Handwriting breakthrough

Turns out MADISON HAS BEEN HOLDING THE PENCIL INCORRECTLY!

Yes!

I noticed this morning that she rests her middle finger over the pencil instead of under the pencil! So heretofore the pencil was resting on her ring finger rather than the more stable middle finger.

She corrected herself and YIPPEE finds it much easier! And it is FAR neater! So I'm hoping that soon she'll be able to write faster and neater, and be much more satisfied with her own work.

Signs of Language

We started sign language classes this week. Last summer, I had gotten Ella excited about possibly starting sign language because I saw how graceful she was with her hands, how expressive, and that idea really appealed to her. Plus, with Dario's hearing problem and Tatiana's plans eventually to find *him* a class so he has that extra dimension of communication, it would be cool for him to have people he loves to converse with. At least a little.

So the class I found for Ella is for ages 3-5. It's on Tuesday night at 5:30, which is a bad time so there was only one other kid in the class, another 5-year-old. So the director invited Madison to join, too, and she did. And I did. Apparently, the moms participate in this class. Which turned out to be a good thing, because it means I can practice with the kids.

It really jazzed them, and I am amazed at how fast they have learned. The stuff really sticks. They know (really know) the numbers up to 10; the colors red, blue, pink, yellow, orange, white; the words to "No more monkeys jumping on the bed"; the words snowman, shark, water, sun, orange, heart, apple; and most of the letters of the alphabet. I found it easy, too. They got these little books "My first signs" which I have incorporated into school a few days. The class is six weeks long and I think we'll take the next level, too, and then figure out where to go from there.


This morning, the girls have pottery while I have drawing. I am finding the drawing class absolutely fascinating; it's a "Drawing in the Galleries" class, which has us copying paintings or sculpture or what have you. I know this may sound really mundane, but what makes it fascinating to me is simply that I can do it. As a kid, I really couldn't. I always considered myself a non-artist. I can't picture things in my head, I can't remember details, and I'm so much more math-and-sciencey than artsy. But just as some good verbal instructions last year sent me just sailing into acrylics painting, this instructor at the Memorial Art Gallery gave some general technique instructions to the class, and some specific comments to each of us when she saw what we were doing, and away I went. This adult brain is really useful. I'll try to scan my cow from a Sorroyo painting. I'm really proud of that cow.

Handwriting everywhere

Almost everything was handwriting today, and it worked. Who'd've thunk it, after yesterday's fiasco.

Handwriting was handwriting.
Math was handwriting.
Spelling was handwriting.
Then we did more handwriting, cursive practice
Read-aloud about caves and layers of the earth wasn't handwriting.
Google research on 10 trees wasn't handwriting.

I explained to Madison at the beginning of the day that I think she's being held back by her handwriting, so we'll be doing a lot of that for the next month to give her practice.

She was actually happy about this. Go figure.

What she liked best was the page of numbers I had her do. One number per line, for 10 lines.

I had her write as many perfect numbers as she could on each line, then at the end of the line I counted up the number of numbers, then the number of which of those were good, and did the division problem with her to get the percentage that were good.

It was incentive to do it well, and that kind of thing works with her. She wants to see those percentages high.

And she was even interested, mildly, in the division equation.

Even we who consider our children just about perfect...

...have mornings in which their 7-year-old screams, whines, pouts, and carries on. All about doing some EASY math. It was too darned EASY! Boring!!Oh me oh my, you'd think I'd been sticking her with red hot pokers:

7 x 8 = 56
8 x 7 = 56
56/8 = 7
56/7 = 8


6 x 9 = 54
Now fill in the other 3 "math relationships."
__________

__________

__________


And do this for 10 other multiplication facts, the first of which is always GIVEN!

How freakin' hard is that? Not! Ella could have done it. But Madison got the sense that we're doing so much handwriting to give her practice because she has lousy handwriting (of course I never use that word) and it's holding her back.

Do you know how long it took her? An hour and a half, and that's after I told her that I am absolutely not working with her until she just does it, and she can't be in the schoolroom if she's carrying on. Many times in and out of the room carrying on.

So handwriting, handwriting, in all its guises is what we're doing this week. And possibly next week.

