More on Learning

My intention has been to write a few posts exploring some of the more notable events and images from our recent trip, but that will have to wait for the moment because something else has intervened that has pre-empted the news from Türkiye and Syria.

It started when I picked up T. from work on Thursday to bring him to our house for dinner. He told me on the way that A. had received a letter from “the big school”, which is the Elementary school a couple of blocks away where she will start Primary in September, and that she was very excited, running around the house with the letter in her hand and chanting, I’m going to the big school. She turned five in February and there is no question that she is ready.

He told me that she had made her first word, “click”. He said he wasn’t sure how she spelled it, and we figured it might have been “klk”. She has been able to print her name and her sister’s, and to copy other names, but to make a word on her own was pretty significant, I thought, and click was an interesting choice. We found out later from S. that the word was actually “lik”, pronounced lick, which is certainly apt because of the habits of her real dog, Dewi, and of her stuffie, Woofer, who both show their affection by licking. It also could have been her attempt to print "like", always a favourite of beginning writers like A.

Yesterday afternoon A. invited me to make pictures with her using the dry erase boards the girls had got at Christmas. I decided to make a picture that would include a sentence for her to read, so I drew a small boat with a figure in it waving and then printed the sentence: “A. IS IN THE BOAT”. We read it together. At the same time A. was printing her alphabet and numbers up to ten, telling me that she was getting ready for going to school. She has also been drawing hopscotches in the driveway to get her numbers right. Then, while I was helping with supper, she drew a long cloud with a small figure standing on it in the space above my boat and told me it was her sister E. It was a wonderful completion to the picture, and I printed another sentence: E. IS ON THE CLOUD”, which she was also able to read.

It is no surprise that A. should be putting together the pieces that will allow her to start reading, since she has always been read to (right now she is in the middle of Charlotte’s Web) and is a thoughtful and inquisitive individual, but that doesn’t take anything away from the joy of watching her begin to decode the printed language around her as she constructs her own understanding of text. As T. pointed out, she is a bit of a night owl, and we both imagined her in the not too distant future with a flashlight under the covers exploring the worlds of reading. We are privileged to be able to watch it happen.