Dictionary

About once a week Molly's teacher assigns the kids a letter. They're supposed to draw or cut out magazine pictures of things starting with that letter and stick them on a half piece of paper. The teacher collects them and then they have a discussion at some point where they look at them all together.

Since the beginning Molly has been doing these almost entirely on her own, usually in the mornings before we're even out of bed. She always draws and the words are usually spelled as she sounds them out, so they take a little deciphering.

This past weekend the assignment was Q and U. When I woke up she brought in her paper and said she could think of only one Q word ... "qeschin" and drew a ? next to it.

I suggested she get out the dictionary that Beppe gave her for Christmas. Well. Now the dictionary is like a game for her. She ended up drawing a quail, a queue, a quiz and all sorts of Q things I never would have thought of.

Even so, I wasn't prepared for what she showed me on her U page when I got out of bed this morning:

She was stuck on the drawings. She told me she didn't know how to draw an umpire. I was surprised that she did seem to have an illustration for unaccountable. Turns out she had read it as "uncomfortable" and drew a person sitting on a floor. We discussed what unaccountable means and she drew a person holding a glass of milk then pouring it on the floor and smiling.

She ended up drawing a baseball for umpire, plus later something that she told me was a mask that he wears.

And then there's ultraviolet. She told me she didn't even know how to pronounce it. After my long-winded and confusing explanation that involved lots of gesturing and finger waving she settled on a drawing that I'm sure she doesn't understand.

I made her promise to tell me what her teacher's face looks like when she holds up Molly's U paper to discuss this week.