Yes, We Are Those People

We bought Kaycie an iPad.

Let me clarify.

As I mentioned in my last post, Kaycie had been using our older Android tablet and we hated it. It was frustrating to everybody. Lately she'd gone from telling me "I CAN'T DO IT!" when it took forever to load or force closed on an app to telling me, "I have to wait and be patient..." Sigh. At least she learned a little something about patience, but it was making me crazy. The apps for my iPhone were considerably easier to use (due to the responsive touch screen) and there was a much better variety, so we decided to suck it up and buy an iPad. It was an educational investment. And since Greg already had an iPad2 courtesy of a work thing (although it belonged to him, not his employer) we decided to upgrade him to the new iPad and let Kaycie and I share the "old" iPad2.  Yes, we've ordered one of those indestructible cases for it. It should arrive today.

It's ironic. For Greg's birthday last year we bought me a Kindle. For my birthday this year we bought Greg a new iPad. Hmmm.

Anyway, Kaycie is crazy about the new tablet. It works a million times better than the old one and I've downloaded a ton of apps. She's learning to add. She learning how to put letters together to make words. She's learning how to write letters and numbers. She's playing memory matching games. She has apps where she can create music. I think her favorite games are the puzzle games. We have a lot of puzzle games. It's absurd. I don't even show her how to use it, really. I downloaded a bunch of apps last night and she just started playing with them today on her own. I haven't shown her that it has a camera yet. She'll flip out. That girl loves to cheese things.

What are her favorites? Right now she's spending the most time playing these:

Preschool Monkey Lunchbox
Monkey Math
Giraffe's Matching Zoo
Letter Quiz (tracing letters)
There are a lot of new ones she hasn't had time to really try out yet.

She's really loving this thing and seems to enjoy the learning process, which I love. I'm thinking about doing some more structured things with her, particularly with the alphabet since letters are a big favorite right now. The other day she had me write out the words Kaycie, Mama, Daddy, Luke and Casper on a piece of paper. Every time I wrote one she pretended to "squish" the letters together to build the word (like they do in Word World). It was the first time I saw her exercise the idea that you put the letters together to make words. Then she hung the paper up on the refrigerator. We've repeated that activity the past two days. 

In a perfect world I would be doing more "school" with her now and signing her up for 3 year old preschool next  year. I'm totally amazed at the woman who runs this blog and home schools her three kids, including one who just turned 3. I know I'll never be disciplined enough to do "school" with K. And I didn't want to sign her up for preschool yet because let's face it, she'll be in school for so many years of her life, will it hurt to wait a year to start? No. And I don't think she'll be "behind" because let's face it, she's pretty darn smart as it is. She'll probably need a year of it to get the structural aspects down and learn how to sit through lessons and stuff, but I don't think she needs it at three. That said, she enjoys this kind of stuff and I should do some more stuff with her. So I think I'll be on the lookout for some fun alphabet activities and work on one letter at a time with her. I've already printed out some alphabet coloring sheets and she loves them. Seriously. The kid is insane. Here's hoping her love of learning will last until she actually gets to school!