TINDERBOX

We’re snowed in.

Over the weekend, we got more than two feet of snow, the most ever recorded in one snowfall in Baltimore. Tomorrow, the National Weather Service is predicting that we’ll get hit with another 10-20 inches. It could be a long time before we can go any further than the garden with the kids.

So, what the heck, we’re going to do another Five in a Row book. We could use some extra fun and structured activity to get us through the long days at home, and we’ll never have a better time to do one of the curriculum’s snow-focused books. It may never snow like this again during Alex’s childhood!

Katy and the Big Snow was written by Virginia Lee Burton, who is better known for writing Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel and the Caldecott Medal winner The Little House. It’s about a plucky, determined snowplow (Katy) who single-handedly rescues the city of Geoppolis when the lesser plows prove incapable of handling a Really Big snowfall.

It wasn’t until today that I realized that no, we really won’t be getting out any time soon. So we didn’t start Katy until this evening, and I didn’t have time to do any advance preparation. (I regret not being able to get to the library, because there are so many fantastic snow-themed picture books out there – and we don’t own any of them.)

We read through the book and spent some time studying the pictures in detail. Then I introduced a Language Arts lesson on personification. I pointed out that in real life, snowplows don’t talk or have feelings the way that Katy does in the book. Personification is taking something that isn’t alive and making it act like a person or giving it a personality. We flipped through Katy again and found the places where the author gives Katy human characteristics.

“Does this sound like anything we’ve seen on television lately?” I asked Alex. Her eyes widened. “Yes! Beauty and the Beast.” “That’s exactly what I was thinking of,” I said. We watched a clip of the song “Be Our Guest” from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and talked about the personality and human actions of the candlestick, teapot, and clock.

Then I told Alex that the book suggested that we make up our own story about something that wasn’t alive having a personality. I wasn’t sure how she would take to this, because we’ve never tried anything like it before. She was tremendously excited. She selected an object (a handkerchief) and started to tell and act out a story while I transcribed it as best I could. We only had to prompt her once, with “How did the handkerchief feel?” Other than that, her story flowed freely.

Once there lived a handkerchief that always loved to clean things. One day the handkerchief fell down while cleaning and looked like a piece of junk. A fine little girl came and found the handkerchief and said, “Mother, I found a handkerchief. You said I needed one to do my job of dusting.”

The handkerchief felt sad because all it had to do was dust and get waved around, and it just got dirtier and dirtier. He wanted to hold another handkerchief that didn’t have personality and clean with that.

The girl sang: “Aaaaaaaaah.”

The handkerchief one day got left on the girl’s bedside table, and here he was. He managed to get into the girl’s smiley face cup. The cup flew up onto the girl’s sewing box and then flew off to the handkerchief’s home. But he fell off, and the girl found him again, and dusted and dusted.

“You did a good job,” said the girl’s mother. And the girl said, “Yes.”

The girl fell asleep in her chair and dropped the handkerchief. The handkerchief managed to get away! It managed to get away and scurried to its box across the room. And then it went back to the handkerchief home, and the handkerchief jumped for joy.

But then the girl found the handkerchief again and dusted and dusted. Then the handkerchief died.

I love that story! And I think she will definitely remember the concept of personification, even if she doesn’t retain the exact term.

Alex’s plan to practice reading every day for a month worked out pretty well. I’d say we managed near-daily practice for about five weeks; since then it’s trailed off to about two or three times a week. In those five weeks, she did manage to make the leap from being a nonreader (or “emergent reader,” I guess) to being an early reader at about first-grade level.

She made it about halfway through the Intermediate series at Progressive Phonics. I’m not sure we’ll continue any further with formal phonics – it may be that Alex will get the rest of the way to fluent reading using real books. Right now she’s able to read things like Green Eggs and Ham and Mo Willems’ hilarious Elephant and Piggie books. She needs a bit of help with these books – we did half of Green Eggs and Ham in one sitting, and I think I only needed to help her with “could.” There Is a Bird on Your Head! has a somewhat less controlled vocabulary, and so I needed to provide a few more irregular words. But mostly she’s reading them.

Even at this early level, she reads with expression. Questions sound like questions, exclamations sound like exclamations, hysterical shrieking is very shrieky indeed. She’ll often puzzle out a new sentence word by word and then repeat it fluently and expressively. It’s fun to read with her.

I’m trying to keep reading fun for her, too. I am realizing that I’ve made a mistake with our reading practice – I’ve kept her moving forward instead of letting her read and re-read familiar texts. Re-reading helps her build confidence, fluency, and instant word recognition. I guess I was sort of thinking that it “didn’t count” as much if she might be remembering the words instead of decoding them, but um. That was dumb. Never mind.

A recent impulse purchase from the dollar bins at Target is helping keep things fun.

The instant I saw this little tin mailbox I knew that Alex would have a great time with it. Maybe every other day I put a note or two in it. Today Alex started writing back. Here are two of our exchanges:

She asked Michael how to spell out every word in the note she wrote me. I’m hoping that as time goes on she’ll feel more comfortable forging ahead with writing on her own; I think she’s too much of a perfectionist to be willing to risk getting it wrong. Brief little mailbox notes seem like a good way to make space to move past that.

