me-na me-na me-na me-na

Making pre-school kids interested in anything requiring concentration is hard to do. And if the kid is very active and always in play mood, forget about it. Yet, I try my best to make my son learn something new regularly. A few days back, I pronounced my name backward and repeated it a couple of times and asked him to observe how my name comes out of the repetition. Then I went to work and in the evening I noticed that his slate had his name forward and backward. From the handwriting I knew it wasn’t he who wrote it 🙂 and yes, it was written by his mommy. But it seems he tried doing it and then asked his mom to help him. I was happy that he tried to follow through and not just stop after I told him about it.

Then I thought about making use of this opportunity, that he was interested in something, for good use to teach him something new. So on my long commute back from work next day, I knew what I wanted to teach him.

I asked him to repeat my name backward and listen how he could hear my name forward. Then I asked him to do the same and how his doesn’t do it. While at it, I also took the opportunity to explain him the difference between letters and syllables and how reversing by letters is different from reversing by syllables. Then we moved from letters to numbers.

So, we started with 12 and reversing it gives 21 and repeating it gives 21 21 21 21 21 and now you can see 1 2 (12) pattern within this.
Then I asked him to do the same for 123 and how he can never get 321 from it. He tried to show me that he could write 321 and then immediately write 23 to get 123 :). Smart, but that’s not repetition. So, then came my question to him, “Can you think of a 3 digit number which when reversed and repeated, it gives the original number”. In about 30 seconds he told me “111”. I was a very proud dad :). Not sure if it was a fluke or his brain is indeed growing to the level where he could understand all the things I try to throw at him.

He will soon be turning 5. One thing that became very clear to me early on (when he was about 3 yrs) is that the best way to make him learn is to take the topics he is interested in and try to teach what I want to using those topics. This is what I call a win-win situation with a kid.