Griffin’s 2 Years Old

When Griffin turned 2, he could talk in phrases already. He could say phrases like ‘kick ball’.

In a couple of months he could already recognize and name shapes. He could also point out the parts of his head when I use the Chinese terms. He could sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and Itsy Bitsy Spider. He even sings part of the Spongebob Squarepants song, although he pronounces Spongebob as “baba”.

By 2 years 4 months or 5 months, he could already recognize and name the Alphabet in upper and lower case and numbers 1 – 10. He was beginning to count in Chinese (1-5). At 2.5 years old, he could already express himself in sentences.

I decided to enroll Griffin in preschool in June 2007, he was 2 years 10 months at that time. The teachers would say that talking to him was like talking to an adult. I enrolled him in pre-nursery but was told that he could be placed in the nursery class because he already knows the alphabet, colors, and shapes. He even knows all the letter sounds already. I refused to have him transferred to the nursery class because I didn’t think he should have 7 workbooks at his age. I wanted Griffin to have fun and enjoy school. However, after 3 weeks of going to his 9:00 am class, he didn’t want to go to school anymore. He had a difficult time getting up early because he sleeps so late at night.

Griffin stopped going to school. He was learning at home anyway, specially with his discovery of Starfall.com which teaches the alphabet and early reading skills. It was around this time that he would often tell me, "I love you mommy!" out of the blue. He would also say, "Thank you mommy, thank you!" whenever I give him something, like a glass of water.

Around a month before he turned 3, I was surprised that he could recognize a Chinese character. There was an instance when he was holding a bottle of C2 then pointed at the Chinese character for green (綠) and said, “Mommy, this is lu4 se4.” After that I found out that he could read the Chinese characters for the colors red, orange, yellow, blue, violet, pink, brown, gray, white and green. He also knows the Chinese words for the parts of the head like eyes, ears, nose, tongue, mouth, eyebrows and hair. By this time he could count from 1-20 correctly.

Some of the words he couldn’t pronounce properly were the ff:

umbrella - umbaba
camera – cam-aba
strawberry - strawbibi
slippery - sutapee
girl – gwerl
banana – manana
thunder - funder
Javellana - ha-ve-ayana
Griffin Bailey - Gwiffin Baiwey
Winnie the Pooh - Windy a Pooh
Sesame Street - Seta Street