- She can't read the instructions to "touch the purple fruit", and she may not yet know what the word purple means, but when I pointed to the word purple (which was colored purple), she immediately hit the purple plum.
- She doesn't appear to have the fine motor skills to drag and drop the pieces of fruit for the reassembly puzzle, but her hand motions make it clear that she knows what she needs to do.
- On paper, the concentration game (eight face-down cards consisting of four pairs that you can flip over two at a time) is the hardest of the games, but she's definitely got the concept of this game (if, perhaps, not the attention span needed to deal with all eight cards - or perhaps getting an adult to take 2-4 of the cards off the board for her is also part of her strategy).
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
We're visiting this week with a niece who just turned two, and my wife downloaded the top-rated toddler app for her iPad. In the game, a cartoon monkey does a somersault and makes a happy monkey noise when the player succeeds at various tasks, like touching the green fruit, re-assembling a small puzzle, etc. Most of the minigames can be solved by tapping the screen repeatedly and yelling "yay, monkey". It was only when this approach did not work that the niece actually attempts to think about the puzzle, and I found the results surprising.