Just last night Sophia and I went to the airport to pick up a friend who was flying in from the U.K.. After we collected his suitcase and got him in the car, he handed a 50p coin to Sophia and was explaining that they used different money there.

Sophia: So they use different money?
Him: yeah.
Me: Just like when we went to Argentina and we used different money.
Sophia: So what language do they speak in the U.K.
Him: The original English.
Sophia: The what?
Him: The original English.
Sophia: So over there they'd say "Mad Skills" instead of "Mad Skizllz?"

I knew it wouldn't take long, but I was still somewhat surprised that it's this soon.

The other day I was sending an email out and Sophia was reading over my shoulder. "There is only 1 'm' in tomorrow, Dad." And I had to hit spell-check, but she was of course right. Then today I was making some coffee for a meeting and I had to make a sign.

Me: I wonder if there is 1 'f' or 2 in coffee.
Sophia: 2.
Me: That was quick. How can you be so sure?
Sophia: Well, I imagine the sign for Starbucks Coffee in my head and that's how it's spelled.
I checked the spelling against the coffee can, and again, she was right.

It's official. In our house, I can only out-spell the dog and cats. And maybe Oz actually has the edge on me. I really need to work on this.

So, for about a year and a half now, Sophia has been doing some of the more complex language works available in the Montessori primary. I was told she might leave the primary having been presented ALL the works, a rarity. Now that she's about to enter the elementary, I don't know if she's done all the works, but I know she's been presented with the vast majority of them.

I was reminded about these language works the other day, when I went over to the house of a friend of Sophia's, and her mother had taped up all the diagramming sentence works in her daughter had completed in the kitchen.

"Oh, I love those works," I told her.

"Me too," she said.

Yeah, in a primary Montessori school, five and six year olds diagram sentences. Well, they start with phrases, and work up to sentences. Still, I found it pretty impressive.

The basic building block for this series of works is the farm. The farm is a physical wooden farm with wooden (or plastic) animals in it, usually set on a small table. Kids are almost always salivating for the farm by the time they get to it, because they can see it in the classroom from day one (when they're three!), but they cannot touch it until they've had the appropriate lessons. So arriving at the farm works is a prestigious, proud moment for most Montessori children. Sophia, who often did "nothing" or "I can't remember" at school when I asked her daily, said, unprompted, "I got a lesson on the farm!!!" the first time she was presented with it. She was almost as excited the day she gave her first lesson. ("Mama, mama, mama! Guess what! I gave Gulshan a lesson on opening and closing today!")

So, to start with, the teacher sets up the farm with several cows and sits across the room. She requests that the child go to the farm and bring her "the cow". Then, when the child has complied she says,"Oh yes, this is a cow, but it's not the cow I was thinking of." Then she describes the cow she's thinking of: "the black cow" or "the spotted cow" or perhaps "the Holstein cow". The child goes to fetch the one she's thinking of. Then the teacher asks the child to think about whether there's a difference between asking for any of the cows and asking for a specific cow. Sophia's Montessori teacher said that never in all the time she had presented this lesson had a child grasped on the first try that the difference is "a" or "the", until she presented the lesson to Sophia. "A means any cow. The means a pacific cow," Sophia told her. She doesn't mispronounce specific anymore these days. (Yeah, this is unabashed bragging, so sue me. I want to remember this and it has generic cool value over and above my marvelous kid.) So they repeat this lesson for a while, using different animals or whatnot, until the kid gets the difference between articles, if they don't get it on the first try.

That's the first lesson, and there's many more, but I'm fuzzy on what happens in the middle, until we get to the writing part. The children set up the farm in a certain way (the nanny goat in the yard and the cow in the barn, for example) and then either they or the teacher (depending on their writing skills) write out a sentence describing the farm and its animals. After they have written out the sentence, they label all the parts of speech. They start with real simple phrases at first, which might be just an article, an adjective and a noun: "The black cat". The article takes a small light blue triangle, the noun a large black triangle and an adjective takes a large darker blue triangle. Thus the kid learns that if it's a triangle, it's either a noun or a noun modifier. They work on this for a while. The words are described by their action, not named, so Sophia doesn't know the parts of speech, per se, but she has an intuitive understanding of how sentences are constructed nonetheless. The verb, when they get to it (weeks and weeks of phrases first), is a bright, round, red ball, to symbolize action. When Sophia stopped bringing home the farm sentences, they were dotted with small pink rectangles (conjunctions) and bright green crescents (prepositions) in addition to the ever present triangles and the red balls. I have sentences such as "The white hen and the rooster on the green grass" and "The white lamb and the white ewe seep [sic] on the green grass".

