Backwards A

Eleanor loves to write her name. She writes it on every drawing she does, and always underlines it. One thing I noticed, though, is that the letter “a” in her name has been morphing. At one point, the vertical line of her “a” shifted from the right side to the left side of the oval. Then, it started getting longer.

I told Eleanor that the “a” in her name was supposed to go the other way, and her response was “it’s okay…” She said it in a way that sounded like she was prompting me to say that it’s okay that her “a” was backwards. I didn’t though, and I said that it really does go the other way, and I drew an “a” as an example.

Eleanor took out a new sheet of paper and got to work writing her name again using the sample “a” as an example. When I checked back on her later, this is what she wrote:

She couldn’t just turn around the “a”. She was so convinced that she had it right, that she thought I must have wanted her whole name to be flipped around. I wasn’t sure what to say. I said that her whole name was backwards. She said “it’s okay…”