like in one of the Little Bear stories.  Those remain his favorite two scenes from a book, but he now play-acts others.

Poles and Sprinklers

Yesterday he slid down the pole at the playground by himself for the first time.  I still keep my hands by his waist, but I no longer need to help him move from the play structure to the pole.

Last summer he was usually afraid of the sprinklers.  Unsurprisingly, this summer he loves them and asks for them.

Adding Things to Chase

In mid-June he briefly played keep away but lost interest.

During the past two weeks he has discovered tickling, and now regularly adds tickling to playing chase.

He also likes adding "stop and go" (freezing like Red Light, Green Light, but with simpler words) to playing chase as long as he is the one giving those commands.