I love this work not just because it's complex and advanced, not just because it provides children with a deep understanding of how sentences are composed, but because it encourages a level of specificity that you don't always see encouraged in children. When a child does this work they're expected and prompted to describe what they see using exact nouns (a ewe is different than a lamb, see?) and accurate adjectives. They set something up, which they see with their own eyes, and then recreate it as faithfully as they can in writing. I LOVE the level of precision and concentration required for this work, a level that the child invariably meets when the directress expects it.

I've kept a bunch of these sentences, a representative sample, from the past year. Some have lost their little pasted on symbols, and some are a little the worse for wear. Below is a picture of the set, as well as two pictures of the first two phrases she ever brought home (likely not the first ones she ever did; one written by the teacher and one she wrote herself), back in September of last year.

While I'm in the world of super brief instant post, let me tell you something else linguistically amusing that Sophia is doing (right this second!). We've been reading this book we checked out from the library called Mr. Dinosaur, in which the narrator is an elementary school boy who describes his five year old brother's obsession with dinosaurs. On one page he marvels that his brother can correctly pronounce stegosaurus and diplodocus, but still says "pistghetti" for spaghetti. For some reason this has caught Sophia's attention, and she has been making all her ponies and dinosaurs today say "spakegeke". Then she turns to me and says,"Mama, do you know how Coco says spaghetti? Spakegeke!" and then she giggles.

As usual I am behind on the stories I want to tell about Sophia. She has been doing so many things, lately, and I've been wanting to write an entry about her language development for about three months now. I hope I will still get to that, but just in case it languishes, I wanted to note that about thirty seconds ago Sophia used the word "suddenly". She's been pretty good about adjectives, but I have not noticed much use of adverbs in her speech. This is the first example I can think of. She said, "I took the lid off suddenly."

People want to know more about the typing works! As the people request, so shall it be done.

Here's another example of what she has done. In this one, I asked her while she worked if she could spell out her name. See if you can find it! Sophia is easily able to reconcile the capital letters with the lower case letters that come out. She also knows where the caps lock button is, and that it changes all her letters to uppercase. We've also told her in no uncertain terms that the top row (the Fkeys) are forbidden and not to be touched. She even understands the use of the space bar and the return. The gap between the letter groupings in this typing work picture was created by her on purpose. If she is typing something ordered (the alphabet or her name or my name) we have to talk her through it. In her hunt for the current letter she loses her place otherwise. We don't help her find the letter though, we just call it out. I have no idea how long this takes when we do it without timing her. It doesn't feel like a long time (maybe a minute or less?). She hunts and pecks pretty well, though it takes her longer to find some letters than others. The bottom row is probably her weakest one. However, she doesn't always intend to repeat a letter more than once when she does. Sometimes she hits several keys at once unintentionally as well. She hasn't quite mastered the fine control of reliably producing a single letter on a single key at a time. She also sometimes just goes straight across the keyboard, row by row (numbers, then qwerty, and so on) very deliberately. Other times, she lays both hands on the keyboard and just presses keys in a frenzy (I think this is in imitation of what it looks like we are doing when we type).

Interestingly, it had never occurred me to think that she might be confused between the lowercase letters she types and the uppercase letters presented on the face of the keyboard, though it probably should have. Her mastery of letters is really quite good (you know, except when people remove parts of them), and extends not only to correctly naming print letters but to cursive letters as well. At school she is working on the cursive sandpaper letters.
The first lesson in this work is identifying the sound of the letters. She's now routinely identifying letters by their sounds as well as their names (she already knew their names from preschool) in three forms : print lowercase, cursive lowercase, and print uppercase. She has tentatively started pronouncing letters in words she sees as well, usually just one or two of the sounds. Sometimes she stresses word sounds in speech too. The other day she was saying "Aslllllan" and "tortillllla" (L seems to be one of her favorite sounds). On the first lesson with the sandpaper letters, her instructor presented her with thirteen of the letters. When the teacher reported this to me, I foolishly asked, "Is that a lot?" She replied, "That's phenomenal." I still don't know how many would be done in an average lesson with an average child, but apparently it's less than thirteen. About a week later she told me that Sophia loves the sandpaper letters and wants to work with them all the time. Well, actually, the word she used was "obsessed" but you know what I mean. Here is one of the great bonuses of the Montessori method. It's apparently Sophia's letter learning steam engine time, and the classroom is prepared with materials that let her go over each letter and its sound for as long and as often as she is interested in it. Some children wouldn't see the letters until later, some might see them sooner. Sophia's ready now, so she gets them now.

