Learning

The girls are still in bed. Looking at them got me thinking how different they are even if they look so alike. Don't get me wrong, I am not comparing who is the better child or that one is brighter than the other. On the contrary, it got me thinking how much their learning styles differ, but how effective each styles are to them.

A amazed me a couple of months ago by spelling out her name. We got our refrigerator alphabet magnets out and spelled everyone's name. She played with it some, and the next thing I know, she was spelling everyone's name out. Then she tried writing down our names. It was really amusing. I know that they weren't doing any writing in school -- at least, not the letters -- yet. But there she was, copying the letters spelled out by the fridge magnets. Although she already knows her letters and letter sounds by heart, I found out that she was writing by drawing. She still hasn't mastered or even tried writing her alphabet before, but now, she was writing letters as if they were objects. How I was able to say that? She wrote our names using the same font as the refrigerator magnets. But when prompted to write her name from memory, she used the proper capitalization and wrote her name in lower case letters.

The first few times she was trying to write her name, she'd always get the 'e' backwards. As in flipped, like a mirror image from left to right. All the other letters were done right except for the 'e'. When I tried teaching her the correct 'e', while she did the 'e' right, all the other letters in her name flipped. And she wrote it left to right. That's right, everything would be as if you read it from a mirror. With the 'e' still flipped.

Then just a few weeks ago, she started spelling out our last name. Since our last name was pretty long (8 letters!), she got only as far as the 5th letter. Still, for me, it's an achievement. She's not even 4 yet! But, yeah, we worked on it, and now she can go all the way through. I also asked her to write down the letters as she spelled it, and she did good.

It's probably not too amusing, you may say, but all these (well, except for the last 3 letters of our last name), she learned all by herself. They have an attendance board in school, and to teach familiarity of their names, they look for their names written on a cardboard "fruit" (or what have you, depending on their theme) and move them to a tree by the door. They are not required to memorize or even learn how to spell everything as early as now, but she did.

D, on the other hand, learned to spell her name after she started reading. She started by sounding out the letters to her name then writing it down. After she mastered her first name, she worked on her last name, again, by sounding out the letters. When we'd see a movie, or hear something on the radio, she would oftentimes surprise me by singing or humming the tune we just recently heard. She learns songs fast, and her taste in music is not very contemporary. She still hasn't gotten to the point yet that she'll look for a specific artist, but when I play songs in the car, she'd call my attention to some tracks that she likes. J and I have laughed about how D's mp3 player has songs older than her.

When D was 4, they had writing exercises brought home from school. D would always have a hard time doing it. So I started playing music for her. I was surprised, with the music, she worked faster and neater. Eventually, she'd ask for background music whenever she'd be doing her homework.

But that's not to say that D isn't visually acute, or that A can't learn much from listening; it's just that each of them has their own strengths, their own style they are more adapted to, their own manner of learning that would be more appropriate for them.