Last night, having dinner out on the porch. Frida pointed to the Met hippo (thanks, Nean! we are still loving it all these years later) on her melamine plate.
"E'fant!"
"Nope, Frida, that's a hippo."
"hu'po!"
"yup"
"hu'po butt!"
"Yup, that's the hippo's butt"
"two butts! hu'po butt, Feeda butt!" (pointing demonstratively at each) "two butts!"
She has been very into pointing out pairs of things recently. "Two doggies!" "Two Feedas!" (spying a photo of herself) "two mommies!" (pointing out a mom in a book whom she thinks resembles me, and pointing at me with her other hand). Etc. Until yesterday, when she spontaneously started labeling threes, she was a two fanatic. The standard account, in developmental psychology, is that kids progress through "knowing" the numbers one, two, and three-- that is, they label those quantities accurately and also do not use the numbers inaccurately to refer to greater quantities. So, Frida would be a 2-knower if she correctly called all pairs "two" but didn't call, say, three of anything "two". But a friend of mine, a developmental psychologist who studies number understanding, thinks that getting pairs is a different thing-- that kids go through a stage when they label pairs correctly as "two" but then, when asked (in F's case only when asked) how many some larger quantity, say 3 or 4 or 5 is, also answer "two" because, in addition to understanding pairs, it's the largest number they're confident about. Anyway... I think Frida is now, properly, a two-knower, in that big numbers are "fee!" and three is also "fee!" but two is only ever "two". But until a little while ago, she passed through this cool stage in which she loved to point out pairs, and only ever did so correctly... but still didn't get two's position between one and three.
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Happy birthday to Frida! Neat to hear some of the developmental psychology behind number mastery. A. gets 2 things right all the time now and sometimes larger numbers of things (she surprised me by correctly identifying 5 chocolate chips on her plate the other night, then 5 pumpkins in a picture). But as your friend's account suggests, she also sometimes refers to 3 or 4 or 5 things as "2." Interesting to hear why.
ReplyDeleteBut speaking of pairs, what I was struck by in F.'s birthday pictures, beyond the loveliness of your children as always, was how much she reminded me of A. They don't look alike in the classic sense, but there was something about her size, alert look, sweetness, and soft bob of hair that made them seem very much of the same age/stage to me. As so often, I wish they could know each other!