Right now, Nat and Selina are hanging in their room where Nat is teaching Selina to count. She is handing her dollhouse dolls and declaring, "One, Selina! One people! Two, two people!" and so on...
Selina is giggling and squealing with delight.
I am still unwell. Today makes a solid two weeks. I used to get these flu-cold-sinus-respiratory things every winter that would last pretty much all winter and then I got a bit older, gained some weight, learned to deal with my depression better, started getting lots of exercise and eating better and I stopped getting those awful things. For a few years, I was more like a normal person, with a normal immune system and when I caught a cold, I was down for a day or two, then okay again.
Then I had kids.
Bad eating habits (namely, skipping meals due to forgetting to eat in the middle of a busy day), lack of sleep (to understate the matter in the extreme) and no exercise but unhealthy lifting habits have rendered me sickly again, it would seem (though I haven't lost the weight I put on initially--a good thing). I get these hang-on-forever illnesses. And I don't have time for long illnesses. I have children!
Yesterday, I was feeling hungry, tired, sore-throated, feverish and grouchy. At one point, I looked up and Nat was doing something under the dining room table and Selina was fussing and looking somewhat victimized, but I couldn't tell exactly what was going on.
"Nat!" I snapped, crossing the room in a small fury. But, finding nothing but two kids on the floor picking up the morning's breakfast crumbs for a mid-morning snack (yuck), I stopped in my tracks and went "oh."
Nat looked at me rather seriously and said "what, Mama Shannon? You're angry?"
"No, I'm not angry, Nat," I told her.
Nat didn't believe me and insisted "but you said: " and here she made the scowlingest scowl I ever saw, wrinkling her forehead and grimacing in frustration.
I assured Nat that I indeed "said" that, but everything was fine now.
I really need to get over this stupid thing.
While bedridden, I have become addicted to LibraryThing. I started by entering just the books in the immediate bedside vicinity (well, actually just the ones I've read most recently), but today I entered my favorite cookbooks and the books on the easiest bookshelf to see from the office desktop computer. Then I took the laptop back to bed and entered tags and whatnot for all of those books.
I am also seriously considering getting the LibraryThing scanner that you plug into your computer and use to read the barcode to enter your books. It's not that hard to type in the titles but often a zillion books will come up and it would be nice to do it by ISBN without having to type in the ISBN, which would entail reading teeny numbers and typing them in slowly (if you're me) and wrong half the time (if you're me).
So! 42 books down, probably about 1500 to go! I will be busy for some time on this new little time-suck. It's a geek's dream come true. Do join me.
Oh, and Nat's first review is up!
I think Good Reads got more votes, but after a little googling for comparisons, I decided Library Thing will suit our needs best. Then I tried to open an account for myself there, only to find someone had taken the name "lilysea." Turns out I joined a long time ago but never added any books. I don't know yet how to "friend" people (or whatever) on there, but if you want to show me, I'm lilysea, and Nat is "MyNat." I just put up my most recently read books and a couple of Nat's favorite authors. But my plan is to get Nat to choose the books she wants to write about and have her dictate reviews to me. We haven't done that yet, so her library is empty so far.
The girls are just zooming along these days. I can't believe my baby is almost not a baby anymore. And Nat is such a little person lately. Toddler-no-more.
Two Sundays ago, when I went to pick up Nat from the childcare room and take her down to the church service for communion, the rector's wife (who has years' of experience with little kids and runs the children's programming at church) asked me "hey, where does Nat got to preschool?"
"At my house" I told her.
"Well it's a shame you can't have other kids come over and do preschool at your house, too!" she declared. A nice commentary on the homeschool moment, for a change. I didn't ask her what Nat did to inspire her curiosity. So now I'm dying to know.
Nat's faces are getting a bit more recognizable these days. This is a good example. Up until recently, eyes, nose, mouth and ears were all just dots somewhere inside a big circle and the hair went all the way around.
Yesterday, we were sitting in the big leather chair in the living room and I was trying to watch the news, but Nat wasn't really letting me. We started playing a game with Nat's name. I signed "N-A-T" and Nat said "N-A-T, Nat!" then I went through every __-A-T combo word in the alphabet and Nat would "read" my fingerspelling and declare the word:
"B-A-T: Bat!"
"C-A-T: Cat!"
"H-A-T: Hat!"
etc. through all the words possible except "eat" which I didn't try. I was impressed. I didn't know she could do that. Kudos to Between the Lions, because heaven knows I'm not sitting her down and making her do reading exercises.
