Aparna asked me how to spell "use". So I did.
Surprised by how it was spelt, she said, "Oh! I thought it would it be
'yuos'. Strange!" She moved on with her play and I started thinking about
how she would have arrived at that spelling. She must have added ’s’ to ‘you’.
I have noticed her swap letters often when she writes and since her way of
spelling “you” is actually “yuo”, “use” becomes “yuos”. It never fails to
tickle me that she reads a “the”
just fine and yet writes it as “teh”.
Three years ago when Aparna started writing, like many
children, would draw mirror images of several letters and numbers. I wondered
about what caused this and why she could not tell the two versions apart. Since
I did not understand how her mental model worked, I thought I shouldn’t correct
it either; so I simply let her be.
She once enthusiastically showed a story that she had
written to an aunt. The well-meaning aunt immediately started pointed out all
the “mistakes” – the reversed letters and the misspellings. Aparna felt
embarrassed and rushed to me and said angrily, “Why did you not point out my
mistakes?” I remember saying something like, “Well, I could clearly read
and understand every word and sentence in your story. And that is what matters.”
She must have understood that I was being honest and instantly stopped being
bothered about her aunt’s remarks.
Now, when she looks at her stories that were written a year
or two ago, Aparna is amused to notice how she had drawn some of her letters (and
yet fails to notice that some other letters continue to stay reversed even
now). As the instances of her unusual penmanship come down, as parents we feel
nostalgic.
⩤⩥
We were at a restaurant with the kids and a friend. Since
the wait was long, our friend started playing a little math game with Aparna (6
then). He wrote the following on a piece of paper and asked her to figure out
the answer.
This took Aparna unusually long and her answer was an
unbelievable ‘48’! How on earth did she arrive at that? Our friend, a sensitive
parent, must have decided not to put Aparna on the spot. He quickly moved on to
the next problem on his list. Dev was curious to know Aparna’s logic behind the
answer. He started out by asking her what the first number in the above problem
was. Aparna’s reply was “66, of course!” That explained the answer; because
that is the way her reversed ‘66’ would look like. Our friend was apologetic
about the way he had written his ‘22’.
