It feels like ages since I blogged about Miss 4. She’s my little TV addict. Hubby used to worry about how much time she spent in front of the screen, but I assured him that it was less than he thought. She would just like to watch ABC2 (a kids’ TV channel) in the early evenings, so he would come home from work, see her in front of the idiot box, and assume that she’d been there all day. Which she hadn’t.
Plus, from what I remember of what I learned, way back when Miss 7 was a baby and I was going to a Mother’s group, the main concern with too much TV watching in kids was that they don’t develop their vocabulary as quickly as non-TV watching kids. Apparently it’s something like 6 words fewer that they learn, per every hour of TV. But that was never going to be a problem with her. She could talk the hind leg off a donkey before she was 2 and a half!
So she was always able to balance out her TV watching with talking, and drawing, coloring in, trying to write, and so on. And she, like her older sister, seems to be developing an amazing memory – for images, at least!
Just the other day, she asked me if she could watch a particular TV show. But she couldn’t really remember the name of it. So she drew the picture (below) then tried describing it, and what she remembered.
- It is on ABC2
- The main character (on the left) is ‘Bernie’
- He is happy
- His friend is angry a lot
I still couldn’t guess, so I delved further.
- Bernie is on two shows, she only wants to watch one of them
- In the show she’d seen, he was playing with a baby (this didn’t help very much!)
- One of the shows he is in, is Sesame Street
- She doesn’t want to watch Sesame Street, she wants to watch the other show.
And then the penny dropped. And I looked closer at her drawing and was very impressed… Miss 4 hadn’t watched the show in literally months, yet she had remembered the huge smile on her favourite character, the stripes on his shirt and his bigger, frizzy hair. She’d also remembered the unhappy look of the other character, his plain shirt and his shorter, sticky-up hair. And drawn them both really, very accurately, all things considered!
So… can you guess the show too?