She Speaks English!

Today when we picked up the kids from school, Lee Anna's teacher was just raving about Lee Anna's test results. (Click on the picture of the test to make it big enough to read.) Since this is an "American" day care, they work every day on the kids' English vocabulary. Our two are the only American kids there, and the other parents really want their kids to get a good start in English, the international trade language of the world. Apparently, little Lee Anna speaks English almost like a native speaker! We spent about 10 minutes going over this test, with the teacher asking us if we've been working on these words with Lee Anna. "Did you teach her 'broccoli?'" "Did you work on 'plate and fork?'" "Did you teach her 'basketball' and 'baseball'?" No, we didn't sit down and work on them, but there's a good chance she heard about some ball games spending three years in our house. Now, Lee Anna's a sharp little girl, and I'm proud that she did well on her test, but I'm not sure it's all that amazing that this little American girl recognized a tree and an apple!!

That being said, there are some words on this test that we are pretty sure she has not heard in our home--like orangutan (we usually just stick with "monkey"), courgette (apparently it's something you eat since it's in the vegetable list), and papaya (I just can't think of a time when we would have talked about papayas). And I'm not sure I could have distinguished between all those birds and flowers! So we're glad to know she's enhancing her English vocabulary at school, too, although we tried to tell them we'd rather have her take tests like this in Arabic!