A few days ago, she surprised me when a little advertising postcard arrived in the mail and I let her have it. (She likes to have her own mail when we go down to check.) It was from a men's store where Cole buys shirts in D.C. They were having an underwear sale. There was this super homoerotic photo of two guys in their skivvies and it said "Some like it HOT!" Nat looks at the card, points to "hot" and sounds out "h-h-h-o-o-o-t-t-t: hot!" Her first word read all by herself on her own impulse (that I know about). On a boys' underwear ad. Heh.
Selina is just motoring all over the place these days. She's started to pull up this week and gets better at it by the hour. I think she'll be walking by her first birthday in three weeks (egads!). She gets sooo proud when she sees something she wants across the room and goes over, and by golly, just gets it! She will wave it in the air and giggle triumphantly (until Nat takes it away, of course).
She still (increasingly) loves to sing. After nearly a year of trying to rock her in my arms and sing her lullabies while she lays quietly against me (like Nat loves to do) and struggling with her about it, I have figured out that what she really wants to do before bed, is sit in my lap facing me and sing along with the lullabies. Unlike certain other children of mine, who I won't name, Selina has a natural sense of pitch and can almost copy my tone when we sing. If I actually work on it and sing a scale to her slowly, letting her adjust, she can get pretty darn close. She also dances the second she hears music and her rhythm is perfect. I do think she has a real gift in the music department. Fern says Selina's father was a singer and Fern loves to dance. She named Selina for Selena because she likes the music. We still haven't got around to watching that film, but we are looking forward to it.
(Mind you I do realize that pitch can be taught and I give Nat a short "lesson" almost every day, when I ask her to copy what I'm singing. We don't tell her anything but that her singing is wonderful and music is fun, and Nat has a great sense of rhythm when she dances, too. Both my kids will be musical. Selina just seems to be born with it a bit more so than Nat.)
Selina is also starting to say "mama" and mean me. She will also copy words when I ask her to. She has said "bite" and "Nat" and "Cole" in this way, though she has yet to utter those words voluntarily. She does have enough sophistication to say them, though. Second child notwithstanding, I do think she'll be talking more or less on target.
I have decided that if we can find someone who will teach little ones, Nat will be taking Capoeira in the fall. I like that it is a combination of dance and martial arts, and that the "bouts" I have seen don't include actual contact. It's more about skillful cooperative choreography than throwing someone down. Yet, if need be, I want to girls to be able to kick some butt. I also like that it is a New World, Black Atlantic, slave tradition. Might as well throw some good geography, history and politics in there, right?
Anyone out there have any Capoeira experiences in the Chicago area to share? Do tell.
I am strapped for blogging time this month. If I had time, here's what I'd be telling you about:
1. Stuff White People Think is Funny (or not) and Why (or not). (Topic requested by reader and jewelry patron, Martha.)
2. Lazy Home-Made Baby Food Shortcuts Discovered by Shannon the Second Time Around
3. Interesting Ways in which Nat is Beginning to Express Growing Understandings of Her Adoption
4. Cute Things the Sisters Are up to These Days
5. Pics of Nat's Birthday (more than a month later!)
6. More about the Big Freelance Writing Job and Why I am Asking for Your Help and Whose Help I'd Like Next
7. A Roundup of Books I've Been Reading Lately on the Topics of Race and Homeschooling (but not both together in one book)
8. Other (specify)
Please vote for your favorite! I'll try to get them out in order of popularity within the next month.
Air kisses!
Recently a virtual discussion of preschool came up in one of my Internet hangouts and it reminded me of the preschool comments I am starting to get in face-to-face life when Nat and I are out and about.
"So, (where) does she go to school?"
It has lately occurred to me that people ask this on the heels of Nat demonstrating her fabulousness in one form or another--perhaps being fairly calm and personable in comparison to same-age peers, saying something pithy, pointing out a word she recognizes or signing a phrase in ASL (or a couple of them in exchanges with me--a particularly handy thing to have available in church during quiet moments). So I think sometimes, what people are asking is "hey, where did she learn that?"
I always feel a little weird about it because Nat is still years out from compulsory school age and it didn't occur to me that I'd be facing the "why aren't you in school?" queries until she is 5 or 6. But at least in our college town, preschool--probably high-achievement preschool--is expected and the professors chat among themselves about which ones they like and why. So the "Oh, she stays home with me" response I give tends to shut down the conversation.
I am finding that people just don't know what to say when the subject arises. Maybe they are really thrown by it. Maybe it's like I've announced that I'm from Pluto--a freaky freak in their midst when here, they thought I was a normal person like them. Maybe they have horrible ideas about home school and are practicing saying nothing if they can't say something nice.
Sometimes people go on to inquire whether I have any special skills or abilities that allow me to keep my 3-year old at home and deprive her of "school." If I mention that I used to teach preschool (which I sometimes mention for other reasons) they assume that it's okay for my child to hang out with me, since I must know what I'm doing.
I just find all of it crazy strange. She's barely three! Since when does a child's own mother need special qualifications to govern her "schooling" at age three? What kind of backwards world is this? Three!
The thing is, I may indeed put her in a preschool or play school next fall, for a half day here or there--two or three days a week--if we can find something handy and affordable, but not because she needs "school," just because I need some time to work and baby sitting is pricey and Nat is an extrovert and would probably have a lot of fun in a group of kids.
But as far as learning stuff goes, well, we've got that covered. In the virtual discussion, there was a question of what kind of academic programs various preschools offer and what people make of them and whether people feel academics are important to little kids anyway. It got me thinking about how much "academic" learning Nat gets in a natural context every day. I lean towards the notion that academics-as-separate-from-life-in-general are a weird invention anyway, and that learning is best absorbed through such contextual experience. I thought I'd brainstorm here about how Nat's daily life experiences might fit into traditional academic slots, were we somehow required to prove she's learning. I plan to do this on a daily basis (not online) next fall, when I start thinking of what we're doing at home in a more formal schoolish way. I figure if I start this now, it will give me practice for a time in the future when I am indeed required to do it for a higher authority.
Math:
I can get Nat to clean up messes by asking her "how many blocks are on the floor?" and she'll count them as she deposits them in the block basket. Or I might say, "pick up all the green blocks" then blue, red, etc. She's very good at follow-on counting, which means she can count five blocks in one corner, move across the room and pick up seven more, counting them one through 12 in spite of the hiatus between piles (rather than counting a pile of five, then a pile of seven, separately). I know this is a good learning experience for her, but mostly I do it to get my living room floor picked up.
Whenever we eat, I ask Nat to think about how many people are eating and what they will need and how many. She can count out plates for each person, then forks, napkins, etc. She's getting good at doing this by herself. Part of it means running around the house and asking whoever's here if they will be eating with us. Extrovert that she is, that's one of her favorite parts of the job.
Nat loves to sort the flatware into the drawer in its little compartments--big forks, little forks, big spoons, little spoons, etc. When she finishes, she throws up her hands in triumph and declares "You did a great job! I'm so proud of you!"
Nat got some haba stringing beads for Christmas. I got her two identical sets and sometimes I string one set then ask her to copy my pattern. She will then string some and ask me to figure out how to copy her pattern.
We do "subtraction" in relation to eating. EG: "You have five bites of pizza...hey! You ate one, now you only have four!" etc. It isn't Montessori counting beads, but it has the same effect.
Science:
Properties of liquid are a daily project around here, as with most preschoolers. We have spills and cleanups and soap bubbles and pouring from container to container etc. ad nauseum, of course. Sometimes I give Nat a variety of unbreakable kitchen items, run some water and soap into half of the sink and let her "wash dishes" while I make dinner or otherwise work in the kitchen.
Nat is still quite into eggs.
Nat's fascination with eggs began because she really liked to eat them. Then she really liked to watch me make them. Now she is learning to break them (I still have to hold her hand so she doesn't just smash them to smithereens) and stir them with milk to scramble them. When you think about it, eggs really are amazing. They come in one form, break into another and cook into another. This whole process just intrigues Nat. She likes to watch them cook. (And she likes to go count up how many people are eating them and bring me the plates to serve them!) But she also knows "baby birds come in eggs!" as she used to say. Lately she's been noticing that other animals come out of eggs too. She has several books that feature eggs hatching and various creatures coming out of them. She returns to the hatching pages over and over and them turns them to find the penguin, chicken, caterpillar, cricket, robin, lizard that hatched, and asks "where's the egg???" In other words where does the egg go when the baby hatches out? I am hoping that when the weather lets up and our CSA starts its free-range (truly free-range, grass-fed) chicken production up again, we can go visit them and she can see eggs in nests and chickens sitting on them and make more egg connections.
Reading/Language
This is perhaps our least overtly attended area, because it is implicit in everything, all the time. We obviously do a lot of book reading, but I just draw Nat's attention to words and letters and how they work together all day in a thousand ways. She does the same, herself. She has started trying to read the signs she sees when we drive around town. "B-A-N-K" she announced a couple of days ago, "Bat!" I told her that was close, but it was actually, "bank." Today, on the way home from Selina's 9-month checkup, it was "A-R-T, rat!" I corrected her on that one too. But darn, that's close again.