Yesterday I got my grant application in to NIH, so now I have time to post a wrap-up of our Five in a Row practice week with Madeline and my impressions of the curriculum now that I’ve tried it out.

I enjoyed the experience of immersing our family in one book and one set of topics for a week. It would probably drive a more linear thinker crazy, but I loved the way we were able to construct a web of facts, ideas, experiences, connections, and relationships spreading out from Madeline at the center. Serving a baguette with dinner led to discussions of the practice of daily marketing (rather than our once-a-week supermarket trip and our factory-packaged bread), Belinda in Paris (in which the large-footed ballerina uses two baguettes as toe shoe forms), and Disney’s movie Beauty and the Beast, with side excursions into the subject of French pastries and Three Kings’ Day. We also found ourselves spontaneously linking in things we’ve discussed before: Remember the book we read about how the Statue of Liberty was built? M. Eiffel designed its metal skeleton as well as the Eiffel Tower. Alex has always enjoyed putting pieces together and finding connections, so this has been a perfect fit for her.

I’m surprised at how deep and rich some of her learning has been. Much of what we talked about we only touched on lightly, as is appropriate for age four-and-a-half. But she was captivated by the idea of the appendix and its connection to human evolution; she went back to our evolution picture book again and again and several times I heard her explain its concepts to other people. She may forget the Obelisk of Luxor in the Place de la Concorde, but I don’t think she’ll forget why she has an appendix and a tailbone.

Reading the book five times in a row really does make a difference. A couple of times Alex balked at re-reading Madeline and was more interested in going straight on to the supplemental library books. But I noticed that with all the re-reading she entered very deeply into the world of the story, finding small details in the pictures, speculating about the characters, using her imagination to fill in unsupplied background and contextual material. I think that as she learns to write, repeated re-reading will also help her begin to notice and appreciate matters of technique.

Using Five in a Row did take research work, finding appropriate supplemental materials and planning out which lessons and activities to use. I didn’t mind, though, because it was totally fun. The FIAR forum archives were a lot of help, as were FIAR blogs and homeschoolshare.com. And I think it was beneficial to model some of my research for Alex, so that in addition to learning new factual information she also absorbed some lessons about finding out what you want to know.

We are going to need to figure out how to incorporate math and reading on a regular basis. We only did math activities twice in the week, and reading practice perhaps three times. I think that once we get started “for real” (rather than squeezing FIAR into a holiday week) it will be easier to set up those habits.

All three of us are feeling enthusiastic about Five in a Row now. Alex was reluctant to return to nursery school at the end of her “kindergarten week,” and I am feeling a similar urge to open up my big box of FIAR books (my collection currently stands at 46) and dive right in. She’s already thinking ahead about what she wants to learn: “When we read The Story about Ping (a book about a runaway duck) we can learn how ducks swim, and how they lay eggs.”

This curriculum is going to be such a great way of feeding her exploratory spirit and opening up her world.

Posted by Michael

Our subject for the fourth day was “Art”.The plan was to find some landmarks shown in Madeline (such as the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame — see this tour guide for all eight places), match them up with pictures, and then go on to talk about how an artist’s drawing might not match up with the reality of a photo, but it could still be recognizable nonetheless. We then intended to follow up with a short trip to the Baltimore Museum of Art to look at some French paintings and talk about Impressionism a little.

Alex started out wanting to read some other books that take place in Paris — Adele & Simon, The Inside-Outside Book of Paris, but when she started looking for yet more books, I nudged us back to the lesson plan, since time was flyng by and the museum had limited hours. She started off having a little trouble with the matching, but quickly got the hang of it, and seemed to enjoy figuring out what buildings were actually shown. She was especially good at picking out geometric details and matching them to the pictures.

I was a little surprised at how definite she was about some of her identifications of what was in the pictures. For example, there is one page where the children encounter a wounded French soldier on crutches wearing a kepi outside the Hotel de Invalides, and she was adamant that he was NOT a soldier, he was just a man with a hurt foot. She’s very accomplished at making up stories about various characters, getting almost to the level of fanfic, so I suppose she can have her own narratives that may conflict with the text, and I’m going to have to remember to not insist on “right” and “wrong” interpretations.

Mama came in during this, and we all compared different representations of the Eiffel Tower in different drawings against photos of the Tower, and all admitted that there was some sort of common theme to the representations, and that it didn’t have to look just like the photo. On that note, we all bundled up and braved the bitter cold to the museum.

We wandered through the collection, and Colin chose to exercise his lungs in the high galleries, which meant that we didn’t stay too long in any one place. Alex seemed to enjoy looking at the pictures and the sculpture, but it didn’t fascinate her. We went over to the Contemporary Art section, and there things got a little different.

