Look-say

"Look-say" is a good term to describe the way kids should learn many concepts. Point at a table (not the word "table") and tell the kid it is a table. Concepts of consciousness are also learned this way. In response to a child remembering something, you comment "oh, you remember that!" Implicitly, you are "pointing" to the mental process the child just underwent and telling him it is "remembering". As with the table, you isolate a particular element of reality and name it.

Unfortunately, the term is "taken". "Look-say" describes a faulty way of teaching children to read. A child may learn a particular word by looking at the word. Teaching phonetically means teaching the kid to read any word.

For more on phonetic/look-say in reading, see...Why Johnny Can't Read