Just in the last week or two, she's had a literacy explosion and will "read" repeated words in her books, when I read aloud and leave the word out, and point to it. She likes to do this with "hug" or "hat" or "eat" or other small, simple words. She also likes to learn (by sight) the words in her favorite book titles and read them out to us, pointing to each word as she reads (mimicking us, of course) "The. Skin. You. Live. In." she will show us, on the cover and again on the title page. She likes to turn any instructional attitudes we've ever taken with her around on us and point to the words she knows, asking us to "try to read it" and when we do, she applauds and congratulates us heartily.
I found the entire first season of Between the Lions (30 episodes) for $60 online and ordered it. She LOVES, LOVES, LOVES it. It has, sadly, usurped her audio-visual affections from Signing Time. She will ask me if she can watch "tween the lions and make words?" I tell her she can make her own words with her own books and she often does. But I often plop her in front of the t.v. while grabbing a quick shower, or feeding and rocking and burping Selina in the other room, so she does get to watch it a lot. It has really bumped up her interest in words and reading. I don't hate it. (I do hate a couple of other "teach reading" t.v. shows for kids, and Nat was all into one I really extra hate, so I am happy to see she is all about this one now.) One bonus nice thing about Between the Lions is how Afro-centric it is. The lions are African and most of the human beings on the show are African American. But I do think the phonics and other reading pedagogy used on the show is solid and Nat is too little to think the mix of "educational" and "entertaining" is lame, so more power to her.
I don't foresee ever having to sit down and teach Nat to read. All I see is sitting down and reading, giving her books and letting her read, etc. She is very self-directed about language arts. That said, dialogues like this one occur multiple times a week in the course of life:
Nat: "Look! There's a word!"
Me: "Yes, it's a word! What does it say? It starts with G, what sound does G make?"
Nat: "g-g-g!"
etc. for the next letters or if it's a long, hard word, I'll just tell her and she'll repeat it. SO yeah, I guess I am teaching her, but not like, sitting down for reading lessons every morning at 11 or anything like that.
She is still signing quite a bit, but I am afraid we are reaching a plateau. I can't find a good ASL curriculum near us that goes beyond what we already know. I am hoping that before too long I can find a true interpreter program and take it and keep her learning and just learn it better myself. We may also be able to find a deaf or otherwise ASL-fluent baby sitter one of these days. One of Nat's current baby sitters is a future speech pathologist and has maxed out on what the university here offers in ASL, which is three semesters. She says Nat knows more. But at least she can sign along a little.
We also still hope to find a French-speaking baby sitter one of these days too. No luck in that department this semester.
Nat is practicing writing and drawing which is really more a matter of fine motor skills than of language. Now that she is less prone to eating pencils, crayons and paint, I try to give her some practice with one or more of them daily. When her skills are developed enough, we can start the drawing lessons in the book I got last year. Meanwhile, we talk about the shapes that make up images and objects and she knows and can copy a vertical line, a horizontal line, a diagonal line, a circle and a dot (which is really also a math skill). Here's a picture she drew by following my instructions exactly, to draw various colors of circles, a vertical line, a horizontal line (it's the teeny one, crossing the sort-of vertical one) and some dots:
Using simple instructions and helping her connect the lines etc., I can direct her to write letters, but she gets bored with it quickly, so I don't usually push it too far unless she asks or shows an interest in writing something specific. She's getting to that little kid drawing stage of making big circles filled with various squiggles and dots to represent faces. Mostly, I just praise her for the beauty of these attempts!
This summer I plan to start an adults' reading group in educational theory and practice with a homeschooling group I recently joined. In the fall, I plan to start Nat in some formal activities including a martial art, Suzuki violin, the drawing lessons from the book I mentioned and a bilingual baby sitter (French or ASL) at least two days a week.
Also, in the fall, I plan to make large sweeping goals like "Get Nat involved in X,Y and Z three times a week" or whatever. I will revise the sweeping goals a couple of times a year, probably. I'll do the daily journalling to see how we do at hitting those goals without thinking too much about them. That's about as unschooly as I can probably get. I don't think I'll ever sleep again if I just let go of the whole thing completely and let the education fall where it may. I'll lay there all night, every night thinking "Wait! When's the last time Nat did blah-blah? Oh my God, I'm stunting her!"
And that's where Nat goes to school--for now.
