Playing Pretend - and insight into Madison's character

From Deb:

Confession: I don't like to "play pretend" with my girls, except in two circumstances, in which I love playing pretend.

I don't like to play with them with puppets, or dollhouse people, or Barbies, or Polly Pocket, or play a fantasy game in which we're all superheroines or kids lost in the woods or queens and princesses.

I'm actually, in theory, a big proponent of playing these kinds of games with kids. I think it gives the parent a chance to model great behavior and solutions in a fantasy context...you don't have to lecture about what the right thing is to do in a certain situation, you model it in a fantasy game that gives the lesson without the preaching.

I LOVED to play Pretend as a child. My sister and I, for some reason, would pretend we were ducks in a royal family. We could make duck faces with our lips, and if I remember right her name was "Duckie" and mine was "Marsha" (?!?). I have vivid memories of us having climbed up the sycamore tree in my grandparents' back yard and saying, "Let's 'tend that Duckie and Marshy were trying to figure out why Prince Drake from the other kingdom gave one of them a necklace."

I cannot for the life of me figure out why I don't like to do this now. It's as if my mind goes blank and I can't think of anything to say, especially since I have to try hard not to take command of the situation and direct the role play myself. And I find myself bored and oddly embarrassed. Weird, huh?

Maybe I'm just LAZY.

But there are two pretend games that I love to play, mostly because they're played in bed (giving validation to my laziness idea): Mommy birdie and baby birdies, and Mommy kitty (or owner) and baby kitties. The action in each game is exactly the same each time:

For Mommy Birdie and Baby Birdies, the girls get under the covers into "eggs" and crowd close to me.

"Here I am, a mommy bird sitting on her eggs," I say. "Eggs are fine, but what I can't wait for is for my baby birds to hatch. I can't wait to be a mommy bird. I've been sitting on these eggs for so many days...35 days in all...and soon, very very soon, I think they will hatch."

"Cold egg! Cold egg!" squeaks one of the eggs. I snuggle them closer to me.

"Oh! Do I hear something?" I say.

"Peep, peep!" comes from one of the eggs, which starts to wiggle.

"They're hatching! They're hatching! Oh, baby birdie, welcome to the world! I'm your mommy..."

And then I proceed to get them food and teach them how to fly. Sometimes there is a monster or predator and then I protect the birdies, becoming aggressive at whatever the thing is, squawking and making a fuss so that it goes away.

Lately, they have been wanting to be kitties that have been left on my doorstep (my bed) in a package, usually at bedtime. I wait outside the room until they are ready.

"Oh. What's this? A package! What's a package doing here? I don't remember ordering anything. Hey, it has my name on it! I guess it must be for me. Well, I guess I'd better open it..."

"Oh my goodness! It's two little kitties! They're so young that their eyes are just barely open."

The girls snuggle up against me and mew and purr.

"Oh! I think they like me! Little kitties, would you like some nice milk?"

They nod and mew some more. I go get sippies of milk, warm for Ella, cold for Madison. Then we snuggle in bed and read.

Lately, there has been a variation of this at Madison's instigation: She warns me before the game that she's going to be a very shy and scared kitty who will have to be won over with some extra attention. So as soon as I open the package, she bolts, mewing in fear. She wants me basically to chase her, pick her up, reassure her as she fights me, stroke her, talk to her gently, kiss her, and overall calm her down.

We play these games over and over. The kitty game has been dominant lately. Madison is 7, and we have been playing Baby Birdies since she was just 2. These games show no sign of going away.

The key here, I think, is that she fights me but wants me to persist anyway in calming her down. I really think that we can take this as validation of something I have long suspected: When Madison tries to fight us and run away from us when she is upset, she really wants us to pursue her and take her in our arms and soothe her, no matter that she protests so vigorously.

For the Rest of Their Lives

Mateo is the 7-year-old boy across the street who is great friends with Madison and Ella, particularly Madison. I thought it would be nice to have him come here after school rather than have him go to his after-school care as usual, for the next couple of weeks until we move, so that the kids have as much time together as possible. So the bus dropped him off in front of our house after school.

And what do you think the boy wanted to do? School! That is, home school. He wanted me to teach him math, math that his class isn't learning yet. And handwriting, too, though we never got to the handwriting part.

I taught him multiple-digit subtraction. He got the concept right away. Because in his class they're learning to put the commas in the right place when naming numbers, so that they can read the units, tens, thousands, millions, billions, and trillions properly, I decided to combine the subtraction with that. I took him, to his intense satisfaction, into the BILLIONS -- he was subtracting 145,420,334,541 from 368,584,865,972. He thought this was way cool.

Then he wanted to learn borrowing. He thought that was really hard, but he wants me to teach him the same thing over and over every day until we leave, so he gets it.

Then he wanted me to teach him multiplication, because he's been hearing Madison say she's been doing it. Fortunately, he already knows how to count by 2's, 3's, 4's, and 5's, so he at least got the concept.

He wanted to work for well over an hour. It was intensely satisfying to me.

His dad had found out that he had off school next Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving. I had offered to have him and his sister spend that day here if indeed they had off. So I gave Mateo the good news this afternoon.

He counted on his fingers. "That's 1-2-3-4-5 days that I have off. Great." Then a thought struck him. "Hey! No fair! Madison and Ella have off...like...for the rest of their lives."

Birthday of the Day: Paul Simon

Paul Simon is 65 today.

65!

It's just not possible that Paul Simon is 65. Heck, it's not even possible that he's 55.

(Then again, is it possible that I'm 37?)

This one was an easy birthday for the girls to remember, as I sing his Kathy's Song to them every night before bed, and we have a Muppets video that he's on. They both got several nickels tonight, I think three apiece (we "do the birthday" at breakfast and then they get 5 cents for every fact they remember at dinner). They were happy that they got to watch the Muppets as part of school.


Actually, they did a great job yesterday of remembering that it was Rodin's birthday, and details about who Rodin was and what he did. It didn't hurt that his Eternal Spring is my favorite sculpture and that David had gotten me a small replica of it for Christmas last year, and I let it decorate the breakfast table. We'll probably visit the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia this coming year when we visit Los Cubanos.

Ella and listening comprehension

Up until recently, Ella, who just turned 5-and-a-half, has been mostly uninterested in listening to chapter books. It is as though (and I'm really saying "as though," not that this is definitely the case) she wasn't able to form the images in her mind that the words should evoke. I also say "as though" because at a much earlier age than 5 1/2, Madison was clearly doing exactly that--seeing the images vividly in her mind. It has been standard for the past year or so, when I read Madison her book at bedtime, Ella tunes out and looks at a picture book.

Well, recently, with both the Boxcar Children and the Little House books, which I've been reading out loud, Ella has been tuning IN. It's been a pleasure to watch her start to discover listening.

One manifestation of this is that she often breaks in suddenly with "WHY?" about something that has just been said, when to the rest of us it is obvious that the reason is about to follow in the next sentence. As in:

"All of a sudden, Benny shouted excitedly."

"Why, Mommy?"
Instead of answering, I continue,

"He had just discovered the very first clue."

To clarify: She doesn't ask "Why" about the larger picture, as in something like, "Why, when the kids were looking for the lost Indian village, did they not like the television producer?" No, the "Why" is extremely localized, relevant only to my last sentence.

I'm sure this will change soon, but it's fascinating to see, because it's like a little window into her consciousness.

Revamping math yet again

From Deb:

Madison is almost finished with the multiplication tables. I took Laura's suggestion to take a break from Saxon, so instead I have on my own been helping her take the math she's been learning a little farther.

We have two parts to math each day: The first part, she has on her own to learn her one or two multiplication equations by whatever method she chooses. Then, she also does a section with me.

I've been writing 2-digit by 1-digit multiplication problems on the big white board, 18 problems per day. Today I mixed them up with multi-digit addition problems just to see "if I can trick her." At first, I just sat her in front of the white board to have her do them alone, and that worked only semi-ok. She had a lot of trouble maintaining focus. But then, this week, I got the idea to *time* how long it takes her to do each problem, and that really works a charm to get her focused. As she's gazing at the problem, I count down the seconds, saying, "5-4-3-2-1-go" and then she does the problem. She tries as hard as she can to figure out what's involved in the problem as I'm doing the countdown, to try to impress me with how fast she can do it. She thinks she's cheating. Ha!

A little bit of minutiae about this -- she was having trouble remembering, when doing the multi-digit multiplication, which digit to "put down" and which digit to carry. Then I showed her that she can remember this by just making sure that the number she's working with reads correctly left-to-right, even though it's broken up between the one that is "put down" and the one that is carried. So I noticed today that she's taken to writing the number that's carried, first (the tens digit) and putting down the units digit second. I've always done it in the reverse order, but in this case there is no conceptual reason for her not to do it this way, and it seems to work for her.

I will admit that a part of me wishes I didn't have to resort to these tricks and manipulation, and then the other part of me slaps the first part of me upside the head and tells it to shut up, that so much of parenting young children is finding clever ways to get them to want to do tedious stuff that ultimately they'll do by habit.

