Language Mess-Ups

In Hunter's phonics reader, there are a lot of drills of an abundance of words that are "decodable" - that is, words that are regularly spelled, composed of only simple consonant and short-vowel sounds.

There are a few words that kids may not be familiar with, such as mum (referring to flowers), lad when talking about a boy, quip, sill, fad, etc. One of those words is dam. I cannot tell you how many times I have had to explain to Hunter that it is ok for him to read the word dam, and that is is talking about a type of wall that controls the flow of water in a river, not a curse word. Yet even though I have explained this to him lots of times, it seems like every time he reads it in a drill he embarrassedly looks up like he's in trouble.

Another language mess-up incident comes from our Arabic picture book. One of the words we've been learning is shower (دش), pronounced doosh, which my dear son finds ever so humorous. He was walking around the house the other day saying "Doosh, doosh, doosh..."

"Why are you saying that?" I asked, knowing that, unfortunately, he has heard the word d----- bag and knows it is not a term to be used.

"It means shower, mom, remember?"

To say the least, he got an explanation as to why we would only use that word if we are speaking in Arabic and talking about showers, not just for fun.

And lastly, what made me think about writing this, was today when we were reviewing the Spanish colors. I was having Hunter repeat after me, and as we're going through the colors, we came to blue - azul (pronounced ah-SOOl)

"Ass hOL'" he says

"What?" I say, laughing (I know, I'm horrible.)

"Ass hOL'" he says again, with a totally straight face, not even looking up from the duplos he was playing with.

"Say azul." I say again, one last time, still laughing (yes, I know, it's bad).

He repeats it the same way, when I finally correct him and tell him the proper way to say it. I know it's bad, but, I couldn't help but laughing at his totally straight face, him not even realizing what he was saying, and saying it the same way so many times.

Yeah. I think my kid knows too many cuss words.

"Thine own mouth condemneth thee, and not I: yea, thine own lips testify against thee."

 Job 15:6

Hunter is 4 years, 7 months old