First person

On the left you see the first person that Isaac has, to my knowledge, ever drawn. I drew the circle for the face, and he added the rest, mostly unprompted, in this order: eyes, mouth, nose, hair, ears, legs, feet, arms, and fingers. What more could a person need?

He hasn't been into drawing lately. This may be a projection of my own issues with perfectionism, but I think he is dissatisfied with his skills.

He wasn't happy with the fingers, for instance, so at the bottom of the page he traced his own hand. In this scan, I partially covered it with two Post-Its.

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The Post-Its are notable because on them, also for the first time, Isaac wrote his name entirely on his own: no copying, no tracing, no coaching.

He's already four and a half, so he's a little late to the name-writing game. Some of his playmates have been writing their names since they were three, although I think in some of those cases it was a case of the parent training the child to perform a parlor trick, and there was little or no understanding of what the letters signified.

Isaac has been able to sound out letters in spoken words since he was three, but he has been resistant to learning the names of the letters themselves. He's also good with rhymes, and he can substitute letter sounds at the beginning of words to make new words. Perhaps the letter sounds came naturally to him, while the letter names would have required someone else to teach him? At any rate, I figured I wouldn't make a big deal of it, and he would learn when he was ready. Until very recently, he called several letters by their phonetic sound rather than their name (ghee instead of "G," key instead of "K"). I think by now he knows the names of all the capital and two-thirds of the lower-case letters, but as he hates to be quizzed, it's hard to tell.

He recognizes numerals from one to four, but after that he simply cannot remember them. He can count slightly past ten, but he can't tell a "7" from a "8."