We recently upped the ante on our nightly single sight word flashcard routine.
After recognizing the word on the card before him the boy has to use that word in a sentence. At five and three quarters old (his description) the words these days are short and typically monosyllabic. We’re giving him things like BROWN and CAME and FUNNY and DOWN to read to us between bites during dinner. Sometimes his sentences turn into paragraphs that take us far from the given word and down a long stream of thoughts. But in the end he finds a way to tidy things up and use the word on the card before him. Does he begin with a theme or does he simply ramble his way through a thought until he finds us nearing the end of our attention span and then clean up the loose ends with the given word?
His word was “DOWN”.
“Um, after dinner and after I finish my words and my food and my milk and my applesauce and after I wash my hands and clean up and put my plate in the sink and everything then will you please get my Halloween candy so I can have a nice piece because I was good and did everything I was supposed to and when you do get the candy you will have to get my Halloween bag from on top of the refrigerator and you will have to get it down.”
My guess is regardless of the word getting candy was the objective.
And if getting candy was his goal then in his mind all he needed to do was turn any word we gave him into a story about how that candy was going to get into his hands.
Perhaps he’s been studying the presidential candidates and learning from the way in which they turn any question into a platform to spin their objective.
In the end they all just want candy.