What's a vowel?

Last night A-One told me that I didn't need to be with him while he did his brain training. 

Given that he's needed to be kept on task all his life, I wasn't willing to leave it to him. I explained that I was blogging about his experience with brain training, so it was necessary for me to work with him on this.  He seemed to accept it.

Yesterday, while he accompanied his dad to an audio/video shop he bought Halo 4 for the X-Box.  I have no idea how late he stayed up playing it, but he did check with me this morning on the brain training time because he was feeling sleepy, and was willing enough to be woken again.

One game today was about vowels and even numbers.  He pressed on with the game but didn't do very well. 

Mum: Do you understood what the game requires?

A-One: I don't know what a vowel is.

Mum: Vowels are the letters 'A' 'E' 'I' 'O' 'U'.  Only 5 of the 26 letters of the alphabet are vowels.  Consonants have harder sounds. All words must have a vowel.  You can't have a word that is only consonants, but you can have a word that is only a vowel e.g. 'a'.

A-One: I don't understand.

I explained again, but emphasised that all he needed for the game was to recognise any of the 5 vowels. When I asked him about trying it again ...

A-One:  No!  I'm doing only 5 games a day. I'll do my 5 today and that's it!  That's all I'm ever doing!

Mum: Do you want to help your brain get better?

A-One: I will.  I don't need to do more than 5 games a day.

So he proceeded with the next game, one in which he needed to recognise faces and orders e.g. for a cafe.  When he tried to give the wrong order to a customer, he insisted that's what she ordered and tried to give it to her 3 times!

Nevertheless he gained some personal bests, one of which was speed! His face lit up briefly on seeing his score, but his overall mood seemed to match 'let's get this over with'.

After hearing Barbara Arrowsmith-Young explain how she developed her first brain exercise for herself, tomorrow I'd like to try A-One on analogue clocks as well as the online brain games. Over the years, we've learnt to give A-One notice about what's planned (and especially after his declaration of 5 games only), so I told him that tomorrow we would try something new on paper as well as the online games. No loud protests, but I guess I'll find out tomorrow.

Now to creating some clock faces ...