Two things Walker loves at this age (2 1/2 years): Seeing himself in videos and the ABC’s. To our surprise, he has fervently taken to letters – likes playing with them as shapes, puzzles and watching ABC / phonics videos online. He also like singing, as I play and sing him a song almost every night when we put him to bed. So I decided to combine all of these things into this creative video. I’m sharing it here, not just because it’s fun and cute, but in the process of choosing something popular in our everyday lives to go with each letter of the alphabet, we’ve created a time capsule of what our lives look like these days, particularly during the hard winter of the global pandemic and so much of our time, effort, and adventures are invested deep in our home and neighborhood. I often look at Walker, and picture him aging toward independence, and lament that there will be a time when he’s bored or embarrassed by everything in this video, including me. And he may soon stop asking me to play and sing our ABC song as his favorite bed time song. But I’ll savor it in person for now, and have this video in my heart’s vault for when he gets too big for such childish things.
Here’s another similar version of the video, with Walker speaking each word rather than “Daddy ” singing a song.
I’m not sure if this helps or hurts Walker’s love for letters, but his Daddy is an alphabet critic who believes that the English alphabet has evolved into a highly irregular and inefficient system of written language, and yet it’s the same system that the entire world must learn to be participants in a global society. We’re so entrenched in it, that no one will dare change the system we’re so used to, but I find it fun to imagine how it could and should be improved. Enough so that I did a PechaKucha presentation on it and my proposed “fixes” to the English alphabet. Here’s the video of it below. For the record, when Walker first started learning the alphabet, I taught him that “W” was the letter “We” instead of “Double U” so he had a phonetically correct basis to identify the letter that his name starts with.