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[#1]

Over the Fourth of July weekend, my wife and I had dinner out with family and friends during our trip to Bangalore, India where she is from.  We had a long table on the restaurant’s thirteenth floor balcony with a lovely view of the city.  As it happened, I sat at the end of the table, across from five-year-old Sareena, the daughter of close family friends.

“What would we talk about for the next hour or two?”  I wondered.  We started with a basic physics problem, how to safely remove the bright red cherry from the bottom of her tall glass of fresh lime soda.  After a largely non-verbal interaction, she met her goal using a spoon and plastic stir stick, only to let the cherry drop back to the bottom of the glass where she could fish it out again.  Sometimes problem solving is its own reward!

Our next conversation involved a spoon, a pen, and paper, prompted by the international symbol for “no-smoking” posted behind me.  First, I slowly printed the letters s-p-o-o-n on the paper, circled the word, and then crossed it with a single diagonal line.  Declaring “no spoon”, I banished one from our end of the table.  When she wrote “spoon ok” it returned.  Sareena quickly got the concept linking symbol-language-action, and played out variations with a water bottle, fork, and ultimately the pen.

The next topics attracted two tweens from the other end of the table, my niece, Rhea, and nephew, Vikram.  First, we drew mazes for Sareena and her younger brother Sonu to follow, and then created a rhyming contest made possible by the strong academic curriculum in Sareena’s kindergarten and our shared use of the English language.  In this game, we alternated writing rhyming words starting with “cat” and ending 17 turns later with “drat.”  Sareena’s final move, with advice from her mom, was “gnat”!

Looking back at that Sunday dinner reminds me that children are open to exploration and learning wherever they are, and often just need a little help to make the most of the opportunity.