Day 3: Walt and writing

Here’s the thing: we think it’s pretty neat that Walt recognizes letters and numbers (and reads!), but honestly, what blew my mind was when he started writing. Less than a month after his second birthday, we caught him writing the ABCs on a magnadoodle apropos of nothing. (Video with the blue magnadoodle below.)  We’ve never pushed any of his learning, it’s all self-directed, but this one skill seemingly came out of nowhere.

Walt has recently taught himself how to write in cursive, though it’s still single letters and not connected to form words.  As a person who has spent an extraordinary amount of her life doing hand lettering, this is both incredibly exciting and also humbling - pretty sure I didn’t learn cursive until 3rd grade. 

Walt’s perfectionism is on full display when writing.  He’s been known to erase and rewrite a couple times until whatever letter or number he slipped up on is corrected. He prefers the French 1 (a long arc up to the top).  Capital Z usually has a line through it; 7s, too.  We don’t know where he picked that up, but my 8th grade algebra teacher is cheering somewhere.  He’s also exploring alternative “fonts” if you will: Andy caught him adding serifs to an alphabet recently. He doesn’t like to show off on camera too much until he feels comfortable putting it on display, so we don’t have a great video of that yet.

He isn’t much into coloring.  Most of his coloring sheets from daycare come home with his hand-written name at the top, a few attempts to fill in a couple areas, and then some spare numbers on the front and back, lol. It’s all about the writing!  I could bore you with infinite videos of him drawing in iPad apps, but instead, here are some early examples on the magnadoodle.