Speaking of tricks, the two checklists I mentioned last week that I'd downloaded from ChartJungle.com are still magic, total magic. I completely attribute all of the schoolwork that the girls accomplished this week to these charts. I think the magic consists in it seeming less to them that I'm arbitrarily selecting stuff they should do than that there is a objective plan for their individual education. Removing it a step or two from Mom really has done the trick, I think, and it's easy for them to see where the end will be each day. We stick a tiny sticker in the relevant column each time they complete a subject, and they have loved seeing the weekly chart fill up with stickers. Madison's subjects are

Multiplication
Other math
Handwriting
Spelling
Logic
Philosophy/History
Science
Economics
Reading out loud
Pleasure reading
Exercise
Cooking
Drama (class)
Fine motor skills (crafts)
Cleaning/beautification
Story writing (The Frontier Team book)
Music (piano)

Of course, we don't do every subject every day, but every day we do multiplication tables, other math, handwriting, and spelling. She does piano every day, too, on her own initiative, which is really encouraging for when we move back to Rochester and actually start her back on lessons. They really like the unit we're doing on American Indians, too, so we have been doing history every day as well.

Ella's subject list is smaller:

Reading
Math
Handwriting
Logic
Philosophy/History
Science
Exercise
Cooking
Fine motor skills (crafts)
Cleaning/beautification
Story writing (she dictates to me)
Drama (class)

Does Ella have perspective, or does she just not care?

The worst thing didn't happen today, but the second-worst thing did: Madison got into the play The Little Mermaid from the Missoula Children's Theatre, but Ella didn't.

However, Madison and I were far more crushed than Ella was. Ella was a little disappointed, but she wasn't upset. No tears or anything, far from it, although I don't think Madison and I were far from tears. I had to do a little work to pull Madison away from her guilt over the whole thing. But Ella just seems to have this attitude that she'll do things in her own time, just like Madison, that being in the play was not the end-all and be-all of her existence, she's ok just to watch it. On the other hand, if Madison hadn't gotten in (especially if Ella had) she would be crushed--this is the outcome I most feared. But with Ella, it just seemed to be water off a duck's back. She had exactly the "right" attitude, but one wouldn't normally expect that from a 5-year-old.

Sometimes I rejoice in how easy this child is, sometimes I worry about it. What if Ella never develops a passion for ANYTHING? But then I remind myself she loves to do many things -- dancing, and playing dress-up princesses, for example, but especially dancing -- and the fact that not everything is a swaying to and fro of passion really makes her life just that much easier. In fact, it's often easier for her to learn academic stuff because there's no emotions to get in the way as there is for Madison. Ella has absolutely no fear of failure, she does what she can, and doesn't much mind if she fails. She's not competitive with Madison, she knows she's younger so things come later. She's cool about that. She's the most laid-back kid I know, except if Madison (or I) push her too far--then, she has a short fretting session. And, let's face it, she still has a passion for me. She's wonderfully snuggly and loves to experience things with all her senses, especially touch. Maybe it was the two-and-a-half years of breastfeeding.

I was so afraid that one kid wouldn't get in, and that the other would have to learn the extremely hard lesson of how to be gracious about it. But somehow Ella is just naturally gracious. I almost can't believe it.

This is a fantastic lesson for Madison. She sees how calmly Ella is reacting to not getting chosen, and she'll remember this well. Because, as I reminded them, if they like to do plays, there will be plenty of times where Ella will be picked and Madison won't. (Although the criteria for getting selected for this play were, I believe, the following: 1) that they can follow directions, 2) that they are confident, 3) that they are smiley, 4) that they have a bit of presence, and 5) they are loud. Ella has 1, 2, and 3 for sure, but can't compare with Madison on 4 and 5. She still has that somewhat-quiet baby voice, and I think that's what did her in.)

The week after we get back to Rochester, the MCT will actually be up in Rochester, doing Robin Hood, the same production they did last year here when Madison got in. I had told the girls that they could try out up there, too...but frankly, I think that I'm not going to have them audition. One reason is that the fee for acting in that production is *seven times* what it is down here, and it just doesn't seem worth it. Add to that the fact that the competition is MUCH greater up there just because of the sheer numbers, which would mean that almost certainly Ella wouldn't get in. And it seems just not worth the $ to have Madison just be in it, just to have a repeat of last year's experience. No, I think we'll wait until next year.

Julia Sweeney

This afternoon, when I was cleaning out the craft closet and Madison was doing an art project with some newly-discovered supplies from the back of said closet, we had on Terri Gross's Fresh Air on NPR. She was interviewing Julia Sweeney, the comedienne of "Pat" fame from SNL.

Turns out Julia is an atheist, and she has just released a new CD called Letting Go of God, an audio CD of her stand-up show of the same name.

Terri was interviewing her about the process of evolving from a Catholic to a Buddhist to an atheist, and Madison was absolutely entranced. Fascinated. They played a clip from the CD in which Julia describes what she did when presented with the argument that "only God could have created an eye, because it is so complex." What did Sweeney do? She read science. She talked about her findings, in a unique Julia-Sweeney humorous kind of way. Turns out that if God created the human eye, he did a really bad job -- squid and octopus, which evolved their eye separately from the human eye, have a lot better of an apparatus, there.

When Madison heard that there is a CD for sale, she insisted we find it on the internet. We found JuliaSweeney.com and then found a place where we could listen to a few more clips from the CD. I thought that she would like the clip "There is no Santa Claus" best, because it describes an experience that Sweeney had on her seventh birthday (September 10!). But no, she liked the "eye" clip ("Intelligent Design") the best.

She wanted the CD so badly that she said she'd spend her own money on it; she has almost exactly the amount necessary. But I said I'd buy it for her, how could I not, with my little philosopher looking at me eagerly like that. She says we (David and I) can listen to it, but she wants to keep it in her room so that she can listen to it on her CD-alarm clock that Aunt Anne gave her for her birthday, September 10. And if we find any more CDs like that, she wants them, too.

When it comes, I will listen to it before I give it to her; in the clips we heard there was one (but only one!) inconveniently-worded phrase ("And do you know what I discovered? That Deepak Chopra is full of shit!")

"Full of WHAT? What did she say?" Madison asked. I had to explain that it is an impolite word for "poop." I'm kind of pleased, frankly, that this is her first encounter with the word, it shows we've done a good job of exposing her to people who don't use foul language. Anyway, I will make sure that the other bits of the CD don't contain more of the same before I hand it over.

Magic revisited

Well, it's like night (yesterday) and day (today).

The morning isn't over yet, but I'm still going to check it off as a plus. And I say this because the thing that worked the magic for the girls this morning was these two free printable lists from ChartJungle.com, thanks to this entry on Dy's blog:

Ready for school checklist

Learning checklist

The kids have just dived right in enthusiastically, checking off accomplishments left and right. We even baked our bread this morning -- well, Ella and I baked Teddy Bear Bread. Madison hovered with good grace, despite having lost bread-baking due to her behavior yesterday. They each get to rip off a hunk of warm, delicious bread after checking "done" on each subject on the learning checklist. It's working.

Peace and contentment reigns. Contrary to my post from the other day, maybe there is such a thing as magic.

Home schooling day from Hell

It must have been the sugar from Halloween. Or maybe the kids are coming down with something.

Whatever it was, Thursday was the home schooling day from Hell. Madison was beside herself with angst over everything. I made what seems to have been a mistake, letting her read for an hour and a half (finishing up Maida's Little House) first thing in the morning. Skipping from that right to breakfast, then to math, was a disaster. The worst always happens when I decide that enough is enough, I'm not going to LET her continue in the subject that's causing her grief that day, then we have a 20-minute tantrum because I'm not letting her do math. Good grief.

Even Handwriting Without Tears turned on the waterworks.

The only thing that didn't cause tears today was, oddly, her SRA cards that we use for reading/logic. I often get outright rebellion over those, though they're quite easy for her.

The worst thing for Madison is that I told her that if she got finished with her work by noon, she could bake bread in the afternoon after we got back from the gym, as long as there were no more tantrums. She finished the SRA work in record time. Then, so help me, as we *pull into the driveway* from gym/errands, the child has a squawking fit over something I can't even remember, and she lost bread baking. Good grief.

It may also be that we had a nice long weekend with David last weekend, and she's experiencing the loss of his being back in Rochester.

Proof that even those of us who have brilliant children who get on great rolls sometimes, have days of total failure. :-)

Well, maybe not total failure. We're studying American Indians during the month of November, and I'm reading from a nice series of kids books I got from the Southwest Indian Foundation almost a decade ago. The kids love to be read to during lunch, and today we did myths from the Navajos and the Eskimos. They sure love legends. There's even an Atlas parallel figure in the Eskimo legend we read, so it was a nice connection to the Greeks.

Ella reading progress

From Deb:

Watching Ella learn to read may be one of the most fascinating developmental milestones I've ever watched take place. Because she is on the younger end of kids who are doing this, the process is probably a little slower for her than for those who are a little older. There haven't yet been too many "magic" points at which she has suddenly switched from being a non-reader to being a reader. On the other hand, maybe some of this would be viewed by someone without my geeky way of picking it all apart as "magic." Not having home schooled Madison for kindergarten, it did seem quite a bit more magical.

Ella has been working her way through Set 3 of the EPS Phonics Books, which, as I have mentioned before, we did this spring as well. But this fall, when we started with Set 2, I had her read a whole book (16 pages) each day rather than half, as we had been doing. Doing so was really no problem for her, and it helped build up her confidence.

We started Set 3 just last week, after Tatiana sent me them back (I'm borrowing them back from her; Dario is finishing up Set 4, I think, and I'll get those back soon). She was reading one book per day. I noticed that she definitely has had a sense of momentum with Set 3 that she hadn't had before, in the following ways:

1) She is sounding words out faster, which is increasing her speed.

2) She is recognizing *many* more words on sight, which is increasing her speed.

