As mentioned before, amazed as I am with the kind of videos picked by Junior, it is fast approaching alarm point of addiction. Luckily he has turned his attention to story books now and should hopefully develop on it. A while back, he was uttering all in comprehensible gibberish, in the tune of the alphabets song. We were worried to the extent that he may even forget the original English alphabets for he even started quoting some random gibberish as words. One day when I was feeding him lunch, while he was watching video, I thought the song sounded similar. Then only we realized that, the gibberish was actually Russian!!! He had been quoting Russian alphabets and words related to those all the while!!! The other song he had been humming all along had been a Chinese one. I was amazed with the ease with which kids pick up language skills, which at the moment, be it their mother tongue or any other language, is as alien. His sentences in tamil are mere repeats of what we talk in the house and he still doesn’t know the difference between “his” and “others” while speaking. On one hand I really do want to encourage him picking up other languages, but not sure if it is the right thing to do.
His way of going through story books is a routine of its own. We’ve to sit with the pages open in front of him and enact in detail about the picture on each page – right from what each character was depicting and how they would’ve spoken the dialogues on the page. If we miss out on any character from the picture he would specifically ask and point out the missing link. Last week, was reading him a story on curious George, the monkey and his trip to a baseball game. The guy, who takes George the monkey, to the game, is missed in on one of the pictures drawn on the page. An apparent miss by the artist I guess, for the page had dialogues for this character. Junior noted that, while I was telling dialogues for the guy, he was missing in the picture and was enquiring where he went. I made it up telling that, the guy went to have mammu (food) leaving George behind. Later that night, he was reading the same story with his mom. When that page came, he immediately told her that the uncle had gone to eat food, leaving behind George monkey. She was stumped and was clueless. I was laughing at it and later we decided that, any extra bit around the stories, should be circulated back for cross reference.
His way of going through story books is a routine of its own. We’ve to sit with the pages open in front of him and enact in detail about the picture on each page – right from what each character was depicting and how they would’ve spoken the dialogues on the page. If we miss out on any character from the picture he would specifically ask and point out the missing link. Last week, was reading him a story on curious George, the monkey and his trip to a baseball game. The guy, who takes George the monkey, to the game, is missed in on one of the pictures drawn on the page. An apparent miss by the artist I guess, for the page had dialogues for this character. Junior noted that, while I was telling dialogues for the guy, he was missing in the picture and was enquiring where he went. I made it up telling that, the guy went to have mammu (food) leaving George behind. Later that night, he was reading the same story with his mom. When that page came, he immediately told her that the uncle had gone to eat food, leaving behind George monkey. She was stumped and was clueless. I was laughing at it and later we decided that, any extra bit around the stories, should be circulated back for cross reference.
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