Here’s my little boy (3 years, 7 months) building a lego truck according to a plan. I only gave him a very few pointers as you’ll see. He actually built this truck once before by himself for grandma over Christmas, and I’m sure we put it together once or twice before that. At first I made them for him, then he started helping, and now he is doing it himself, except with a more complicated design. He is a total lego nut, he spends hours every day at it (unless I get tired of cleaning up after hiim and put the organizer up). So I put his many lego sets into an organizer and labelled all the drawers with descriptive names. He has learned all of the names and uses the organizer very well (as you can see). He makes his own designs, too. My only regret is that I haven’t trained him to pick up the legos after he’s spent hours building stuff!
Very very impressive Dadude.
That’s very advanced for that age. His fine motor skills are very well developed. Did you do baby sign with him?
Kimba
Thanks Kimba. We didn’t do baby signing with him. At the time, I vaguely remember thinking it was more trouble than it was worth (the baby would speak soon enough, wouldn’t he?). I didn’t realize that people do it to develop their children’s minds.
In the first 18 months, let’s see…I started reading books to him a lot when he was like 6 months, maybe earlier. By the time he was 12 months we were reading to him 1-2+ hours per day, several little-kid story books (like the Seuss “Beginner Books”) every meal and often other times as well. We also bought him lots of different toys, many many educational toys like the simplest puzzles, different kinds of blocks, Duplos, etc. We didn’t do Doman flashcards but I did buy quite a few commercial flash cards, so he was definitely exposed to numbers and letters and various animals etc. from before the age of 12 months. We also (I confess) bought most of the available “Baby Einstein” videos–he ate those up–I didn’t take the time to investigate if anything better was available. Now I wish I did. But anyway he was very very stimulated in many different ways in his earliest months. I used a more convention “baby brain builder” book from the time he was tiny (this one) and maybe it worked, but I don’t know… When he was 18 months or so, we were playing with the LeapFrog Alphabet Bus, which he really liked at the time, and he’d learned his ABCs so well from books and videos and toys that he could recognize most of them by 18-20 months. I didn’t start investigate early reading until shortly after that. I literally didn’t know anything at all about YBCR or Doman until he was like 22 months old. Now I have to wonder what would have happened if I had started on Doman methods two years earlier!
You know, his fine motor skills for legos are well developed because he plays with legos all the time. But he’s no great shakes when it comes to feeding himself or brushing his teeth or other such things.
Very impressive!! And I LOVE the drawers :)! I’m sure you’ve gotten every possible question already…but…when did he start talking? I’m guessing it was extremely early because you did so much reading? My son is 17 months and not talking very much yet (loads of sign language though). And second…(kind of random) do you think you would have been able to work with him the same amount/ have the same results if you had a second child? As you can tell, I’m figuring out when an “ideal” timing would be between kids (if there’s such a thing). You obviously spend a lot of one on one time with your son. I just wonder if there’s any harm in the reading time being shared - or if it has to be one on one for each child. Thank you again for sharing the video!
The little drawers can be found probably at any hardware store or Wal-Mart-type store, I highly recommend 'em.
No, he wasn’t an early talker. He was pretty much on target. I remember following along in one of those What to Expect books and he was maybe a little advanced but not at all precocious. He really started talking a lot, in longer sentences, with more words, etc., just at the time we started teaching him with my flashcards and watching YBCR (about 22 months). As a 2-year-old he was surprising us every day with the things he was saying. He still surprises us, but maybe not so often. And I try to remember, not all early learners end up as geniuses and some of the late learners end up geniuses… So I say we aren’t trying to make a genius, we’re just trying to get him to learn as much as he can.
You are 100% right that I spend a lot of one-on-one time with my son (and so does his Mama). He is greatly loved. I worry what might happen if we have another, and I have to divide my attention. But I think I’ll be able to get my boy to help teach his younger sibling. I’m sure there’s no harm in the reading time being shared, but what do I know? Well, one thing I do know is that if he’s 5 years old and he has a 1-year-old sibling, he probably isn’t going to be too interested in Dr. Seuss and Curious George, and the 1-year-old isn’t going to be interested in Harry Potter or whatever we’re reading at age 5. But again I hope I’ll be able to recruit him to teach his younger sib.
