Emma and the 3 R’s

A quick update on some of the things that Emma knows about Reading, ‘Riting, and ‘Rithmetic (so far).

Technically speaking, she can’t actually read yet, per se, but that doesn’t stop her from pretending to try.  She will sit either on the couch or on the step to our family room and read aloud as if she was a teacher reading aloud to her students.  Before turning the page, she flips the book so it faces outward and slowly rotates it around the room for everyone in attendance (both real and imaginary) to get a look-see at the picture on the page.  When it comes to the act of reading, the words that flow from her lips are an equal combination of a description of the artwork she sees and what she remembers of the story from when Fehmeen had read it to her before.  This little girl even throws in passages from other books she has heard, verbatim, just to keep things interesting for her audience.

I’m pretty sure it was during her first few days of pre-school that she came home with her first of many miniature sound books.  Inside each one of these classroom created booklets are four or five letters, as well as their associated sounds in context to a word she is familiar with, for Emma to work on at her leisure.  Soon enough, she learned that E, m, m, a spelled Emma and just this past week, she took pencil to paper and wrote her first legitimately legible letter.  Using her sound book as a guide, Emma sat down at the kitchen table and wrote a capital E.  I almost blew out the motor on my Bi-PAP machine (by extreme exhalation) when I heard how loudly Fehmeen screamed when she saw the “perfectly” rendered letter.

When it comes to numbers, Emma can usually count to about twenty-nine before she gets caught in an infinite loop of 29, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 23, 24, 25 etcetera, etcetera and so on.  It’s kinda cute in a way.  Fehmeen has also begun teaching her how to use her fingers to represent various digits.  So far Emma knows one, two, three, and five (although getting her fingers to make the symbol for three takes a little help from her other hand).  All that being said, the best was when someone asked her how many was all fingers on both hands up, her instantaneous and deadpan response was, “A lot.”

Class dismissed (for today).

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