3) Because she is increasing her speed and it takes less brain space to sound out a word, she is able almost simultaneously to eyeball a word and *also* check out the picture on the page to ensure that the word she is about to say works with the context. And she can use what she then sees in the picture as a clue to what the following word is. I see her doing this, now in a split second, almost unconsciously, where it used to be a much more deliberate process. And this further increases her speed.

Well, yesterday, she had four down and six more to go in the series. I said to her yesterday that if she put her mind to it she might be able to do *all six* in a day and therefore get the prize she always gets to choose at the end of a series. Well, that kid just went to town. She was able to finish four of the books, and then swiftly read the other two first thing this morning. My goodness, I was proud of her. She was proud of herself. And we went out after her acting class this morning and she chose a fluffy pink tutu. My princess.



I feel so privileged to be up-close-and-personal with this. The one down side of this is that by dissecting it so carefully and getting to know so well what she's doing, I'm probably taking a little of the sense of "magic" out of the whole process. Ah, well. I appreciate the "magic of childhood" as well as the next mom, but being witness to the minute details of this process is just so darned fulfilling for someone like me.

This counts as home schooling, right?

They sorted the candy, categorized it by type, and then we input the values into Excel and then made cool charts like this:



I'm sure this counts as math.

What piano lessons have shown me about readiness

Madison took piano lessons during her kindergarten year. She really loved the lessons. She approached the piano like a mathematician; I can tell that (like her mother) she grasps math spatially, and this was very useful for piano. She liked the challenge of matching up the notes on the staff to the notes on the keyboard, and she liked the reward of the tune she made.

But getting her to practice was like pulling teeth. It was horrible for both of us. (In fact, I was so frustrated that I had her teacher write an article for KidsOutAndAbout.com, tips for getting kids to practice music. You'll see some really cute photos of Madison if you click on that link.) She liked being taught by Mrs. B, and she liked to show off, but doing so in the absence of an adult's bottom right there on the piano bench next to her was not rewarding for her. She learned, of course, but not as much as she would have had she been motivated to practice each day.

At the same time, I was fascinated to discover that when I sat down at the piano, I was instantly better than I was at any point in my youth. I took piano lessons from age 7-10, at which point I gave it up. I just couldn't get both hands to work together at the same time. But I have always considered myself to have learned music from the piano. In high school, I approached choral sight reading by visualizing the piano keys in the treble clef; somehow, I translated that spatial relationship into what my vocal chords were doing. Even as an adult, visualizing the piano keys while I'm singing is the only way I stay moderately in tune.

When we moved to Virginia last year, I decided to stop Madison's piano lessons for a while, because it had turned into something stressful for both of us. I figured we'd settle into life here first. I set up the keyboard, though, for anyone to play whenever she wanted. Well, as soon as we were settled enough for me to consider whether she was ready to resume lessons, there we were, making plans to leave again. So I decided to put it off again, until we are settled back in Rochester in December.

But interestingly enough, just recently Madison started sitting down at the keyboard for long stretches, picking out her own little tunes and just fooling around with the keys. (She has been doing this, I discovered, partly as a way of remembering the multiplication table, of all things -- she has made up little tiny tunes to help her remember certain equations.)

And today, she picked up her old American songbook, and actively started looking at the notes (well, she looks at the written-out letter-note below the staff to figure out what note it is, not actually at the staff itself, she never got far enough to know what a note was from sight), and picking out the songs.

I sat next to her and realized something remarkable: Even after not practicing for 16 months (other than "Happy Birthday"), her playing is dramatically superior to what it used to be. There are two dimensions on which she is better:

1) She hears the song in her head that she is playing, and is using her knowledge of the song -- whether the next note is higher in pitch or lower in pitch -- to guide whether the next keyboard note is to the left or to the right.

2) Hearing the song in her head guides her to how long to hold down the note. Before, there was no way to explain a quarter note or a whole note to her; actually, she understood it intellectually but she just couldn't translate that into holding down the note.

Before, I now realize, she wasn't playing a song, she was following the letters written on the page and figuring out how that translated into finger movement, and then hearing the song *after* the notes were played. Now, in her mind's ear, she is hearing what the note should be *before* she strikes the key, and this helps her know which one to strike. She is able to hold in her mind the overriding purpose of playing a song. It is, I think, an entirely new experience for her.

This provides marvelous evidence about how important it is to be sensitive to what kids are ready for, and not pushing or having expectations in advance of when they're ready.

Before, the exercise of learning piano was somewhat valuable as an intellectual exercise, and (moderately) as a lesson in how working hard at something can get results. But I can see that now, she's really ready. I honestly think that she would have been at this same point had she started just a month ago rather than two years ago.

There are several lessons to be learned from this:

1) There really are sensitive periods when a particular child's brain is ready for a certain kind of activity. There is nothing that we did, between when Madison stopped taking lessons and now, that can account for her dramatic advance. It is slightly possible that we primed her for this by having the lessons in the first place, but I attribute her readiness much more to how her brain has developed in the intervening 16 months.

2) More mundanely, I am certain that Ella, who is 5 1/2, is not ready for piano. A better way of saying it is that she'll get far more value out of lessons in a year or two rather than immediately upon our return to Rochester. I'm going to wait until she positively asks for lessons and shows that she's ready. I think she will.

3) This strengthens my conviction that there are certain times that kids are ready for certain academic pursuits, and that pushing them when they aren't ready or positively disinterested is time and energy better spent teaching them something else.

4) Interest follows ability. Madison is FAR more interested in working on the piano now, when she has this new, natural, more conceptually mature approach to music. So strong interest in something probably indicates a readiness for it.

5) Although figuring out when kids are ready for certain things does rely, to a large extent, on the child's self-report of their own interests and desires, it can't substitute for the parent's careful observation of the child. It's so important that we consider who she is, and where she is intellectually, before we push.

6) Even if a child rejects something early or says it's not for her, try it again later on if you think she'll find it valuable. She just may have developed enough, or have gathered enough information in the meantime, to be ready for it.

7) This has serious implications for teaching math, which should be obvious.

Ella

Ella has just been going gangbusters on the schoolwork lately. She takes to everything with such enthusiasm, except her reading of the Phonics series. Even that, though, has been done much more readily lately. She reads a whole book now each day (16 pages) rather than half, and she's quite impressed with herself (lots of "hey, I'm already on page 11!"), so in some ways the thing she likes to do least is having the strongest effect. But yesterday, she listened with enthusiasm to the geography section of What Your Kindergartner Needs to Know, which lead to me getting down the globe, and then we have two map puzzles that she just had to do. Then she got into the directions: North, South, East, and West, and started looking at maps to find where the compass is printed, and how ornately. I've got to find a web resource to download color-in map printables. And I've got to hunt down Madison's old compass that we used to have in the car.

Ella loves Handwriting without Tears. She's always been justly proud of her handwriting, focusing on it as she does.

And she also likes the Ancient Greeks, even Greek culture stuff other than the myths. She doesn't get the philosophy or politics parts at all, but that's ok with me.

It takes Ella much less time to do schoolwork than Madison, not simply because I give her slightly less (she's technically only in kindergarten, you know) but she really gets down to business and gets done what she needs to get done.

I'm very proud of her.

Three Cheers for Handwriting Without Tears!

We got the Handwriting Without Tears program yesterday, and the Madison and Ella started it this morning.

I know it's a little premature to say it, but so far the kids love it, Madison especially. One thing that Madison particularly likes about it is that there is a definite method, starting letters and numbers from the top. The other thing that they both like about it is that I'm learning right along with them...I got the parent/teacher guide for the various programs, and I was calling out little tidbits that I learned along the way, such as

The top to bottom habit is the key to printing quickly and neatly. Children who start letters at the top don't have to think about making letters. They print automatically and are able to print quickly without becoming sloppy. Starting at the bottom causes difficulty because it is impossible to write with speed without becoming sloppy.

Madison only has 17 equations left to learn her multiplication to 10 x 10. When I asked her her method today, she let me in on the little songs she's been making up to remember them, two at a time. She's up at the piano right now, trying to match her little tunes to keyed notes. (She can't wait to start piano again when we get back to Rochester.) Today was 7 x 6 is 42 and 7 x 7 is 49.

In math, Ella worked on equalities yesterday, and today is back to odds and evens.

We watched a video from the library about the digestive and excretory systems this morning.

A really cool human anatomy web site

This is Human Anatomy Online, which we have been having a great time exploring today.

The medicine goes down in a most delightful way -- peristalsis through the esophagus

It was a rainy, rainy day yesterday. We played Mommy and Baby Birdies in the morning, didn't start school until noon. Ah, well. We all did math (half of Lesson 8 in Saxon for Madison, addition problems for Ella), reading, Ella did vowel combinations of O (OW, OU, OA), and then we all did the Digestive System. I traced the girls out on brown paper, and drew in the various organs in the digestive system, all the while talking about what goes on. For some reason, the villi in the small intestine were especially interesting, and Madison loves the appendix (she likes the hypothesis that pre-humans used them to digest grass in an earlier stage of evolution). The girls colored in the organs.





Not bad on the outlines of the intestines, no? I'll take credit for those.

After we finished our lessons, we went to Michael's to get paint and little wooden boxes. When we got home, the girls painted their boxes, and glued the shells to them from yesterday's trip to Lake Anna.

Tomorrow, Ella and I will review "time" again and greater than/less than symbols. We'll label the various organs on their figures, and we'll watch the Magic School Bus "For Lunch."

Lake Anna

We went to Lake Anna today, probably for the last time, so the girls could gather shells and hike and wade a little.

I just had to post this photo of Madison, this IS Madison.

An E.B. White kind of day

I'll always remember Virginia October as a sunny-mellow day when the air was fresh and the clover patches still warm, when Madison's hair was the color of ripe hay and Ella's the color of ripe straw, and my golden girls jumped from bale to bale, silhouetted against the Blue Ridge Mountains and an even bluer sky.

Handwriting

I have an email in to a mail-order home school supplies client to see if I can get a deal on Handwriting Without Tears, but in the meantime I decided to take Laura's advice in hand immediately and focus on handwriting exercises with Madison.

I decided that the path of least resistance would be to have her trace *my* writing, and I used it today to combine "math," spelling, and handwriting, by writing (neatly) a page of number-words (four hundred forty-four, etc) and having Madison *trace* them, just writing over my pencil lines (while memorizing the spelling). And low and behold, she traced them just great. Really. I had her trace the words three times, in three different colors, and they looked beautiful. Kind of indistinguishable from my handwriting. And she didn't mind the whole thing at all. No tears.

Laura, any insight? Any criticism if I continue on this track? You're the expert in The Writing Road to Reading, so I need your advice. Maybe you have some objection to this that I haven't thought of.

Wailing & gnashing of teeth over math

I'm going to give this Saxon Math another month or so before I give up and move to Math-U-See. That child loves math, and she's hating it lately.

Saxon seems to be fine for her as long as it's problems to solve. But Lesson 7 had to do with writing out the word-numbers properly. Madison is so bad and slow and handwriting, and hates it so much, that the three problems in which she had to write "three hundred one," "three hundred twenty," "three hundred twelve" took her (literally!) 25 minutes of fidgeting and fussing.

That got her on a really bad track, and the following problems which were writing the next three numbers in a series (e.g., 12, 18, 24, ___, ___, ___), which she can usually do just fine, generated a real meltdown and whining fest even though *I* was writing the answers to the problems.

I had made the mistake (didn't think it was a mistake at the time) of letting her read all morning and then we had an interesting Child Study experiment with Ella at UVa, so we didn't get to math until late afternoon. I'm sure doing it at a different time of day had to do with what happened. But this is distressing me because this child of mathematician really does love math, and I don't want her to get in a rut.

Oral reports on Ancient Greece

For the last few days, Madison has been enjoying giving little oral reports on Ancient Greece. She has been using the book How Would You Survive as an Ancient Greek. She enjoys the format, which is chock-full of illustrations and nice compact little sidebars. Madison reads a couple of pages, and then gives us a report on the subject. She resisted the idea at first, but I knew she'd like it. That girl likes to talk so much.

To Do

Educate children

Publish successful novel

Meet Dick Francis

One down, two to go.

Being alone was the problem

I'm pretty sure that being on her own was the problem with Madison and Saxon Math. Today, she did Lesson 5 with me writing down her answers for the first half and her writing the answers for the second half, while I was beside her to keep her focused. She even wrote very neatly, without too much getting distracted. And, voila, only 20 minutes for the whole deal. She was very encouraged. I think I'll do this for a while to wean her slowly from me.

Ella has been zipping through lessons, anything I give her. She's now great at the addition problems for facts up to 20, and doesn't mind writing them out in workbooks. She did 40 problems this morning without even blinking. And her handwriting continues to be great.

We did snuggle school for an hour this morning in bed, with me reading the Greek myths while the open window let in the fresh crisp air and the sound of the rain.

We did logic. Madison and I read and discussed economics. Ella did reading with some three-part cards you put together to make words. They played outside in the rain with some warm clothes.

In addition, Madison read a couple of pages from my Dick Francis book To the Hilt, because we're going to a Dick Francis book signing tonight in Warrenton, VA, which is about 70 miles north of Charlottesville. I can't wait to shake his hand! As he's 85, I never thought I'd get the opportunity.

And all in about 2 hours. Good thing, because I'm now off to get my hair cut. Have to look good in front of the Master, you know.

Ella-Bunny's story about Ella and the Bunny

I'm having so much fun with Ella starting to tell stories. Ella's nickname is Baby Bunny (or Ella-Bunny) because she was born near Easter, and consequently she loves bunnies. The last two weeks in her art class, she made a bunny sculpture and today she painted it gray and white. She called it Snowy. And so her story today is about Snowy.

I always take down her stories verbatim. I have realized that there are two ways that she tells stories: concept by concept or word by word. When she does it concept by concept, she thinks, then talks for a few sentences, then thinks some more, and then says some sentences while I type fast. When she does it word by word, she pauses after each word so I can type it, then back-reconstructs the sentence in her mind so she can go on to the next word after a pause.

Earlier on, she did it concept by concept. Now, she's taken to telling the stories more word by word, watching as I type each individual word. I can't tell whether she is doing it word by word with the express purpose of watching me type the word, or for another reason. In any case, she's watching me type.

Today, when she was doing the story word by word (with the occasional phrase thrown in), she was dictating:

Madison brought her cat. Ella brought...

and then she watched in amazement as I typed "her bunny."

"That's right!" she said. "How did you know I was going to say that?"

Note: The child was READING what I was typing, and she knew that I was typing ahead of what she had actually said.

Actually reading what I was typing. I wanted to pat myself on the back.

After she wrote her story, we went out on the web and found a photo of a bunny and a cat and pasted it into the story. Here, in case you're interested, is the story:

SNOWY AND ELLA

Snowy is a cute, cuddly bunny. She likes to play in the snow. Once, when it was winter, Snowy went on a walk with Ella. They walked through the forest in the winter because Snowy liked the winter. They came to a part of the forest where a cat was in their way. The cat was attached to a leash. It was her sister Madison’s cat. Then they walked through the forest with their animals. And then they walked home.

They played with their animals. Madison rolled some yarn for her cat. And Ella threw a ball for her bunny. The bunny and the cat had lots of fun with their owners Madison and Ella. And at bedtime, they read stories with books, and the animals hopped into bed with them.

Then, in the morning, it was time for the animal club that could do the greatest sports. They brought their animals to camp so they could do it. Madison brought her cat. Ella brought her bunny. They jumped, they twirled, they hopped around, they did everything that was great. And surprise, they both won the contest. They went home.

The End

Math update - hope I'm doing the right thing

From Deb:

Yesterday brought another tantrum about Saxon Math. As Ella pointed out (her sense of time is growing much better...she has a much more accurate sense about when various things have happened), that made three days in a row of Madison fussing over math.

In Laura's comment from yesterday's entry, she pointed out how daunting it can be for a child to be placed in front of this big math book and be told to learn independently from it. She only does half a lesson per day with Raymond.

We may get to half a lesson per day when we are actually learning new stuff, but this is all review, review, review.

So yesterday Madison had done about 1/2 the 29 math problems (have I mentioned they are REVIEW?!?) in about 90 minutes. Whining the whole way, fidgeting, staring off into space, etc. Then a tantrum.

I realized she was just creating all this angst for herself, erecting her own barriers to the whole thing. I wanted to prove to her that it didn't have to be this way. So a little later, I brought her over to me, took her answer page from her, and sat her down next to me.

"Number 13. What is the answer?"

She focused for a moment, and gave the correct answer. I wrote it down.

"Number 14. What is the answer?"

Again, no problem.

We did 13-29 in this fashion, taking less than 10 minutes. She was rather amazed.

Today, I sat her down next to me for the 29 problems in Lesson 4. I made out the answer sheet while she read the lesson.

"Number 1. What is the answer?"

Just like yesterday. We had the whole thing done in under 20 minutes.
I wonder, really, if the problem is more the fact that felt so much on her own for this, or the fact that she has to *write* the stuff on her own.

So tomorrow, I'll test which of these might be true. The strategy is the following (she knows this): For half of them, we'll do it just like today. The second half, she will write the answer herself, but I'll still be next to her, guiding the process. We'll see whether her having to physically write the answers herself makes a difference.

See, I had envisioned that we'd start at the beginning of Saxon Math, and that more of the lesson would be about the discipline of Madison starting to work on her own than about the math itself, which she already knows how to do. We saw how THAT worked out. Maybe she is just not ready for the independent work. Maybe I should do Math-U-See instead. But I'm really cheap about it, I guess. I figure that I should be able to teach my brainy little math kids math without spending money on a program that has them watching a video of someone *else* teaching them math.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I shouldn't have been such a softie about switching the program when she had a tantrum or three. Maybe that will teach her to throw tantrums, although over the last six months or so that has decreased enormously.

I think I was right, though. I think it was just too abrupt, plunking her down in front of the book on Monday morning.

Chalk this one up to an experiment.

------------------------------

If indeed it's the handwriting that's getting her way, I'll have to (ugh) work more with Madison on handwriting. This morning, though, she did it herself. Even before we started school, she spontaneously decided to write a list of the Christmas carols that she knew, down on a piece of paper. Then she asked me if I had a list of carols so that she could pick out which ones she knew, and I pulled one up on the web. She took 15 minutes or so to write them out, and then we were treated to a little concert. She was thrilled when I told her it could count as handwriting for school.

Beware of Greeks Doing Saxon Math

From Deb (Laura, I know how insanely busy you've been lately but I miss you!):

Madison has been going along steadily, about two per day, on her multiplication tables. It only takes her between 5-10 minutes of study, and I'm actually unaware of what method she's using to remember the equations.

So I decided officially to start her on the Saxon Math 54 book yesterday. She didn't even have to write out the problems herself, she only had to provide the answers in the numbered spaces I provided. And it's easy, easy, easy. Addition. Along the lines of 5 + 4 + N + 6 + 15 = 35, what is N?

All hell broke loose. She had weird tantrum upon tantrum, apologizing after each one, then taking up the whine again, and it took the child two hours to do 27 problems. Plus, two were wrong and 12 had numbers written backwards. She knows she could have done these in 15 minutes tops, if she had put her mind to it. She even joked: two-hours-for-27-problems, can you imagine? -- at dinner last night with our across-the-street neighbors whom I'd invited over for a pork roast. I figured it was just an anomaly, and didn't worry about it.

Today, I sat her down again in front of it, without comment about yesterday's fiasco. 29 problems today. And again, not entirely to my surprise because she'd awoken in a kind of "testing" mood: fidgeting, tears, weird whining. All for stuff that is easy for her! I figured she'd just decided to test me about what I would do. About 20 minutes into it, I picked the book up and put it back on the shelf, saying it was clear that she couldn't do it. And then, of course, for the next 45 minutes she threw a fit, begging to do it now that I'd taken it away from her. I had to lock her out of the schoolroom for a bit so I could work with Ella.

Then she calmed down and asked to do it.

"Sure, go ahead and take it off the shelf and do it, if you think you can," I told her. "I just think maybe you're not ready for it!"

She wanted ME to take it off the shelf and open up her notebook again. Yeah, right.

Eventually, she took it off the shelf and did it, actually very neatly. But it took up 1 1/2 hours total today, and because someone was coming to see the house and we had to leave in the early afternoon, we consequently didn't have time to work together on The Frontier Team book. She didn't like that. Maybe tomorrow the book will be more of an incentive, I'll make it clear that if we have time to work on it, we will.

But in more positive news...

We started a unit on Ancient Greece, for both kids. Yesterday I read to them some of the history as it is written in What Your Second Grader Needs to Know, and today we did the Greek myths from a separate section in the same book.

And guess what...Ella is now on fire about the Greek myths! Go figure! So we went to the library when the house was being shown this afternoon, and got out a bunch of books: four about Ancient Greece and two about Greek mythology (one the Usborne Greek Myths for Young Readers, another a more sophisticated one). We read Greek myths at the library, then for another hour when we went out to a late lunch (the Red Lobster people were amused), then for another half hour back at home, then for another 45 minutes before bed. (We did Heracle's Tasks before bed...the fact that he was doing these out of penitence for killing his children grabbed the girls' attention, as you might imagine. Madison was in Lawyer Mode -- it wasn't fair, she pointed out, that he had to do penance for something that was really Hera's fault, as she had magically caused his fit of rage.)

Madison really likes the stories, too -- she even chose the more sophisticated mythology book as her "read-before-bedtime" book -- but Ella is absolutely captivated. I'm going to get some toga material and dress them up as goddesses, maybe next week as a carrot for getting through some more of the history. I wouldn't be surprised if Ella turns from devising roles for herself as female superheroes (all the rage here on Berwick Court) to devising powers for herself as a Greek goddess. Wait until we get to Helen of Troy and she realizes that the names "Ella" and "Helen" are from the same root.

This is the first intellectual thing that has really captured and held Ella's attention. I think she's in a real transitional period; I posted a week or two ago about how Ella has never liked to be read the more sophisticated things, preferring picture books. Well, these books have stories that are a lot more sophisticated; the word-to-picture ratio is far higher than what she is accustomed to. I think the fact that there are some pictures (actually very nice ones) helps to hold that part of her attention, and she is really following along with the stories.

I had a good time telling them the Roman names of some of the Greek gods, and helping them make connections such as to the planets. They were particularly excited about the Poseidon-Nepture God of the Sea. Why? Well, in two months we will have our own personal Neptune in our new house on Penfield Road. The people who are leaving are planning to leave it behind -- Neptune -- ever-watchful as you can see -- is right on the edge of our own little woods, and you can apparently see him from the parlor window. I pointed out to Madison that if people ask whether she believes in God, she can always say "Of course!" and point to Neptune. She enjoyed the joke.

We've done Raphael's School of Athens before -- at least I have with Madison, and we'll do it again in the context of actual Athens when we do the history later this week. I've reviewed with her the general stuff about the difference in Plato vs. Aristotle, how Plato is pointing at the sky and the folks on his side are the religious philosophers, and how Aristotle is pointing at the ground and the folks on his side are scientists. Madison really does understand the basics. Ella didn't get it yet, and I think she won't get it this time around either, it will have to wait a year or two. I think we have time! :-)

Open House, Broken House

From Deb:

Our second Open House was at 1pm today.

During the four days curled up in bed this past week, my two creative children were, happily, all-too-eager to try their hand at making their own (cold, obviously!) breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and entertain themselves with crafts and schoolwork so I could lay around and gaze vacantly at the ceiling. So you can imagine what the house looked like.

Yesterday, feeling much better but with energy still ebbing rather low, I undertook to make it look as it should so that people should not run away screaming as soon as crossed the threshold this afternoon.

I took it slowly. For the first time, I damned whatever impulse had made me buy a 3200 s.f. house. Usually, the spread-out quality of the house means that there really CAN be a place for everything and everything in its place. It seemed to me yesterday, though, that it had morphed into an "every place for everything" house. So it took a while. But I timed myself well, drew up a list of things to accomplish and in what order, and set about it.

At 11:45 this morning, I had precisely an hour's left of work. The girls were actually "helping" at that point -- I had given them Windex and paper towels with the instructions to clean off the various white boards, and mirrors that they could reach.

I was vacuuming the family room when disaster struck.

"Um, Mom," said Ella, whom Madison had sent down to break the bad news, "The door to Madison's closet kind of...got broken."

Note the careful use of the passive voice.

I figured that it had just slid off its track. "I'm sure I can get it back on the track, Ella," I said.

"Well, um, I think the wood kind of...cracked...and there is...well...another piece on the floor."

An hour to go with an hour left to do. I simply didn't have time to figure in a destroyed closet door. As it happened, the girls had abandoned the Windex in favor of one of them careening the other wildly around Madison's room in her desk chair on wheels, and at one point they crashed into the open door. But at that point, I didn't know this and I didn't care how it had happened, I only knew that it hadn't happened without intervention. I am glad that at some point in the distant past I had resolved never to lose control in front of young children, because if this had not been firmly ingrained in every fiber of my being, I would have lost it. I am not beyond getting really ticked off, though (I just never appear to have lost control), and this was one of those times because the kids know that they shouldn't be hanging or yanking on doors. We've had to bend back the hinges on the tv cabinet too many times, and they've heard the lecture. At that point, I imagined that they had been using the closet door as a sliding apparatus such as on playgrounds.

"WHAT!" I brushed past Ella on my way up the stairs. Madison was obviously apprehensive as I rushed into her room. There, indeed, was the offending door, sagging off the track as Ella had described. The bottom left part was still held in place by the metal fitting on the bottom track. But in place of what would have been the upper left-hand corner fitting to the top track was a thick, triangular splinter of wood. As I watched, the metal peg inside it gave way, and the splinter crashed to the floor. The rest of the door sagged forward, threatening to break on the bottom if I didn't remove it immediately, which I did.

I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do. The idea of showing the house with a broken left closet door was unthinkable. So I sent the kids out of the room (they were glad to go) and fetched the toolbox. Thank goodness, it was a fairly clean break, so that when I put the bit of door back where it belonged, the front part, at least, didn't have extra bits missing; it just looked like a crack. I was able to get it nailed and screwed together back to the main part of the door, solidly enough to hold its weight on the peg.

I tried to put the door back in place, but I needed a second person to help me fit the peg on the floor into the correct hole in the bottom of the door. So, I drafted a child by shouting sternly down the stairs:

"Whoever it was that did this, and only that person, come on up here!"

Madison appeared at the bottom of the stairs.

"I need your help to fix this."

"But I'm not going to be able to do anything, I'm only a little ki--"

"So help me, Madison, if you whine at me right now, there will be repercussions. I can't even THINK of what repercussions right now, but believe me, they will be bad."

That actually shut her up.

She was able to help me guide the bottom part in place, and then fetch me the hammer and a screwdriver so I could jimmy the top peg back into the mechanism.

And it was done, in 15 minutes. I was able to do the rest of the hour's work in 45 minutes, at a frantic pace. The girls wisely skedaddled and barricaded themselves in the (very clean) family room with Scooby Doo.

Thank goodness I was able to fix it, because I have no idea what I would have done had I not.

Frankly, I don't know whether I would have done it so well had I not been under the stress. Later, when the girls and I were at the Indian restaurant and we were talking about it, I used the episode as an example of the saying, "Necessity is the mother of invention."

They agreed, though, that today, Deb was the mother of invention.

Just a rationalization?

In the three days I've been rather incapacited and provided very little instruction, the girls have quite happily been left to their own devices. One aspect of this is that our cable was out on our tv when I got back home, but I had no energy to try to call Adelphia about it.

I have to say, they've been remarkable, in that a lot of what they've devised for themselves has been very educational. Not that they hit the workbooks or anything, but their play has included Madison typing out sentences and printing them out for Ella to read, which both helps Madison with spelling and Ella with reading. They have been doing a lot of crafts (as the craft area, which they haven't been inclined to clean up, attests!), reading, and play-acting. They have devised some new imaginary friends and have spent hours each day playing with them all together. Madison has read to Ella, and read on her own a lot. They have both played educational computer games. And, even though they both now have colds, there has been very little fighting.

