This fall, my older child is headed to Kindergarten, and I have many feelings about this! First and foremost, I am excited for him, because this past year has been unpredictable in so many ways, that I hope Kindergarten will finally bring with it some more predictability and stability in friendships. I am also curious as a parent to see how he will respond to adversity and setbacks in this transition. For most of his life, he has attended the same daycare -- from about 14 months old to now, age 5. This past year, however, has shown us that he has a resilient side to him. During COVID, we have had to adjust his routine and school attendance patterns many times based on local public health data, our visits with his grandparents, and his therapy needs; he has bounced back from the many changes and disruptions by remaining mostly cheerful and optimistic. I am sure Kindergarten is going to hold challenges for him, but I feel hopeful that he will grow from those challenges and become a stronger person for it.
As a parent, of course I also have some anxieties as well. Mostly, I am still trying to figure out which elementary school my child should attend. Our district has a system of lottery-based enrollment into specialized public schools, as well as a public neighborhood school where you are guaranteed a seat. We are currently on the wait list for a particular specialized (projects-based) school in our neighborhood, and it seems quite likely that we will receive an offer by the end of the summer. I feel fine with sending my child to either that choice school or our neighborhood school based on their programs alone, but I have heard some anecdotal stories that indicate that my son may face some racial prejudices in these schools. (What parents from the local families of color have told me is that he will almost certainly have those negative interactions no matter where he goes, and the administration is either going to brush my concerns under the rug or be blatantly racist themselves. Such is the deep systemic issue of segregation in our city.) Another major issue I have learned about our district (and this is common knowledge) is that some essential academic services are funded by the PTA. The state and local governments chronically underfund public education (due to insufficient local taxation), and so every year, each school's principal creates a "wishlist" for the PTA that might include things like: hire a counselor and an art teacher. The local PTA for that particular school looks at the list of requests and approves what they think they can fundraise to support, and that is how the budget becomes complete for the year. This system is horrifically inequitable, because as our local elementary school has a PTA budget of around $250,000 per year, an elementary school in another part of the city that is predominantly made up of families of color could not consistently raise enough funds to have so many on-going programs and benefits for the students. On paper, each school is funded the same amount per student, but in reality, resources vary greatly from pocket to pocket in this huge district. What I have heard parents of color phrase it as is that they are put into the impossible position of choosing: Do I want my child to grow up in well-resourced, overwhelmingly white, schools that will subject them to regularly occurring racist experiences, or do I want my child to grow up in a diverse neighborhood with under-funded schools? I know this is not a problem unique to our city, but it breaks my heart that the opportunity gaps run so deep. And yet, another problem is also that the public schools in the more affluent parts of town are in competition with private schools. Our city has a very high attendance rate of private schools (22% of all K-12 students), and many of these parents who are donating money to the local PTA to make sure their kids receive the best-funded public education do not want to share that PTA pot with schools in other pockets of the city. At a certain point of financial contribution, the wealthiest of those public-school parents will start to consider pulling their kids out of the public schools and paying for a private education. The odds are stacked against equitable public education funding in our on-the-paper "progressive" city. This past year, as I was looking for opportunities to head back to work, I also looked at working in public versus private schools. When I left my teaching job two years ago, I was sure that I would end up in a public school next, but a pandemic and a steep public school budget cut later, I was scrambling to find any job available. In the end, I took a private school teaching job, with lots of questions about the role that I play in furthering the inequities of this broken system. (I don't regret my choice, because months later, I still have not seen any public school jobs be posted in my area of expertise, and I have been keeping a fairly close eye. That honestly is crazy, because generally there is a lot of demand in my area. I feel relieved that I had made the right choice for our family to take the private-school job that came up, when it did.) In the fall, our baby will be starting daycare for the first time (after being home for the entire pandemic thus far); our big kid will be starting Kindergarten; I will be teaching at a new-to-me school and having my first driving commute in years; my husband will need to manage the dropoffs of both kids in the morning via bicycles, since we only have one car; I will be picking both kids up and dumping big kid's bicycle in my car everyday. It will be a lot of changes! I am feeling intimidated just thinking about the huge changes ahead for our family, but I also feel so fortunate that we have been able to take so much family time this past year to slow down, breathe, and be with one another.