Alex found some works that were fun to play around, such as one piece that was just a 10-foot by 10-foot length of blue and silver beads hanging in a gap in the wall, like a door into a giant hippie’s bedroom. Alex loved running through the beads, and holding them open; I rather suspect the artist would have strongly approved. She also expressed appreciation for “splatter paintings”; I confess that Jackson Pollock is lost on me, but if she likes it, more power to her. It didn’t tie in well with the “France” theme, but that’s OK — we want her to think of museums as places that you go to frequently, and not just visits to see specific things.

I know this is only the fourth day you’re seeing, but today was our last day of our Five in a Row practice run. Michael is still planning to write up and post yesterday’s art lesson, while I go ahead and post about today.

Our subject on the fifth day was “Applied Math.” Five in a Row doesn’t include a full math course (that would be hard to do, given the wide potential age range), but every week there are some lessons that include a practical or experiential math component linked to the story. This is probably the weakest part of the curriculum – I’m not troubled about it, though, because we have plenty of other opportunities for math.

Before we read Madeline for the last time, I had Alex collect twelve of the new Polly Pocket dolls Santa brought her to be the “twelve little girls in two straight lines” featured in the book. A thirteenth Polly Pocket stood in for Miss Clavel and ordered the girls to line up in two straight lines. Then “Miss Clavel” asked the girls how many were in each row, and one of the dolls raised her hand to give the correct answer. Next the girls were ordered to line up in three straight lines, then four, then six. After the first couple of times, I had Alex guess how many would be in each row before rearranging the dolls. She noticed that four rows of three is the same as three rows of four, but wasn’t immediately able to generalize that to know how many to expect in six rows, even though we’d done two rows of six. I thought that was interesting.

Next I had the doll designated as Madeline go to the hospital, leaving eleven little girls. We experimented with different ways of organizing them and discovered that there isn’t any way to have them line up in equal rows unless they go single file.

Our final Madeline activity was unrelated to math. Each week of Five in a Row, we’re going to have Alex do a “narration” of the story. This is a technique a lot of homeschoolers use to replace the fill-in-the-blank “comprehension” worksheets most of us probably did in elementary school. It simply consists of asking the child to tell, in their own words, as much of a story or book chapter as they can remember. Alex likes to have movies taken of her, so I promised that I would film her telling the story of Madeline.

Interestingly enough, in her practice session she recited many sections of the book word for word, including quite a few details. Then she got camera shy or something, because the recorded version is a brief summary of only a few elements – plus some things Alex made up to add in. I include it here for your pleasure.

Today was the Science day of our Madeline study. The suggested science lessons in the Five in a Row manual didn’t really grab me, so I freelanced.

In the book, Madeline gets appendicitis and is rushed to the hospital for surgery. After we read the book through, I brought out our copy of Pop Up Facts: Human Body and we found the appendix on the digestive system page. I introduced the word “vermiform” and explained that it means “shaped like a worm.” We discussed what the appendix does: apparently, nothing; some doctors think it plays a role in the immune system, but taking it out doesn’t seem to make any difference.

“Why do we have an appendix?” Alex asked, playing right into my hands. I explained that some plant-eating animals have an appendix too, and they use theirs to help them digest parts of plants that humans can’t eat. “Like cows?” she asked. Actually, I explained, cows have four stomachs to do all the extra digestive work they need to get energy from grass. “Do you know how some dinosaurs digested their food?” Alex asked. “They swallowed rocks to grind their food up in their stomachs.” Right, and so there are several different ways for animals who eat grass to help their body use the hard-to-digest parts. A working appendix (as opposed to our own non-working appendix) is one of them.

Our appendix is probably left over from when our distant ancestors were plant-eating animals. So we read Our Family Tree: An Evolution Story, a beautifully illustrated and poetic picture book that traces human ancestry back to single-celled sea organisms. Then we continued to talk about how sometimes when animals change over time, old parts they don’t need anymore are still passed down. The appendix is one example for humans, and another is the tailbone. Alex struggled a bit with the time scale of evolution (“Did I have an ape for the great great great grandmother of my grandmother?”) but seemed to understand the general idea.

Then I asked her if she wanted to know more about what happens when a kid has an operation, like Madeline did. Yes! She totally did. So we watched a couple of hospital-produced YouTube videos designed to prepare children for surgery. (I was inspired by Sprouts Homeschooling – they use YouTube a lot, in neat ways.)

We watched one sweet and earnest one:

And one fast-paced funny one from Australia:

They both give a very good idea of what happens before and after surgery, what anesthesia is, how hospital personnel look and what they do – all fascinating information for Alex. I also told her a few non-scary details about what it was like when I had surgery as a child, and talked about some differences between hospital stays in Madeline’s era and hospital stays now. (Madeline could only have visitors for two hours a day, and she stayed in the hospital for more than ten days for her appendectomy.) Alex came out of this discussion totally convinced that she wants to have an operation and stay overnight in the hospital, so I guess those hospital prep videos are doing their job.

After dinner tonight we’re going to return to France and make crepes with raspberry jam and powdered sugar.

In the usual way of things, each day of Five in a Row focuses on a different subject. Yesterday was Social Studies; today was supposed to be devoted to Language Arts. But of course learning doesn’t divide itself up neatly like that. We took an immediate detour, first thing, when Alex picked up Madeline and the Bad Hat, looked at the cover picture, and said conversationally, “The thing that I don’t understand is, these look like hieroglyphics.”