And all of this in the context of no TV! (Not that they have ever relied on TV in any significant way.) Even their use of videos was minimal and limited to when I suggested it.

Maybe I should become an unschooler.

No, don't worry.

Neglecting my post

From Deb:

We've had hardly any school for three days now because of this weird stomach bug I have that won't quit.

Good thing that they're ahead and at least I don't have to worry about missing a few days here and there.

Dare I say it, but the multiplication is working

After six months of struggle with the multiplication tables, Madison's sudden decision to take control of her own multiplication learning (admittedly at my mild suggestion) is bearing fruit.

Today, she took her 10 x 10 grid to her room, looked where she hadn't colored in with highlighter, and she learned, really learned (I tested her at the end of the day):

2 x 8
4 x 6 (and 6 x 4)
5 x 6 (and 6 x 5)
6 x 6

Six problems in one day...when you have only 38 to learn, that will happen in no time. Even SHE can see that.

Then, when we were talking in the car about 4 x 6, I asked her:

What happens when you double 4?

You get eight.

What happens when you divide 6 by 2?

You get three.

What is 4 x 6 again?

24.

Guess what happens when you multiply 8 x 3?

(Gasps.) No! Really? Does it work for EVERY SINGLE number, if you multiply one by 2 and divide the other one by 2, do you get the same answer as for the first problem?

Yep.

(A big grin from the back seat.) Ok, let's prove it... give me another!

Today was a pretty good and fast day, work-wise. Ella is working on odd and even numbers, and we have a little block set where she can fit together chains of numbers, so the last few days she's been doing that. She gets the concept of an even number, but I'm not sure she's at the point at which she could describe it.

Ella and I also worked on time, today. I realized that before I teach her about telling time, I have to teach her more about the concept of time. So for the last couple of times we did it, I've simply been taking this nice little educational plastic clock with the big and little hands that you can manipulate -- an important component of this clock is that the big hand will only move if you correctly move the little hand around the dial, so it acts as if real. For the last couple of times we have worked on this, we start at midnight and go around the clock twice for the 24 hours, saying whether it's light or dark outside, and say what we're doing at that hour. One more session of that and it will be time to talk more about the big hand and the small hand.

Madison did spelling fairly willingly today. We are using the Spellwell series a bit unconventionally, which is just taking their list suggestions and testing her until she gets six that she doesn't know. Then she has taken those six and typed them out on her computer. (I love seeing her do this, because she is starting to hesitate and focus before typing a word -- I can see that she's working out the typing pattern with her eyes on the keyboard so she can do it as a unit rather than hunt-and-peck. I didn't teach her to do this, she's just doing it naturally.)

Amazing that even though she's such a good reader (she's into the third Harry Potter these days), she can't spell better than the typical first- or second-grader. When she was very young, I used to think that she was an aural learner, because sometimes she could figure out what word we were spelling by listening to the sound of the letters. But as soon as she could read, she snapped right into being a visual learner. It is amazing that in the course of about the two months before she turned six, when reading became a pleasure rather than a chore, she also became completely a word recognizer and relied much less on phonics, so little that sometimes she's lackadaisical about sounding out a word that she doesn't know; she'd vastly prefer to figure it out from context or just skip it. Regular "educators" might try to point to the idea that she is now a whole-language learner rather than a phonics learner, but that is nonsense. Already-successful readers recognize words as units, it is true, but to try to use that as a pedagogical method rather than phonics is, I really believe, a recipe for disaster.

To round things out today, Madison worked in her logic workbook (Mind Benders -- she LOVES this, I have to limit her time on it or she'd do the whole workbook in a day). She also read out loud a fair amount of Robert Frost, as occasioned by the onset of a fall-like day here in Virginia. She loves reading The Road Not Taken, and I think her favorite poem by Frost is The Last Word of A Bluebird. We have a wonderful edition of Frost in the Poetry for Young People series; this book is divided up into poems for the various seasons, and it's illustrated by Henri Sorensen. Henri, wherever you are, you're wonderful.

Oh, and we went apple picking this afternoon, in preparation for our marathon applesauce cooking extravaganza tomorrow. Madison loves eating fresh applesauce right off the stove. The one orchard in Charlottesville is Carter Mountain Orchard; the orchard is right on the top of Carter Mountain and you have a beautiful 360-degree view all around Virginia.

The struggle of handwriting

From Deb:

It's hard when your brain so far outstrips your hand. Madison is getting a little better at handwriting, but struggles both with its look and its pace. She knows it's pretty bad, and it takes her so long to form the letters that she in no way can use handwriting to record her thoughts. She's learning to type partly to take away this frustration, but that is still very slow, of course. (It's a good thing we're doing the book together, us talking while I type, just so that she has some outlet for getting down her thoughts.) Yesterday was the day for thank-you cards for her birthday, and my god, it took her two hours to write "Thank you, love Madison" on ten cards and print out a sentence or two on the computer in the vein of "Thank you for coming to my birthday party. I really loved the art supplies." And I even typed the original sentence, made her letterhead, and provided her with the list of who gave her what. She had a lot of fun with fonts and colors, though.

It even frustrates me, so I can imagine how she feels.

I know that the key is the same as the way to Broadway. But I think I hate that she has to practice even more than she hates it. So, admission of guilt here: We don't do it every day. Kind of far from it.

Ella and reading

From Deb:

Because I had not pressed Ella on reading all summer, she naturally fell behind in skills, which I of course didn't worry about because she's only 5, after all, and she came so far so fast in the spring. So what I did this week was borrow back my EPS Phonics Books from Tatiana, and start Ella back on the second series of 10 books (she had finished the third in the spring). We'll read them through again. We've done one every day (where usually she has read just half a book in a day as they got harder). This has been very successful the last two days; she is impressed with herself that she is able to zoom through a whole book in about 10 minutes. We'll rapidly be back to where we left off.

Regarding the silent E question, I have noticed an interesting thing about Ella: She is not holding the entire sound of the word in her mind until she actually makes the word-meaning connection, it's still a collection of strung-together sounds that she has to reconstruct by looking again at the first letter. I noticed this because when she is reading a word that has a silent E, she doesn't notice at the outset that there is a silent E at the end, and adjust her vowel sounds accordingly (she had done this well as of about May, so I'm sure it will come back quickly); instead, she sounds through the entire word, comes to a silent E at the end, and stops, confused. She has heard the sounded-out version in her mind, and it doesn't make any sense.

For example, take the word "cake". She'll sound out C-A-K and then stop and see the silent E. She repeats "CAK" in her mind. "CAK" doesn't make any sense to her. But instead of automatically substituting the short A vowel sound for the long one she's using, and realizing that it must be "C-AY-K," she has to reconstruct the whole thing. First, she fixes in her mind that the sound is now "Ay" not "Ah" because of the silent E, and then she goes back to reconstruct the word. "C-AY-K" and now she hears herself saying it, and knows it's Cake.

That probably made no sense to anyone but me, but I find it fascinating. I need to get this stuff down, because there is no recreating the little bits and pieces of exactly how they learn; you have to record it immediately.

One other note: I am seeing glimpses in Ella that she is interested in listening to more complicated stories from chapter books rather than just being willing to sit with me for picture books. I had noted -- not in a worried way, but interested -- that whereas at the age of 3 Madison had wanted to hear books like The Trumpet of the Swan, Ella is still not interested in focusing on those kinds of stories. And by her age, Madison was having me read her the Boxcar Children and Cam Jansen. I don't know exactly what it means that Ella hasn't been ready for these things, maybe it's just that Madison has always had this exceptional imagination that she is willing to substitute for the pictures in the storybooks. I don't know.

Order of Operations

From Deb:

We had a good first day back after vacation today. I mean yesterday, it's past midnight.

Madison, who has finally decided to take control of her own multiplication table learning, asked to create a 10 x 10 grid so she could see which ones she knew by heart and which she didn't. I printed out a grid from Excel so she didn't have to waste hours trying to make a nice one with rulers, etc. She completed all of the blank spaces, sometimes knowing the answers by heart, sometimes having to figure them out. I used it as our handwriting lesson, too, and believe it or not she was kind of enthusiastic about making it look nice, so things looked better than normal. She still kept reversing the 6's, though.

After she completed the grid, she had me test her on the tables. I put a small dot in the squares of the ones she knew by heart. Then, she took a highlighter marker and colored in all of the squares of the ones she knew, leaving the rest white. She figured out that she didn't know 38 of them, which translates to roughly 20 that she has to memorize since many of them are the same backwards-forwards.

20 seemed so manageable to her. She's going to devise strategies for doing the memorization. I'll leave her be on that for a while.

So that was the scheduled part of the day. But I love how sometimes learning happens just spontaneously rather than having been planned.

We were eating out for lunch (I want to mess up the kitchen as little as possible because of potential buyers seeing the house), and she asked me the difference between answers to equations that people knew, versus ones they had to figure out. So, she asked me, "Do you know the answer to 10 times 10 minus 10 plus 10 times 10?"

We then talked about how knowing the answer to parts of it makes the other parts easy to figure out, and that no one has memorized the answers to problems that have more than 2 steps; pretty much you just have to know the multiplication tables and your addition facts, to be able to do things that are much more complicated.

