Yesterday I had the pleasure of watching Mopsy make clearly very enjoyable discovery.  I was holding the hoover for a very pregnant friend of mine while she hoovered the stairs.  I had Mopsy on my hip as she usually is terrified of hoovers.  Suddenly I saw her put her hands on her ears, then take them off again and grin.  Then she did the same again, but finished with an even larger grin.  What an exciting thing to realise that it is one’s ears that one hears with…and an even more exciting thing to learn that you can make things quieter by covering your ears!  It was lovely to watch as she experimented with putting her hands on and off her ears quickly, then slowly, then at an irregular pace.  That’s what being a stay-at-home mum is about…not seeing the first steps or hearing the first words, but having the opportunity to witness the discoveries, the eurekas, the things that mean so much to our children.

Flopsy’s latest discovery is that she doesn’t know how to read.  Up until now, she’s loved looking at the pictures in books on her own, and been very excited to be able to read the odd name that is special to her (her own name, Mummy, her sister’s name, Daddy, Grandma, Kipper (don’t ask!) etc.).  Suddenly she’s started to only read books on her own if she knows them well enough to sort of recite them with prompts from the pictures.  If she doesn’t know them well, or the picture’s not helpful enough to remind her, she says “I can’t read that book, I don’t remember the words” or “I can’t read those words”.  It’s almost sad…but also exciting that she’s reached the stage of ‘concious imcompetence’…I can see that that realisation must be the real motivation for learning to read.  Before now, she was unconciously imcompetent…she knew that when adults read books to her, they talked, she knew words had something to do with it, but she also found just looking at the pictures enough to amuse her.  She now looks very closely at words in books with very short sentences, and often points to them as we read and knows that it is the words we are reading, and that these strange combinations of letters are the representations of what she hears coming from our mouths (and her own mouth!), and she knows she can’t yet decode them.  It’s sad that it means that there are a lot of books that are now, for her, inaccessible but it’s a lovely sign that she’s really starting out on the long road to reading which will make every book in the world accessible to her eventually! 

Edited: ROFL - I can see that I was unconciously incompetent at typing the word ‘incompetent’ correctly!  I have now replaced the word in the title to be spelt properly!