We once bought some software for Miles to play with on the computer when he was about 18 months old – one of those Fisher Price things with a big keyboard overlay thing to help them learn to type the letters. He never showed a glimmer of interest in it. He just wanted to “play letters,” as he describned his process of learning to type on the century-old Qwerty keyboard.
Instead, now at just over 3 and a half years old he has been able to type all the names of the kids in his class for a few months now, can color them in (both the font and the background colors in Word) can start Winamp and play his favorite songs from long playlists and has managed to change our user icons in Windows XP many times, but does so deliberately.
His latest thing is that “planet thing where we can see Nanny & Grandad’s house,” by which he means Google Earth. If you want to teach your kids that there quite literally is a whole other world out there, I can’t think of a better way of doing it. The Fisher Price software is probably headed towards eBay.
He likes nothing better than starting at his house and flying across the ocean to Nanny & Grandad’s, ending here:
