Scrabble
This wasn’t June 1982, this was yesterday btw. The photo just arrived captioned like this.
I love this photograph. Darlek has become a lot more confident with her reading, writing and spelling – she even attempted Scrabble on her dad’s iPad yesterday. This is a picture of her battling against the computer, with me faithfully on her side trying my best to help. Considering how she’s struggled to get her head around spelling and sentences and the like, I was so impressed with her casual determination.
Not all of the words she came up with made sense, they weren’t all spelt correctly, but a lot of them were absolutely fine and fitted in well. She has, as they say ‘cracked it!’ With her typical ‘I’ll have a go!’ attitude she dived into the game and gave her all. There was no ‘I can’t do this!’ or even a hint of a defeatist attitude – although she did of course try to get me to do some for her, as they do. She wanted to win, and she wanted to use the knowledge she has gained and put it into practise. Eventually she got bored, but it took quite a while for her to lose interest, and it was only because she was nosey about what her brother was doing that she gave up. Needless to say she didn’t beat the iPad, but she tried. I am very, very proud of her for that.
Darlek loves music and often loves to play her favourite songs, with the words on the computer screen so she can sing along now. She reads shop signs, picks up books and absent-mindedly reads the covers, attempts shopping lists, pretends to lose her voice and writes me notes on scraps of paper, wants to write her birthday cards herself and the list of little triumphs goes on.
Maths has come easy to her, but english has not, and I have worried about her intellectual inheritance if you can call it that. Her dad has dyslexia, and I have a close family member who has struggled with the same condition all her life. I’ll admit I worried Darlek would follow in their footsteps. But after seeing her this weekend, switching her letters around, tweaking the word sounds, manipulating her knowledge into the Scrabble grid – I’m content to relax a little on her behalf.
Little victories mean a lot, to me and to Darlek too. I must be doing something right if she’s doing alright. My baby can play Scrabble now, how cool is that! I’ll get her on Countdown before she’s 15, just see if I don’t! Right now I’m imagining my daughter stuck in a hothouse, feet dug into a ton of soil in a massive over-sized plantpot, soaking up words and numbers. She’s growing up beautifully and blooming. :O)
