A few numbers

1) Can Isaac count? He can count to two, and he can even identify a grouping of two objects at a glance without having to stop to count them. He knows the names of other numbers, because he can recite the numbers from one to ten with varying levels of accuracy -- he gets up to four, things often get muddled in the middle, and then he pulls it together for "Eight, nine, ten!" (This ability is sheer memorization, and it hasn't improved any in the six months he's been able to do it. Maybe we don't practice it enough.)

But I haven't been sure that he could comprehendingly count past two. However, last week we stopped at a series of closely-spaced stop signs while we were driving. "One stop sign, two stop signs," Isaac said, counting the first two. Ten seconds later, when we came to another, he said, "Three stop signs!"

2) I don't have any idea when kids are supposed to learn to count, but Isaac is much more interested in letters than he is in numbers. Maybe he would internalize his numbers faster if he were less good at talking. He knows how old he is, but instead of holding up two fingers when he's asked his age, which might give him a physical sense of the quantity, he answers, "Two years old."

But maybe that bodes well for him. After all, I use my fingers when I'm doing addition, and math was always a challenge for me (although I got an A in high school geometry -- after I failed it the first time).

3) Isaac likes to play with the ruler, and especially the tape measure. When he's pretending to measure something, usually I ask him, "Is it big or little?" He knows from observing us while we work that things are measured using numbers, but he usually sticks to saying things are either big or little. However, recently he was using the ruler to measure the wall, and we heard him say, "Twenty bigs!"

"Wow," Craig said. "That's pretty big! Is it twenty inches tall?"

"Twenty big inches," Isaac agreed.

(Isaac continued to play with the ruler, which is blue, and a few moments later he held it up and said, "Blue ruler. Blue-ler!" So I have to agree with him -- letters are more fun than numbers.)