Graphing the lemonade stand

From Deb:

Inspired by Raymond's real-life marble business, Madison has been talking a lot about the lemonade stand she will have someday. She'd do it right now, but January in Rochester is not the most auspicious time to have a lemonade stand. She plans to do it at RIT, get sponsored by the math club there, and share half the profits with them. What self-respecting college student, she figures, wouldn't buy a quarter's worth of lemonade from a cute little blonde-haired girl?

Madison talks about the lemonade stand all the time, so I decided to make it our math project for a couple of days. I pretended she already had the stand, and had done it for two weeks. I said that I had given her $10 in quarters to start out, and then gave her the sum total of the cash drawer for each day of the two weeks of the business. From this, she first figured out her sales for each day (subtraction with decimals), then the number of glasses she'd sold each day (division), then the number of glasses she'd sold total (long addition). Then, given that it costed $.05/glass to make the lemonade, the profit (.20 x # glasses sold...and we also did it a different way, with multiplication of fractions: 4/5 of the sales was profit).

And then...she graphed total sales, sales per day, and glasses per day. She loves the graphing. And, I was stunned at this. She graphed sales per day, first, and noticed the zigzags, because some days she had more sales than others. And then, she graphed glasses sold per day, and noticed that the graph was the exact same pattern. Then, she graphed total sales, and at first expected that this graph, too, would be the same pattern. But then it was not. And then, she looked carefully at WHAT it was she was graphing, and explained perfectly why the first two graphs were the same graph, while the total sales couldn't be (specifically, it couldn't go down, she said, it always must go up, unless you spend the money in the middle of the time). Yes!

We're now graphing daily snow levels thanks to the great snow ruler our friends Tom and Susan gave us.

Sorry, Laura, but Madison likes this so much better than Saxon Math.

Handwriting breakthrough

Turns out MADISON HAS BEEN HOLDING THE PENCIL INCORRECTLY!

Yes!

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

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

Signs of Language

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

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

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


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

Handwriting everywhere

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

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

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

She was actually happy about this. Go figure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

__________

__________


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

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

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

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

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

It's a good thing I love this.

Nonsense from Charles Murray on I.Q.

From Deb:

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

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

It's happened sooner than I thought

Ella now wants piano lessons.

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

G A B C C
C G A B B
etc

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

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

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

Prokofiev?

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

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

Once upon a time

M

The princess is coming (repeat 3)

I am not .... she is not content

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

A party

M

A true love at last

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

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

Marrying two of Adrienne's ideas

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

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

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

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

Very successful day, yesterday.

On the Beach

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

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

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

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

"Why?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Darting ahead to fun math

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

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

Those kinds of equations.

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

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

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

Madison's Function:

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

David graphed it on Excel and it looks like this:


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

3x + 2 = y

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

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

I know it's morning, but...

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

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

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

Get-Out-Of-God Free

Madison's first Brownie event is tomorrow, a hike in the park that is right across the street from our house!

I got the registration information yesterday, and saw to my chagrin that we both have to sign the Girl Scout Promise:

The Girl Scout Promise

On my honor, I will try:
To serve God* and my country,
To help people at all times,
And to live by the Girl Scout Law.

The Girl Scout Law

I will do my best to be
honest and fair,
friendly and helpful,
considerate and caring,
courageous and strong, and
responsible for what I say and do,
and to
respect myself and others,
respect authority,
use resources wisely,
make the world a better place, and
be a sister to every Girl Scout.

You see the asterisk next to God. On the Girl Scout web site, that asterisk refers to this:

* The word "God" can be interpreted in a number of ways, depending on one's spiritual beliefs. When reciting the Girl Scout Promise, it is okay to replace the word "God" with whatever word your spiritual beliefs dictate.

This is a good thing, because the info they sent us didn't give us this little Get-Out-Of-God-Free option, and David and I got a bit nervous about whether anyone was going to make a fuss about this. That's the last thing we wanted for Madison to have to experience. But given what the web site said, I didn't have the least problem signing off on it.

A new spelling program, going to give it a shot

We've not been able to be at all systematic about spelling with Madison this year. I saw a post from another blogger about a program called AVKO (avko.org). It supposedly teaches using related word families rather the spelling lists. No memorization...you just have the child spell the word and immediately correct them if it is wrong. It relies strongly on seeing patterns, which is one of Madison's strengths. They have a seven-day tryout page, so we'll probably do that and see if it works.

Running out of Jesus

The St. Paul's ceremony last night was lovely, if a little long. The church was indeed beautiful, the priest actually made some engaging points in the sermon and delivered it well (probably the best we've heard in our quest for historic churches -- although almost all sermons we have heard are dismal, so that's really not saying much). The woman behind me sang alto, which helped me remember the alto parts to the various carols, which was fun.

We also went to the Episcopalians last year in Virginia. It was interesting that that service was much closer to Protestantism, while the one at St. Paul's was almost identical to Catholicism's. (Almost too close for the comfort of my psyche, actually.)

So of course, we had more theology discussion in the car on the way home. I explained that although the ceremony was extremely close to Catholicism, one of the differences is in their views on transubstantiation: The Episcopalians regard the breaking of the bread as a symbolic act by the priest, whereas the Catholics believe the priest has magic powers and ACTUALLY turns the communion wafer into the body of Jesus.

My little logician in the back seat said, "But that doesn't make any sense. After just a little while, wouldn't they run out of Jesus?"

Why not just hate the person they marry?

Each year, on Christmas Eve, we visit a different historic church and go to the family service to sing Christmas carols. This year, we're going to St. Paul's Episcopal Church.

We were explaining at dinner what it meant to be an Episcopalian, how they straddle the Catholics and the Protestants in terms of both theology and services. I was explaining that one dimension on which Episcopalians are different from Catholics is that their priests are allowed to marry, whereas Catholic priests aren't. Madison was interested in why the Catholics have this rule, and David said that the logic is that they're supposed to devote themselves completely to God, rather than to a wife.

She replied, "Well, how about if they just hate the person they marry, that would be ok, wouldn't it?"

Lightbulb Day

We had our Lightbulb Day celebration last night. It was a kind of modified Lightbulb Day, because I decided we needed to do the zoo for school instead of create our inventions game. So we didn't do games, just the usual gathering around the fire, lighting candles, talking about human inventiveness, and celebrating our favorite inventions. A little discussion about the invention of fire gave Madison the opportunity to give a little lecture about hominid development (she's been reading about human evolution lately) and then she remembered a Cherokee legend, Turquoise Boy, which talked about the invention of horses as transportation for American Indians. (We studied American Indians last month.) She regaled us for 10 minutes with the story, and remembered far more details than I had.

It was all fun, but perhaps not as much fun as in years past because I didn't really have my act together. And so, Madison, my little glass-half-empty-phase girl, designated it as "the worst holiday we've ever celebrated." Was it bad? No, it was good, it was just "the worst." I had to explain that we only use "worst" in cases in which something really is bad. Otherwise, it's "lowest ranked." She decided to continue on the negative track, though, and pronounced it "worst." She really liked the little hand-held computer game we gave her, though.

Anyway, we really did have a good time. Here is a photo of Ella whacking at the Lightbulb pinata. Yes, she's on a stool, yes, she's wearing a blindfold, yes, she's using a bat, yes, she's right in front of our brick fireplace. Yes, we're probably bad parents, especially after the brick-diving incident from earlier this year.

Going to the zoo, zoo, zoo -- how about you, you you?

Yesterday, we went to the Seneca Park Zoo for school. The Rochester Zoo in December, you ask? Sure! It was almost 50 degrees and sunny, but you can even go in the cold and it's still fun. Our real estate agent gave us a one-year membership to the zoo, and we decided to take advantage of it. Both girls brought notebooks, and Madison sketched some animals with the names upder them. But Ella really went to down, writing down the name of every single animal we visited. While I read about the animals, she wrote, very proudly and as neatly as she could. Really great, especially for 5 1/2. Here is a photo of the notebook page:

Grammar

I'm going to start Madison with the rules of grammar. I plan to use the Montessori method of assigning certain colored shapes to parts of speech, unless one of the four people who read this blog has another suggestion.

I wouldn't mind using a good book, too, I never mind shortcuts.

But I know grammar, I figure I'll do this by the seat of my pants for now.

(David, the comma and period go INSIDE the double-quotes except in very very special circumstances. Under the imaginary middle of the line, inside. Two marks or over the imaginary middle of the line (; : ! ? ), outside.)

Homeschooling, again, finally

From Deb:

We started homeschooling again today, for the first time in two weeks. I say TWO weeks, in the sense of, well, ok, THREE weeks, if you want to be picky.

Homeschooling in the dentist's office!

It was a day of completely on-the-go, as in two haircuts, three dental cleanings, four notarized documents, zero new driver's licenses (despite aborted attempt), and a partridge in a pear tree.

While each girl was in the chair getting checked, her sister was learning all about the structure of teeth in one of our human body books, and I made Dr. Parnes give them lectures about dentin and enamel. Then, while I was in the chair, they worked. Really did, out in the reception area on math and handwriting, and the receptionist comment on how well-behaved and sweet they were! I love this age. Possibly it was the carrot of a trip to McDonald's that made them that way, though.

(Madison will need rather immediate orthodonture work as a six-year molar is slamming diagonally into a baby tooth and consequently not growing. Sigh.)

By the way, concerning physiology, they both had checkups at their pediatrician on Monday. The P.A., who has known them since birth, pronounced them "perfect." Height, weight, spine, you name it. And, believe it or not, Ella decided she wasn't going to cry during her three 5-year-old vaccination shots, and SHE DIDN'T. Really. You should have seen the triumphant look on her face. She says they didn't really hurt all that much, especially not compared with the brick-diving nose injury back in February. Ouch.

Madison finished the multiplication tables!

Because of the moving chaos, I was not able to post that Madison finished memorizing her multiplication tables! She had about six to go in the week before we left, which sent her into a panic, because her big prize that she'd eyed for months was at the Toys R Us there, a stuffed-animal horse, and she couldn't stand the idea of having to move without it.

So she asked for a hand with the last six problems.

I came up with YET ANOTHER strategy for memorizing them, and it worked, she did those in one day. I am sure that it was more the motivation than my strategy, but here is what I did.

We have a whole bunch of stickers in a sticker box. I decided to use those, with a different type of sticker for each equation.

We took note cards and made flash cards, with the equations on one side, and the answers on the other, and put a certain kind of stickers on each card, on both sides, with a little story to go with both the numbers and the stickers. And lo and behold, it worked!

She got this horse at Toys R Us. An enormous stuffed horse which is almost as big as she is. She named it Rosebud, and it sleeps with her. The child adores that horse.

The "Time Before"

Throughout my life, I have always been keenly aware of when I'm actively in a "time before."

The time before college.
The time before I started work.
The time before I moved to Rochester to be with David.
The time before we had Madison.
The time before we moved to Virginia.
And now...
The time before we moved back to Rochester.

Each of these "times" has a crisp point at which life abruptly swings you around in a new direction, where to some extent life begins anew, and you get to re-evaluate, and start over. Because these moments are planned, we have the luxury of using the concentrated "time before" as a period of contemplation for who we will be in our new life.

But these are also the times when, because you're about to be swung around again, there's an odd void in your imagination when you try to visualize what's in store. Some things just defy projection, such as becoming a mother. Before Madison was born, I couldn't imagine what her face would look like, and then in an instant there she was, and life whirled around and clicked me into a new place.

In this case, of course, I can visualize our new life all over the place. I've seen photos of the beautiful house we're moving into, I run a web site with all of the kid-friendly details about the area. We'll experience the "Norm" barstool phenomenon all over the place when the girls and I go to the nature center, or gymnastics, or karate.

And yet...it's still one of those points. It's still immensely stressful. I'm sitting here in the family room in Charlottesville, and I almost can't believe that in less than 48 hours I'll never be here again. Never. A stark word, that.

It's a new life, again, only a year and a half after the last new life, which promptly got put on hold because of the mess with Archimedes. We're settling in, this time, though, for the long haul. I'm 37, David is 48, it's definitely time to settle in and live. I'm hoping very much that this is the last "time before" for a long, long time.

Until...

Oh dear, until the girls leave home.

Fortunately, I have the next decade to plan for that one.

In the throes

We're surrounded by boxes, and boy are the girls wired. The packers came today. We had thought there would be one person for two days, and turns out there were three people for one day. So now there are two days to wait. Fortunately, we have art and drama classes for the next two days, to get us out of the house.

One of the things I have to do is return library books. I have just discovered that of the seven we have out, four of them are Boxcar Children books that have been packed. Somewhere. I am assuming they got integrated with her regular books in her room, that's where all of the Boxcars are. Let's hope that the library will put some kind of a stop hold on them and I can mail them back from Rochester.

We have Mateo, the 7-year-old from across the street in the afternoons -- we persuaded his parents (easily) to let him come here instead of going to his after-school care so he and the girls could spend more time together before we leave. In between the great hide-and-seek among the boxes, though, they're all squabbling, particularly Mateo and Madison. "You just want to go to Rochester because everything is better there, and you'll have better friends and forget all about me!" And Madison saying that she wants to go to Chili's for dinner, as long as Mateo doesn't go too. Geez. It's as though all the kids were on a sugar high.

Which they may be, because we made krusciki yesterday, my grandmother's recipe, to give out as gifts to various teachers. The best dessert in the world. Everything sinful in there. Egg yolks, sour cream, vanilla, flour, sugar, a little salt...then kneaded for dozens of minutes, rolled out, shaped, and deep fried for a minute, then coated with powdered sugar. Ahhhhhh....

All really necessary, even for me...today I realized that we needed, good grief, homeowner's insurance before Thursday...

Making use of the husband

As many others have noted, when the spouse who is not the primary homeschooler is home on vacation, the whole routine tends to go right to pot. Last vacation time, we just gave up on home schooling altogether, because too much was going on. However, for the beginning of this week, I'm trying to keep it going, because the next couple of weeks are going to be so hectic, what with moving and everything.

So, I have found out that the first step is to ADMIT YOU HAVE A PROBLEM. That is, to acknowledge right up front that David's being home is so exciting to the girls that adding him to the mix would really disrupt the routine we have established, making it harder for us to get done what we have to. That, plus he tends to make them feel the pressure of "performing" more than I do, which makes them nervous (ok, it makes Madison nervous; those things don't tend to rattle Ella). I will admit that my internal attitude about home schooling is akin to John Galt's: "Get the hell out of my way!" But, my admiration of Rand aside, this was the time for diplomacy. So, this time, I asked David to stay out of it unless I could find a way to incorporate him.

Fortunately, he understood, being a man who appreciates routine...and also fortunately, we have the luxury of doing our home schooling in our basement playroom. So it was easy for us to be out of the way.

And, I have to say, it has worked well. The girls both had things to show him and would pop upstairs when they had accomplished them, Ella asked if she could read her phonics book to David rather than to me, and they both practiced their drama class play for him. He read to them about Indians. Otherwise, we stayed below ground for the morning, and they weren't too distracted.

However, it did show me that I am definitely the one to do this. I gave Madison Thanksgiving-oriented spelling words this week: thanks, giving, potato, turkey, Pilgrim, and Indian. We practiced them below-ground, and then she wanted David to give her a little test. They spent some time going back-and-forth about the words, with her spelling them incorrectly much of the time.

Later on, he remarked to me, "Hey, you were pretty loose about making her do the spelling words."

"Well, she has the whole week to learn them," I said.

"Oh," he said.

Learning it by brain

Ella has been practicing hard for her part in her drama class' little play that will be performed in about 10 days. She has six or eight lines. She really likes to practice, especially since she can practice as part of school.

As we were laying in bed last night drifting off to sleep, she suddenly said to me:

"You know, if I were the one making up the words, I wouldn't call it 'learning it by heart.' I would call it 'learning it by brain.'"

We've been studying the human body for the last couple of weeks. I guess she's been paying attention!

If she had a million dollars

Madison is starting to get an understanding of what things cost with respect to each other. I guess part of it comes from the fact of our buying the new house; she has been asking a lot of questions about what things cost as she's getting her mind around the relative value of numbers.

We were listening to "If I Had a Million Dollars" yesterday by the Bare Naked Ladies, and by the end of the song, she said, "That's impossible."

"What's impossible?"

"He can't buy all of those things with just a million dollars. He'd run out by the middle of the song."

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.