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Three out of five
Jun. 19th, 2014 08:41 pmI got home Tuesday afternoon after a (very busy, terribly exhausting, at times awfully frustrating and at times exactly wonderfully what I needed) week in England. That makes three weeks out of the last five that I have been gone. Last Thursday night Benedikt and I went out for supper after the reception at John's, and I got to catch him up on all the interesting numeracy and literacy facts about Gwen, and between that and being gone so much, I've spent quite a bit of time reflecting on those matters and figure now, just past 2.5 years, is a good time to take stock of things again.
Gwen can count to 10 in both English and German, and in English can recite numbers up to 20, though she tends to miss a few in between. She likes to climb up on the ledge next to the sand pit, count to 20, and then jump into the sand.
One time when mom was visiting and the three of us were walking home, we each had one of her hands and were counting a certain number of steps and then swinging. We'd ask Gwen to name a number, and if she cried "1" or "2" or "3", I kept asking her for a bigger number, because walking 1 or 2, or even 3 steps isn't quite enough to get momentum going for a good swing. She kept deflecting the question, and that's when I realized that though she'd developed a concept of ordinal number, and of 1-1 correlation, she hadn't any concept of cardinality, so I had to explain to her that the longer you count, the bigger the number gets. And eventually she started asking for "8" or "9" or "10".
She knows many letter tokens very well -- she can identify every letter in her alphabet puzzle -- but still struggles with letter types; if I present her with a new token that she hasn't seen before, even if she's seen the type, she doesn't always recognize it. And I can't blame her: majuscules vs. miniscules, different fonts, it's actually really hard to extrapolate away from tokens to types. But of the tokens she does know, she has a lot of associations between them and words, particularly the ones in her alphabet puzzle. She also knows which sound goes with which letter when they are spoken, thanks to numerous repetitions of phonics songs on the bike ride to and from daycare. She has one book picture book, of animals, where what she wants me to do is name each letter as she points to it. I noticed it took her awhile to learn that they need to be pointed to in a certain order, or I won't read them, or I'll correct her. I found it even more fascinating when she put a name to the action: She asked me one night, "count, mommy, count!" Which totally makes sense since that's the only other context where you point to things, in succession, and say something.
One early connection that she made was between her name, herself, and written tokens of her name; this is in part because her name always gets put on to pictures that she's drawn. It was around January or February that she started pointing that string out to me, saying "name, name!", and maybe a month later when she would start asking me to put her name on things. Now, she can recognize it in many different modalities, and this morning while coloring she did a very fine, very small grouping of scribbles in one corner, very different from her usual mode of drawing, and then told me "dat's my name!" Only recently, though, has she begun to extrapolate from this. There are three round cylinders outside of daycare that she has to climb up and jump off, each one, once, every afternoon when we leave. The other day, she pointed at the raised letters molded in to one of them, and said "name!"
Her personal pronouns came in in the last three weeks or so. For a long time, she simply referred to herself as "Gwennie" (we never got "you" as a general word for "I"; that switch occured only in very particular contexts, specifically, two-place relations such as "behind you" and "beside you"); then, I suddenly realized that she was saying "Ich". About a week later, it had become "I" when speaking English. We still occasionally get "Gwennie", but now, "Ich" only shows up in the context of two German phrases that she uses to the exclusion of their English counterparts: "Ich muss" ("I must", usually "I muss peepee") and "Ich will" ("I want", used with everything. She confused the waitress at Vetter the other night when she said "Ich will food!" when ordering).
She still doesn't really have any concept of age or how old she is, even though she liberally celebrates birthdays on a near daily basis.
Each of the three weeks away, I came home to a child I hardly recognized; the first week, when we were both gone and she was staying with mom, was the most stark difference. Mom emailed at one point during the week and said "I've figured out what 'stas' means!" I hadn't even realized that that was a phrases Gwen used all the time, because I automatically knew it was a shortening of "Was ist das". But once she pointed that out, a few other phrases fell in to place: "Schwardes" is "Ich hört es" = "I hear it". I knew from context that "Schwardes" was a question "What is that noise?" but for the life of me I hadn't been able to figure out what she was trying to say. And "Willies", or even sometimes "Das willies", was "Ich will es" = "I want it". And funnily, as soon as I noticed that constant use of "Stas", she started moving towards "Was dis called?" instead.
Her ability to distinguish between German and English at the conceptual, rather than vocabularic, level continues. The other day, she came up to me with a flower and asked "Was dis called?" but followed that up with "in English!" and then proceeded to tell me that Renate at daycare had told her what the flower was called in German (though she didn't tell ME what the German name was). I thought that that showed a pretty high-level of reflection about language for a 2.5 year old.
Joel says that she asks every me every night and every morning when I'm away. But her happiness upon my return seems to be dwindling. When we got back from Scotland, it was late at night and she was asleep. She only discovered we were home when she woke up and came into our room and found us, instead of grandma, in bed. She flung herself between us and kept turning from one to the other, putting out a hand and saying "Dis my daddy" or "dis my mommy", as if she was trying to reassure herself that we were there and hers. I got home from Sweden one evening during supper time, and she heard my key in the door and I could hear "mommy, mommy, mommy!" and she raced out to fling herself at me in a hug. Tuesday, though, I went straight to daycare from the train station, arriving about half an hour earlier than I normally pick her up, and I thought I'd get a happy, excited hug, but instead, she barely nodded acknowledgement and continued playing. She eventually left happily enough, but I had to coax a hug out of her. The next day when I picked her up as usual, she saw me coming from across the yard, and shouted "Nein!" Sure makes me glad to come home...