It's going to be one hell of a couple of weeks. She's got to get past this handwriting block. I am Just. So. Tempted. to make her competitive with Ella about this. Because Ella has great handwriting. I won't. But gosh darn it, it's so tempting...it would work...

It's a good thing I love this.

Nonsense from Charles Murray on I.Q.

From Deb:

I posted about this in a little article I wrote on KOA today, thought you might be interested in reading it. See if you agree with me that, contrary to Murray's assertion, intelligence is more a matter of free will than what you're handed at birth.

http://rochester.kidsoutandabout.com/main-articles/BrainFoodIntelligence.html

It's happened sooner than I thought

Ella now wants piano lessons.

Actually, this is not a glad-eyed pie-in-the-sky wish, it's active. And she proved she's ready last night by taking Madison's hand-written guide to "This Land is Your Land" which she figured out on her own the other week

G A B C C
C G A B B
etc

and started playing it on her own. She then got me to write out the letter-notes to Twinkle Twinkle and has been playing it almost perfectly, with the right rhythm and hold to the notes and everything...and singing in tune along with it. (She often doesn't sing in tune, this has actually had her modulating her voice to match the piano.)

And this morning the very first thing she did was come over to the piano to practice. And she wants me to write out MORE songs. Right now.

The problem is, of course, that *I* still want piano lessons. :-) I'm paid up for the grown-up lessons until the end of the month, I have two more. I guess then she can have my slot.

Prokofiev?

Yesterday, spontaneously, Madison went to the piano and was working on something for some time, with the headphones on. Then she went upstairs to her computer and worked on something on it for another long time.

Then she printed what she had, and it turned out to be a kind of composer's note to herself to remind herself of the storyline of the musical composition she had created. Here are the notes:

Once upon a time

M

The princess is coming (repeat 3)

I am not .... she is not content

I need a prince ..... Find a prince

A party

M

A true love at last

The only thing she would reveal about it is that the M stands for music.

She told her piano teacher all about it this morning. But none of us have heard it. She always has the headphones on.

Marrying two of Adrienne's ideas

Adrienne, children's librarian extraordinaire, has given us some good suggestions about grammar, and we took her up on both of them. Several weeks ago, I got Schoolhouse Rock out of the library, and the girls loved it. Of course, we had to return it after a week so I got David to order it in our latest Amazon order.

Yesterday, I decided to take her up on her second suggestion and do Mad Libs, of which we have several lying around. No sooner did I call out for someone to give me an adjective than Ella started singing,

Adjectives are words you use to really describe things,
Handy words to carry around.

Guess Schoolhouse Rock really stuck! The new one came today and the girls are watching it.

Very successful day, yesterday.

On the Beach

David took Madison and Ella up to Lake Ontario this afternoon to do a little hiking, exploring, and beachcombing. (We adore this 45-degree winter!)

They found no shells, but got several good rocks and, apparently, saw lots of dead fish. Carp, some fairly eviscerated and disgusting. David says the girls were simultaneously appalled and fascinated.

Afterward, Madison was relating how she had seen, among the dead fish, a dead baby shark.

"Well, no," said David. "There are no sharks in Lake Ontario."

"Why?"

"Because it's fresh water, and sharks only live in salt water."

After only a short pause, she replied, "Well, I guess that's why it was dead!"

All I want is having you and music, music, music!

This week has been heavy on music. Madison started back up with piano lessons with Mrs. B, who comes to our house on Wednesday mornings. I take the slot right after hers, which I will relinquish to Ella when she begs me to do so, which will indicate she's ready to practice.

Madison is a LOT better than she was when she left off just before she turned 6. And I am far and away better than I was when I left off at the age of 10.

It's mostly, I think, that we both understand music so much better.

In the gap time, Madison grasped tune (to be able to match her voice to a note) and rhythm (well, to some extent). When she's playing something, she's now able to listen to herself play, and grasp the extent to which it matches her expectations for the melody.