The next lesson in the sandpaper letters will be to trace them with her finger (as you see the child doing on the left). In this you can start to see some of the genius behind Maria Montessori and her design of the works. The child traces the letter with his fingers, something he can easily do, while making the letter sound. This creates multi-sensory associations with the letter and its sound. Movement helps the kinesthetic learner, and its writing prep for all children, even those not kinesthetically oriented. Hearing himself say the sound as he traces the letter strongly connects the visual input with the auditory. It makes so much sense! Plus you get additional information from the fact that the letter plates are differently colored (pink for consonants and blue for vowels). And although the color difference is not something the teacher will consciously draw attention to, the child will still internalize it.

Sophia's old school used print sandpaper letters, not cursive. I'm not sure why. Print letters are probably a better groundwork for reading and cursive a better groundwork for writing. There's lots of small differences between her old school and her current school that I have struggled to understand. Sophia's old school was AMS affiliated, and her new school is AMI affiliated. Some of the differences are due to that, others to differing teacher personalities. At some point I want to explore these differences in more depth because I find them really interesting.

Sophia has not only fallen in love with the sandpaper letters, she has also taken her first steps on the moveable alphabet. Earlier in the year we had a conference with her teacher who told me she would be following along these steps, and that Sophia would begin reading soon, but that she would not tell me when they first started the lessons on reading, because she didn't want us to get overexcited and push her too hard. The moveable alphabet is also genius, as far as I'm concerned, because it lets the kid begin to write without having to know how to hold a pencil. It narrows the act of writing to putting the right letters in the right order together. This is another facet of the genius of Montessori, which is breaking down acts into their component parts and working on one component at a time. There are so many skills required for writing; it's overwhelming to hand a child a pencil, face them with letters they've never seen before (cursive) and have them trying to learn how words are put together at the same time as teaching them how to write. The fine manual dexterity involved in writing doesn't develop in children until they are about five or six (although there are any number of Montessori works in a classroom that help children develop this dexterity) but the child's mind may well be ready to write and form words before then. It's also incredibly empowering for a child to form her own words, and we all know how three and four year olds love to be empowered. Again, forming the words to read is more active than simply reading them, and choosing and ordering the letters can be a big help to those who need movement to help them learn. Sophia, by the way, is largely an auditory learner. She does require some small kinesthetic component, but mostly she listens and learns. This is no surprise, as I'm primarily an auditory learner too, which is why I did so well in conventional school, where information is delivered mostly orally.

I suspect that Sophia might be reading (and forming) a few small words before her fourth birthday. That would be really exciting. I don't think I was a particularly early reader, but this story is often told in my family about my grandmother: that her mother called the school and asked if they couldn't please, please send their daughter on up to school because she was driving them crazy with her demands for instruction, and so my grandmother went to first grade at five or so, and learned to read fairly early, especially for the time (early 1900's). She graduated from college at 19 or so, if I'm not mistaken. I wish that she could see Sophia now.

One of the things I find fascinating about watching a child grow is the realization of how much that you take for granted is not a given for them. Right now, Sophia is learning her letters and sounds (in the fabled Montessori post that never happens, I tell you about the sandpaper letters). Today we were sitting in the car on the way home from school. Sometimes we talk. Sometimes we are silent. In this case, we were quietly stopped at a red light. I was half-listening to a discussion on NPR about child soldiers (and thought to myself "there's a story to be had there, if I can lay my finger on it"). Suddenly, Sophia says to me,"Mama, what is that?"

A lot of her questions are like that. Sometimes I have to say,"What is what?" because I have no idea what she's looking at or if we've passed it or whether it's up or down or right or left, but since we are stopped, I glance at her and then try to follow her gaze out the window. I see immediately what she's staring at :

For some reason, I know right away what's giving her problems. It's the stylized, missing-the-stick-that-goes-across A. Apparently, she has noticed that most signs are letters, and that she's aware that she knows all the letters, so she's tried to make sense of this in the context of letters but can't quite do it.

"Is it an upside-down V?" she asks me, before I can answer her previous question. A lot of her questions go unanswered because of this. And this particular time I'm grateful that I haven't said anything yet, because I love what she's revealed about how her mind works with her question.

"It very much looks like an upside-down V, doesn't it?"

And man, does it ever.

"Mmmmhmmm."

"It looks like an upside-down V, but I think that it's an A missing the bar that goes across."

"It's an A missing the bar that goes across," she repeats thoughtfully.

