3V1065.02 “I thought I saw a pussy cat” (12/22/80) Ever since the summer, Peggy has enjoyed watching afternoon cartoons on TV. Her favorite is Tom and Jerry (so much so that she calls the cartoon show by that name). The last day or so she has been driving us crazy by imitating Tweety’s common complaint, …
3V1065.01 Past two months: PUPPY DOG: an invented game/role (12/22) A quick scan of these notes shows no notice taken of something very important to Peggy: she has created a game-role for herself, the character “Puppy Dog.” This began months ago when, playing with Scurry, Peggy fastened the leash to her collar and ran about …
3V1063.02 Reciting number names: varied responses to correction (12/20/80) I drove to New Haven. Miriam and Peggy came along for the ride. On the return trip, Peggy stood behind and between the two front seats of the Saab, holding on and exclaiming amazedly at nearly everything seen. As I drove from I-91 down onto route …
3V1063.01 Hop on Pop: the right phrase; the wrong orthographic order (12/20/80) Peggy brought me this book to read and spontaneously read the title, pointing to each of three words, “Hop on Pop”… Subsequently, (again spontaneously) she read on the title page, “Hop on Pop.” This was most interesting in that she pointed to “Pop”, …
3V1058.01 Counting objects: near standard sequence with omissions (12/13/80) Miriam and Peggy went to visit Mrs. Smith. She keeps toys in her house for children she takes care of. Peggy selected a ring pyramid and Miriam (as she later tells the story) inverted the rings. Peggy began re-stacking the ring and spontaneously reciting number names: …
3V1056.01 Counting objects for herself (12/6/80) What I remember as significant about this episode was Peggy’s putting her fingers and the number names into 1-1 correspondence. Now she can “count” (as documented below) but the limits of her correspondence appears to be TWO. But that fact that she attempts correspondence at all shows a preliminary …
3V1054.01 Generalizations: “nightgowns has no pockets on them” (12/11/80) This evening Peggy came near me, “Nightgowns has no pockets on them,” she said. Looking at my shirt, she continued, “Shirts does but nightgowns never do.”
3V1049.06 Finger Counting: 1-1 correspondence, up to 2 (12/6/80) no further content.
3V1049.05 More complicated verbs: “could” used correctly () Today for the first time, I heard Peggy use the form “could” correctly. Gretchen
3V1049.04 Letters and words: “P” is no longer /peggi/ by itself (12/8/80) Peggy had me read “Letters, Sound, and Words.” When we came to the page for the initial consonant P, Peggy pointed to it and said “P is the letter in Peggy.” Gretchen
3V1049.03 Holophrastic verbs (12/6/80; see also 12/1, 11/20, 11/22) The most common use is “put” and “take”. Today I scolded Peggy about something minor. Instead of crumpling into tears, Peggy (who was standing beside my chair) merely ducked her head a bit and said “Hide!” Others [heard]: run, run away. Gretchen
3V1049.02 Put Me in the Zoo: tracing words in the title (12/6/80) Peggy has discovered this book and I have read it to her, perhaps half a dozen times at most. When I read the title, I point to each word. Today, Peggy was in my lap requesting I read. She put down the book …
3V1049.01 Finger counting: [I want fifteen childs] (12/6/80) Asked if she thought it would be nice to have a baby, Peggy held up her hand and said, “I want a baby. a boy, and a girl.” holding up a finger for each. We tried again, “Peggy, the baby will be a little boy or a …
3V1046.01 Jumping jacks: analogy (12/3/80) Playing with the fire tongs, Peggy held them vertical and opened and closed them a bit, bouncing them off the floor. “Tweezers [tongs] are doing ‘jumping jacks’.” Comment in passing: “I think bears piss in the woods.” Noted by one of the children: Peggy at her toy telephone: “Doctor, come …
3V1044.02 Position and relative names: up and down (12/1/80) Peggy comes with me when I take Scurry for an exercise walk. Going along North Madison opposite the old golf course, she moves up onto the lawns of the houses. Today she pointed out “I’m up…You’re down.” Sometimes she varies it “I’m high.” Gretchen
3V1044.01 Despair: sparseness of observation (12/1/80) Despair over how sparse and inadequate our observation has become. Neither Gretchen nor I now seems to note or later describe those behaviors we might judge to be significant. This last month is almost another hiatus in the corpus. If we don’t do better, we should close out the …
3V1043.03 Singing “nonsense” (11/30/80) Peggy overheard singing to herself. “King king kong kong” Bob interpreted this as coming from the cards [king, queen] as Robby and Miriam had been playing and sorting out a deck. Gretchen.
