[olpc-help] Do 6-12 year old kids "get" tagging and searching?

[KayTi]

Steve, it sounds like you've got a strongly visual-spatial kid on your hands. Congrats, it's a fascinating way to live life (coming from a highly visual-spatial adult here, with a 6 yr old highly visual and a likely 4 yr old - she's not as obvious with it yet - visual kid too.) 

A resource you might be interested in is here:
http://www.gifteddevelopment.com/Visual_Spatial_Learner/vsl.htm
Linda Silverman in Denver is the primary researcher/author in this space that I have read, but there are others. Great stuff.

As for the seemingly meaningless strings, to a visual kid, letters/words are pictures. A trick for a visual kid who has difficulty spelling is to ask him/her to spell the word backward and then forward, using the picture that's in his/her mind already. Remind them to look at the picture, help them realize the power of their mental images of things. For them it's easier (my 4 yr old is named Anastasia and can spell her name back and forth, it's crazy!) because it's a physical picture in their head. Think about looking at a family photo. Could you name the people left to right? Right to left? no big deal, right? It's not like it's any different to start from the right, it's just convention in western culture to start from the left. 

Anyway, when a visual kid is putting what seems like random strings of letters together, they are forming a picture in his/her head. It's easy (at least for us visual folk) to recall pictures, particularly easy to recall approximations of pictures. So he probably remembers things like the approximate length of the string he entered, and it's shape (lots of down-letters like p, j, q, or up letters like k, d, f, or skinny letters like i and t and l...etc. or a pattern like puuuuuuuqqqyyyyy as compared to duuuuuuuufffddddd would look very different to a visual kid.) 

If you want a wacky example - I have a hard time remembering names, it's worse for me with male names of similar length. In my head, Jason and Brian look almost the same. Mark and Matt, no difference. Jim and Dan. Dave and Gary. The names don't have to sound a thing alike, but the similar look gets me confused. 

My visual kids are quickly adapting to the graphic icons used to indicate the different activities, including my non-reader 4 year old who can find the paint activity, launch it, and doodle to her heart's content (though I have to look more into the stylus options/configs as she'd really like to draw.) We haven't used the journal much and my son's laptop went back in on an RMA with the sticky keyboard issue, but I'll keep an eye on this and let you know more as we go. However, I know that they know things like "I did paint after I wrote a note to grandma, but before I drew in turtle art and after I played on a website" - so they can find things positionally, the chronological journal appeals to them both. 
I am guessing they do something like what I do. I visualize chronology (literally, in my head, like a timeline with pictures on it...weird, I know, but this is how it works for me.) So, chronological organizations are really comfortable for me, much more so than alpha or arbitrarily numeric orderings. I have my digital photos stored using an elaborate naming scheme that orders them rigidly by date so that I can always find my pictures that I know I took last july just after the forth but before we went on vacation on the 20th and...

Anyway, I will offer my kids the suggestion to name/tag their activities and see where that takes them. While I suspect it's a natural inclination already, they probably need to know that they can/should do that with the journal. I'm sure this is part of the teacher's role (materials I'm starting to look into as I dig deeper into the XO world.)

Enough of my random visual babble, just wanted to throw in a bit to the discussion. :)