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I wanted to give a little update on how I talk to my son about math at home, since I realized that the last time I had a post about math was before Christmas. This post is mostly for me, to remember what I did with L when my daughter becomes a similar age, but maybe this would help someone else as well. 1. For many weeks, we did division math using snacks. After Chinese lesson everyday, I would hold out a handful of yogurt puffs to my son, and ask him, "If you split this evenly with your sister, then how many can you get?" I would throw him any number even or odd, up to about 8. Let's say I hold out 7 yogurt puffs, then he would look at it and say, "3." To see if he's just guessing, I would ask, "If you take 3, then how many would remain?" Sometimes he would answer incorrectly at first, and correct himself when I posed the follow-up question. (If there is a remainder, that extra puff always goes to me.) Recently, I also occasionally would throw in a division by 3 problem, but only with 3, 4, or 6 puffs. ("If you, your sister, and I were to split this evenly, then how many can you each take?") What I like is that these problems are real, they are quick, they give us daily practice, and my son is practicing visual division, which helps him to decompose small, single-digit numbers into parts visually. 2. On Thursdays, we keep our son home because he has feeding therapy and OT. On those days when he is home with me, my son often says that he wants to stay up a little extra after I put his sister down for a nap. (He does not nap anymore, but he does quiet time still. He tries to get out of it if he can, so I've leveraged this to my advantage to get him to do some math.) If he wants to delay/shorten quiet time by an hour on those days, then I ask that he uses part of that time to do math with me. He enjoys this! I rotate through what we do -- we've done subitizing review with 10 frames (like I put down a small quantity of colored magnets, then uncover it quickly for him to see, then cover it back up and ask him how many he sees and why). We also use the cards Tiny Polka Dots quite a lot. We use them to play "War", and I ask him questions like, "Who has more?" "How many more do you have than me?" "If I want to have as many as you, how many more do I need?" I like the cards because they are a mixture of different representations -- some cards have numbers on them, some have colored dots arranged in different forms, some have dots filled into ten frames. I also like varying up what I ask him during each hand, so that he is constantly practicing hearing language that signals either addition or subtraction, without explicitly saying "plus" or "minus". 3. Recently, his class in pre-K started doing some addition and subtraction. I decided to reinforce this at home, but to really focus on the process instead of the answer, because I worry that at school he may receive a different message. Instead of doing division problems like we used to do with the post-Chinese lesson snacks, I have been giving him small numbers at a time (any number between 1 and 4), and asking him to give me the running total of how many yogurt puffs he has eaten. We just started this exercise this week, and I can see that he understands counting-on, but needs some more practice for fluency. (No problem, I love that it's something we can practice together.) I always ask L to justify each answer to me, even when his answer is correct. I try to suspend feedback about whether he is correct or not, until he has justified his answer with a verbalized process. Yesterday, when we were doing this, at one point he had already received 13 yogurt puffs, and I was going to give him another 3. I asked him how many that would make, and he said 17. Instead of saying that he was wrong, I asked, "Okay, how did you get that answer?" When he started to explain, I pointed out that he had skipped 14 in his counting sequence, so he re-counted and changed his answer to 13+3 = 16 without me telling him that 17 was originally incorrect. Subsequently, I asked, "Okay, so now that you have had 16 puffs, how many more will I need to give you so that you can have 20?" He initially said 5, but again, in the process of explaining himself, he changed it to 4 without me pointing out any error. This is the power of asking kids to articulate their process! They can and should do it as soon as they start to learn early math (and they should do it throughout the rest of their math career). Accuracy does not matter as much as the practice in articulating their thought process. 4. I also want to encourage my son to see math as an open-ended endeavor, while still practicing decomposing numbers into smaller numbers. (I just feel like decomposing numbers is a really good number sense practice at this age.) So, today I asked him, "If I want to give you 5 yogurt puffs, then I can give you first how many, then how many?" He was happy to say, "Oh, I have an idea. You can give me 2 and then 3 puffs." I obliged. Then, I asked him, "Now, if I want to give you 7 yogurt puffs, then I can give you first how many, then how many?" He thought for a bit longer, then said, "5 and 2!" I liked that, but I wondered if he could see that 7 could also decompose into 3 and 4? So I asked him, "Okay, and I also want to give your sister 7 puffs, but I just gave her 3. How many more should I give her?" He thought about it for a little bit, and then told me 3. I said, "Okay, so if I give her 3 and 3, that makes 7?" He said, "Oh, no, 4! 