So off to Google we went, to find out why there would be hieroglyphics on a monument in Paris. We quickly found out that it was the Obelisk of Luxor, given to France by the viceroy of Egypt in 1829. We found a great set of pictures of the Place de la Concorde, the Obelisk, and the unbelievably garish fountain that stands alongside. A picture of the Place de la Concorde Metro station led us on a brief and completely fruitless excursion into the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens, a subject which is just a trifle above the head of a four-year-old. (I should’ve limited my answer to “those are some famous words in French!” and left it at that.)

So then: Language Arts. Today when we read Madeline I encouraged Alex to find the pairs of words that rhyme. She had a bit more trouble with this than I expected; for example, she suggested that “cried” and “red” rhyme because they both end with the same letter. But she picked it up as we went along. Then we took four words, two picked by me and two picked by her, and generated a list of words that rhyme with each word. For example: line, mine, shine, Madeline, fine, sign.

The other Language Arts thing I’d picked out for her to do was copywork. This is pretty much what it sounds like: working on copying as a way of learning to write. I had her trace the word “Madeline” and then write it on a separate line. She has mostly learned capital letters, so I was interested to see what she would do with a word in mixed case. She copied it very carefully; the lower-case “a” looked a little funny, but the rest of the letters were great.

A little later on Alex wanted to read more books from the box. We read Adele and Simon and Madeline and the Bad Hat again (with, ugh, some discussion of what a guillotine is and how it works, because Pepito in Bad Hat builds a guillotine for chickens. I did not raise the question of past human uses, even if we are studying Paris.), then moved on to a book we’ve had from the library before, Belinda in Paris, part of a series about a ballerina with enormous feet. The course of the plot carries Belinda through a number of Paris scenes. Some of these are definitely starting to look familiar to both of us; we matched pictures in Belinda to scenes in Everybody Bonjours (a book we read yesterday) and used some of the endnotes from Everybody Bonjours to figure out that we were looking at the Tuilleries garden and at the Paris opera house. I learned something new myself: I’ve seen The Phantom of the Opera, but I had no idea that the Paris opera actually does have an underground lake in the cellar. I thought that was romantic fantasy.

“Someday can we go to Paris?” Alex wants to know.

Michael and I both worked a full day today, and then we were all invited to a party in the evening. So our first day of Five in a Row was pretty brief.

We read Madeline, as we will every day through Sunday. While we read it we talked a bit about the scenes that were chosen to illustrate the line “They smiled at the good and frowned at the bad, and sometimes they were very sad.” Alex wanted to discuss what was good, bad, and sad in the pictures. We followed Madeline up with my least favorite of the sequels (which would be why it’s novel and exciting to Alex), Madeline and the Bad Hat.

I helped Alex pick out France on our world map, and she stuck a laminated picture of the Madeline book cover there with double-sided tape. We looked at the pages for France in our child’s atlas and found Paris, where Madeline lived.

We also read a couple of supplemental picture books about Paris: Adele and Simon, a Where’s Waldo-esque journey of a young boy and girl through early 20th century Paris, losing something on every page, and Everybody Bonjours, which has great drawings of Paris and very simple text. (I’ve put together a little tub of books to go along with Madeline, and these were the ones Alex chose today. We may get to more of them later in the week.)

We finished up by watching a half-hour video from a PBS series called Families of the World. This one was called Families of France. It follows two children, a nine-year-old girl whose family owns a vineyard and guesthouse in the Beaujolais region and a ten-year-old boy who lives in urban Lyon, through a couple of days of their ordinary lives as they go to school, play, and spend time with their families. I liked it because it gives an impression of normal modern life for French children, so that Alex doesn’t get the idea that Madeline is what France is like today.

This evening after the party I asked Alex what she remembered about France. She remembers Paris, and the Eiffel Tower, and that Madeline lived there, and that they say “bonjour” for hello. And that they make little cakes. And she recognizes the French flag. Not bad for the first day.

We’re going to have five consecutive days (Wednesday-Sunday) at home with no nursery school after coming home from our post-Christmas trip to Memphis. Michael has to work on Wednesday and Thursday, but after that it will be all of us together.

It seemed like it might be a good idea to use that five-day stretch for a practice run with our intended homeschooling curriculum; after all, they do call it “Five in a Row,” and days are what they mean. Alex has been eager to dive into the box that I call “kindergarten books,” and Michael and I figure that (a) we could use some practice, and (b) it would be nice to be sure that this is the approach we want.

We’ve decided to start with Ludwig Bemelmans’ Madeline, a book we all know well and one of the FIAR books that’s most suitable for a four-year-old. On the menu for our practice week: learning about Paris and France, exploring rhyming words, figuring out other ways the girls could line up besides the canonical two straight lines of six (i.e., an introduction to the factors of twelve), comparing the illustrations of Paris landmarks in the book to photos of the real thing, learning about the appendix and why we have one (because Madeline has an appendectomy in the book), and discovering what happens when a person has surgery. We might have dinner at a French bistro in our neighborhood, and maybe we’ll search out a good local source for French pastries. (It’s amazing, what I’m willing to suffer for the sake of my child’s education!)