So impressed with him! Very good indeed! Love the drawers too…Very happy to hear that you and your wife really spend time with him. It’s really very important to let our children know that they are loved! You are doing such a GREAT JOB! Kudos to you!
He is so adorable!! He has such a nice personality! I love his videos. Yes I think the best give to our children is giving them good education and lots of attention. They are so great!
like always i love watching videos of your little one , he is adorable . we are still working with duplo with mine thought lego are too small but watching your son enjoying it , made me think maybe we should try . i love the way you organize your sets . this is what i use plastic drawers for most our toys better than damping them all in one big box .
for first timer lego players what would you recommend . as i have mentioned before we have no lego around here so i order everything from amazon and i was owndering what set should i go for ?? any advice
thanks viviane
also if you don’t mind explaining to us your system of organizing the lego pieces .
thanks
viviane
Very nice! He does it soo well and attentively. I hope you are not tired of answering questions because I have another one. How did you start with puzzles/problem solving games with him? I sometimes feel that I will not have patience for those because of the worry that I will be doing it on my own. I know with my nephew if I walk away from the game, he will too. But how do you get the kid to think what pieces go where. If you had an agenda that you followed to increase your boy’s problem solving skills, please share with us. I am very much interested.
Thanks, Great job!
DadDude, Your child is very smart and very intelligent. Congrats!!! I m amazed seeing him build a lego truck at such tiny age…Really really nice to see the kid do this. I also saw other videos of Henry. All are very nice.
Well, at first I just had separate plastic bags for each different color of piece, and then another plastic bag for the smallest pieces. As we got more pieces, I added more kinds of bags (always trying to keep the number of pieces in a bag smallish). Finally that became unmanageable so we got an organizer with drawers. I named and reorganized the drawers a couple of different times. It’s whatever works for you. My system is very idiosyncratic and you’d have to work out your own for yourself, once you got enough sets.
If you get a bunch of different sets, you can’t practically avoid getting the pieces of the different sets mixed up. So you have to have some method of organization. If you don’t, then most of your time building stuff is spent hunting for pieces. Or, if you don’t have an organization system and you don’t have patience to hunt for pieces, you just can never build the cooler models because you can never find all the pieces you need quickly enough.
Thank you! Well, I regularly offer to do puzzles with him but he’s gotten tired of them, always says no. We never moved past the 35 piece ones…maybe that’s the problem, maybe we should try a 100 piece one…but I doubt it.
We started puzzles when he was like 12 months old, with the kind where you just put different single pieces, a little holder pegs on them, into a single holes (none of the pieces touch). After a while we tried 2- and 4-piece puzzles which we got at Barnes & Noble (which has started carrying educational toys and stuff by the way). There’s a nice series of puzzles we found there that had different puzzles, with 4, 6, 9, and 12 pieces. We had a good time with those when he was around 24 months, I guess it was. Later, we also got quite a few 25-piece puzzles that have different kinds of animals, architecture, etc., at Meijer (a local Wal-Mart type store) for very cheap. He was doing those a lot when he was 30 months-ish. But he hasn’t done many puzzles since then.
The method as you can see is just to start simple and work your way up gradually to complex.
Problem-solving skills, well, my opinion is that that is not something you can or should try to train generally. It is always learned in the context of a particular kind of problem. There is overlap and carry-over, of course, but the skills are always learned in a specific context. Simply playing with a lot of different toys, getting many different experiences, and (maybe especially) getting a lot of general knowledge–just like we are all trying to do–is the best way to ensure that a person can solve lots of problems. I think breadth of exposure (to books, videos, games, puzzles, etc.) is probably the most important thing for a person to have all-round good problem-solving skills.
Hope this helps.