Spell-ing-bound

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’.