On top of the Five in a Row studies, we’ll probably continue on with the daily or near-daily reading practice we’ve been doing, and add a small amount of daily math. Alex has been interested in fractions lately, so we might pull out some of that – or maybe we’ll just stick to adding and subtracting, which is where she left off in the Miquon curriculum when the initial thrill of having a math book wore off.

I think it’s reasonable to aim for a total of about 60-90 minutes a day of “official kindergarten.” Maybe a little less for the practice week; maybe a little more because we haven’t got a feel for what we’re doing yet.

“I used to love playing with my rods and pattern blocks, but” – Alex heaved a dramatic sigh – “not anymore.”

“Oh yeah? Why do you think that is?”

“Well, sometimes when children get older they just don’t like the same things they used to like,” my worldly-wise four-year-old explained.

She went on to clarify, a little later, that she still likes math but only when she can do it in her head. She told me that she lies in bed at night doing silent math. (There was an interesting side discussion here about the special mouth inside her head that can talk in a way that no one hears.) “Like, I do 2+2=4, 4+4=8, 8+8=16.”

I told her that it was cool that she could do math in her head, but that we might want to get the rods out sometime to learn new math that she doesn’t already know. It turns out that she was not really aware that there might be math she didn’t know. She demanded to know what it was. I mentioned fractions, multiplication, division, and “more stuff with negative numbers.” Hmm, she said.

I asked her a few simple addition problems that start with larger numbers, like 70+5 and 100+10. She was pretty gleeful about getting them right. Then I tried 33+1 and 22+2. I think of those as being trickier because you’re not just mashing two number names together the way you are with seventy plus five is seventy-five. She got them both right, though, so maybe she really is clear on the concept.

This was all happening in the car on the way to nursery school. We were pulling up in front of the school and I wanted to let her finish with a bang, so I asked her “How much is a hundred million plus one million?”

“A hundred and one million,” Alex said, grinning from ear to ear.

“Yeah,” I said. “How awesome is that?”

Alex’s regular reading practice continues. She missed a couple of days while we were on vacation, of course, and that combined with the fact that we’re now in the intermediate Progressive Phonics books, which are definitely harder, to cause a little resistance.

So we went to the library and sat down with Dr. Seuss’s Hop on Pop. I chimed in for words that she didn’t know, but Alex was able to read most of the book herself. Resistance cured. I think being able to pick up a “real” library book and read it made quite an impression on her

Our library also has a set of phonics readers called “Wonder Books” – nonfiction picture books with very simple text illustrated with photos, and about 10-12 sentences per book. We took out three of them, and tonight Alex read all three in a row. I helped with occasional irregular words (like “when”), but she didn’t need any help with sentences like “I can help Mom do a job” or “I can wash the corn or not.”

I learned from these books that Alex can read words I didn’t expect her to: wash, corn, have, like, help. I pointed out to her that those are words she hasn’t technically “learned,” but she was still able to read them. I think it was really helpful for her confidence, to see that she can figure out words that haven’t been presented.

“We should have gotten more of these,” I said. “Because I think that if you can read these three, you can probably read all the books in that box.”

“It’s going to be BOOM! The box is empty!” Alex said gleefully.

Right on.

When last I wrote, Alex had started to show an interest in learning to read, and we had discussed possibly reading every day for a month. A few days after I wrote that post, we were doing something reading-related and I asked her if she still planned to learn reading every day in December. “Yeah,” she said happily. “…Because you don’t have to wait until then, you know. Your month could start at any time.” She hadn’t known that.

So the next day we sat down for a little reading practice. The day after that she didn’t want to, but the six days after that she’s practiced reading every single day. We read Bob Books – very, very simple short phonics readers – and Progressive Phonics books, a free web program that embeds short words for the child to read into longer text that the parent reads.

In eight days, we’ve whipped through the first four basic Progressive Phonics readers and most of the first set of Bob books. Alex gets to decide what we do and how much. Sometimes it’s only five minutes. Other times she stays motivated for almost half an hour! And her progress has been considerable. She can really sound out words now instead of using the look-and-guess method, and she’s so confident and excited that she usually shouts her portions of the Progressive Phonics stories.

On Friday, my mother asked Alex if she reads to Colin. I mentioned a couple of short books I thought Alex had memorized. She picked up Sheep in a Shop and said “I can read this one.” And damned if she didn’t try. She had bits of it memorized (you could tell because she read them fluently), but in other places she had to sound out words. They were above her reading level, as most words are, but you could tell that she was applying rules as best as she could. She seemed to have quite a sense of accomplishment when she was done. It was the first time that I know of that she read a real piece of literature rather than a text-for-learning-to-read.

