Ashley J Let’s chat about how I taught my son the alphabet and how to count. I wanted to share this with you guys because 1. I’m super proud of the progress my son has made. 2. You can do this too. He knows the alphabet and how to count because I didn’t want him to be a statistic. I also wanted him to be better than I am. I want him to be able to teach the teacher something when he gets to school.
I first mentioned doing this with my son in a post called What I learned my first year as a mother. When Marquis was about 2 months old, I decided to teach him early. I knew he wouldn’t understand what I was teaching him, but that didn’t stop my determination. That almost stopped me from teaching him initially because I thought it would be a waste of time. But I kept pushing to teach him. He was my clay that I couldn’t wait to mold. One thing that came to mind from the first time I saw his face was that I did not want him to be a statistic. Being in the profession I am in, I hear about the diagnoses black children are given. I did not want my son to be labeled because someone doesn’t recognize his intelligence and cannot cultivate it.
I wasn’t working when he was two months old but was getting my master’s degree. That little detail is important because I’m unsure if I would have had the forethought to start teaching him at such a young age. I began by typing uppercase and lowercase letters on my laptop, placing him on my lap, and talking him through what was on the screen. This was a daily practice for us. As he got older and began to recognize what he was seeing, I downloaded some apps to help him learn the alphabet. I also downloaded an app that taught him the alphabet in Spanish and how to count in Spanish. I asked why I should not teach him to be bilingual or start going in that direction. The next step was establishing a routine. Every morning after his morning feeding at around 10 am, I found that was the sweet spot for his attention. We would lie in my bed and go through the apps, learning to recognize letters and the sounds they make. He would also learn how to recognize numbers and count. This was every single morning.
When he was a toddler, my son would see letters, mimic their sounds, and say the letter’s name. My husband loved hearing him do that and seeing our son’s progress. This was important because it showed he appreciated what I was doing with our son and enjoyed it. Then, we discussed what the next step would be for our son. We decided to get a very popular learning site you see advertisements for on TV. We registered him on the site and began advancing our daily routine to the site. Every day, he would learn on this site. It was great working on the site because now I was able to gauge where his progress was going. He excelled on this site. Before going to school, he recognized the words and checked with me to see if he saw the words correctly. One day, we were at a pool and saw the word “no” on the pool sign for “no diving.” He blew me away by recognizing the word. He continued to recognize words before attending school. If we fast forward to today, he’s doing excellent in school. He has been a fantastic student, and this came because I set the foundation for him, along with the natural intelligence he was born with. I take into account how he was doing things in utero before he was supposed to, and he had the survival skill while I was in labor not to come down the birthing canal because he had the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. You might be thinking this is a stretch, but to me, it points to how intelligent my son is.
Here’s the thing. You have recognized this in your child or would like your child to be in this position. I’m here to tell you if you are pregnant, you can teach your child the same way I did. If your child is already walking the earth, teaching them is not too late. Now, we focus a lot on reading and spelling. He’s in school now and still uses the foundation laid for him. He is continually getting better reading and is excellent in math as well. He always asks me to quiz him with math equations, or he might come up with some on his own and ask me if his solutions to his problems are correct. I love watching him read and solve math problems. It let me know my son will be just fine in school. I want to point out that this is bigger than his book intelligence because he’s black. We have a delicate job in teaching him how to proudly be a black boy and be protective of himself when he is out of our sight. This is an ongoing job as he matures and gets older.
You must practice patience while teaching your children. Don’t give up on yourself because you think it isn’t working; trust me, it is. Teach your child according to how you believe they learn at their age. We did nothing but ten minutes a day and increased it as he got older. Your child deserves to be taught by the best teacher: you. Pray and ask God to give you guidance on teaching your child.
Proverbs 22:6 NCV Train children to live the right way,
and when they are old, they will not stray from it.
(This post was completed 4 years after the first paragraph was written.) Are you interested in teaching your child the alphabet and numbers at a young age? Let me know in the comments.