And THEN I gave her a shocker, which is that the answer to her question depends on how you group the parts of it. Really? The answer can be 1000, or 190, or 200, and probably others, depending on whether you don't use any parentheses at all to group them, or put parentheses in certain configurations. We talked about My Dear Aunt Sally as being the way to memorize the Order of Operations, and we did a couple of problems on napkins, both her above problem and things like

3 x 4 + 4 = 18
if there are no parentheses, and that this means

(3 x 4) + 4

But if you use a different set of parentheses like this:

3 x (4 + 4) then the answer is 24.

She loved this. She's glimpsing the fact that there is cool math beyond the multiplication tables.

Working and home schooling

From Deb:

Sometimes this is really hard.

I mean, the girls are very independent, especially for being 5 and 7, but sometimes clients just need me in the morning and there's no two ways about it--especially for people whose projects I've been working on a lot and getting it to them late, if you know what I mean. There's only so far that they'll be perfectly understanding about my setup.

So I'm afraid I've been giving a bit more of a reduced workload for Madison and Ella this week. I haven't been pushing Ella too hard on the reading, nor Madison on handwriting, and the multiplication strategy that Laura suggested I try with Madison involves just a bit too much of my focus for me to accomplish it this week. Add to this is the stress that I'm going to be on vacation next week, and there are things that simply.must.be.accomplished for clients before I go. I've been working until 12:30 at night (another benefit of David's being gone...he's not here to distract me, and not to give me The Disapproving Look) and getting a lot done in that quiet time, but clients actually need to converse during the day.

And I'm supposed to be the epitome of home schooling working mom, or so I may be portrayed in Sue Shellenbarger's column next week. Ah well, some days are easier than others.

On the other hand, they are getting learning time in, no doubt about it. And having fun. Gotta go and do our new "Teaching American History with Folk Songs" book and CD, which I've been promising all morning as long as their other work got done. It turned out to be a good incentive!

Looks like I'm leaning toward a Robinson approach in the next few years!

First Day of School

From Deb:

We had a good First Day of School. Not a to-die-for day, with wild enthusiasm for every new idea presented to them, not a my-god-I'm-the-best-mother-educator-in-the-whole-freaking-world kind of day, not a can't-wait-to-get-to-this-new-work kind of day, but a solid day of education and (mostly) snuggles. Ella has a new attitude that she is trying on, a cranky one, but it won't work, trust me. She just needs a few days for that fact to sink in.

In between reading, handwriting, math, and logic, we pulled all of the remaining carrots we planted in the spring (a motley crop of mostly small, hairy, bitter carrots) and put them into a stew that cooked all day in the crock pot. The cooking didn't improve their taste too much, so even Ella, who is wild for carrots when I slow-cook them with my Brazilian beef stew (apple cider vinegar and cumin flavoring), didn't like them come dinnertime. We worked on the Frontier Team (Raymond will be happy to know we're about done with Chapter 3) and I had my interview with Sue Shellenbarger in peace for 40 minutes. Plus I got some work done for, well, my own work. "Real" work. And I have a loose outline for the rest of the week.

Some day, maybe my own real work will be the Frontier Team. God, that would be great. Given focus, Madison and I could probably churn out two or three per year. She LOVES writing with me.

We're going to take off all of next week and travel to various northeast friends and relatives for about 10 days. We'll make it all the way up to northern Connecticut where we'll stay with a colleague of mine and visit...yes, really!...the Gertrude Chandler Warner Boxcar Children Museum. I found out about it today, and Madison is REALLY excited about going.

And just to top it all off, heck, maybe I'll take the girls to the beach on Friday. It's not like we're going to be anywhere near a beach when we live in Rochester. Why not, we'll just go to the darned beach. TWPFFFTT to the school officials.

Right-mouse-click for spelling

From Deb:

The last few days, both Madison and Ella independently have been obsessed with writing on the computer. I got Madison a new computer and printer at the beginning of the summer, and in the last couple of days, despite the fact that we haven't officially started school yet (that's today), she has preferred writing in the word processor to playing games. Ella, too, has wanted to do this on her own computer, and, really, it's independent of Madison, it's not as though she is imitating her deliberately. Ella may even have had the idea first.

One shortcoming of this is that I have had to be fairly close by, otherwise there is Spelling Shouting going on all over the house. "Mom, how do you spell SCHOOL?" one of them might shout while I'm down in the kitchen. I yell back over the sound of the sink, "School. S-C-H-O-O-L. School. There is a silent H in there, so think of it as pronounced "SK- -HOOL."

One thing that Madison can't abide when we're writing The Frontier Team together is the wiggly red line under the misspelled words or the wiggly green line under the sentence fragments that Word deems ungrammatical. Even when I tell her that it's just a proper name that Word doesn't know, or we're doing something for effect so it's okay, she wants me to get rid of that line. So of course she notices instantly when she has misspelled something in her own writing when she's on the conmputer.

I debated about 4 seconds after I thought to teach her the right-mouse-click to fix the spelling. Should I or shouldn't I? Would it just make her too reliant on the right-mouse-click and she wouldn't bother learning to spell? On the other hand, I'm not in the least concerned over her being able to spell well someday, and this way she's noticing what she did wrong (which she doesnt, particularly, when she hand writes something; it either seems okay to her, or she sees it's wrong but it's too late to do anything about it except an ugly cross-out so she lives with it), checking out the possibilities the computer provides, noticing the difference between what she did and the correct spelling (she invariably picks the correct spelling because she recognizes it instantly -- which speaks to the stupidity of the multiple-choice spelling test Laura's tutoring client will be using in her 6th-grade classroom). So, right-mouse-click it is, and she loves the independence. I'm only being consulted at times when the spelling is so far off the mark that the options don't give her the right word (such as when she tried to spell "they" T-H-A).

She didn't want to stop writing even after 9pm last night. She wanted to write in lieu of reading her new (old) Bobbsey Twins book or of having me read to her. Who was I to deny her, I figured. So I let her write until 9:30 and then snuggled with her in bed, but she was so excited by what she was doing (more on that later) that she couldn't fall asleep until almost 10:30.

The other thing that I have noticed about both girls after only a few days of this writing obsession is that they're both getting much better at knowing where the letters are on the keyboard. Madison keeps wanting to use more than one finger, so she's thinking ahead two or three letters and placing her fingers on the keyboard so she can use two or three fingers.

Ella is deinitely much faster than before in knowing where the letters are, too, although she's using just the one finger. When Ella types, though, I really do have to stick close or else she gets stuck on the spelling. Ella doesn't care a whit about the red underlinings, though, and she's content to misspell and doesn't really realize that she has done so. Interestingly, she is more willing than Madison to make an effort to memorize the short words I give her when she wants to spell them, and then type them out from her memorization. (Got. G-O-T. Got. And then she'll go over to the computer and type G-O-T.) Madison is much more interested in me giving her the sounds chunk by chunk, rather than the whole word at once.

Woodworking birthday party

We had a fun, energetic, and non-frantic birthday party yesterday for Madison on our screened-in porch. I had always vowed (there's that vowing again!) to have the girls' birthday parties outside the house, to let other people manage it for me. But Madison really wanted to have a woodworking party with Miss Judy, from whom she's been taking lessons during the spring and summer. Miss Judy actually does it pretty cheaply, and I figured that since it would be the main activity, I wouldn't have to plan other "party games." I have always had these nightmare visions of having to corral a screaming bunch of kids and lead them from one activity to another. This was pretty tame; we had eight kids accept the invitation, although only six showed (!). I made great little gift favor bags with real tools: A small screwdriver, pliers, a level, glue (Wal-mart for only 9 cents each!), and a ruler. Miss Judy managed everything well, everyone had a good time, and as you can see from the photo, the local bakery was able to take this printout that I made by downloading some "tool alphabet" letters from the web and put it in edible form on the cake. Interestingly, every single present Madison got was art supplies, although one family also gave her a Mad Libs books.(Too bad I'm banning art projects until we sell the house. They'll have art Thursdays with Mrs. Geffken anyway.)

A shell story by Ella

From Deb:

Here is the kind of story Ella tells now; I guess she based it on the great time she had on Monday at the Lake Anna beach. She dictates, I type verbatim.

Finding Shells at the Beach
By Ella

Once upon a time, Ella was collecting shells at the beach. And she was going to play with them with her friend Lara. They were playing with them until they found one little shell that was little. It was a connect-shell. There was a little conch shell, but there were lots of those little connect-together shells too. Then they connected the little shells together, and then the conch shell, and they put the two little shells under the conch shell. They showed them to their mom and dad, and they were going to keep them. And they found two places that had those same things, and they did the same thing for one of them, and the other.

And then, they swam out to the deep part of the lake with their fathers. Ella found a huge conch shell at the bottom of the lake, even bigger than a child’s head. Since they couldn’t reach it, but their fathers could reach it, Ella’s father got the big conch shell and put the conch shell in a big sack. Then they swam back with Lara carrying the sack, and showed their mothers.

They kept the big conch shell until they found another one that was the big size, but it was in the shallow end of the lake. And then, they were trying to find treasure at the down part of the shallow end of the lake. They were trying to find a big shell that had these little double baby shells on it, and they found them. They also found little conch shells.

When they were going back home…the street behind Ella’s house was Lara’s house…they played at Ella’s house. They played and played, the rest of the day.

The End

Not-Back-To-School Day

From Deb:

Yesterday, the local kids started back to school. To celebrate our not-back-to-school, we spent the afternoon at Lake Anna, a large man-made lake a little over an hour to the east. They had a lovely, clean beach, with nice sand that extended far out into the lake -- no icky, living lake bottom like they usually are, and fairly clear water that you didn't mind getting in the babies' mouths and noses.

