Ivy tricks

Ivy became fascinated with learning to snap her fingers when she saw someone (probably her Daddy, who just *does* it sometimes, for no discernable reason) doing it a few months ago. I saw her attempting something weird with her fingers and asked what she was up to. She didn’t know the word for snap so was trying to describe to me what she was trying to do. “Finger sounds. I’m trying to make the finger sounds.” There was a lot of wrist flicking and weird pointing motions and growls of frustration as she demononstrated for me. The lightbulb went on and I said “ohhhh, you mean a snap!” And then did it. She nodded and went back to hand contortions.

So I broke it down to the basics and showed her what needed to be done. She kept at it for a few minutes and then another shiny object caught her attention and she moved on to The Next Thing. Fast forward 4 months or so, to last night. We’re watching TV and I heard a dull click from her side of the couch, and then a gasp and a laugh. I look over and her hand is in the distinctive “post-snap” position. I said “did you snap?” “Yup!” A couple more attempts and then sure enough, another snap sound.

Proud moment for a 4 yearold!

One other nifty “trick” of sorts is that she seems to have a pretty firm grasp on shapes and how they can be manipulated and moved around and combined to form other shapes. She is also in the early stages of wanting to actually READ… we sound out letters and words, and she wrote “Mama”, “Papa” and “oso” (spanish for bear) on paper on her own without help… citing that they are “patrons” (spanish for patterns — what they were studying in preK before Christmas break). There’s a magnetic board just inside the door to her room, with magnetic letters on it. She matches all the upper and lower case letters together, which I thought was pretty cool, but then yesterday as we walked past she stopped and said:

“Look, when you put them like this ” – maneuvering the upper and lower case L and l to near each other – “It’s a ‘L’, but when you do this ” – she put the upper case L to the left and up a little bit, and touched it to the middle of the lower case l – ” it’s a 4.” And sure enough, she’s exactly right!

Proud moment for a 4 yearold’s Mommy, right there 🙂