The Dinosaur, the Wizard, and the King

My son, Johan Matthew is 5 years old. He is the only "reader" in the entire Kindergarter-1 class in an integrated special education school. Since he started attending classes, he never came home with less that perfect scores in all his school works. The results of his Mastery Examinations were always star-studded. Johan speaks the English language with much fluency and with proper pronunciations too.

Nobody in the entire household can rightfully claim credit over this phenomenon. The credits are due to a purple dinosaur, a scarred wizard, and a reluctant king!

Being the only small one in the house, he developed the ability on how to entertain himself. While everybody else is busy doing "grown up stuff." He is often left under the purple dinosaur's care.

Barney taught him the alphabet, table manners, basic hygiene, and his introduction to numeracy and sensory perceptual concepts.

Later on, when Johan was 3 years old he developed kinship with Harry Potter. The subtitles on the DVD provided him advanced lessons in speech development, speed reading and context comprehension. At age 4, Harry was replaced by Peter of Narnia.

I had a chat with a friend who was a teacher of Psychology and who specializes on Child Development about this condition. She said that while television, movie and other fictional characters cannot substitute parental teaching and guidance, they may fill-in certain gaps that parents are unable to perform. Just make sure that parents know who these fictional characters are and what the nature of their characters project. It is also important that parents make sure that the subtitles on movies that children watch are grammatically correct and the words are accurately spelled.

The subtitles represent visual representations of the words spoken by the character; the spoken words are the aural affirmation of the words read; and the scenes provide the perceptual meaning of the words read and heard. Over-all, it becomes a multi-sensory experience for the child.

My son may not become a Mensa candidate anytime soon. But, I am just glad that he is growing up to be smart. Thanks to Barney, Harry and Peter.