Clock-wise with Kajal

There has been some progress in the last couple of days.
I had a vague recollection of ‘flash cards’ as a teaching aid, mentioned by Dr Jalaluddin when we had worked together a long time ago. I decided to make my own version, a set of simple cards, each having either a picture of an object or it’s corresponding word. The idea is to make games around the cards. There’s not much that one can do, just simple things like matching the words to the pictures, or clubbing all pictures/ words that start with the same letter together (works better with just pictures, with words it’s obviously easier), or picking up picture cards one by one and naming the objects, and the spellings, or the same activity done with words. These might seem simple, but the child’s answers, and more importantly her mistakes, reveal her thinking process and her way of making associations.

For instance, Kajal can’t yet remember ‘cake’ and ‘clock’ too well. She remembers that one of the words has an l in it, but can’t always recall which one, especially because I never ask her in any particular order, which can sometimes give children a clue. So she tries to squeeze it in, in both, and ‘cake’ becomes ‘clake’. I can’t get her to associate sounds with letters yet. Her blank expression, and long silences have led me to conclude that perhaps it is too early for that.
But other than that the cards have been a minor success. They have generated an interest, and I hope it lasts long enough for us to reach ‘z’. Then maybe I’ll have to come up with another strategy.
Two other interesting things happened today, which I think I should mention. She knows already several parts of the body, having learnt them in school. So she can start with head, eyes, ears, and so on, all the way till toes. And she can name quite a few. So I was surprised when we picked up the word ‘eye’ and she said she didn’t know what it meant. Having learnt it as the plural ‘eyes’, she was unable to make the connection. Even after I explained to her the difference in singular and plural, taking knee as a ‘part of the body’ and cloth as a general example, it still took her awhile to figure out that what she was reading and saying were actually the same word. Well, almost. So I realize that the concept of singular and plural, which seems so easy, takes time to grasp. Not as a concept per se, because I’m sure she encounters it often enough in her everyday life. But the fact, I guess, that she has to now remember another factor about words.
The other has to do with a phenomenon that all of us have been through or even used, that is of ‘switching off’ when something is not interesting enough to hold our attention. Or when we have more pressing matters to think about, and we feel that we can temporarily suspend our thoughts, allow them to stray in another direction and return to the task at hand, without missing much in the intervening period. I realized Kajal had one such lapse when I asked her to write ‘clock’ in her notebook. It was a new word, and I felt that she needed perhaps to write it several times over to be able to remember it. So once I introduced it to her, I asked her to write it ten times. She got it right the first three times. The rest of the times, the ‘l’ was missing. Strange. She’s only copying, in a way, one row to the next, and there’s no reason to not get it right. The word, correctly spelt is written in the rows above. And yet, the fourth time onwards, she writes ‘cock’ all the way down. When she finished, I asked her the spelling, and guess what? She got it right.
Its not that she was not writing it correctly, it was that she didn’t even realize that she wasn’t. A task so boring, that she began to do it mechanically, making a mistake in the bargain, and yet managing to achieve the desired result.