This is what I've been reading for the past couple of weeks:
What's Liberal about the Liberal Arts?: Classroom Politics and Bias in Higher Education by Michael Berube
A Christmas gift from Cole. Two thumbs up! Berube (who is not as liberal as I am, given that he calls himself "liberal" and I tend to avoid that term) takes on the rhetoric from the Fox news set that somehow, higher education has been wrongly hijacked by "liberals" who are brainwashing students (you know, unlike Fox news). Anyway, I will stack my piles of student feedback forms insisting that I, a self-described socialist pinko, give my students free reign to draw their own conclusions through free and open discussions in my classroom against any "brainwashing" claims. Berube says this, sort of, but much more cleverly and convincingly and, for the record, in beautiful prose that is a pleasure to read (contrary to another academic stereotype). If you're a teacher, this will get you all fired up to be a better one. Anyway, it has that effect on me.
The Case against Homework: How Homework is Hurting our Children and What we can do about It. by Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish
More below.
The Homeschooling Option: How to Decide When it's Right for your Family by Lisa Rivero
More below.
The Gift of Good Manners: A Parents' Guide to Raising Respectful, Kind, Considerate Children by Peggy Post and Cindy Post Senning
So far, my response to this has been "well, duh!" But I'm only up to the preschool section. Looking forward to reading about school-aged kids, preteens, teens, etc.
I had requests to talk more about both the homework book and the homeschooling book.
The homework book is a sort of watered down version of more scientific homework books (or so I gather, not having read any others). I think they are pretty much following an Alfie Kohn logic. They also give specific guidelines and suggestions for reducing your child's homework, and/or getting your school or school board to set more reasonable homework policies.
I was interested to hear that research pretty much shows almost any homework prior to high school to be almost useless as far as learning goes, and quite often very counter-productive. The rule of thumb they cite is that kids should probably not get any homework before high school, but if they do, they should get no more than 10 minutes per grade-level.
This book, along with every homeschooling book I've ever read, really got me musing on my childhood and my schooling. I never felt terrible about my schooling. I think I had a pretty good education from K-8 grade and I know I got an excellent one from 9-12 grade.
But.
I still have recurring nightmares about having to go back to high school (plaid skirt and all) and repeat Algebra. I have to remind myself when I wake up that now I have a terminal degree and truly never have to take Algebra again.
I had a great algebra teacher, I truly did. She even appreciated me for all my non-Math skills and gifts. I even think she liked me as a person. But she just couldn't teach the likes of me in a normal classroom setting. I was simply never going to get it without serious personal help. And so, when I was failing Algebra II, I asked her for extra help and she refused. She told me I was not turning in complete homework assignments, and given my failure to do my own work, she wasn't going to do extra on her end.
Her logic seemed fair at the time and I still think that according to her lights, it was fair. She was right about me in her assessment that I was more than bright enough to do well in algebra but needed to work harder than I was used to working in any other class. But she was wrong that I could pull myself up by my bootstraps or simply buckle down and get to work if I stopped my laziness.
I needed a coach.
So I took advantage of the "Math Resource Center" at school and the grad student tutor who staffed it. (Her name was Shannon and she was Hawaiian. I saw this as a Sign. I was right!) For weeks I spent hours in the resource center getting that tutor to coach me one-on-one through my homework and studying for quizzes and tests and I made straight A's on everything for the rest of the term, pulling my F up to a C+ (and the highest grade I ever got in HS math).
What does this have to do with homework?
The homework book says that 5 math problems is better than 40. If a student can get five right, she has shown adequate mastery to move on. If a student can't get five right, 35 more is going to be a miserable, overwhelming, demoralizing experience and only give the student exercise in doing it wrong.
When I read that, boy did it strike a chord. That's why I wasn't turning in my homework. I couldn't figure out the first two or three problems and continuing on for 30, 35, 40 or 50 more was just unthinkable. Impossible. I really, honestly couldn't do it after mere classroom instruction.
I have hated Math with an unrelenting passion ever since 3rd grade when the impossible homework started and it makes me so sad--especially now that I see what simple joy Nat is taking in numbers. I want not just to encourage her, but somehow identify even slightly with her joy.
But I digress. When I wasn't doing my Math homework, guess what I was doing? I was reading my way through the Penguin Classics section of my father's bookstore. And I was, often enough, getting in trouble for practicing this leisure activity when I was supposed to be doing homework.
The homework book says parents should write notes to teachers that say something like this:
"Dear Wonderful Teacher Whom our Child Adores, We know you are a professional who knows best, but after 5 math problems, it was clear to us that our child understands the math and rather than making her do 40 more, we wanted to let her get back the book she's been reading on her own this week. We believe reading is very important and hate to discourage her. Signed, supportive, respectful parents."
That blew me away. Mind you, just because I say I got in trouble for reading doesn't mean I was actually discouraged from it. My father did own a bookstore after all. It's just that reading was so taken-for-granted in our family that I came to see it on the same level as t.v. It was a fun leisure activity and anything you enjoyed that much must not be okay to do until you've finished your math homework and your chores, right? So I love the idea of telling a teacher that my kid couldn't do her homework because she was too busy reading!
