The 'Education' of Ethan

Writing
I suppose it's still too early to teach him to write letters. Especially since he does not show any interest in following strokes.
(In relation to this, I should also mention an incident. I was reading this book called 'Mia's Story' to him. The book has both printed and cursive fonts for the letters. Ethan pointed the cursive ones to me and asked me what's that. I said those were just another way of writing the alphabets. The next time he drew some squiggles and told me they were some letters of the alphabets. I told him there was a proper way to write them and the ones he 'wrote' weren't recognisable. He told me vehemently that that's his way of writing them and brought me 'Mia's Story' to show me the cursive writings. I was stumped and tried to point out recognisable forms of 'C' or 'O' to him but it wasn't convincing enough for him.)
In a 'successful' attempt to write 'E', after much cajoling and bargaining - if he would try, we would let him make a card as he had asked for - he finally got something that was sort of a lateral inverted E, with a few more lines than necessary. This triumph has not been repeated since. However, recently he showed me some squiggles that looked like 'w', 'm', 'n', 'p'. He said the 'p' was 'D' and I was so pleasantly surprised that I hesitated to tell him it looked more like 'p'. Of course, I still am a spoilsport at heart and could not resist telling him so in the end.

Time
a. The clock
It's tough to tell Ethan to get ready for nursery by keeping his toys, having lunch, change - he would always say, 'it's not time yet', which is true. So I bought a book (one of 4 that sold for 2 for 50p from the charity shop PDSA) that has a clock in it. And he is able to move the hour hand when I told him to, to the correct hour up to 9. And I tried to explain how he should be ready about 15 minutes before school starts as it takes some time to get to school. In vain. After awhile, he loses interest in it, as expected.

b. The calendar
Ever since the approach of Christmas last year, when the whole of Edinburgh was rife with Christmas things, he's been saying it's Christmas (all except on Christmas Day - I suppose we told him too many times 'not yet' that he did not believe us when we told him it's the day). When it snowed in February, he was talking about Christmas again. So I tried to tell him how long we would have to wait before the next one - MarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec 10 months. Then one day early this month he suddenly said, 'I like March, because I like marching.' Spot on, Ethan, spot on. They do have the same spelling.

About heat
Sometimes, when the dish is still hot, we'll ask Ethan to wait for awhile, let it get warm. Later, when we start giving him warm caffeine-free tea or horlicks, he'll say, 'um, I like warm drink.' One night, I was giving him a shower. The water, when it first started to flow, was always too hot. So he said, 'Wait for it to get warmer.' I was confused for an instant. Warmer? Don't you want it cooler? Then it dawned on me, to him warm is cooler than hot, of course. So I tried to explain that he should use 'cooler' instead, but as is with all such explanations, no one got the wiser for it.

Counting
There is this Sesame Street podcast, at the end of it there is a counting song. One morning, Ethan was bargaining with Jianming. Jianming wanted him to watch 2 sesame street podcasts, Ethan wanted 4. Jianming said no, so they settled on 3. After finishing one, Ethan showed 2 fingers and said '2'. After the second one, he said, 'Now, it's just the last one.' He seemed to have gotten some notion of subtraction after watching the counting song. Only, as Jianming related to me, that was not the last one, they had another really last podcast.

Pick-up Sticks
Somehow we got around to playing pick-up sticks (using magic pens) with Ethan and it was rather fun while the interest lasted and we thought it teaches a few useful things:
1. take turns
2. rules of games
3. counting (to see who has more)
4. dexterity of hands
What's more important is that we actually had fun learning.