Missing the obvious

Sometimes you get caught unwares...you assume so much about your child's competency that they take you by surprise with something they dont understand.

A few months back I noticed how Jonathan was having to learn a different structure when he typed in a web address from the writing he was doing at school. Its pretty tricky to be seven and learning that there are always gaps between words, a capital letter at the beginning of a sentence and a full stop at the end and then discover that a url has a totally different writing convention. Jonathan has his own google homepage with all his favorite sites bookmarked or showing as RSS feeds. He finds that a lot easier than a browser bookmark index. But yesterday he was trying to find a site and wrote its name with gaps between all the words and needed reminding that we have different rules for web addresses.

The question that caught me out though was him asking for help with a site joining form. He still has difficulty getting his email address right. When I went to look at the form it was for a site he already belongs to. We talked past each other for a little while with me trying to clarify why he needed to join a second time and him trying to explain that he needed to join on this computer. I realised that he didn't understand that his membership was held on the host site's server and all he needed to do was put in his user name and password and he would be recognised whichever computer he was on!

If you think about it ... that isn't the easiest thing in the world to understand. If he wants to play one of his own games he needs to have the CD and the basics installed on each computer and each computer will save only the games he has played on that unit (we have 6 computers in our house and he plays on four of them) But if he plays a game on the Net he can go back to it from any computer and start where he left off...but then that depends on the game and how the site manages its members.

It makes you think about multiple literacies and the different complexities of the world our children are growing up in. And it is a timely reminder that our children still need adults to interpret the world for them.