Punctuation

Part of Charlotte’s homework for school is to read for 15 minutes every day. She could read, I could read, it doesn’t matter who is doing the reading just as long as something is being read. Sometimes I will read to her from Pippi Longstocking and she’ll cut in to read some of the words she knows, sometimes we read books for her age level and she does most of the work, and sometimes we choose something off of that app Epic Kids and read whatever is on there. There are nights she gives me a hard time and pretends like she has never seen words before in her life. Those are the nights that she gets pissed off about how different books have different fonts and they don’t look like the letters she knows so she just yells at me for the better part of 15 minutes. You’d think this kid would stop complaining about fonts at some point. It’s been like a year of her yelling at me about fonts. Enough! But then there are the nights, like last night, when she does such an amazing job on her own that I KNOW she knows how to read more than she lets on. We read a book off of Epic Kids called Cinderella Rex and when I tell you she read almost the entire thing by herself, I mean it. It took a while, but not because she was having trouble with words. It took a while because she is now hung up on punctuation like she is hung up on fonts. She would look at quotation marks and ask what they were, so I told her those are there when someone in the book is speaking. Then she looked at me and said, “but why is it the same as the one that goes on the bottom and also on the top?” And I had no idea WTF she meant, so of course she got annoyed. So she flipped through the app to show me. She meant commas and apostrophes. “But why do they all look the same? It’s like they are the same thing just in different places. How am I supposed to know WHAT THEY DO?” I told her that eventually she will just know when to use them and it will be second nature to her and she was fine with that answer but still slightly annoyed by it. After she went to bed I thought about how her brain works. That sure, she sometimes still has trouble mixing up her b’s and d’s, but she is actively thinking about the difference in quotation marks, commas, and apostrophes. And that’s got to count for something, right?