I want to tell her it's stylized, and explain what that is, but I hold off. There'll be other chances to get into that. Still, how cool is it that she not only knows all her letters, she knows that she knows them, and that all words on all signs are made up of them? Time to move to China, right? That'd keep her guessing.

And while I'm on the subject of letters, allow me this strongly worded hint : if anyone is wondering what would make a good gift to give Sophia for - say - Easter, might I suggest this DVD or this CD? We've been at this site since I discovered it this weekend, watching the videos for "E eats Everything" and "D and W" over and over and over. Mom and Dad have a high tolerance for multiple repetitions of They Might Be Giants tunes and Sophia already has plenty of candy.

We have been listening to CDs in the mornings in the car, when the CD player will cooperate. As it's been warm this last week, we've listened to CDs almost every day. Kurt made several mix CDs of music for Sophia that have a combination of children's songs and other simple songs we think she might like. The variety is there for our sanity. Sophia loves to sing along, and sometimes will start singing the songs she's heard at other times, when the music is not playing. This past weekend, she surprised us by breaking out into Gorillaz' "Clint Eastwood". "It's coming on, it's coming on, it's coming on..." Yesterday, I drove her to school in the morning and after we got out of the car, she sang this,"Pah, pah, pahpah, pah, pah, pahpah, I wanna be serrated."

You can't really blame her for not completely understanding the lyrics, as the Ramone brothers aren't exactly known for their enunciation. However, what's funny to me, is that my child knows the word serrated, but not the word sedated. We have talked about knives, and their sharpness, and how to tell which is the sharp part by looking at them (hence serrated). Apparently, I have never had cause to talk to her about sedation. I often get these feelings in moments like these, where I don't actually want to correct her, because I'm so charmed by how she misstates things. I love breafkast and mazagine. I love crashcan and glitterbox. I love serrated.

Still, in the interests of truth and all that, I explained that he was saying sedated, and that sedated means getting medicine to calm you down. I'm waiting for her to sing it again, to see whether it stuck or not.

At Montessori school (and yes, I'm still working on that long, long post about the Montessori school, in which I will go into detail about some of the works that Sophia does and some of the educational principles behind it all) Sophia has learned a number of songs. The one that I am most charmed by is "The Continent Song". If life weren't so crazy right now I'd try to make Kurt get a recording of it for the site, because it's unbearably cute to hear Sophia singing it, but you'll have to make do with the lyrics, which are :

North America , South America
Africa, Europe, then Asia
Don't forget Antarctica
Don't forget Australia.

Sophia pronounces it more like this:

NorfAmerica, SouthAmerica
AfricaEuropethenAaaaygia
Don't forget Ant-art-ica
Dont forget Australeeia.

Sophia has also learned the word "globe" and frequently points them out when we see them in magazines or stores, ("Look mama, it's a globe, just like in my classroom"). She can also tell you that a globe is a sphere and which parts on it represent land and which parts represents water. There's several geographical works that she has a lot of interest in, including the continent puzzle. She knows there are seven continents and (obviously) knows their names. She'll say stuff like "Aunt Kelly lives in Europe" (and we have to correct her and tell her she used to) and "Uncle Stan lives in South America". She also talks about the city we live in. She's starting to have a real grip on the concept of place.

Sometimes, however, that grip slips a little. We have been trying to talk to her about our impending move to St. Louis. Last week we went up there to visit, so that she would have a concrete idea of place to go with all this talk about St. Louis. How much she needed this visual, tactile reinforcement was made evident as I was packing. I pulled out some slightly warmer clothes for her to wear, thinking that it would be cooler there in the evenings than it is here. She hasn't worn long pants in many months, and I wasn't sure the ones I had in a drawer would fit her. So I held them up to her for a quick measure. She snatched them out of my hands and insisted that she wanted to wear them that moment. I said that I had pulled them out "for St. Louis". She immediately wailed in despair, "I want to wear these pants! Don't give them to St. Louis! He doesn't need them!"

She reported that she enjoyed her trip to St. Louis, except for the part about sleeping in a hotel. We told her that we were thinking we would get a house there, instead of a hotel, and wouldn't that be so much nicer?

Last but not least, today I came upon the picture of this paper lamp:

I've been thinking that if the architecture of Sophia's new room in St. Louis allows it and her interest in geography holds, wouldn't that be really cool for her?

We had just eaten lunch, and so Sophia got up from the table. After lunch is generally nap time. She looked at me and said "I want to go straight to bed, get a paci, take my animals, and sleep with my socks on." Besides being a cute thing to say, this is the longest list of concurrent requests I've yet heard her make. She's going to be a regular list maker, that girl is, just like her mom.