Spongebrain

I've heard that the young child's brain, especially between 2 - 6 years old, is like a super absorbant sponge. They form the most connections and absorb new information at a rate that will not be duplicated again for the rest of their life. It's amazing.

XX is at this age and I can see it happening. The way he picks up language, music, psycho motor skills and behaviour from KK, movies, books and us. He's very curious and will ask me what is this and what is that. He'll also repeat everything that you teach him. Everything is so interesting to him that he refuses to take naps anymore, even when he's very tired.

When I was in Singapore, I bought him 2 little cardboard books. One of them teaches the alphabets and the other has some basic chinese characters. He was very interested in them and will ask me to read through the whole book to him everyday. Every time I'll point to the characters and say the word, he'll repeat after me. We do this even after we came back to Melbourne. With repeated exposure, XX has learnt to recognise the shapes of the different alphabets and chinese characters and associate them with its pronunciation. Within days, he started to recognise some of the most repeated characters. About 3 - 4 weeks later, he can identify almost all the alphabets and read all the chinese characters of 1 to 10, including many other chinese characters like 海, 火, 水, 石, 土 and 山 that even KK does not know.

Based on this method (thanks to the suggestion from Christina), I've purchased some chinese character cards and pasted some of the more common everyday words (starting with food) on the wall. I got KK to stick pictures next to the matching words. It works. After looking at them and repeating them for a few days, XX and KK has already learnt to recognise those words.

Having said that, XX is also at this age where he's a total blind follower. He's totally non-discriminating about the things he learns. So we really got to watch what he's exposed to. The most 'dangerous' person around him at the moment, yet also the most fun and inspiring, is elder brother KK, who often sprouts nonsense and influences his little brother to do funny things, like dipping fish fingers into the chocolate spread and playing "street fighter 4" totally naked. Many a times, I've got to do damage control (and lecture the instigator) but trying to squeeze out stuff absorbed into XX's spongebrain is not easy.