Simply Mother

We’re sitting in the living room this morning. The Hymns are being played over the surround sound speaker thingie. I just finished reading scriptures and now I’m journaling. The girls were dancing, but now they’re talking on the other couch. I overhear Sarah saying things like “four plus four equals 6” and “five plus five equals seven.”

Hmm. It was over a year ago that she reasoned out (all on her own, out of nowhere) that since we needed eight glasses of water a day, and we’d already had two, we just needed to drink six more. She hadn’t heard terms like “plus” and “equals” then.

Is this one of those things that are easier to grasp at a lower level, and then as understanding deepens, the complexities of the concept are more obvious, so that it’s actually harder to grasp?

Like how she started out speaking with seeming perfect grammar, but it turns out it was because all she was doing was mimicking the adults around her. Then as she started to understand the way our language works, she noticed that we usually add “-ed” when speaking in past tense, so suddenly she started making mistakes like saying “I hadded to” instead of “I had to.” In that way, the mistaken speech was actually more advanced than the earlier correct form she was using earlier.

Is that what is going on here too? Or could this an instance in which the adult way of explaining concepts disrupts the natural understanding she already had? I don’t know but, either way I’m not worrying about it, just observing. Even if adult explanations confuse kids, confusion isn’t a bad thing! It’s just an impetus for further investigation.

At any rate, I don’t know where it’s coming from. I guess other kids talking about it, combined with the fact that she’s playing with a bunch of discarded shower curtain rings and talking about buying and selling them. (You could buy 1 for $2, but if you wanted 2, you know, one for each ear, you had to shell out $50. Unless you waited a day to buy the second one. Then you could get it for the discounted, two-dollar rate.)

Anyway, next time I can take a break, I go into the kitchen and get her some beans and cups, show her five beans in each one, and she counts them, stopping at seven to look up at me with a knowing smile, seeing there are still more.

Now she and Jade are both having a grand ol’ time with beans, measuring cups, plates, and water.

(See next post for what happened later that evening.)

Filed in: child development • family • home education | December 3, 2008