30 December 2013
Derin has started reading.
It’s only in the past week or so that he has started talking coherently (to us). A couple of days ago he was in our bed early in the morning on a work day (he had woken too late to go back to sleep, but too early to ignore) and Sheb had got up. He was sitting in the bed and when she came into the room he patted the mattress beside him and said “Mummy, come bed. Night night.” That was 3-4 days ago.
Now today he has shown that he can read numbers. It started with something earlier today – can’t remember what right now – where he said “Five. Five” and there was a “5” on a bottle/box/label. Then this evening when Bruce was brushing Derin’s teeth Derin started pointing at a Listerine mouth wash bottle and saying “Six. Six. Six” On checking, it turned out that the label said “6 benefits” or something.
It’s crazy late – now after 10pm, but we did a quick test a few minutes ago, writing numbers on his whiteboard, and he knows 4, 5, 6, 7. He said “nine” for “2”. Unfortunately it was too late for more testing. He was too tired. Strangely, the 5, 6, 7 were said in English, with Bruce writing the numbers. When Sheb wrote “4” he said “dort” (“four”). Is this a coincidence? We don’t know… yet.
Interesting though that his first word was “bir” (“one”), his first coherent string of words was “one, two, three, …, ten”, and the first characters that he can read were “5” and “6”
More experiments tomorrow!