Familial relationships seem to have finally sunk in. Elena can now pretty accurately identify how people in her family are related to each other ("Your father is my grandfather." "Your brother is my uncle."). This is interesting because it demonstrates some of the fading of the egocentrism that goes with this (Piaget) stage of development. Strong egocentrism orients everything to the self ("Who is that woman?" "My mama." "Is she also Papa's wife?" "NO! She is MY MAMA!"). Along with this, as one would expect, we are seeing the development of theory of mind, though this is far from complete in her. No examples come readily to mind right now, but I do remember noting them.

Part of me also wants to note her understanding of familial relationships because I think there is buried somewhere a desire in me to prove (to myself?) that she's learning things at home that she would be learning if she were in school. But I actually have very little idea of what kids learn in the early school years. I'm confident that things like language, math, and geography are covered, but lately it's occurred to me that were Elena in a more traditional school, it might also cover things like learning the seasons of the year, making a family tree, and maybe even stringing a necklace (which she learned to do recently, much to her delight).

Even though my stated philosophy is to not worry much about what she's learning because she's naturally driven to learn and because if left uninhibited and provided with a rich atmosphere, she'll pick up on what she needs to, there's still a part of me that wonders how what she gets here at home compares to what she would be getting elsewhere. More out of curiosity than any sense of doubt that we're doing the right thing by educating her here.

And because I know that once we reach school age, we'll have to be "proving" regularly to the state that she's learning at home what she'd learn at school. So I think that's the source of this desire to practice extracting out of the million things she does during the day some of the things that might be considered "school activities."