I was feeling fiercely defiant the whole day. David was amused, and made a cryptic, not-quite-critical comment about the fact that I kept mentioning that the girls were NOT in school. I was able to spend a lot of nice, quiet time on the beach, and I realized during it that I am still burningly angry about the amount of desperately trapped feelings I had to repress at the start of school for probably 11 of the 12 years I was in public school. I wasn't psychologically able to experience those feelings then, because I wouldn't have been able to manage them. So that's what's coming out now. I resent having been forced to go, and I still experience that resentment to a degree that I find surprising now, almost 20 years later. And I was good at school, heck, I was valedictorian. I know that circumstances would be a lot different for my girls, that they would never feel trapped in the way I did...but I tell you, you'd have to pry them from my cold, dead fingers before they'd set foot in a public school as a student.

On the other hand, 15 years ago I vowed to leave the Philadelphia area forever, and just look at what are we contemplating now. So much for vows.

Back-to-school spending

From CNN.com today:

A survey by the National Retail Federation found the average family expects to spend $527 on back-to-school items this year, up 18 percent from $444 last year.

If I spend $527 on curriculum stuff for this entire upcoming YEAR I'd be amazed. And they say that public school is free?!

Synonym Silliness

Madison discovered the right-mouse-click thesaurus today in Word as we were working on the book. She got the biggest kick out of finding random words that we had written, and right-mouse-clicking on it to select a recommended synonym that was just "off" enough to make it funny. For example:

“No swimming, silly!” said Elizabeth.

became

“No swimming, harebrained!” said Elizabeth.

We definitely had fun!

Insurance?!?

Overheard from Madison:

"Mom, why don't I have insurance?"

"INSURANCE?!?"

"Yeah, you know, where parents give kids money for doing little chores around the house."

The Frontier Team book

From Deb:

Madison and I have been working on the book very hard for the last two days, and she shows no signs of wanting to stop. We've been working perhaps three hours per day!

We have a plot summary, a plot outline, the setting, annotated list of characters, the first chapter, and we're now working on the second chapter! (The chapters are pretty short.)

It's so much fun! At lunch yesterday we had a really great, long discussion about first person, second person, and third person writing, omniscient narrators, non-omniscient narrators, and why books written in the first person can't have omnicient narrators. Our book is written in the first person, although I think third-person omnicient is appealing to Madison because it makes the author into god.

Vocabulary used, PURELY from reading

From Deb:

This evening, Madison and I were talking about the Rules for Detecting that we're going to write about in our book (starting Monday!), and she proposed one to me:

"Never element a clue unless you're absolutely sure it's not part of the mystery."

Element? Of course, she meant eliminate. And she knows the word "eliminate" to speak it, in regular conversation. But she had come across the word "eliminate" written out very often in her own reading, and for some reason had always in her mind apparently pronounced it "element."

"That's funny," she said. "I kind of thought 'element' (spelled eliminate) was a synonym for 'get rid of something,' just like 'eliminate' -- I didn't realize it was the same word."

And then, a tiny bit later, she used the word "element" again, showing how firmly the written word "eliminate" is fastened in her mind with that wrong pronunciation. She was even interested, herself, in the fact that I had to correct her again (mildly and interestedly, of course. Then, the next time she used it, she said the word correctly, "eliminate."

This was fascinating from the perspective of how children learn (and how she is learning to learn independently), and also very good for her in one very important way: She got it wrong, I corrected her, she was interested introspectively in why she got it wrong, but most important, she didn't mind at all getting it wrong, and worked to get it precise...without any problem at all, without the profound embarrassment or self-consciousness that my little perfectionist sometimes exhibits. This was marvelous.

I told Madison that I remembered doing the exact same thing when I was in the second grade, and I even remembered the two words that I mispronounced because of reading them rather than speaking them: "Rapid" (which I pronounced as it's spelled: "rape-id" -- the darned word should be spelled rappid), and "crouch" (which I pronounced "crutch"). She was very interested in these words, and in fact told me that she often makes the same inner-ear mispronunciation of "crowch" into "crutch." I think it's because it is spelled like "touch."

Really, in so many ways, that girl IS me. And in so many ways, that girl IS David. Actually, she's an almost perfect blend of the two of us.

Morse Code

Ella and Madison are discovering a neat new way to represent the alphabet: Morse Code! It's particularly useful for Ella. My friends from college visited last night and today, and they brought little gifts for the girls. For Madison, they brought a little electronics kit, one of whose products is a telegraph. She and David built it this afternoon, and now they're having a great time building words in Morse Code. I don't even care about the shrieky quality of the beeps the thing makes.

Editor-in-Chief

From Deb:

Went to a curriculum meeting of a bunch of HS moms and dads last night at the local Barnes & Noble. Got a couple of decent leads on some stuff that has worked for others.

One is a program called Editor-in-Chief, produced by the same Critical Press people that do the Mind Benders. Editor-in-Chief teachers grammar, spelling, and punctuation by teaching kids the editing marks and having them make the corrections on things that are wrong. I think that Madison will enjoy this kind of thing.

I also saw the workbooks for Susan Wise Bauer's History of the World series. We have the first book in the series on Ancient History, but I skimped on buying the workbook. Several moms there swear by the workbook, and when I saw it I thought it might work for us too.

Toward a method of classifying children's literature

Theorizing from Deb:

As a means of furthering my goal of helping my KidsOutAndAbout.com readership grow ever smarter and more thoughtful about their parenting, I have started to write more book reviews and do more interviews with children's authors on the KOA site. As you know from the post that is two posts below this one, I intend to pursue writing children's books in earnest. So I've started to read Madison's books more actively. Actually, what I'm doing is steering her toward books that I enjoyed when I was a girl, and I'm either reading them with her out loud, or snagging her books and reading them on my own, as a means of formulating what I like and don't like about such books.

We're about 2/3 of the way through The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgeson Burnett, a book I loved as a kid and read until the pages fell out. Madison loves it too. Yesterday when the kids were at the pool with David, I read through to the end. I sobbed most of the way, as I would have throughout much of the first part had I not been under control while reading to Madison. It's not a sad book or anything, in fact it's quite a joyous book, but I think I was just astonished at how different it is to read the same book as an adult. One sees so much more in it. For example, I would never have understood as a child why The Secret Garden is, among other things, about redemption. The significance of redemption to human life was absolutely beyond me as a child (despite being Catholic then). I could understand it, theoretically, as a teenager, but there is no substitute for living life, making terrible mistakes and doing one's best to make up for them, to "get" what redemption is about and its significance to human relationships...and why books that address this topic can be so powerful. (Incidentally, I’m glad I have a good memory, because I can zoom back to childhood and remember what I got from reading a certain passage, and compare it with how I respond as an adult. I did this recently when I saw The Karate Kid Part II, as well. I loved that movie when I was 17. I saw it recently, and I still really like it, but now I’m seeing it from the adult point of view rather than the kid point of view. To say that it’s dramatically different is putting it mildly.)

Reading Madison’s books got me thinking a lot about the differences between the adult and child experiences of a book that is meant for children to read. After all, the book is written by an adult. Are some books experienced the same by both adults and children, and some experienced differently? What are the dimensions that comprise the differences?

I'm going to address chapter books only, because picture books are not intended to be read in the same way as are chapter books. It's true that picture books sometimes teach values, but I don't think they fall into my two neat categories, so they're out. I'm really interested in the higher-level conceptual thinking that is possible by readers of chapter books.

Here is my main conclusion: There are two kinds of children's books (aren't there always "two kinds" of everything?):

1) Books that place the child protagonists in a safe and stable world setting, in which the problem to be solved is situational, and achievements made and lessons learned are those typical in and useful to childhood.

2) Books that address personal development and integration into the rest of the world – an adult world – in which the personal development of the protagonist(s) is central to the plot.

Books of Type #2 win Newberry Medals, and books of Type #1 don’t. But I think both are important to have available for children.

Type #1 teaches concrete achievements that children ought to learn, and teaches them how to navigate their own world, an environment that has been carefully circumscribed by adults (difficult enough when you are a kid). It’s easier (and psychologically safer) for a young reader to identify with the protagonist in Type #1 books.

Type #2 books teach children to spread their mental wings beyond the concerns of childhood, to see themselves as the same person they will be when they are adults, to move in an adult world that is usually unstable and fraught with uncertainty. Type #2 gives young readers glimpses into the idea that things will change, that they will change, and that the direction in which change happens is important.

To put it briefly, Type #1 shows how to do, Type #2 shows how to become.

My next post will try to elucidate the characteristics of “Doing” books and “Becoming” books.

Question: What do you think of the words “Doing” and “Becoming” as designators of the two categories? I suspect there are better buzzwords to describe the two categories, and I’d love to have suggestions. Maybe "stable world" and "unstable world"? No, that's not that satisfying either.

One Lesson in Economics

When I was driving Madison to camp yesterday, we had a terrific discussion about economics -- about prices (as she'd already kind of derived, implicitly, the concepts of supply and demand when we were bargaining for something the other week), about macroeconomies and microeconomies, and why money was huge improvement on barter. So, given that this weekend is "tax-free school supplies weekend" in Virginia, I went out and got some cool new workbooks. Basics of Economics Grade 3

Also got two more, one is Teaching American History with Favorite Folk Songs which includes a CD, and also one that she is really excited about, Logic Safari Grades 3-4 which have those logic puzzles with the tables that really excite her.