Those aren't your knuckles!

A while back I talked about my love of Parents As Teachers.  Part of the program is a screening every six months (birthday and half birthday months) to make sure your child is on track.  In the past they have used the Denver Screening but recently just switched to a more in depth test.

The Denver Screening was fine, but it was a tad out of date.  There were black and white sketches of animals and since Ellie was 18 months old she has said the black and white spotted dog was a cow.  Every six months Sara points to the dog and Ellie says, "That's a cow."

The next part of the test Sarah said things like, "Which animal flies?  Which animal gallops?" Then she would ask, "Which animal barks?" and Ellie would reply, "Sara, none of those animals bark." And Sara and I would giggle.

If we thought that was funny, we had no idea what was coming next.

Last week Ellie took the new standarized test for the first time.  After she had counted, sorted and stacked her blocks, skipped, jumped on one foot and drew shapes, we arrived at the last section of the test.  Body parts.  Sara and I giggled together as Madeline tried to point to her forehead, wrist, knee, elbow and ankle along with Ellie.

Then came the last part to name.  Sara said, "Show me your knuckles."

I immediately knew that Ellie didn't have a clue what that meant.  We hadn't taught her about knuckles so unless it was a random thing learned at preschool, it would be a wrong answer.  After explaining to Sara that we hadn't gone over that yet I glance over to Ellie and was shocked at what I saw.

She had the neck of her shirt pulled down and was pointing to her nickels. 

(click here if you need a refresher on what nickels are, but I'm sure you probably have it figured out)

Sara, already in on that Ellie-ism, looked at me and we laughed so hard our stomachs hurt.

"No, Ellie!  Not nickels, KNUCKLES!  KNUCKLES are where your fingers bend!  See?"

"Oh!  I thought you guys were asking to see my nickels!  I know just where those are!"

Despite that little snafu, Ellie did great on the screening.  Not to brag, but let's just say if you lined up one hundred four year olds, only 2-3 would have scored higher.  Their moms obviously did a better job enunciating the names of body parts when they were smaller.  ;)