Emilie's drawing/writing abilities at 18 months

Emilie and I have read books together since she came home from the hospital. She absolutely loves me reading to her and I love it too. She sits on my lap while I read and my cheek against hers as we look at the book together and point out different things happening in the pictures.

Her favourite books at the moment are Cars, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Dear Zoo and My First Prayer. She will sit for ages looking and "reading" a book. We go to the library every Wednesday morning for Story Time (a librarian reads a story book, then the kids do a craft activity relating to the story). Emilie is the youngest there but she LOVES it!

Emilie has enjoyed "drawing" since she was able to hold the pencil to the paper. At first she would scribble back and forth unintelligibly. Then a few months ago she started "writing" where she would draw little tiny scribbles that look like W or M (letters) and she would recite "A, E, A, A, E, E" as she wrote them (like she was spelling out her words as she went along).

Emilie and I practise writing her name - I hold the pencil over the top of her hand and write each letter and spell it out as we go. E, m, i, l, i, e - EMILIE! "Emilie!" we exclaim when her name is written! She can spell out her name as we go along (but only if I am spelling it out with her, otherwise she says something like, E, M, I, M, E, M etc).

She can recognise a capital E and if she sees an E on a sign she will point it out to me and say "EEEEE!"

She has recently learnt to say her own name and she uses it a lot to describe something that is hers, or to indicate something about herself

"Emmie ouch", "Emmie car" or just pointing at any word and proclaiming that it says "Emmie" LOL

Just the other day, as I was watching her draw, it struck me that Emilie can draw faces! We have been drawing faces together for a while now (my hand ontop of hers and saying the facial features as we go - for example, "A biiiiiig round circle for a head, one eye, two eyes, a nose, a mouth, one ear, two ears and some spiky hair!"

Of course the faces that she draws on her own are very abstract at this stage, but each face has a big circle for a head, facial features and sometimes they have hair or ears (or both!) Sometimes when she is drawing her faces, she will say what she is drawing at the time - "Eyes, Ears, mouth, hair, nose" which is so cute to watch and surprising at how much she knows where features of the face belong from her own recall - for example when she draws ears she always draws one on each side of the head, right where they belong. Other features can be a bit of hit and miss though, sometimes the mouth is above the eyes, or there can be three eyes etc.

 Here are a few of her masterpieces:

Here is today's video of her drawing faces (she is not narrating this one - I'm yet to video her doing this but everytime I turn the camera on she stops!!!)

Hope you enjoyed watching!