Alphabet & Elements

Here's a kid who knows her alphabet and her elements...



Here's the blurb that goes with the video:

26 month-old Rose from Seattle loves to play "elements cards". We shuffled up the cards of the 50+ she knows (sorry praseodymium fans) and let her show off. Special guest appearance(s) by the alphabet.

I'm not keen on parents trying to "hothouse" their kids. You can really distort a poor kid by giving and withholding approval to "shape" them to what you want. That is tragic. But if they have a natural interest and you aren't pushy, then it is fun to see what kind of crazy interests & abilities kids can develop.

You can tell that she is using the alphabet with the element's symbol written on the back to "guess" some elements before the picture is shown. You can also tell that she is using phonetics to figure out some element names. And I would be that she is using whole language with all its contextual clues to figure out other element names. The parents can be seen to be encouraging her and pushing a bit, but they don't go all ballistic when she has lapses of attention or gets the odd element wrong. That is good. This is encouragement without being "pushy" parents.

Here's the post about her. She's 26 months old which is pretty young to be reading, but obviously she has the basics of reading down, plus a fascination with the pretty pictures of all those elements!

Here's a place to get those nifty periodic element cards.