The more I read about homeschooling the more I think back on how much dumb stuff I did in school and how much time was wasted--even in my good schools in my expensive education. I spent the better part of my 7th grade social studies class memorizing state and national capitals (many of which have changed numerous times since then, of course) and the order of the terms of the U.S. presidents. I got B's instead of A's in that class because I couldn't memorize facts in a void very well and did a mediocre job on the tests over this stuff.
In the homeschooling book above, Rivero gives as an example of a course of study a kid around 7th grade age might do, reading a biography of each U.S. president. And at the end of the year, if the kid can't quite recall the exact order they all came in? Who the heck cares. But she probably will be able to, given all the context she'll have gotten on history and society and politics via those biographies.
When blowing off my homework I also used to sneak off to the local art gallery with sketch materials and sit and draw statues in the corridors for hours. I used to write short stories and poems in my journals. In short, I did stuff that would pretty much qualify as homeschooling in my "spare" time while getting mediocre grades in school because I blew off busy work (and algebra until that tutor). I graduated last of the top half of my class in high school (somewhere around 160th), while my ten best friends were all in the top 15 (including the top two).
Everyone shook their heads and tsk-tsked ("everyone" meaning my hardworking good-grade-getting peers) and went off to fancy colleges while I went an hour north of home to Small Baptist U. But Small Baptist U. sent me to Oxford for a year which I wouldn't trade for an extra decade of life on this planet, so that was all for the best.
And the homeschool book points out that when a kid wants something--say, admission to a certain college--a kid will be able to do what she needs to do--including finding an algebra tutor, for example--to meet the requirements of that goal.
Thinking about all of this gets me so excited to homeschool. It gets me excited about giving my girls a chance to follow their own strongest interests, to work hard with good coaches on stuff that doesn't come as easily, to learn for myself all kinds of wonderful things as they are learning. But these books also have a healing effect on this unshakeable shame that has been sitting in my gut most of my life for not having done better by working harder in school. I feel vindicated and actually glad that I was so "lazy" that I set aside work that didn't interest me for what I can now recognize as self-directed learning in subjects that were not only more fun at the time, but have made a significant contribution to the best parts of who I am today. BAsically, I am learning that it is okay to prioritize learning what is fun to learn. Fun doesn't mean "bad for you."
I know there are great schools, wonderful teachers and kids who thrive with and in them in the world. But for my family and me, nothing seems as exciting as the infinite possibilities of homeschooling. I am planning to start a homeschool journal where I record what we do every day, starting in the fall when Nat is about three and a half. Basically, I want to make sure that we hit certain things weekly. Some will be through classes and some will be at home and some will be via "field trips." There are big changes afoot chez LilySea that make these prospects even more exciting, but I won't tell you the details of those today.
/Insert your own conclusion here. I must get to bed./
ETA: If you're looking to read up on homeschooling, I started a couple of years ago with John Holt's Teach Your Own, as recommended by Dawn and I recommend it too! I also like the Big Classical Homeschooling Book, The Well-Trained Mind.
I have a confession.
Nat is scary smart.
She will be three at the end of February. She is starting to read phonetically. Not with skill and ease and not with comprehension or consistency, but still.
Caveat: I have no interest in having a 2-year old who can read. In fact everything I've read says woe unto the early reading child and woe unto the early-reading-pushing parent. They burn out. They all catch up by age 6 or 7 anyway and earliness in reading provides no lasting benefit for later intellectual development.
But Nat is just a fan of letters (and numbers, I'd add--she can count like the dickens and is nailing about 25% of the skills in a kindergarten math curriculum book I bought--again, by my casual assessment, not because I've been "teaching" her). She is also a fan of a new Sprout show I intensely dislike because of what I consider bad music, bad animation and bad pedagogy. But it's one of those "teach-little-kids-phonics" shows and it's seems to be, er, um, teaching her phonics. You know, along with Sesame Street, Reading Between the Lions and other "educational" kids programming. Because like I said and will say again, I'm not "teaching" her to read myself.
Nat likes more age-appropriate language activities too, like pretend-reading books she has memorized (which includes "reading" her favorite memorized story out of any gosh-darned book at hand). Before nap or bed, I read to her, then she takes the book and "reads" back to me. We focus a lot on what's going on in the pictures. We focus a lot on how fun books and reading are. There is no pressure.
See how defensive I am about it? I am really defensive about it. I don't care if she doesn't read until she's ten!!!
