Sarah and Lauren are about to turn two and have already changed so much in the past few months. They are doing a lot more talking and have increased their use of two and three word sentences. They say “please” and “thank you” when requesting things they want and are better able at using their words to express themselves.
They also point to objects and name them on a regular basis, looking to us for confirmation as they label everything in their world. They continued to attend story time at the local library and love to do the finger plays and sing songs. Their favourite songs right now are “Happy Birthday”, “Twinkle, twinkle”, and singing the alphabet. Although their accuracy of the words is not 100% yet, every time we sing with them they seem to be saying the words more clearly and confidently.
Their love for books continues to grow and they have their favourites that they seem to like to read over and over again! They can answer simple questions that we ask them while reading such as “where is the dog?” or “what kind of animal is that?”. I think it is also really important to make comments and observations while reading books with them to get them to start thinking about the story and make predictions about what will happen or what a character might be feeling. This is helping to develop a child’s reading comprehension which is a very important lifelong skill for understanding what we read and for developing critical thinking tools.
I have noticed that the girls’ ability to sit and listen to a story from beginning to end has increased, indicating that they are probably paying more attention to the story as opposed to simply looking at the pictures. They often point out things to us as well without prompting, which indicates that they are remembering particular details or pictures from having read the same story previously.
An alumna of UBishops, Megan Collins lives in Calgary with her ‘growing family’. We’ve been featuring Megan’s posts about Lauren, Sarah, and their books since December 2011. Let’s compare Sarah, when her fingers were soooo tiny holding a book, to now!






