the letter E

we made this name banner last week with some pretty transparent paper we picked up at van dorp - our local dutch office supply store. they carry special products like transparent paper from holland that i've been wanting to make window stars out of. but, that is a project for me and not for ezra, so we started off making this sun together. i drew the sun with pencil and ezra glued down all the squares of paper.

the coolest thing about the transparent paper is it's transparency. when you overlap the colors you can see how yellow and red make orange which ezra himself pointed out to me.

i am so proud of his excellent fine motor skills -

being a former first grade teacher i can't help myself.

i've been working on getting more organized with teaching ezra his letters and numbers. we talk about them all the time and have letters scattered around the house, on the fridge, on his felt board, in his play-dough tool bucket, and on a great wooden alphabet puzzle made in germany. ezra will say, 'there's the letter s' or g, v, t etc.. he's learned what he knows thus far just from his environment and because he is showing such an interest in letter recognition, i am gearing up to teach him his letters montessori style. but, he surprised me yesterday by sitting at his table and writing the letter E with his crayon all by himself.

michael and i high-fived him, cheered and i grabbed the camera. he proceeded to write the rest of the letters of his name and trace the felt letters of his name that i made from our felt board. it was so exciting to see him do this without me having ever shown him how to do that. later he went in michael's office with him and started writing his E's all over michael's whiteboard. i came in to see and he said, "i like studying with daddy."

he's been showing us all kinds of things he knows lately and not only identifies letters around him but shapes too. when we were coming up from the pool today and waiting for the elevator he noticed the triangle on the digital screen above the elevator to symbolize the elevator going up. i said, "you know so many things ezra." and he proceeded to count up from thirty... "thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two ..., thirty-nine, thirty-ten, thirty-eleven, thirty-twelve." i love it when little kids do that.