The other N

The other day, some of my kiddies were doing an alphabet dot-to-dot worksheet. Some of them knew the alphabet by heart, some looked at my alphabet chart, and others sang the ABC song under their breath. I noticed that one of my girls looked confused, so I went over and said, "Are you having a problem?" She said, "They did this wrong. The 'n' is missing." I looked at her paper and saw that she had completed the puzzle correctly up to the letter 'y'. I said, "Honey, you already did the 'n,' see?" She shook her head. "No, the other 'n' is missing." Now I was stumped. I pointed to the 'z,' thinking that maybe she was looking at it the wrong way. "Look, here's the 'z'... 'z' comes after 'y'." She shook her head again, insistently, and began to sing the alphabet song. When she got to the end, she sang, "... Q-R-S, T-U-V, W, X, Y-N-Z." She was hearing "n" instead of "and." Oh, boy.

That would actually be kinda funny, if not for the fact that this is her second year in first grade. She's making a lot of improvements, but she still has some catching up to do. She is a very auditory learner. She can't read or write very well, but she can hear letter sounds, and she can remember things that I say to her. She never bothered to look at the alphabet chart; she just went with what she heard. And apparently she heard two n's.