Gills

Last week I took Lee back to the DeCordova. On the drive over, we started talking about remembering things, and I brought up the mnemonic that Bridges quite often uses to remember a list of things. It goes like this: one is a bun, two is a shoe, three is a tree, etc... For each number you visual whatever you are trying to remember in relation to the rhyme. For instance, if you want to remember to buy milk, butter, and eggs, you think of a picture relating milk to a bun, butter to a shoe, and eggs to a tree. Then when you want to remember it, you just have to bring up the picture again.

We decided that Lee would try to remember her ten favorite sculptures that she saw. So as we went around, she'd decide whether or not a particular sculpture would go on the list, and then she'd have to come up with a picture. It worked really well, and she remembered nearly all of them even after we got home. She made a collage by cutting out the pictures of her favorites from the brochure.

One of her favorites was "Pine Sharks." It seems a bit silly now, but at the time I wasn't one hundred percent sure they were sharks (this was before I read the title of the work). I thought that possibly they were dolphins, since I'm never quite sure how their dorsal fins are different. Lee kept assuring me they were sharks.

"But how do you know?" I finally asked her.

"Because they have gills, Mommy," she said. And she was right.

A ha, we seem to have reached the point where she knows more about certain things than I do. It's wonderful!