In the (27-year) gap time for me, I not only learned a LOT of music theory from playing the cello (age 8-17...that sounds like a long time but really, I never got very good), but as a post-college adult I gained a lot of appreciation for different kinds of music, particularly jazz. So I can put together a whole composition much better than I used to--it parallels Madison's new grasp of the piece as a whole. I have a sense of how a piece is supposed to sound.

Plus, both hands work together now. I have a different brain now, and it enables me to use both hands at the same time. (This may be partly attributable to my ability to type fast.) It's fascinating, I can practically feel the new neural pathways forging in my brain every time I practice something difficult.

I just downloaded the piano part to Five For Fighting's song "100 Years." I love this song. It became my representative song when we moved to Virginia a year-and-a-half ago, and it's also my representative song for moving back to Rochester. One of those notice-whats-going-on-at-this-stage-in-life-because-one-day-all-you'll-have-is-your-memory songs. It's also a beautiful piano part.

One great aspect of my doing piano is that I want to practice ALL THE TIME. And that means that practicing has become something enjoyable and interesting for Madison, too. It's a new bond between us. It's no longer a chore for her, because it so obviously isn't a chore for me, as I steal over to the keyboard every chance I get. It's something that much more appealing.

Also, both girls have had the opportunity to hear me getting a LOT better at a couple of songs over the last couple of days, which is a marvelous lesson for them about the power that comes from working hard at something. Of course, it may not be totally realistic for them -- what would have taken me weeks and weeks of practice when I was 10 now takes me an hour or two.

The fact is, I'm paying attention to what I'm doing in a radically different way than I did when I was 10, and this gives me some insight to what's going on in a kid's brain. There is no way I was even close to this level of focus 27 years ago -- my brain would go in all directions. (Primarily: "How much longer do I have to practice? Am I at the half-hour mark yet?") So because my brain so clearly worked differently then, this reminds me that focus, like music, takes practice, practice, practice.

So...what has YOUR brain worked on today?


*P.S. The title of this post is from "Music, Music, Music" by Ray Charles. ("Put another nickel in...in the nickelodeon.") I had known the song, but hadn't known Ray wrote it! Another nice connection that I never would have made as a kid.

Darting ahead to fun math

This is probably terribly contrary to Saxon's recommendations, but now that we have the multiplication tables pretty much nailed, I wanted to fulfill my promise to Madison that the fun math comes after the tedious work of memorizing those tables. So we went on to fairly simple algebra:

3x + 2 = 29
6x - 3 = 15
x-squared - 5 = 20

Those kinds of equations.

She doesn't particularly like it that I make her do them out - i.e., for the first one, subtracting the 2 from both sides and then writing 3x=27, then x=9. She wants to do them in her head. David remembers having the same frustration all the way through school, but he agrees with my rationale to her: You need to know the method in order to be able to apply it to more complex problems. Also, I think it's a useful skill to be able to concretize what you're doing in your head so quickly.

And then, just over the weekend in casual conversation, we moved on to graphing X and Y and what a function is.

See, she'd made up her own function in her head, and was busy applying it all the time. So we decided to show her what it looks like in a graph. Just casually, over the lunch table. This is what happens in a mathematician's house.

Madison's Function:

Take your favorite 2-digit number. To find your SECOND-favorite two digit number, here is the method: Take the two digits and add them together. Then subtract that result from your favorite number (unless your favorite is smaller, then subtract the favorite from that result), and add those together with the original number. That's your second favorite number.

David graphed it on Excel and it looks like this:


While he was working on the function, I gave her a basic introduction to graphing X and Y points, using the simple kinds of equations that she's been working on, but substituting Y for the answer:

3x + 2 = y

I first showed her what an X,Y coordinate was, then started at x=0 and started generating Y results. I told her in passing what a Y-intercept is. After four or so answers were graphed, she saw that it made a line, and was equally fascinated that you can simply extend the line with a ruler and you'll get the answers for all other values of X.

Then, she had enough background knowledge to be able to understand in general what the graph of her own function was all about.

I know it's morning, but...

I just went to wake up Madison, who loves to sleep in. But it's a school day!

Still 2/3 asleep, she muttered as she was turning back over:

"I know it's morning. But I feel like a carousel horse. It's like there is a pole through me and I can't go anywhere unless the carousel moves me there."