Ruby has a placemat with a world map on it, and after every meal is over, she pushes aside her dishes and says, “let’s talk about countries!” As a map lover, I can’t resist this entreaty. She started by pointing at the very largest countries and asking me what they were called. Soon she was also interested in medium-sized countries as well, and I realized she now knows a LOT of countries’ names, so I made a list.<\/p>\n
When I point at the following countries, she can name them (these are the ones she knows best):\u00a0 Russia, Madagascar, Australia, Mongolia, South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, Greenland, Canada, United States, Antarctica, China, Mexico, Bolivia, France, Norway, <\/strong>Papua New Guinea<\/strong>.<\/p>\n When I ask her to point to these countries, she can (these are the ones she’s learned more recently): India, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Finland<\/strong>.<\/p>\n That makes 21 countries! There are other countries she’s just now learning where she knows the name but can’t reliably find them on the map (England, Germany, New Zealand, Singapore).<\/p>\n I swear I’m not pushing this on her; she’s as naturally interested in maps as I am.\u00a0 And I’ll add that she can identify most of these countries on other maps that have different colors. I’m amazed. Is this normal?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ruby has a placemat with a world map on it, and after every meal is over, she pushes aside her dishes and says, “let’s talk about countries!” As a map lover, I can’t resist this entreaty. She started by pointing at the very largest countries and asking me what they were called. Soon she was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-learning","category-personality"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mynameisruby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mynameisruby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mynameisruby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mynameisruby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mynameisruby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mynameisruby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mynameisruby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mynameisruby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mynameisruby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}