Smarty

After I wrote about all the cute things that the younger two were doing, Andrew blew me away later this morning. So I thought I'd write it down...you know, so I can document how dumb my other kids are when they get to be almost 6 years old.

Last night Andrew and Lily were watching Dinosaur Train, their new favorite PBS show. They are actually watching it right now as we begin the wind down to school time. Anyhow, Andrew asked Jeff and I why so many dinosaur's names ended in -saurus...like tyrannosaurus, stegosaurus, etc. We explained that sometimes parts of words have meaning, like dinosaur actually means dino-"terrible" and -saurus "lizard". So the -saurus means lizard...which makes sense at the end of those dino names...the first part probably means something in latin also.

Fast forward to this morning.

He out of the blue says, "Mom? I think that -vore means eating or food."
Me: Huh? Vore means what? Do you want oatmeal or cereal?
Andrew: No, -vore, like omnivore or carnivore. I think it means eating or food or something like that. Because all those words have to do with what food an animal eats, and it is the same in all those words.
Me: Great thinking. What do you think the beginning of the words might mean?
Andrew: Um, carn means meat? Herb sounds like cooking stuff (I interject it is a plant). I don't know about omni.
Me: Let's get out the dictionary and see if you are right.

Yesterday, in a totally separate incident, I was showing Andrew my good old-fashioned dictionary. We were looking up a word that we were curious about, and so I was showing him how each entry was set up, and how to find a word. Yah, I know, it's like a 24/7 party house over here. Anyway, this is why we knew to go reference the old dictionary. And we looked up the prefixes and suffixes and he was just about right. All on his own.

Smarty.