'Tis the spooky season! We finally carved our pumpkins yesterday. I think they did not turn out as well as last year's pumpkins, but considering that now we have two little ones running around, it was not bad! My husband also roasted some really delicious pumpkin seeds, which we had never done before. Now that the sun is setting earlier, we have been trying to eat dinner early on Friday nights, so that we can either play boardgames or do crafts as a family after dinner to ease into the weekend. This past Friday night, we had our second family Halloween craft night. This time, I thought it might be fun to make a ghost garland together, since it requires only printer paper, scissors, a hole-puncher, and some clear tape. Surprisingly, the family was super into this simple craft! My husband and I enjoyed making various designs of ghosts on tri-folded printer paper, and my son enjoyed cutting them out. (The adults cut out/hole-punched the faces, since they were a bit tricky, and I helped with taping the garland pieces all together, but my son was happy to cut out all the ghost outlines, and I think he did a very nice job "cutting on the line"!) My daughter enjoyed sitting on the bench, touching the paper scraps, and being one of the big kids. Below are some finished products. If you are looking for a fun and easy Halloween activity still for this coming week, I would highly recommend trying this! My husband remarked that the last time our house was this decorated for Halloween was when we threw a huge Halloween bash 4 years ago. Earlier in the week, when I was out walking with my kids on a particularly dry and windy day, we enjoyed seeing all of the colorful fall foliage. We collected some leaves from the floor and made foliage crowns! Such an easy and fun thing to make. My daughter, in particular, loved her crown and wore it around the house on multiple days. In other updates, we have been going to the library every week, now that our local branch offers curb-side pickup for the books that we have reserved online. This week, we coincided our library pickup with dropping off our ballots for the November election. In light of all of the voter suppression, I feel so incredibly fortunate to not only live in an area that has had a track record of extremely effective voting-by-mail, but to be able to walk to our nearest ballot box, which is located next to our neighborhood branch of the library. I usually take one or both kids with me to drop off our ballots. This year was no exception, and my son was very excited to be the designated ballot-inserter! After we dropped off the ballots, we walked literally less than 10 feet to get in line to pick up our library books. Our latest stash from the library includes two books about gender identity. My son enjoys both of them very much! One is called I Am Jazz and it is told from the perspective of a (real-life) transgender child, Jazz Jennings. I agree with the review on the back cover of the book that says that the best part of the book is that Jazz is never apologetic about who she is. From beginning to end, the book has no feeling of shame, and L says he likes "everything" about the book! The other book, Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress, is about a boy who likes to wear a dress and high heels at school. It's more nuanced than I am Jazz, because it is not clear if Morris is exploring a different gender or if he is simply creative and likes to play outside of the norms of stereotypical gender roles. I really like this book, because it reaffirms that everyone is okay to wear what they like to wear, and they don't owe anyone else an explanation. My son also really likes this book (no surprise there; I think it is really well-written, thoughtful, and FUN). He told me, at one point, that I had already asked him multiple times, "Is that nice?" when other kids at school bully Morris for wearing a dress. I think some things bear repeating, and I told L that if we both can agree that it is not nice, then if L were to see someone at school acting that way, he should stand up and tell them, "Hey, that's not nice! You should not do that!" L nodded and replied, "Or, I can also tell the teacher."
The books from the library are part of my on-going attempt to expose L to issues outside of himself. In my reflection about home-schooling, I have been thinking a lot about teaching empathy, compassion, and self-regulation. I think that generally, my son can be empathetic and reasonable, but he is not consistently so. I can do a better job in focusing on building up his socio-emotional skills, even though it can be hard to teach that in a vacuum, when he is not around other kids except for his little sister. One thing that I will try to do in the coming months is to introduce an emotions chart. My son has maybe only 6 or so self-regulating descriptors that he currently uses: happy, sad, mad, tired, hungry, thirsty, and scared; and he sometimes says "This is taking too long!" instead of saying he feels impatient or "This is too hard!" when he means to say that he feels frustrated. I want to increase his facility with emotional vocabulary, to increase his ability to label his own feelings. I also want to encourage him to practice articulating boundaries like, "I don't like it when you __________ because ___________." Like anything else, I think it will just take practice for him to get better with it, and if we practice using that language even just once a day, everyday, then we will see dividends in a little while!
