Jon Felipe-isms

Jon Felipe has interesting fads and ways of approaching life. For example, he still has to count the number of days until the next event of interest in his life. As soon as we leave church on Sunday, he checks to make sure that it is indeed seven days until we go to church again. He always knows the number of days until the next time we go to Kid Zone. Our family will be having dinner at Kid Zone on Monday and he is very interested in how many days until that exciting event occurs. He has developed an excellent ability to count backwards because, of course, as each day passes the number of days until the next event keeps decreasing.

He also collects bus numbers. He has memorized the four digit number of the bus he rides to school. He knows the four digit number of the bus that takes him to swimming lessons, even though he has only been on this particular bus three times. He knows the number of the bus he rode in Holland. He got a book about buses from the library and has determined he wants to move to a certain town shown in this book because he would like to ride a bus with that bus number (14). The towns in this book are all in the south, this particular one being in Florida, and I can certainly think of several good reasons for moving there too.

He has become very interested in the weather this year. We check the weather forecast every evening. We have to count the number of days until the next time snow is forecast. In the morning, he likes me to take him to a website called "Is it going to rain?" Currently it answers the question, "Is it going to snow?" This web page just displays a one word answer to that question, generally either "Yes" or "No." The other day it said, "Maybe," giving Jon Felipe a chance to learn to read a new word.

JF does homework every night. This is a child who thrives on routine so, for right now anyway, he never gives me grief about doing homework. When he practices his math facts, he still sometimes needs to count on the fingers of both hands and, because he has little control over his own left hand, he just uses mine. Pretty clever, I think. When he writes his spelling words, I ask him to say them in a sentence. He often acts out his idea, in his own amusing way, rather than saying a sentence, but at least I have a sense that he understands the idea behind the word he is trying to spell. This week one of his spelling words is Jesus. He immediately added that important name to his mental list of names that start with J, another of his collections.

He also just started doing Bible memory. He has never memorized Bible verses before, but as his speech is getting clearer and he is become more confident in English, I suggested that it might be time to try learning Bible verses. I suggested he start with the ABC Bible verses as his class' verses seemed a bit long to be beginning with. He was delighted to discover that Colin knew his ABC verses too. How cool is that! He lacks confidence on this new task so most of the words seem to turn to mush in his mouth, but I'm pretty certain that he is retaining much of what we are reviewing. We'll see if he can recite it to his teacher at the end of the week.