The Difference between Sarah and Samuel and their Learning Progress and my Teaching Adjustments

   Sarah and Samuel are different. Before the age of three, both have demonstrated their academic inclinations quite distinctly. 

SARAH
Sarah is a very spatial person and thus very conceptual. That also accounts why she is pretty good with Mighty Minds. She has shown as early as two, an inclination towards Math. I remembered before she took her naps, she would love to count. She counted everything in her picture books. There were two books that she loved to count and which I believed help her. One was her fairy book and another is a chinese book showing objects arranged in circles. She was quite proficient in counting so wishing not for her to lose interest in mastering her counting, I asked her to count silently without pointing with her fingers. As she is a person who laps up challenges, she started to concentrate and count silently. I think those silent counting activities have enabled her to leverage on her inclination and caused her counting to improve significantly.

     On our way to her music class one day, Dan was just testing her about addition between numbers one through five. Initially, she was stumped. And being one who cannot 'lose', she wanted to opt out of the activity. Then when we changed the denominator to 'jelly beans', suddenly everything clicked. And she was amazingly quick to shoot off the answers [1+4, 2 +1, 3+2 etc]. Haha...that was amusing and amazing at the same time. 

    Just last week, I was teaching Sarah how to write the numbers 1 through 10. She has done it before sporadically, informally on bathroom walls with soap foam and with her Dora book. But this time, we ploughed through it officially [as I hope to train her concentration and discipline] and she completed it well. I printed the numbers from this site which has free handwriting worksheets. There are many practices but I chose this numbers in a jar. http://www.first-school.ws/theme/printables/number-worksheet-jar.htm so she could put the correct number of stickers onto her jar when she has completed. She has since after that handwriting session, picked up the Primary One Maths Books [which I bought the week before] and tried a couple of counting questions on her own successfully. I am looking forward to doing more formal Maths with her. 

SAMUEL

Our little boy on the other hand has not had much personal sessions with me on counting. And he points his finger anywhere and many times on the same object, often resulting in double, and triple counting. Haha....
   But this boy has been reading well and is definitely linguistically inclined. At times, I think it has to do with his ability to associate words of the same sound together. And Sammy likes looking at letters and he would look at my mouth for assistance if he is stuck at a word. Just short of turning 3, he could read some pages of Jack and the Beanstalk and Percy the Pirate. He would sometimes find the early books of Peter and Jane pretty easy. And it has surprised us because I have spent lesser time with him on reading. But he picks up reading well through Leapfrog, Meet the Sight Words and flashcards using 'The Ordinary Parents' Guide to Teaching Reading'.
   A cute sight one night was when he wasn't ready to sleep yet but Sarah was. So whilst I was patting Sarah to sleep, I spotted him from the corner of my eye, cross-legged on his bed and bent over with Percy and the Pirate and reading to himself. His small voice reading big words is so sweet....

Yup, so that's where Sarah and Samuel is.
Non academically, both are enjoying hearty rides through the park on their skate scooter:)