Comments for blog.limedaley.com/post/spelling-counting-play-and-more

Comment #2467

2007-12-13T19:58:20Z

Amen, Laedelas! No language learning is useless. And all learning helps the brain grow, especially at that age. But she's right that it would be better if he could keep it up...the brain also "prunes" what it doesn't use. :(

I used to say the Japanese have a hard time with L and R. Then I went to Japan, and tried to pronounce their R! I couldn't come close. For some reason, R is really hard in many languages. French and German, for another example....

Comment #2466

2007-12-13T18:57:35Z

Oooh, agglutinating languages! Fun stuff.

Children have very good ears compared to adults. Over the years we train ourselves to ignore slight variations of sound to understand each other better, but children don't have those filters yet (Example: "to-may-to" or "to-mah-to." Or how Japanese have a hard time distinguishing "L" from "R").

As for learning a "useless" language, language learning helps children to understand their native language better and enables them to learn other languages more quickly, so it's a good thing! (Says the girl who spent 4 years learning a "dead" language.)

Comment #2465

2007-12-13T14:22:08Z

It bothers me because I know that he can say things correctly

You know this story but I'll say it again because it is relevant. I identify with this because of the phase you went through, imitating your friend's style of drawing when I knew you could draw much better. It would have been much better had I not troubled you about it, but you were entering a drawing contest.... Stupid parental pride -- all it did was make both of us miserable.

Comment #2464

2007-12-12T22:23:29Z

That's some of my annoyance with books that enable guessing the story from the pictures: They encourage guessing. Worse is the approach often taken in schools; I'm not kidding: Look at the first and last letters, look at the pictures, think about the context, and guess!

John Holt, I believe it was, in talking about the frustration of beginning readers who figure out a word on one page and then have to figure it out again on the next, reminded us that for a beginning reader, it's not the same word but a new word all over again. It takes a while to be able to trust that d-o-g is "dog" every time.