Toddlers, TV, Books, Composition Notebooks

I've always thought it was interesting to note when my kids first were upset by something they saw on TV, and what it was. Miss M has recently started watching the old Lassie VHS tapes I taped long ago when Tim was her age. And today she's watching it (she missed her nap and I'd rather keep her up until bedtime than have her take a late nap and be up til 2am!) She came up to me and said, 'I don't like this, I want to watch Honkey Donkey.' It turns out she was disturbed by the episode where the mother is trapped in her truck after a minor accident. Lassie comes to the rescue, of course, but I guess she didn't like seeing her unable to get out, or something.

When Tim was little, he didn't like an episode where some robbers trap Lassie in a shed and threaten Timmy. He used to run out of the room when that part came on. And Kahoa used to be scared of a Donut Man video because the puppets freaked him out. I don't think Keola was ever bothered by anything.

I always think that when they see something that bothers them, it shows that they've reached a certain level of understanding--the ability to imagine what they see on the screen, and the attention span and comprehension to follow a storyline and make some kind of sense of it.

Yes, we do read books, too! LOL! Miss M has been into Beatrix Potter's Tale of Two Bad Mice lately, she reads it to me now. And today I bought her a miniature composition notebook because she wanted a school book like her brothers' copywork books. She's been having me write things down for her, most of them don't make sense, they're just words assembled in a Jabberwocky kind of order that she thinks makes a sentence. One page says, 'It's about my Dad has ruined a bake someday.' She made me write a few pages and then she read it to me very dramatically as if it was a story: 'God has ruined the end of the day. God and Mary and they said, Go away! And that's the end of that.'

And then she turned to me and said, 'Now, you narrate.'