ABC'S

Anne-Marie, who won’t be four for another week-and-a-half, is catching on fast. Our granddaughter is learning to spell. (As far as I know, she isn’t reading yet, although that may be another of her hidden talents.) Recently, her parents were discussing some family activities, and not wanting to involve her in the conversation, they used a technique common to parents--spelling key words. “Should we go I-C-E S-K-A-T-I-N-G?” Jamie said to Tammy. Anne-Marie piped up, “I wanna go ice-skating!” Her astounded parents tried again.“Or should we go see “B-E-A-U-T-Y AND THE B-E-A-S-T?” he asked. His daughter jumped up and down and shouted,“Beauty and the Beast!”

I was sharing this nugget of grandmotherly pride with our pastor’s wife last night, whose little girl will be four in a couple of months. We often compare notes about the children’s antics. She told me that when her daughter was even younger, she asked her mother about the letter “u” in a word. When the letter was identified for her, the 3-year-old said, “Oh, H-O-U-S-E, that spells “house!”

That reminded me of the time when Anne-Marie was around two-and-a-half, and, pointing to a bar of soap on the bathtub, she said to her mother, “Look, Mommy,
D-I-A-L!” These are instances of the old expression about learning being caught, rather than taught. The kiddies’ language skills, extending even to print, are developing by leaps and bounds, starting before we even realize it. One of our sons, then a little more than two years old, saw a newspaper page I had dropped on the floor while reading the paper, and said, “Mama, that says, ‘CHURCH’,” pointing to the big block letters ‘CH’ in an ad. Actually, it said CHICKEN, 39 CENTS/LB, but he was on the right track. He had often noticed the word CHURCH on a lighted sign in front of our house of worship and recognized the similarity.

Years ago, when my niece’s children were small, she was putting away groceries and said to her husband, “Where did you put the C-A-N-D-Y?” Her pre-school son looked up brightly and said, “I want some of that sandy-candy!” repeating the sound of her spelling and giving them an eye-opener at the same time. As adults, we often forget how quickly kids learn, not giving them enough credit and thinking of them as babies. (Until we see how glibly they can sing and repeat television ads and slogans!) Science tells us that we are hard-wired to read at about age six, but parents often get clues way ahead of time. Spiritually, kids are astute, too, having special awareness of God and His love if they are guided in that direction. “Train up a child the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it," Proverbs 22:6. It’s later than you think.