About a month and a half ago I was reading a article in the Tribune and they were discussing a family with 19 month old twins. The article briefly mentioned that the kids were singing the ABCs and could count to 10. I had a moment of panic, knowing that Zoe was no where close to accomplishing these to feats. I discussed it with Zak and although we are constantly counting with Zoe and saying letters and trying so hard to get her to say ANYTHING, we decided it might be time to take this a step further. I’ve been a self proclaimed santimommy when it comes to television, but we recorded three episodes of Sesame Street with the hopes that perhaps Zoe will learn some new words.
Over the past six weeks, Zoe has watched two complete episodes and ten minutes of a third one and has learned one word, Elmo. That is NOT the word we were hoping she’d pick up, but it’s her new favorite. (At the very least, we were hoping she’d pick up Elmo’s sister’s name, Zoe. But no.) We’ll be walking down the toy aisle of Target and Zoe is frantically pointing, shouting, “Elmo! Elmo! Elmo!” She has a Sesame Street peek-a-boo book and loves playing with the Elmo page. When she sees one of our remote controls, she picks it up and hands it to us saying, “Elmo? Elmo?”
I guess it’s time to try a strategy to get this girl to talk!
My nephew, Lucas, was also behind. His vocabulary exploded at about 22 months, and I still have a lot of difficulty understanding some of his words. (He just turned two.) Now he is stringing together simple sentences, though. I don’t think you have anything to worry about.
I heard about a related neat idea for teaching- have students all bring in information about when they started walking, talking, etc. to point out that everyone learns at different rates, and that it didn’t matter anymore in 4th grade who learned to crawl first, just as it won’t matter in another 8 years who learned their times tables first. The important thing is that everyone learns.
Oh, and now that Lucas is more vocal, it can be a bit annoying… he’s pretty repetitive and loud… maybe less talk early is a blessing?