But gee whiz, she seems to be kind of picking it up at two. And I can't help but go "wow" a little. Just a teensy bit down in my heart of hearts.
I started to realize this only in the last week or so. I didn't know she knew all the phonemes of the letters, but lo and behold, she started picking refrigerator magnets off of Donita's refrigerator at a play date and announcing "Letter T! t-t-t! Letter B! b-b-b! Letter S! ssss...." and on and on and pretty much on from A to Z. Now she will announce, "let's spell [fill in the blank]" and tell me the beginning sound, then the beginning letter of the word. She will go (with a little encouragement) right on through all the sounds of a word as I write the letters until we've spelled it together. And she can reverse this process by pointing to letters in a word, announcing each sound and "sounding out" the word.
Sometimes, she guesses a word kind of close in sound to the right one and gets it wrong. Like the label on our sink. "K-O-H-L-E-R!" she'll declare excitedly, "Cole-Mom!" Um, darn close, there, kid.
She named a stuff dog someone gave her a month ago "Kika." This was a weird mystery because she never names anything. Her babies are all called "baby" or "doll" and her animals are "elephant," "cat," "bear," etc. We told her her bedtime pal was "Baker" having named him ourselves after a woman who owns a dog-biscuit bakery gave him to her. But when someone asked her the new dog's name, "Kika!" she said with absolute certainty. Later I noticed the dog has a prominent I.D. tag around his neck that reads "Ike." I started to wonder...could "Kika" be a sort of anagram for "Ike?" Had she tried to read Ike and come up with Kika?
Maybe.
Cue Twilight Zone theme here.
So homeschooling Nat is beginning to look like it's going to consist of throwing books her way and waiting to see what will happen. Sure, I have started to say, "yep that's a big letter P, what sound does P make?" when Nat points out the public parking signs in town. Sure I follow her interest casually. But I am not about to sit my two-year old down and make her study hooked-on-phonics or whatnot.
And yet.
Wow.
I have four house guests, two of whom are under seven, so this will be brief. But wow, thanks for all the music feedback and ideas!
Here's what we have done so far, music-wise:
- I started singing to them both immediately, including singing the scale in pitch syllables (do-re-mi)
- I bought toy instruments that resemble real instruments as closely as possible. Nat has a ukelele, a toy piano with black and white keys that sound by touch (not electronic). They aren't hammering strings like a real piano--I think it's more like a xylophone in there (it's shaped like a grand piano, but toddler-size) but they do respond via percussion. I stuck clear stickers with the note names (A,B,C etc.) on the keys (there are about 2.5 octaves). I haven't spent any time teaching Nat about the keys and the note names, they are just there on the keys. Nat also has a plastic recorder that was mine as a child. I plan to get her a wooden one, but this one has real fingering at least, and I can play the scale on it (and that's it). She also has some bells to shake. She's getting bongo drums for xmas.
- We play the instruments with the ipod shuffling my 5000 songs of vastly differing genres.
- I danced with Nat and now dance with Selina. (Nat dances with us under her own power.) I actually try to either two-step or waltz (the limit of my dancing knowledge) and we count out loud as we dance much of the time. Sometimes we clap along to the rhythm while counting.
- We sing a lot, including lullabyes every night. Nat's also recently become interested in hand-clapping games and likes to try those.
That's about it. I am going to look into some of the stuff you all recommended. I don't know exactly what kind of learner Nat is yet, but so far she is pretty darned verbal and literate. But then, she's very numbery too. I am so not-numbery that I don't even know the math-speak equivalent of "literate." Nat can easily and accurately count objects up into the twenties (the developmental charts all say that she should be able to count three or four objects 4 months from now) and she has moved from letter recognition to phoneme practice and trying to sound-out words (in imitation of t.v. like Sesame Street--and don't worry, she can't really do it "right" yet, but she is very interested in pretending to).
So I think the number and letter parts of music will really get her attention. But she also loves, loves loves to dance. She imitates dancing she sees on t.v. and she's not half bad. So there's that aspect of music too.
I guess we will see what we will see. I think Nat is going to be one of those people who is quite good at a number of things. I wonder if she'll pick a particular one to be passionate about or if she'll browse among them all?
Reader Mary emailed a question I thought I'd answer here:
… Linguists have been teaching that AAE is a language separate from English, with a completely different grammatical structure.
... As a PhD in English and a mother of African American children, I wonder what your thoughts on this issue are.
I’m not a linguist, so I’m not going to quibble about the official definition of a separate language. But in my personal experience, I always say that if I understood it, it was English, because English is the only language in which I’m fluent. I’ve always just considered English to be a good deal broader than many people consider and to include multiple grammars. If these are considered separate languages by linguists then, yea! I am multi-lingual and didn’t know it.
