Note on learning

Daisy is doing the beginnings of addition and subtraction, and I wanted to note it for this blog. Today we had a conversation with her about a character named Triops (from a They Might Be Giants CD), and she was noting that if Triops got another eye, that would be four. That gave us the idea of presenting her some hypothetical situations-- like if a horse got one more leg, how many legs would he have? She got that one, too. She had a bit more difficulty when we made it two (how many legs if the horse got TWO more), but was often getting it right. She could also do some subtraction (like if we asked her how many eyes Triops would have if we took one away). I am pretty impressed with this kid!

It's also worth noting that a song prompted this conversation. I have to hand it to They Might Be Giants, because another song of theirs has gotten Daisy interested in spelling. They have a song called "The Alphabet Lost and Found" in which words lose letters and have to get them back at the Alphabet Lost and Found. Anyway, in the song someone tries to "ring a bell that lost its Ls" (I think that's how it goes). Daisy was very interested, so I took some of our bath letters (thank you, Nellie, who gave them to us) and spelled out the word BELL. Then I showed Daisy how it would look if we took away the Ls. We tried different variations (like if it lost the E, or the B, etc). Daisy thought it was very funny to say the new words, minus the key letters--like "BLL" and "ELL" and "BE"--but she also absorbed the spelling of BELL. Mark and I asked her how to spell BELL in the car today, and she spelled it.

So, in summary: Daisy is learning the beginnings of spelling and math, and They Might Be Giants are geniuses who make up these catchy songs that insidiously get kids interested in learning.