TJ and Her Art

In the car on the way home Friday, our five-year-old granddaughter noticed some clipboards I'd salvaged from camera club and forgotten to take into the house. She immediately decided she wanted to make a book. I embraced the idea enthusiastically.

"Sure, you can use one. What else do you need?"
"A pen and some paper."
"Big pieces or little pieces?"
"Big. Three. Three is enough."

So when we got home, she went straight to the paper supply and got three sheets of paper. She set herself up at the kitchen table and proceeded to draw. After the first picture, she called me.

"Grandma. Can you come and write the words?"
"Sure. What do you want me to write?"
"An angel. Smiling at a cow. But I didn't draw the cow."

I obliged.
The next one was a slide, and even though there's a person beside it, that's all she wanted written on it. "Slide."

Then she drew stairs and a mountain.

That was followed by another angel. I was to write "The Little Angel" on it. She's been learning her letters this year, one per week, and is up to "T". She learns uppercase and lower case, practices writing them, learns what their sounds are, learns what words start with them and makes projects with some of those words - like a tiger this week. So knowing she knew all the letters in "the little angel", I suggested she could write it herself if I spelled it for her. We started with Little. All went well until she made an "A" for the "E" at the end. She knew immediately she'd goofed and looked up with a silly sort of "oops" expression.
Then she asked, "What did I write?"
"Littla," I pronounced.
"Littla," she repeated. And then, triumphantly, "That's her NAME! Littla!"
So "Littla the Little Angel" it was.

The other drawings included a robot and yet another angel - this one the mother of the angel smiling at a cow. And then we were done. The angels are roughly triangular in shape but with large scallops down the sides for the wings. They are invariably happy. Their halos look like apples with long stems - a circle perched on top of the angels' pointed heads with a line coming out of the top. I asked carefully about the lines, and she drew a circle in the air above her own head and then drew the line down to show how the halo is attached to the head. Who can argue with that?

Anyway, we read it three times that evening. She and I read through it when I finished stapling. Then she took it down and she and Papa read it together. Then it came upstairs with us and became one of our bedtime stories.