Lists, lists, lists

My son is a great maker of lists.

It started in September, when he came home from preschool and announced he needed to practice his writing. Sometimes he asks me to spell out a bunch of words. Other times he copies words from a book or packaging labels.

For a while he would ask me to help him make an N or a U or a Z. Then he would ask me, "how do you make" one of those three troublesome letters. "Up, down, up," I would say to describe the N. As time passed he would ask the question, then pause and answer it himself. Now he no longer asks.

He makes lists of things we need from the grocery store, the things he wants to accomplish in a day, collections of objects that have something in common, the names of family members, his stuffed animals or characters in a book. Tucked in bed the other night, he asked me to get one of his lists so he could cross off the things he had done that day.

This morning he is making a list of each kind of Halloween candy he got while trick-or-treating last night.