But today was (yet another) holiday, so I was off work and daycare was closed, and we went to the park in the morning and played outside in the sandpit in the afternoon, and then came home and baked a cake. Even though I have lots of work to do, it was nice having a day off to reconnect with her.
Gwen can count to 10 in both English and German, and in English can recite numbers up to 20, though she tends to miss a few in between. She likes to climb up on the ledge next to the sand pit, count to 20, and then jump into the sand.
One time when mom was visiting and the three of us were walking home, we each had one of her hands and were counting a certain number of steps and then swinging. We'd ask Gwen to name a number, and if she cried "1" or "2" or "3", I kept asking her for a bigger number, because walking 1 or 2, or even 3 steps isn't quite enough to get momentum going for a good swing. She kept deflecting the question, and that's when I realized that though she'd developed a concept of ordinal number, and of 1-1 correlation, she hadn't any concept of cardinality, so I had to explain to her that the longer you count, the bigger the number gets. And eventually she started asking for "8" or "9" or "10".
She knows many letter tokens very well -- she can identify every letter in her alphabet puzzle -- but still struggles with letter types; if I present her with a new token that she hasn't seen before, even if she's seen the type, she doesn't always recognize it. And I can't blame her: majuscules vs. miniscules, different fonts, it's actually really hard to extrapolate away from tokens to types. But of the tokens she does know, she has a lot of associations between them and words, particularly the ones in her alphabet puzzle. She also knows which sound goes with which letter when they are spoken, thanks to numerous repetitions of phonics songs on the bike ride to and from daycare. She has one book picture book, of animals, where what she wants me to do is name each letter as she points to it. I noticed it took her awhile to learn that they need to be pointed to in a certain order, or I won't read them, or I'll correct her. I found it even more fascinating when she put a name to the action: She asked me one night, "count, mommy, count!" Which totally makes sense since that's the only other context where you point to things, in succession, and say something.
One early connection that she made was between her name, herself, and written tokens of her name; this is in part because her name always gets put on to pictures that she's drawn. It was around January or February that she started pointing that string out to me, saying "name, name!", and maybe a month later when she would start asking me to put her name on things. Now, she can recognize it in many different modalities, and this morning while coloring she did a very fine, very small grouping of scribbles in one corner, very different from her usual mode of drawing, and then told me "dat's my name!" Only recently, though, has she begun to extrapolate from this. There are three round cylinders outside of daycare that she has to climb up and jump off, each one, once, every afternoon when we leave. The other day, she pointed at the raised letters molded in to one of them, and said "name!"
Her personal pronouns came in in the last three weeks or so. For a long time, she simply referred to herself as "Gwennie" (we never got "you" as a general word for "I"; that switch occured only in very particular contexts, specifically, two-place relations such as "behind you" and "beside you"); then, I suddenly realized that she was saying "Ich". About a week later, it had become "I" when speaking English. We still occasionally get "Gwennie", but now, "Ich" only shows up in the context of two German phrases that she uses to the exclusion of their English counterparts: "Ich muss" ("I must", usually "I muss peepee") and "Ich will" ("I want", used with everything. She confused the waitress at Vetter the other night when she said "Ich will food!" when ordering).
She still doesn't really have any concept of age or how old she is, even though she liberally celebrates birthdays on a near daily basis.
Each of the three weeks away, I came home to a child I hardly recognized; the first week, when we were both gone and she was staying with mom, was the most stark difference. Mom emailed at one point during the week and said "I've figured out what 'stas' means!" I hadn't even realized that that was a phrases Gwen used all the time, because I automatically knew it was a shortening of "Was ist das". But once she pointed that out, a few other phrases fell in to place: "Schwardes" is "Ich hört es" = "I hear it". I knew from context that "Schwardes" was a question "What is that noise?" but for the life of me I hadn't been able to figure out what she was trying to say. And "Willies", or even sometimes "Das willies", was "Ich will es" = "I want it". And funnily, as soon as I noticed that constant use of "Stas", she started moving towards "Was dis called?" instead.
Her ability to distinguish between German and English at the conceptual, rather than vocabularic, level continues. The other day, she came up to me with a flower and asked "Was dis called?" but followed that up with "in English!" and then proceeded to tell me that Renate at daycare had told her what the flower was called in German (though she didn't tell ME what the German name was). I thought that that showed a pretty high-level of reflection about language for a 2.5 year old.
Joel says that she asks every me every night and every morning when I'm away. But her happiness upon my return seems to be dwindling. When we got back from Scotland, it was late at night and she was asleep. She only discovered we were home when she woke up and came into our room and found us, instead of grandma, in bed. She flung herself between us and kept turning from one to the other, putting out a hand and saying "Dis my daddy" or "dis my mommy", as if she was trying to reassure herself that we were there and hers. I got home from Sweden one evening during supper time, and she heard my key in the door and I could hear "mommy, mommy, mommy!" and she raced out to fling herself at me in a hug. Tuesday, though, I went straight to daycare from the train station, arriving about half an hour earlier than I normally pick her up, and I thought I'd get a happy, excited hug, but instead, she barely nodded acknowledgement and continued playing. She eventually left happily enough, but I had to coax a hug out of her. The next day when I picked her up as usual, she saw me coming from across the yard, and shouted "Nein!" Sure makes me glad to come home...
But today was (yet another) holiday, so I was off work and daycare was closed, and we went to the park in the morning and played outside in the sandpit in the afternoon, and then came home and baked a cake. Even though I have lots of work to do, it was nice having a day off to reconnect with her.
