How Learning Happens in an Unschooled Family, #583

Yesterday, my daughter was watching the movie The Parent Trap, for what seemed like the eighty-thousandth time (we had it checked out from the library this month). But I could hear that she kept pausing and rewinding and watching the same scene multiple times over and over. Sometimes it would just be a few words from the movie I'd heard repeated and repeated.

When she came downstairs, I asked her what she was doing. "Oh, I figured out that I could change the languages. So I've been watching parts in English and then in French, so I can teach myself French. Now I know that "thank you" is "merci" and that "dog" is "chien" and stuff like that. Can you teach me some more French?"

So I pulled out my worn college edition English-French dictionary and translated whichever phrases she threw out, to the best of my ability.

It's always so fun to see that even when it looks like they are doing something that many people would deem "meaningless" (watching bit of a movie over and over), it always has meaning for them.