I decided at the outset that I have no interest in holding her to her original plan to practice reading every day for a month. I do treat reading time as assumed; instead of asking her “Do you want to have reading time today?” I’ll ask “Do you want to have reading time in private or where Grandma and Grandpa can hear?” But she’s free to pick “neither” as her choice. Interestingly enough, in the beginning she balked a few times and said she wasn’t going to do it, but changed her mind as soon as I said “Okay, that’s up to you. You don’t have to read.” (Well, she decided then, maybe she would just read a little…) And now it’s clearly self-reinforcing. She can tell that she’s getting better and better, and that’s a reward all by itself.

Alex continues to write and write. She’s making a lot of progress with her letter forms – she still occasionally reverses J and Z, but most of the other letters are accurately shaped and she’s able to draw them quite small. Telling her how to spell something is much less laborious these days – she can handle being given a couple of letters at a time, and she draws individual letters quickly.

And she does tend to ask us how to spell. I know that invented spelling is supposed to be the thing, and I think it would really help her reading skills if she tried to puzzle out how to write words on her own. But when she writes on her own, she sticks to random collections of letters, the alphabet, her name, and a few words she knows how to spell well. She may be too much of a perfectionist to use invented spelling, or she may need a bigger base of words she can spell before she has the confidence to strike out on her own. In the meantime, she has a lot of patience for being helped to spell sentences letter by letter.

She’s starting to ask about upper case vs. lower case letters (she doesn’t know many lower case letters) and also about placing periods in her sentences. It’s so fascinating to me, how much writing progress occurs when you have something to say.

I’d say that pique is her biggest motivator for independent writing right now. I have in my possession notes which say “NO NO NO NO NO I AM SAD” “NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO I AM MAD” AND “TO MAMA FROM ALEX NO I WONT U YOU ARE MAKE KING ME MAD” (she asked me, separately, how to spell “make” and “king”). I think I’m supposed to feel terrible about receiving these, but instead I think they’re hilarious.

We’ve left reading strictly alone for some time; I was feeling like I might have pushed a bit too hard when she first showed interest in learning to read, so I backed way off. But yesterday we had a conversation about it. We were tucked away in the pharmacy waiting area at the supermarket so that I could nurse Colin, and there was a big display of media tie-in picture books. I will read to Alex for hours – we went through The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in less than a day – but I have a longstanding policy that I will not read books based on a movie or TV show. I hate them. I am not totally anti- licensed characters; she watches videos and she has some Disney Princess and Little Einsteins toys. But the books are pretty much universally bad. They’re created as a product, not imagined by someone burning to tell a story, and it shows. Awful writing, stupid plots, developmentally inappropriate elements… okay, that’s enough ranting. But that’s the reason for my policy.

So Alex wanted me to read the Spongebob Squarepants books we were sitting beside, and I reminded her that I don’t read books like that. I also pointed out that when she can read on her own, she can read whatever books she wants – so if she wants Spongebob stories, the best thing to do is learn to read.

“But that will take a long time!”

“I don’t really think so. It all comes down to practice, and I think that if you practiced every day you could learn to read pretty well in about a month. So not too long.”

We went on to talk about other things. But that evening she brought me a pencil and some post-its and asked me to write her notes. She did pretty well at reading, with assistance, things like “I had fun at the park. Did you?” and “I am not a cat. I am not a dog. I am a Mama.” And she didn’t balk at trying.

Then today she told me, “You know what? In December, I’m going to learn reading every day.”

“Okay,” I said. “We can do that.” I wonder if that motivation will last.

Alex shouted down from the bathroom to say that she was typing numbers on her calculator and the wrong number came out. By the time I had a chance to talk to her about it, she had it all figured out: “I didn’t realize that when it has a little line in front of it, it’s a negative number.” I asked how she’d figured it out. “I put in one take away two equals.”

“As long as we’re talking about negative numbers…” I was curious about how much she’d actually taken away from the five-minute lesson we did last weekend. So I asked her about 2-4 and 3-6, and she answered them both quickly. 3-4 got me “Mooooom, I want to watch a video!” so I stopped pushing my luck. But yeah, looks like the concept stuck.

Sometimes incidents like this make me feel pressured – like I really ought to be sitting down with her on a regular basis and encouraging her to make steady progress through math (and probably other things), since she obviously has the capability. It’s hard to let go of the mindset that can means should.

[This post is intended in part as a test of the LJ RSS feed, which seems to be up and running for new posts but not picking up dropped ones from before. If you read this blog through LiveJournal, you've probably missed posts here and here.]

Although she was enthusiastic about trying out some of the games for math when I brought home Peggy Kaye’s book, I can’t remember the last time that Alex asked to do what I think of as formal math work (Cuisenaire rods, pattern blocks, “orangey book” which is what she calls the first Miquon workbook). But she has a huge amount of math development going on all the same.

Yesterday we were reading More All of a Kind Family and came to a bit where there are twenty children “plus all of us.” Alex asked me how much was five plus twenty. I suggested that she could probably figure it out, and she did. She was pretty pleased with herself and danced through a bunch of other examples: 50+5, 70+3, 100+9. It really seemed to thrill her to be able to answer math questions involving such big numbers. I announced that I was going to try to trick her and followed up 20+9 with 20+10. She was not even slightly tricked. *grin*

I forget how negative numbers came up, but they did recently in an inconvenient setting and I fended her off by saying that I would need to draw a number line to explain them. Yesterday she demanded that I draw that number line and explain negative numbers, and so I did the best I could. She was intrigued and was able to answer a couple of simple questions like 3-4 by consulting the number line.