Do you plan to expose Nat and Selina to AAE, or are they already exposed to this? Do your adult African American friends speak AAE around you or when talking among other African Americans?
Since I’m not sure what the boundaries are of some officially separate African American English, I can’t really say. I will say that various non-standard English dialects are spoken around my children on a regular basis, including African American patterns, working-class white patterns, southern white/Black (they overlap mostly) patterns, etc.
If your girls' birth families speak AAE and they remain in contact with them, how will you teach them to view this? Nat, being the language genius that she is/will be, may recognize their speech patterns as wrong and incorrect, a view commonly held by Standard English speakers.
How will you teach her about the different languages? Will you be open to Nat speaking AAE when she is in the AA community as long as she can code-switch when in a formal setting?
See, I don’t anticipate this ever being an issue. We don’t view varying ways to speak English as wrong, so it’s not likely she’d necessarily see it this way. Standard English will be her mother tongue, but she has lots of exposure to other types of language as well.
But when I was teaching English in a public school in DC, I used to deal with this quedtion every day. I wanted my students not just to know Standard English, but to know when and where to use it, without disrespecting their mother tongue versions of English. It’s not easy to teach Standard English without seeming to negatively judge other forms, but I did the very best I could.
Sometimes I used “the way I talk” as a stand-in for “standard” with my students. For example, one day I was having a discussion with a boy about whether or not it was safe for me to leave my bag in my room unattended. He insisted, “You can’t trust nobody, Miss Lady!”
I said, “you mean, you can’t trust anybody, Jose?”
“That’s right, Miss Lady, you can’t trust nobody!”
“But how would I say that, Jose?” I asked again.
“Oh!” he answered, getting it, “you can’t trust anybody!”
He knew the difference. I didn’t need to teach him the standard version. I just needed to help cultivate his awareness of when to switch forms (at school with an English teacher, for example).
When I did lessons for kids about common mistakes in beginning essay writing, I included things like mismatched number between pronouns and antecedents (eg: “someone might want their daughter to grow up to be president”). I would describe this as something you hear a lot in speech that is not the best way to write for school papers. I’d invite students to give different examples from their own lives of how different people say the same things. Then I would tell them that what most of their teachers want them to write in school, or lots of employers want to hear in a job interview is called “Standard English.” We’d talk about how people like me (Miss Lady!) talk, versus how their grandmother from the Dominican Republic talks versus how their uncle from Georgia talks, etc. etc.
I know it’s not possible to teach Standard English without raising the spectre of “correct” and “incorrect” but I never use those words when I teach it. I just talk about different ways to talk to different people in different contexts.
Another way I’d teach vocabulary for things like SATs would be to offer them three words, and ask them to give me back three words. I’d give them three “SAT” words to look up, define and use in a sentence, then I’d ask them to give me three words not found in the dictionary (or not found with their definition), but in common use among them and their peers or relatives, ask them to write their own definitions and give me a sample sentence. One example I got was “joint” used to mean “thing” or “event” (And this is how dumb I was at the time—I had a lightbulb moment of realizing what “A Spike Lee Joint” meant.)
If you study English long enough, you realize that it is constantly changing and has drastically changed from its early forms. Old and Middle English require translation skills, and can’t be read by a modern English speaker. (Believe me, I spent many miserable nights translating them during the nasty cold, dark, Hillary Term in Oxford.) Shakespeare, whose English was modern English, just like ours, wrote in a way that many people these days have trouble understanding. Spelling was not standardized until dictionaries became common in the nineteenth century and educated, upper-class men like Thomas Jefferson might well spell the same word in different ways in the same document and not be thought to have made a mistake. The same is true for rules of capitalization, punctuation and for quite a bit of grammar.
I grew up being told that “ain’t” was improper English and shouldn’t be used. That is completely untrue. “Ain’t” is a perfectly legitimate contraction for “is not” used by Elizabethan writers and speakers all the time (Shakespeare again, for example). That word, along with “yonder,” “ya’ll” and other words and expressions survived years of linguistic change in the isolated Appalachian region and later, when other places with more cultural capital had stopped using those expressions they became associated with poor, uneducated people. My southern family didn’t want their offspring speaking in that way. But it’s just good old Shakespeare’s English.
I have every hope that my daughters will be multilingual across languages as well as within English, across its forms. Whether those forms constitute separate languages is not for me to say, but I believe the more ways you can say or write something, the more ways you can think, so we will cultivate knowledge of languages and their appropriate contexts in every possible way in our family.
