Reading to the Munchkin

A year or so back, we started subscribing to the Nat Geo Kids magazine for our (now) 6 year-old daughter. As the thrill of finding mail bearing her name wore off, so too did her interest in the magazine. Until it got revived recently. Either the interest is genuine or it’s because she’s now started taking a magazine to school of late. Apparently, reading (in the bus) is what the cool kids do nowadays!

Talking of the stuff that she reads (or that is read to her) reminds me…

One time, I was reading to her about the Titanic. It was called the “unsinkable ship”, I told her. “Hmmmph”, came the contemptuous snort. I dismissed it as the know-it-all smugness of the kid who’d seen the movie Titanic. But then she said something that made me wonder if she knew something deeper: “Anything can be made to sink”, she announced. Exactly, kiddo, this can-sink attitude is why the Allies were able to sink the German flagship of war, the Bismarck …

Then there was this Geronimo Stilton book that had a mapping between Hieroglyphics letters and the English alphabet. C’mon, I thought, you can’t do a perfect one-to-one mapping between unrelated scripts. Thankfully she won’t notice the mapping anyway, I consoled myself. I spoke too soon. She grabbed the book, and scanned it intently. And then asked, “Why are they using the same symbol for different letters? Won’t it be confusing?”:

The repetitions I had not noticed. Then she continued, “How lucky. Their letters are designs. It would be so much fun to write like this!”. How quickly she swung from a problem in the script to the pleasure of writing in it!

The Nat Geo Kids magazine has lots of cute animal pictures (obviously), but what also catches my daughter’s eye are the speech/thought bubble jokes. What’s there, I said, I’ve done pics of you with similar callouts when you were a baby. She was amazed, “You can add thought bubbles? And write texts in them?”. Yes, I said, and showed her a few pics. She liked them. Even better, she got the jokes. And then she asked what she found even more impressive, “But how did you know what I was thinking when I was a baby?”

(Aha, I wanted to say, I have the mind reading powers of Lord Voldemort and Darth Vader combined, but that would be lost on her… until she reads Harry Potter and watches Star Wars).

And then there was an issue of the magazine that described this bear in a safari. The bear took off the cap from one of the wheels of the first jeep, then went and tried putting it onto the second jeep which was missing a cap! “But that doesn’t solve anything. Now the first jeep won’t have a cap”, she announced. Yes, m’am, we’re glad you’ve understood the concept of zero sum games, and also how electrons move in a semiconductor (I hope).

Here’s hoping that you keep reading, munchkin…