Amy can spell!

[pne]

A little while ago, I was playing around with the Fisher-Price schoolhouse and spelling some words.

Amy asked me to write horse, because she was a horse, so I put the letters H O R S E on the roof of the school.

Then she asked me to write monkey, because I was supposed to be a monkey.

I asked her, “What letter does mmmmmmmonkey start with?” and she replied, “With a M!”

I was very surprised; as far as I can remember, that was the first time she guessed how to spell a word she hadn't seen written before.

When it worked, I would give her clues in the past, such as “ddddddog starts with a dddddee” or “bbbbbaby starts with a bbbbbee”, to show that at least some letters have regular sound-to-symbol correspondences (even in English :D), but this was the first time she showed that she had even taken notice of those hints: by applying the knowledge to the spelling of an unknown word!

I was well chuffed.

---

In unrelated news, Stella’s computer was running a Norton Security scan just now. I asked her where she got that from and she said that it installed with something she got from the Internet yesterday.

I suppose it’s better than some keyboard Trojan, but still… I’m prejudiced against Norton and would rather not buy it, and having it appear “by itself” seems rather suspicious. Especially since we already have anti-virus software on our computers.

Comments

[ifeedformula.livejournal.com]

Don't know if you want to spend the $$$ on Shipping and all that, but LeapFrog makes a wonderful magnetic alphabet with a talking thingie. All the letters fit into this doofingie and when you press the letter it says "*Letter* says *sound* and letter says sound, every letter makes a sound and letter says sound!".

James LOVED it.
Until he lost all the letters under the fridge.

[nik-w.livejournal.com]

Norton = Evil! Remove it at once!:D

[pne.livejournal.com]

That's pretty much what I thought, too.

And the uninstall routine claimed to have removed it, and it doesn't appear in the list of installed programs any more, so let's hope that did get rid of it.

[noidd.livejournal.com]

You're making the assumption that it isn't a trojaned or malwared version.

Just a few days ago I did a malware analysis on a trojaned version of symantec antivirus.