More SummerFun posts.

Apologizing in advance for poor picture quality. Our digital cam is shot and I have to make do with pics from phone.

Just before summer break started, Mieja had started movable alphabets and numbers. For a long time, much to the amusement of people at home, this child was counting “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 17, 53. I am done amma”. She started counting in order just before summer break and to me it was indicative of her grasp of symbolic representation of objects. Also her KE+O+T+R+U+C+K spelling started getting closer to the norm. During summer break we read a lot of books at home, but looks like she needed the stimulation of writing and sounding out alphabets. Some afternoons, Mieja would ask me to work with her on her writing.

I would doodle something like this

on one side of the paper and ask her to try spelling it on the other side. For the most part she did pretty well.

She was so taken with the concept of picture clues and she started playing quiz master. I have to admit that I struggled quite a bit with a few picture clues. I couldn’t decipher eraser and spoon.

Mieja’s condition is that she would sound out the word and I write. She would say F-R-A-M for frame and by my conditioning I would write FRAME. Same with words like easel(E-S-E-L). Reminded me of ‘Ek gauv mein ek kissan raguthatha‘ movie clip. She waved her hands, sighed and complained that I am not listening to her sounds 🙂

In accordance to Murphy’s law, Chula ploinked herself next to us and demanded that she NEEDS me pronto. So I had  to convience her that she needs challenging work and had her occupied with crosswords such as these. She did pretty well with some help from me and I did pretty well with help from Boo, YaadaYaada and PV 🙂

Another toy that helped us with Chula’s addition/substraction phase and Mieja’s counting/addition phase  – the IKEA abacus. May the person who designed this toy live long and prosper.