“Do Becky, Lyn, and Uri know about negative numbers?” she asked, referring to some adult friends of ours. I asked her what she thought, and she said she thought they didn’t. So maybe they’ll get a lesson the next time Alex sees them.

She asked me to make a giant number line from -10 to 100. I did, and she immediately lost interest in it. Oh well. I’ll leave it up for a while and see if she wants to do anything else with it.

I also notice that her interest in writing is paying big dividends. She continues to write lots of notes and to incorporate writing into her games and drawings. My favorite example was when she decided that we were playing school, and got peeved because Michael and I didn’t want to take part. The next thing we knew she had a marker and piece of paper, and was asking us to spell “bad children” so she could make a list of our names. Heh.

Through all of this practice, she is now very confident about her ability to form all the letters. I notice that she now consistently orders her letters from left to right (as opposed to squeezing them in wherever they fit), and she is starting to put spaces in between words and to keep the letters of a word together. And she’s showing more awareness of spelling; she’ll sometimes break words down into phonemes when she’s asking for help writing them, and yesterday she told me that she was “s-a-d.”

Here’s a note she wrote me yesterday. She spelled “to Mama” and her name without assistance; I helped with the rest of the spelling. if you can’t decipher it, it says:” Help to Mama from Alex she’s poor.” (There’s been a lot of Robin Hood around here lately, and thus fascination with poverty.)

Today was one of my afternoons home with Alex. We burned through a bunch of the activities in Peggy Kaye’s Games for Math.

The games worked best for us as short concentrated bursts; we played five in about half an hour. Kaye emphasizes that you should only play as long as they’re fun, and that it’s better for the game to be a little too easy than a little too hard. There are more elaborate games in the book, but we stuck with some simple ones for today. I’m just going to describe the three I thought worked best for us.

The first game we played was called “What did I do?” I knew it would be a hit with Alex because it involves one person hiding their eyes while the other does something sneaky, and she likes just about every other variation on that theme. I brought out a cup of beads, put a few in my hand, and showed them to her. Then she closed her eyes. I adjusted the number of beads in my hand and asked her to figure out “What did I do?” Once she figured it out, it was her turn to try to fool me.

Alex had a good memory for the beads and mostly had no trouble figuring out what I had done. The one time she did (I started with three and added four) I had her recreate the problem in her own hand, and she figured it out that way. She was proud of herself for coming up with a very tricky problem for me: she began with two beads of one color and swapped them for two beads of another color. That was funny enough that she did it two turns in a row. She also thought it was funny when I showed her four beads followed by an empty hand. “You took away four!”

The second game was called “Grasshopper.” We went outside and chalked a bunch of numbers on the sidewalk. For the first round, Alex wanted to use 1 to 11; when she decided to do another round after we’d played hopscotch for a while she asked me to add 12, 13, and – I thought this was interesting – 0. Once we had the numbers set up, not in a number line but sort of scattered around out of order, we took turns directing each other. “Jump to the number of how old you are.” “Jump to the number that’s one less than seven.” “Twirl to the number that’s four plus four.”

The last game we played was one Alex found paging through the book. I thought it would be too hard for her, but we gave it a try. This one used the Disney Princess cards again – they’re convenient for math games because there aren’t any face cards. I dealt Alex a hand of five cards and told her that we were looking for as many ways as possible to make 10 by adding or subtracting numbers.

She had 9 and 1 in her hand, so that was easy. Then I pointed out that she had a 5 and a 6. She knew that 5+5=10, and when I asked she was able to use that fact to figure out that 5+6=11. “Is there any way you could get from there to 10?” I started to ask, but she was already reaching for the one. I wrote down 5+6-1=10. After studying a while longer, she told me that we could do 6+5-1 as well, so I wrote that down without arguing that it was same as her previous equation. That was as many as we could figure out, so Alex’s score was 3.

My hand had two 5s, so I made that right away. Then Alex excitedly pointed out that I could also do 2+3+5=10. I didn’t have any other combinations for 10, so Alex won that round 3 to 2.

I’m impressed that she was able to pick out some combinations spontaneously, especially the 2+3+5 one. But mostly I was asking a lot of leading questions (“Belle says, ‘who would I match up with to make 10?’ That’s right, two. No, I know you don’t have a two, but do you have any cards you could put together to make two?”), which is good insofar as it’s modeling mathematical reasoning but also probably means that the game is too hard for her right now.

At any rate, our first encounter with Games for Math was very successful, and I think I’ll probably end up buying the book. Samples of Peggy Kaye’s games are here if you want to try them out; they’re meant to be for grades K-3.

This morning I heard Alex say quietly to herself, “This has only one side.” I looked up. She had twisted the end of her dress sash into a Moebius strip and was tracing around it with her finger.

