Increasing Attention Span

Yesterday, my Montessori sandpaper letters arrived. I am so excited! John saw them on the counter top and wanted to play with them (use them to build a house and as stepping stones across the kitchen floor), misusing them as they're not toys. Finally I had to ask that he put them away, saying I'd show them to him the next day when we did some school time. So this morning he woke up before six a.m. and within about three minutes asked me, "Is it school time yet?" I didn't know what he was talking about until I realized that he wanted to be introduced to those sandpaper letters! I introduced two different sounding letters ('s' and 't'), plus I spelled his name for him (j-o-h-n). I asked him why we want to know the sounds of letters and he didn't know: "If you know the sound of a letter, you can know the sound of a word, and then you can read your own books." This idea thrilled the boy and then I offered to read to him from a new big boy book I had purchased: James Herriot's "Treasury for Children."

I have been purchasing some classic children's works in the last few weeks, but when this one arrived in the mail I thought to myself that it was too advanced for a boy three-and-one-quarter years. The chapters are long, the language at an adult level, and the dialect foreign (British).

Boy, was I wrong!

Ultimately, John sat riveted through two-and-a-half stories, for a total of forty-five minutes of reading time. I saw that after half an hour, John was becoming fidgety. He would leap up from the couch and do a few somersaults, so I'd ask cheerfully, "Do you want me to keep reading or are we all done?" He'd say, "Still reading!" and jump back onto the couch. I've learned that method because, of course, I (perfectionist melancholic) want him to sit still "properly" and listen to a whole story, but sometimes (usually) he can't. So rather than try to scold him into lasting longer than he can last at any given age, I just quietly close the book and ask if he's all done. And in my heart I force myself for it to be okay for him to be all done, to be uninterested in this story that I think is so wonderful and edifying. But, most of the time, John does want to keep reading, or he wants to run in circles around the room a few times, then keep reading.

It was during this reading session that, for the first time, John asked me to point to the words as I was reading them. "Which word are you reading now?" I think it was a direct result of his new understanding from working with the sandpaper letters.

A bookworm like me, raised on beautiful literature, is in rhapsody to realize that John's attention span and interest level are now such that I can read him classics and true children's literature. I will be enjoying the things I read to him! No more dross and prattle! Below are two examples of the lovely paragraphs I read in James Herriot this morning:

"I had driven about ten miles from home, thinking all the time that the Dales always looked their coldest, not when they were covered with snow, but as now, when the first sprinkling streaked the bare flanks of the fells in bars of black and white like the ribs of a crouching beast."

"I had driven through and, streaming-eyed, was about to get back into the car when I noticed something unusual. There was a frozen pond just off the path and among the rime-covered rushes which fringed the dead opacity of the surface a small object stood out, shiny black."

John has already put in an order to listen to "Peter and the Wolf" again today (after listening to it three times yesterday) and to have me read him the Treasure Box books again (we own only numbers one through four, so now I'm an eager beaver to buy five through twenty!).

I promise I won't detail future children's learning development in this level of detail. It is simply so delightful for me this first go-round!