The Girl's cognitive

Well, even though her pronunciation is still behind the curve (but, getting better on a daily basis!), The Girl has darned good fine motor skills for her age (3.5 years old).

A week or two, she finally made the cognitive leap on how to use a computer mouse -- although she finds a trackball easier, as you can divide the tasks across two hands: right hand "steers" via the trackball; left hand "left-clicks".

This is a screenshot (click to enlarge) of one of the drawings she did in TuxPaint. (Complaint: it's not clear where the saved paintings are stored; and a quick Google search doesn't answer the question. Thus, I had to do a screenshot. ADDENDUM: Re-Googled, and found the info under the FAQ on the TuxPaint website.)


First off, I'm impressed that The Girl can "steer" this stuff. In the cognitive realm, she's placing items with purpose, rather than just a random mess. In the image I've shown here, the teddy bear came first. Then she placed the penguin above it, and declared "The penguin is sitting on the teddy bear's head!" Then, "The penguin is eating an apple!" and "The other penguin is eating a banana."

It's also interesting that shes internalized the cultural representation of the relative placement of two-dimensional objects having three-dimensional meanings: for example, placing the penguin above (and slightly overlapping) means that it's sitting on the teddy bear's head; or that placing the apple or banana touching the penguin's mouth means that it's being eaten.

Interesting stuff. :)


--GG