As Little Miss C develops one of the things which I marvel about most is her speech and understanding. She's always been quite vocal, but since she turned one words just started tumbling out of her. At first we just had random objects being named in isolation, but more recently phrases and sentences have been formed and it's fascinating to see how her understanding and imagination are driving this.
A lot of the language she knows has been driven by books. We read loads with her; first thing in a morning, just before bed and at several other points throughout the day. That means she knows lots of animals as she's always had a fascination with books that involve them and one of her favourite reads is still the Schleich catalogue which she insists on going through animal by animal – and trust me there are a lot of animals in there!
Her first attempts at putting words together has caused quite a few moments of confusion and laughter though. The time when she was out in the garden with me and my parents and suddenly pointed at the ground and shouted "little snake" – we thought she might have found a slow worm or similar, but no, it was quite simply a worm. But, imagine that you haven't seen a worm before, but that you have seen snakes in books about the zoo. Then it become pretty obvious that the worm could quite easily be a little snake.
Not all these word combinations make quite as much sense though. She's happy to ask to go "upstairs" but once we are upstairs and she wants to go down we suddenly get requests to go "down-upstairs". Obviously the concept of "stairs" and going up or down them needs a bit more work.
Inspiration also seems to have come from one of our recent new books (The Worst Princess) as just yesterday LMC was dancing round the living room when she suddenly started twirling round and shouting "I am a princess". Not quite what I was hoping to hear, but still, I just hope she's picking up the rest of the messages from the book too. Later on in the day we heard exclamations of "I'm in a pirate boat" from her whilst she was sat astride a folded up travel cot – not quite sure where that one came from, but at least it's not all princesses and fairies in this household!
suzical says
It’s amazing to hear their language develop isn’t it.
Edward always says ‘there are no camels’ when we take him to the farm – apparently a constant disappointment 🙂
Mrs C says
Their observations and preconceptions are fantastic!