3 and 3 make 6, so 3 and 4 make 7!" I love this dialogue, because I can see that he is thinking about number relations flexibly and creatively. 5. My son and I just started looking at the (Western) abacus again. A little while ago, we practiced putting two-digit numbers on the abacus. Like if we had the number 32, he learned that it means 3 tens and 2 ones, so he would move 3 rows of 10 beads over on the abacus, and then on the fourth row count out two more beads. Yesterday and today, we brought that notion back in talking about percentages. We have an Amazon Echo at home, and it always reports the likelihood of rain showers via percentages. My son, who has not yet turned 5, cannot understand what that means. I realized though, that I could just show him visually on our abacus. First, I move all the beads to the left, and tell him that is 100%, which means that it will definitely rain. Then, I move all the beads to the right, and tell him that is 0%, which means that it will definitely NOT rain. Then we count out 88 beads to represent 88%, and I ask him if that looks like it's more likely to rain or not? He is able to visually see that more beads are on the "rain" side than on the "dry" side, which means that on Sunday it will very likely rain. Not bad for a percent visualization that is friendly to a pre-schooler?? 6. There have also been the one-off talks about fractions at our house. We try to normalize using the terms "half" and "quarter" when talking about food. Our son knows what a half is (from talking about bagels and pizzas and such), and he also knows that "a half of a half" is a quarter. So the other day, while eating leftover sausages, I first gave him half of a sausage. Then, he asked for more, and I asked, "Do you want another half sausage or just a quarter sausage this time?" He said, "A quarter." I took out the full sausage and asked him where he thought I should cut it, in order to make a quarter sausage. He was pretty spot on! After that quarter though, he wanted another quarter. And then afterwards, he wondered who had more sausage -- he or I? I talked to him about how 1/4 + 1/4 + 1/2 make a whole sausage, which was also how much I had eaten. So we had eaten an equal amount! That was just a passing discussion, but I do try to go with the occasion and bring up math wherever possible.
7. A while ago, my son's school was doing a farm learning unit... I don't really know exactly what they learned about farms, but it inspired me to ask L if there were two cows and a chicken on a farm, then how many feet would there be? My son enjoyed thinking about it and explaining to me how he knew that it was 10 feet. Or, another time when he asked me if I am old enough to die soon. I said, "Well, I hope not! Actually, my grandparents lived until their 80s, and I am almost 40. So, that means I might have another 40 years to live! 40 plus 40 equals 80, because 4 tens plus 4 tens is 8 tens." My son was so tickled by the fact that 4 tens and 4 tens would make 8 tens. (It makes even more sense in Chinese, because "4 tens" is literally how you say "40" and "8 tens" is literally how you say "80." It helps to be bilingual sometimes.) Or, when my son, my husband, and I split two pieces of Twizzlers on our road trip, I talked to my son about how we first split the first Twizzler into thirds, and we each had one "third piece." Then we did the same with the second Twizzler, so in the end, we each had two "third pieces" (or 2/3 of a Twizzler). Conceptual math can be everywhere and it can all be so relevant to young kids! We just have to look for those opportunities. 8. We have not done any numeric writing practice for a long time, and only ever did a little bit, because I feel like writing is one of those things that is easier to learn once your hand/fine motor develops a bit more, but a couple of weeks ago, my son was so keen on writing and drawing various things, and one of the things he produced was a hopscotch that had numbers from 0 up to about 21. It was so cool to see him producing digits after not having worked on them for so long! (Even though he mixed up the order, like he would write "fifteen" as "51". I mentioned it casually at some point, but didn't stop him from writing whatever he wanted, because the point was more that he was taking ownership of this learning-oriented work during play time and produced it with so much pride and joy, which was so cool to observe.) Even though we have done mostly a mishmash of math stuff since L returned to pre-K, I feel pretty good about my son's math readiness for Kindergarten. I head back to work this fall to teach high-school kiddos, but I know that I will still keep a close eye on his math development. I am excited for him to have daily math time next year, and for math learning to be more social for him!!! I know I have written already about growth mindset, but I feel like I am constantly learning about it from different angles. In my own life, for sure, but also through my children's eyes. One thing that I am a firm believer in is that it is very hard to teach kids things like growth mindset and resilience in a vacuum. In order for kids to learn how to foster growth mindset and how to maintain resilience, they must actually feel challenged. The greater that challenge they have to overcome, the more of an opportunity we have to help them shatter existing negative self-beliefs.
