Helping a young child keep track, using her level of understanding, using methods she’s, comfortable with, translated…
Lei is seemingly, careless, but she’s, actually, very delicate in thought, to the point that she’d felt, a bit, too, stubborn at times, and sometimes, she’d, jumped to conclusion, missed the points. Awhile ago, she’d cried how she’d not liked her teacher and didn’t want to, go to school anymore. With the prior experiences, I’d, known, to ignore her conclusions first, to trace back to exactly, what had, happened.
“Why don’t you like your teacher?” “Because she has us draw the charts of our own experiences, and I always forgot. But, Ms. Han-Han wouldn’t make me remember it all.” Jumping to conclusions, again, “I forget too, so that’s why I wrote everything down.” “But I can’t write yet,” she’d stated, sorrowfully. “You can draw it out.” “But I don’t have anything to draw on.”
That’s, simple, as I bought some books a while ago, I received a notebook as a gift, I’d not used the paper version of calendars, so I’d, set it aside all this time.
“Wait for me, I’ll give you something.”
I’d, slowly explained to Lei-Lei how this was to be, approached, then told her, “okay, now I have something for you to do!” “Okay!”, children all loved to work, this was, so totally, the opposite of me.
“Draw what you did in class every day before school’s out, inside this, small box, then, bring it home to me, okay?”, she’d, nodded “That way, when we’re, making our experience charts, we can know what to draw, okay?”
It’s hard, to decipher the cavemen drawings at first sight, like how she’d needed to explain to us, what she drew, for me to write out the topic beside her sketches.
And, just like that, Lei had, started, her very first, diary in the year 2020, but, how long is she, going to, continue, doing this???
And so, this parent is, teaching her own young to become, more organized, using what she can understand, and because the child can’t write yet, she can, only use the drawing to express what she was thinking, and sometimes, it is, often, quite, difficult for us, the adults, to decipher what those pictographs, those, cavemen drawings meant…