Yanga

When N was really little, I made an alphabet border for her room out of construction paper, and every night we’d lie in her bed and I’d point to the letters one by one, saying them aloud. It was amazing how quickly she started recognizing them. As pictures, at first, and then as pieces of words. There are so many small steps into reading – I remember being thrilled when I realized she could recognize her favourite books by their spines. She wasn’t reading in the traditional sense, but it was a start just to make those connections — to see the whole title as an image she understood. When she was about three, my husband made one of his N movies, which we call Yanga, and it perfectly captures a child’s early discoveries of how letters turn into words.