The little things in life...

paper trousers carefully cut

Sometimes one has the pleasure of sitting down with just one child and having the time to talk and be observant. I had one of those moments yesterday where I sat down with a child in the art area and we started drawing pictures. After a while she decided to cut her paper up into small, small pieces - a pretty normal thing for a three year old - there is often a fascination for just cutting an cutting.

At first the cutting was random - although with full concentration. She showed me each piece - "what shape is this?" - most of the times it was squares or rectangles - then she did something new - she cut a slit in one of her rectangles and handed it to me ... and then waited. I picked it up and made it walk back to her like a pair of trousers - which she thought was hilarious - so she made more and more and more trousers - I asked her if I could write the word trousers (Byxor - in Swedish) on them - and she nodded eagerly - and then expected that I wrote on every one - explaining to me what sort of trousers - huge trousers, fancy trousers, many trousers, another trousers, skinny trousers, mini trousers, one more trousers, three legged trousers. There was an enormous amount of concentration to cut purposefully all these different trousers and when she ran out of paper she cut up her "huge trousers" and made more pairs.

She looked at all the writing on the small pieces of paper trousers and then she picked up a pen and started to write herself - and as she did she said aloud the words she was writing (which I quickly wrote down on the reverse side of my drawing - and since it is a her own unique way of saying some Swedish words I am at a total loss as to how to translate) - it was several sentences, and she was quite clear that this was a story that she was writing on the small slithers of paper. After her first two sentences she stopped saying the words aloud but I could see that she was still mouthing words silently as she "wrote".

early writing