When we first started feeding therapy, and I noticed my son having some traction right away with the exercises, I idly wondered whether learning to eat new foods would help him in building a growth mindset in other areas of his life as well. Then, we started OT and (more recently) working with him actively on his fear of stairs, and in the past week, I noticed some amazing changes about him. The first is that he has been trying lots of new foods -- almost every couple of days, he is trying a food that is slightly new to him, and usually on his own accord. Even though there are plenty of things he still won't eat, he has started eating lots of foods with mixed texture and 3 or 4 ingredients mixed together, which he used to only eat in de-constructed form. And, amazingly, his risk-taking does not stop there... A few days ago, my son suggested that I could ride my bike, carrying his little sister, and he could ride his bike behind me, and we could head to a little green area 1.25 miles from our house. To get there, he would have to ride in the (mostly residential) streets, because I couldn't ride carrying his sister in the street and keep an eye on him on the sidewalk. I was a little nervous, because I didn't know how it would go, with me carrying a toddler and keeping an eye on a new rider behind me. But, since it was his idea completely, I didn't want to discourage his enthusiasm. We did it! It was an adventure! The roundtrip distance was 2.5 miles, and that was the longest distance he had ever ridden in the streets. It was a nice adventure for all of us, and I was impressed that my son was the one who suggested the trip, and that from beginning to end, he did not complain or express any negativity. My son has always been extremely resistant to drawing. This has always been a concern for me, because drawing is not only an emotional outlet, it is a way to practice being creative, to practice risk-taking, and to communicate our understanding in non-verbal ways. To encourage him to draw, we even had some family crafts nights, so that he could have some positive associations with the act of drawing. But, maybe seeing us drawing actually discouraged him from drawing on his own? I don't know, but that is one theory I have read in a RIE parenting group, offered by Janet Lansbury herself. Anyhow, this week I have been super excited to see L draw a variety of objects via chalk, on our sidewalk! He drew a steam train, an octopus, a spider, a backpack, a bumble bee, a rainbow, a bike trail, balloons, and some stop signs. I try very deliberately not to give him feedback on his drawings, because I don't want him to feel self-conscious at all in his budding hobby. I am just so thrilled that he has immersed himself, on two consecutive days, on drawing chalk on the sidewalk and really seeming to be "in the zone." Today, I took L to his first gymnastics class ever. Since he has physical anxieties on the playground and still some anxiety about descending stairs (although they are getting so much better), my husband and I felt that we wanted to make a conscious effort in working with him on gross-motor development. I took him last week to an indoor playground at our local gymnastics academy, and he loved it. (He had been there previous to COVID, but this was the first time going in well over a year.) When I looked into wait-listing him for gymnastics classes, I saw that one weekday introductory class at a different gym actually had an opening. I immediately jumped on it, with plans to take him there through the end of the summer, if he is interested. (The program charges month-by-month.) Before the class today, my son was extremely nervous, and told me that he definitely would not participate in the gymnastics class. His tone was such that he was looking for a fight. Instead of giving him a fight, however, I said, "You are feeling very anxious about the class. I understand how you feel, and that is totally normal, because it's new and new is always scary. Here, I will take you there and you can just check it out. You don't have to do anything if you don't want to; you can just sit there. I just want you to check it out." I also reminded him that recently, he was super nervous to go indoor-climbing with his dad, but ended up enjoying it (with lots of gummy bear bribes). A little while after, shortly before we left for the class, L told me -- to my huge surprise and trying-to-act-very-casual delight -- that he had decided he would participate in the gymnastics class today. After we got to gymnastics, I could tell that it was very challenging for my son. He is such a bright kid in many ways, but he is usually awkward in navigating physical tasks. He was visibly (and audibly) super nervous about all of the tasks, but he participated 100% and tried so hard to do every drill. He even climbed up a steep (almost vertical) A-frame that was almost 5 feet tall and climbed down on the other side, all by himself without the coach nearby, which I would never, EVER have imagined him to do today. This kid is a rock star!!! My husband was not there to see his risk-taking, but when I relayed what had happened at the gym, we agreed that it is a glimpse into the kind of learner that our son is -- he doubts himself almost always, but he will still give things his best shot, and in that process, he can sometimes shatter his self-doubt and surprise himself. It made me wonder if all of the work that we have been doing with him across eating and OT are starting to pay off in other areas of his life, like I had hoped? I don't really understand child development and psychology, but if those therapies are the reason for his change and willingness to take on new risks and experiences, I am just so hugely grateful. |
About MeBorn in Asia, I have spent more than a third of my life living outside of the U.S. thus far. I currently reside in the Pacific Northwest with my techie husband and two biracial children. Categories
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