I showed her that with paper, once. A couple of months ago.

This kid? Is a sponge. I knew that, but somehow it still manages to keep surprising me.

Alex has started writing with great urgency.

Usually she asks us how to spell things; other times she tells us what things spell. The first note here, she informs me, is “the secret Chinese word for ‘Thank you for being my Mama.’” This series of notes was produced in the bathroom.

Today she decided to be Maid Marian and told me I was Robin Hood. She brought me a notebook and suggested that I could write down how to shoot a bow and arrow, in case I forget. When I didn’t seem disposed to do so, she did it for me.

Any situation now calls for a note. She wanted to take her temperature – she’s been sick – and so she asked me how to spell “where’s the thermometer.” Here’s the second half of that one:

I like the curly, fancy letters, but they certainly do sacrifice something in the legibility department.

Her letter formation has improved markedly just over the last few days. She’s writing numbers too, but having more difficulty with them. The picture in the lower right is supposed to be Japanese numbers from 1 to 3, courtesy of Yoko Writes Her Name.

I’ve been thinking about whether we should teach “handwriting” in any kind of systematic way, or whether we should just let go and let her write. I’m attracted to Italic styles, which a lot of homeschoolers use. This PDF of children’s writing samples is quite appealing. And yet… I see people getting all exercised about whether their kids are holding their pencils right and whether they’re making the lines of each letter in the right order, and it’s hard for me to care about those things. A beautiful Italic hand would be a nice thing to have, but the really essential part of writing is communication.

I know, I know, it’s not either/or. I got lousy, lousy grades in penmanship when I was a kid, but a little later on I enjoyed doing calligraphy with a fountain pen. I’m not going to slow down her urgent note-writing now to have her focus on forming the perfect “a,” and we can worry about later when later comes. Although I am giving some feedback when she starts up with stuff like “This is how I make a two.” “Well, your two needs to look enough like other people’s twos that people will be able to recognize it.”

We spent a couple of hours in the family art center in the basement of the Walters Art Museum today. Alex ran around with her friend Zoe playing big, complicated pretend games while Zoe’s mother and I hung out with the babies and talked.

Alex wanted to visit the mummy before we left, of course. She had me read the names of the figures on the canopic jars and say which organ went in each jar.

“In early days, the heart was left in the body,” she explained authoritatively. “In later times, the heart was tooken out and they put a scarab in its place. Like that one.” She stabbed a finger at a large and beautiful scarab displayed in the case.

“This mummy is from about nine hundred years before Jesus was born,” I contributed. “So its heart would have been taken out.”

She nodded. “Now let’s go to Rome. Look, here are some more tombs.”

We really are going to wind up mummifying a damn chicken, aren’t we?

A bit later on, in the Ancient Greece room, Alex’s attention was caught by an elaborate sarcophagus with relief carvings showing the abduction of Persephone. I’ve read her that story before, so I pointed the characters out to her.

“Why did he kidnap her?” she said, frowning at Hades.

“Because he wanted to marry her, and she didn’t want to marry him.”

Alex scowled. “That is not a good reason to kidnap someone.”

Yes. Yes indeed, Hollywood.

Sunday night we met up with a local homeschooling group, Homeschool Connections of Central Maryland. There was a program with different getting-to-know-you bingo games, but it was also set up so that new families could meet informally with experienced members to find out more about homeschooling and about the group.

This is an inclusive (homeschooling code for “not conservative Christian”) group, and from the general feel of them they seemed like our kind of people – friendly, relaxed, and kind of geeky. They were warmly welcoming and encouraged us to join even though we aren’t homeschooling yet.

They have a series of large whole-group events: a Halloween costume party, a science fair, an art show, an open mike night, a history fair, a camping trip, a field day, a dinner dance. They operate a Girl Scout cluster – a coordinated organization of troops at each age level. They meet in the same building at the same time so that they can do some combined activities and have older girls mentor the younger ones, as well as separating for age-appropriate activities.

There are also apparently tons of smaller and more informal events – “play days” at parks, a drama club, field trips, art classes, D&D nights for teenagers, bowling, skating. One family we met said that whenever they’re doing a particularly fun science experiment or history project they put it up on the group calendar so others can drop by if they want to take part.

I spent some time talking with a group of experienced mothers about the nuts and bolts of homeschooling in Maryland. There are two primary legal options: you can join an “umbrella group,” an organization which contracts with the state to supervise and review your homeschooling for a fee, or you can keep a portfolio and have it reviewed twice a year by your local school district.

They warned me (and I had heard this elsewhere) that school district reviewers can get overenthusiastic and ask for things that you aren’t required by law to provide. Apparently it varies quite a bit from county to county and reviewer to reviewer. They all recommended bringing a copy of the law to reviews.

By the end of the night we decided to join. It’s worth $25 in membership dues just to find out if this is going to work for us, I think. My biggest reservation is whether it will turn out to be too suburban and spread out to be useful to us. It’s not a Baltimore group, it’s a Central Maryland group – and most of the bigger activities seem to be held in Howard County. So we’ll try it out this year and see how it goes.