3V1043.02 Shooting Monsters (22/30/80) Miriam was in the basement watching King Kong on TV. Peggy came into the living room and told Robby there was a monster. He drew out his gun and undertook shooting all the monsters. Peggy was not content with this form of their game. She wheedled the gun from Robby and …
3V1043.01 Singing “offstage”: The Fox (11/30/80) I tried to get Peggy singing “The Fox went out on a chilly night” during P149 today. She refused. But this evening, alone in a chair in the living room while the rest of us were there but otherwise occupied, Peggy began reading/singing the story. She did fine at …
3V1035.01 Constructive reading: Reading pictures and her own memories (11/22/80) Peggy’s crib is an unbelievable mess. There is hardly room for her with all the animals, covers, books in it. When put to bed before she’s sleepy, she will often read silently to herself. I have heard her, in the mornings, reading aloud. It is …
3V1033.01 Holophrastic verbs: imitation of Peggy by Miriam as confirmation (11/20/80) Peggy imitates Miriam — sure enough — but the opposite is also true. Miriam has begun imitating Peggy’s single word descriptions…. single VERB descriptions. Peggy may pick up a cookie, say emphatically “eat” and pop it in her mouth. When reclaiming toys from the …
3V1029.01 Graphics as names (11/16/80) Peggy sat on the floor, a large Richard Scary book opened to the title page which was decorated with the drawing of a large moose. The words, of course, were the title of the book. Peggy read it: “That say ‘moose’.”
3V1026.01 “walrus”: Peggy’s assertion that graphic symbols name things (11/13/80) On one of the walls at the Logo lab is painted a large rhinoceros — in that blue paint which may be used as a chalk board. That drawing has many things chalked on it: one of Miriam’s “queens”, binary arithmetic, a set of matrices. …
3V1025.03 Commitment to her own knowledge: we only sleep when it’s dark (11/12/80) Peggy distinguishes between dark and not dark. She knows that we sleep when it is dark. (Or rather that it is dark when we go to bed for the night.) Of late, she has been after the dog, waking her up from …
3V1025.02 Counting on her fingers (11/12/80) The other day I saw Peggy pointing to the fingers on one hand and counting one by one as she did so, “9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16, 19” (or perhaps the last two were “19, 16”.) Gretchen
3V1025.01 85 dollars (1/12/80) For several months Peggy has been coming out at random times with odd numbers. She will look at a supermarket tag and say with a decisive air “This costs 86 dollars.” to which my usual reply is “I hope not.” Gretchen.
3V1022.02 Appetite for Reading: (in text between two notes written up on 11/12) Back in May, Peggy began to request a Tintin in her crib at night. Sometimes she “read” it, but many times she just wanted to have it there before she would lie down and go to sleep. And of course, it would …
3V1022.01 Like a birdie (2) (11/9/80) In P146 today, Peggy remarked ( ) that Daddy Long Legs could fly like a birdy… we should keep our eyes open for other uses of “like” and the specific contexts so that we can observe the development of her use of simile.
3V1015.01 Like a birdie: concrete inspiration of observation (11/2/80) Peggy came around the dining room table with a turtle bean-bag in her hand, moving it up and down, “Turtle flies like a birdy.” she said, and the turtle’s feet did flap like wings…. but when she turned it over, I saw a patch of the …
3V1013.02 Past tenses: self-correction after pause (10/29/80) Remarking on some item of food, Peggy noted there was none, “I eat (short pause) …ate it.” 11/11: “I finded it.”
3V1013.01 One to one correspondence (10/29/80) I found Peggy with the Train book, looking at a diagram of a locomotive. She was pointing to the numbers (denoting parts that were described below) and reciting random letters of the alphabet, one to each number: “B…E…K…D…” when I approached to see what she was doing, she pointed …
3V1011.01 Jumping Jacks and Counting (10/27/80) Peggy sometimes goes to gymnastics make up classes with Miriam. She has seen the girls do jumping jacks and counting them. Whenever she feels full of energy, Peggy is as likely to break into jumping jacks as any other activity. Usually Peggy counts, but with the numbers 16 and …
3V1010.03 Reading “good grief” in Peanuts book (10/26/80) Peggy asked me to read a Peanuts book to her. I did so. She was looking for instances of “Good Grief !” and would point to panels having a character with the appropriate expression and ask “Good Grief ” She would also point to the speech balloons …
3V1010.02 Singing (10/26/80) Peggy’s favorite song is “The fox went out on a chilly night.” This is her first song, (in the sense of having parts well enough known for her to begin singing). Her original version interleaved two lines, “The fox went out on a chilly night” and “town-o, town-o…(repeated a variable number of …
3V1010.01 Playing with coins: progressive discrimination (10/26/80) After P143 (where we played with many coins) Peggy found the pile of change and asked me to join her in playing with them on the floor. As we did so, Peggy separated them and said, “I’m picking the big pennies out and putting them on the floor.” …
3V1006.02 One to one correspondence: words and things (very impt)(10/22/80) Gretchen was reading to Peggy from “The Big Book of Real Trains.” At the bottom of each page is a little picture reviewing each of the cars introduced in the previous pages, each having an engine at the head. As Gretchen read and turned the …
3V1006.01 “When Mimi was my age, Christina was my age too” (10/22/80) I judge this an amazing statement for a child of Peggy’s age. Christina is a coeval of Miriam’s who rides to and from gymnastics in a car pool. Christina is of significantly slighter frame than Miriam. It is possible that Peggy imagined Christina …