Little Scientist

Ever get the feeling your kid is experimenting on you?

Back around the "just gone three" mark, when the Small Boy's words could still be counted on your fingers, I was continually on the lookout for signs that he understood one particular word or another. The aim was identifying individual words - there were a number of long(-ish) word strings that he clearly understood the meanings of, but extracting the specific units of meaning within those sentences was something that may or may not have been happening. So I would watch closely for signs of understanding, and set up word games to try to test his knowledge.

One of these I remember quite clearly. It was called "Where's Bear" and was played with a cast of a) Bear and b) Wombat

"Where's Bear"

{holds up Bear}

"Look! Bear! There's Bear! Where's Wombat?"

{holds up Wombat}

"Yes! Wombat!"

... and so on and so on. That was pretty much the whole game, which could go on for about fifteen minutes (which is actually rather a long time to get excited about two stuffed toys being raised ten cm multiple times). The above was the ideal - in fact the game frequently went more like this:

"Where's Bear"

{holds up Wombat}

"No! That's not Bear. That's Wombat! Where's Wombat?"

{holds up Bear}

"No! That's not Wombat."

So, totally useless from the point of view of testing his knowledge - except that I knew for a fact that he most certainly did know which of them was Bear and which was Wombat. This was Bear the Beloved, Companion of the Bedtime ... not know Bear? Impossible! And besides, he had that look in his eyes. I was busy testing him, but he'd turned it right around and was testing me. Hmmm... she said 'Bear' - what will she do if I hold up the wombat instead? Ooh! That was interesting! Lets do it again!

Of course, this has implications for IQ and language development testing, where they do just that - present him with a variety of options and ask him to identify which is which. Since he had absolutely zero motivation to identify objects correctly just because someone has asked him to, he won't. It's much more fun to identify them incorrectly, and see what your tester's reaction is.

Now that I have a Talking Small Boy, I've pretty much given up on the language testing thing. Current scheme is terribly scientific - does it "look like" he understands? If so, keep on going.

It's not the testing that matters, it's the skills. As long as the skills are developing, I can live with the uncertainty of not really knowing excatly how fast.