The picture above comes from an English textbook for very young children. One of my students looked at it and said, "Look! The tiger has the cheese cat's shoes." I guess it's meant to be a leopard or something, but to him the natural assumption was that it was a cat made of cheese!
Cheshire cheese, no doubt.
6 comments:
Perhaps the student was referring to Chester Cheetah of Cheetos fame. You know, the cat that says, "It's not easy being cheesy!" Just a thought.
We don't have Cheetos in Taiwan, so I doubt it. I think he thought the black spots were holes and the cat was made of Emmental.
You are going to need a new textbook very soon. In the new edition, the tiger will have been replaced by a polar bear.
It's amazing what children see before there minds sorting abilities become complex. If you don't know what a leopard is but you know 'cheese' and 'cat', it makes sense.
To my 2 year old every circle is a ball and every blimp is an American football.
This matter of cartoon cheese is interesting. It is the convention for such cheese to have holes - e.g. in Tom and Jerry); which makes a good visual shorthand for what would otherwise be merely yellow or white blocks.
But it is confusing for young children - who often don't eat real cheese (I used to eat only Dairylea - which does not taste of cheese At All); but assume cheese must have big holes.
Yet Emmental, the commonest of not many cheeses with big holes - is relatively expensive and rare. It wasn't on sale locally when I was a kid*.
So cheese of a cartoon type was something out of my experience for several years.
When I wanted my kids to eat cheese when they were young, I would laboriously makes holes in cheddar - using a plastic drinking straw; after cutting the cheese into wedge shapes.
*(Unsurprisingly we ate mostly cheddar; the village of Cheddar, where it was invented, being was only a score or so miles away.)
“Swiss cheese” (Emmental) is one of the most popular cheeses in the US, so most kids there are familiar with holey cheese.
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