Jorie learns things
Jorie's going to preschool three mornings a week now, and it's already weirdly hard to get her to talk to us about what she does there, even though her teachers report that she's chatty enough in class. So we piece stuff together from teachers' remarks and ask her leading questions, and sometimes other things come out. She had a slightly rough adjustment when she moved up from the toddler to the preschool class; she's now one of the youngest and smallest kids in her class, and I get the impression that the other kids are generally nice to her but treat her more as a cute baby than as a peer. Nevertheless, she does refer to some of her classmates as her friends, so I guess she's doing all right there.
They did a recent unit on space, and one teacher mentioned that Jorie was just about the only kid in class who was getting into the lessons about planets, maybe because she'd gotten interested in the subject previously. One evening when I was trying to get her to sleep, she suddenly announced "The Sun is hot. It has hot gas. Mars is cold." Yesterday she started talking about putting her spacesuit on to walk on the Moon.
At almost 2 years 10 months, she's started to recognize some short printed words (mostly in all caps), and is into attempting to spell things with magnetic letters on the refrigerator; the order that the letters go in can be a little fuzzy, but she does all right otherwise. One of the earliest ones she wanted to spell was "VOOM", the mysterious nanotech cleaning agent under the hat of Little Cat Z in The Cat In The Hat Comes Back. She's also memorized essentially the complete text of that book and recites it by heart when I try to read it. It's become a bit problematic, in that she's discovered she can slow down the recitation as a delaying tactic at bedtime, and she gets angry when I try to butt in and start reading again. "NO!! You can't say that!"
She likes to scribble on her chalkboard; the scribblings have not become all that figurative yet, but there are some things she likes to draw because I identified a chance resemblance to something, such as a forest of vertical lines that we call "beanstalks", and her first recognizable glyph: a vertical line with a horizontal leftward bar at the top that is the digit 7. Jorie also seems to have a pretty good operating concept of numbers up to about 5, and can count as far as 29.
Yesterday, she spent the whole day referring to herself as Laurie Berkner. This morning she decided that she and I were John Linnell and John Flansburgh.
They did a recent unit on space, and one teacher mentioned that Jorie was just about the only kid in class who was getting into the lessons about planets, maybe because she'd gotten interested in the subject previously. One evening when I was trying to get her to sleep, she suddenly announced "The Sun is hot. It has hot gas. Mars is cold." Yesterday she started talking about putting her spacesuit on to walk on the Moon.
At almost 2 years 10 months, she's started to recognize some short printed words (mostly in all caps), and is into attempting to spell things with magnetic letters on the refrigerator; the order that the letters go in can be a little fuzzy, but she does all right otherwise. One of the earliest ones she wanted to spell was "VOOM", the mysterious nanotech cleaning agent under the hat of Little Cat Z in The Cat In The Hat Comes Back. She's also memorized essentially the complete text of that book and recites it by heart when I try to read it. It's become a bit problematic, in that she's discovered she can slow down the recitation as a delaying tactic at bedtime, and she gets angry when I try to butt in and start reading again. "NO!! You can't say that!"
She likes to scribble on her chalkboard; the scribblings have not become all that figurative yet, but there are some things she likes to draw because I identified a chance resemblance to something, such as a forest of vertical lines that we call "beanstalks", and her first recognizable glyph: a vertical line with a horizontal leftward bar at the top that is the digit 7. Jorie also seems to have a pretty good operating concept of numbers up to about 5, and can count as far as 29.
Yesterday, she spent the whole day referring to herself as Laurie Berkner. This morning she decided that she and I were John Linnell and John Flansburgh.