My sweet little girl has been watching some new “Little Einstein” movies that I bought through i tunes (thanks Mom, Steve, and GG for the movie money). I’m not crazy about the name of the show but she likes them; the music is good and it incorporates famous paintings into the animation in creative ways.
Just now she was sitting in front of her computer and, based on one of the Little Einstein’s space adventures, using the paint program to draw Mars. She drew it first as a pink circle; I said, well it’s the red planet. She promptly drew a red oval and said, “there it is!” Then she added a boot underneath and a surprised round mouth along with two dots for eyes and said, “Now Mars can stomp on everything!” After that she drew a ‘smiling planet’ and then another Mars with teeth. Then, accidentally as she was trying to create a new ‘blank’ page, she turned the whole rectangular space of the document red triumphantly declaring: “Mars, it’s the square planet!”
Earlier, as I was immersed in writing the first of three essays for International Poetry Month she asked me what an eSS-Ay was. I went for simple and said that it was writing what you thought about something that you were interested in. Now she’s busily writing her father a series of ‘colourful essays’ by making overlapping text boxes each filled with different coloured letters… she says: “I think about Papa alot.”
Bonnie McClellan-Broussard 