“She loves her Souns!  We are doing some extended travel [and mail is an issue].  It would have been a lot easier to just order the whole set to begin with, but we had never seen them in person or known anybody to use them, so we didn’t know if we would even like them or use them.She’s learning so quickly.  I had no idea kids could learn this stuff so early!  Sometimes we talk about Souns as we are reading stories (/m/ /o/ /m/, or /p/ /e/ /t/, especially) and she just soaks it all up.

That reminds me of one other thing–when I introduced /p/ and /e/, it was as if Paisley already knew them, and was glad to finally know what they were.  She was delighted!  (Especially with her /p/.)  I’ve been thinking about it, and I think Souns are especially good for her because she talks so much, and since she is still little, when she verbalizes different words her speech is obviously not as clear as an adult’s.  She sometimes thinks it is funny that words in English sound alike.  For example, she is always asking me what things are, and one thing she asked about recently was the sheet on her bed.  So I told her, “Sheet.  That’s called a sheet.”  She was really surprised and amused by that.  “BAAA!”–she grinned–“Sheep!”  OH!  Yes, those words sound very similar, don’t they.  I explained it to her and sounded the words out clearly and slowly…but that is fairly typical.  Souns make it easier for me to help her differentiate between very similar words because they give us a shared frame of reference and they help separate sounds that are related to one another but different.  I think that will continue to be the case when we are able introduce more.

She loves “reading” (just flipping through pages of her books, mostly silently), and being read to, and this past week I offered her a pen and paper and she finally loves to scribble…so it will be very interesting to see how Souns continue to shape her learning.  We’re having a lot of fun with this!”