Full circle

When Dash was three and in nursery school, his classroom began getting the kids to "sign in" every morning.

Yes, I know that sounds a bit pushy, but really, it was the lowest of low-key. They would print out a class list with the large letters of each child's name in dots, so that the children just had to find their own and try to trace over it. By the time they started kindergarden, a year and a half later for most of the class, they'd be expected to recognise and write their names - this was just the beginning of a very slow ramping up to that.

Honestly, even the following year at nursery school, signing in was absolutely all the writing they were expected to do - though of course if they wanted to do more, they could, and they did talk about the letters and have a show-and-share (bring in something starting with your assigned letter and tell the class about it) once a week. I love this school and its ethos is all about learning through play.

Anyway, every morning I'd bring three-and-a-half-year-old Dash to school, and his 14-month-old baby sister would grab a pencil and yell "Ning! Ning!" and try her best to sign in along with everyone else. "Ning" meant pen or pencil in Mabel-ese."Ning circle!" she said.

And this week Mabel, in the same classroom, with the same teachers her brother had, started signing in. Because she's a girl (maybe) and because she's six months older than he was in this class (November versus April birthday), she's already pretty good at writing her name, and tracing over the letters was no challenge. Some of the younger boys, I could see, were much closer to where Dash was at that age, just digging the pencil deeply across the line of letters in an angry-looking scribble. That's fine - it's totally age appropriate, and so long as they're learning to know how their name looks by seeing it every morning, it's a start.

But I remember thinking how lovely it would be when Mabel finally got to this stage and was allowed use the ning for its intended purpose, and here we are, and yes, it is.

Not actually signing her name right now