Kevin's Letters

I've been pretty amazed at Kevin within the last two weeks. Suddenly, he's become obsessed with letters and writing.

All day, he pulls paper out and writes on it. His favorite words currently are his name, Mom, Dad, Arkhon, and Siff. He loves to write, "For..." and create masterpieces to give to us. He's gotten to the point where he can write most of those without any help. Here's one he did yesterday without any help:

Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to present our 4-year-old

He had his name written on this one too, but since I use a pseudonym for my son, I had to take his name off. Just in case it's hard to read, the first line says "Arkhon," the second line says "For Siff," the last line says, "Dad, Mom."

He amazes me sometimes. The best part is, he's been doing this all on his own. When I was in college, a lot of my classes talked about parents and how the current system pushes children too hard. Some parents seem super competitive about making sure that their children are ahead of everyone else. In the class, we discussed how this causes some children to burn out and they never learn to enjoy learning.

So, after talking about that with my teachers and the other students, I decided that I didn't want to force my children to learn things early. Other parents can do things they way they want to, but I really wanted my children to enjoy learning. If they they were interested in something, I would definitely teach them, but I wanted to let them develop at their own pace (especially before formal education started).

When we got married, I found that Grig felt similarly. So, we've never really pushed Kevin to read. We read to him, and we answer his questions when he asks them, but I don't sit him down and force him to write.

I'm just tickled that he is so interested in writing right now. He fills entire papers with rows of letters, and then copies the letters that he wrote.

I think he's pretty amazing, and I'm grateful that he is so interested in reading and writing.