0 Comments
A few posts back, I briefly mentioned that I had just started teaching my son to read in Chinese. After some back and forth and asking my son for his opinions on Sage 500, I bit the bullet and ordered the Sage 500 system today! I am not sure how it will go, but at $420 (which includes the international shipping, 5 sets of books that teach the most commonly used 500 characters over the course of 500 lessons, plus some leveled picture books to go with the lessons), I felt like it would be worth the investment -- particularly because it is a fraction of the daycare costs we are still paying for every month, without actually sending him to daycare. I have been using just Set 1, Book 1 with my son to try it out before purchasing, and it has been surprisingly both fun for him and easy for me. Realistically, I don't know if he will ever become fluent in reading Chinese while growing up in America, and that's okay. To me, short Chinese lessons at home are an easy way to offer him both cultural appreciation and extracurricular enrichment, so, why not? His speaking has come a long way since the start of COVID (even when I was in the bathroom the other day, I heard him explaining something to his toddler sister in Chinese, and on a separate day I heard him reading to himself in Chinese while looking at an English book during quiet time), but he isn't a fluent speaker yet; even though he sounds pretty clear to me, the speech-to-text feature on my phone often cannot transcribe what he is saying to the correct characters, and it does not have the same issue when I am speaking. I am hoping that reading will help with L's Chinese-speaking to improve its clarity/enunciation, the way reading in English has helped him to better enunciate certain words like "immediately" and "crayon." I also hope that having some basic Chinese reading skills will affirm his ethnic identity and build his confidence as a Mandarin-speaker. I thought I would share what has worked well with us thus far in our beginning home lessons. Right from the start, I decided to incorporate matching cards to help L with reviewing the learned characters everyday, both because long-term memory is not my own strong suit in learning and because I think it is a good opportunity to normalize a good study habit/strategy. Before we go into a new lesson, we always warm up by going through the deck of cards we have so far, for him to match each picture to a learned character (see below). Whenever possible, I try to make the definition cards pictorial only, because I think linguistically it's more beneficial for our brains to match a concept directly to Chinese, rather than from a concept to English, then to Chinese. As my son matches the cards, he also sounds out the character (since L already knows the language natively, this part is easy for him. I am trying not to introduce pingyin because I have read from other parents online that it can become a crutch to always be looking for the pingyin, when we want the kids to build direct visual recognition of the characters; I also don't want to confuse L when he is reading in English, because there are some differences between pingyin and actual English phonetics). After the matching warm-up, I usually collect the cards and put together a short sentence comprised of some of the characters that we have seen, then ask him to sound out the sentence from sight based on his visual knowledge of the characters. Today, I tried to orally dictate a sentence and have my son fish out all the characters from the pile to create that sentence visually. (I do this because he is too young for me to ask him to write the characters. We run his fingers along the printed characters in the book lessons to reinforce stroke recognition/memory, but I don't actually expect him to write out a character or a sentence independently.) I dictated two short sentences, and both times he did very well in choosing the right characters to formulate the sentence! I did not give him a new lesson today, since he was excited about reading our library books from yesterday. I feel like the consistency of practice, rather than quantity of characters, is what I would like to shoot for as we slowly build L's reading vocabulary. We are going about this casually, so every week we cover only maybe 3 or 4 new characters. At this rate, it could easily be 3 or 4 years before we finish the 500 characters, and I am mentally prepared for it to be a years-long undertaking, while determined to keep it fun.
I am excited to have made this decision to embark on this -- frankly, unexpected and -- ambitious journey with my son! Let's see where it will take us. PS. I decided to go with the Simplified Chinese curriculum, because as a Traditional Chinese reader, I am always frustrated by how prevalent the Simplified characters are, and it is not always easy for me to read them. I feel like L would have a better chance of encountering Simplified Chinese (which is used in Mainland China) in his life. Plus, teaching him would give me an opportunity of getting up to speed with recognizing the most common Simplified characters myself. I love to read with my kids. My son is now 4 and loves to read anything from baby board books to short chapter books, so how we read together over the years has changed a lot, but reading has always filled a special place in our home. We are very lucky to have had no regular screen time for him up until now (before COVID, it was a parenting choice because we did not like how even short exposure to screens affected his moods, but after the pandemic started, I am cognizant of how much of a privilege it is to parent without screens). Because of this, books play a huge role in our down time. I thought I would write a post to share what types of books and what styles of reading have worked best for us, in case this helps anyone else. When my son was a baby, he immediately liked interactive books and music. He loved the baby animal books with flaps, of course. We also have a shark finger puppet book Little Shark, and when I read it, I interleave the actual book text with "little shark, doo-doo, doo-doo-doo-doo" rhythm from the Baby Shark song while wiggling the shark finger puppet. He also liked Snuggle Puppy, because I made up a tune to go with the book and would sing the tune every time. (I probably should have looked up the actual Sandra Boynton song, but once I made up a tune, we just stuck by it, and even my husband sings my tune.) Similarly, he liked Moo, Baa, La La La and we would always sing the "la la la" part with gusto. Even my one-year-old sings it now, which is adorable! When my son got a little older, his favorite musical books included The Wonky Donky and Coat of Many Colors (both songs now stream conveniently on Alexa). My husband loves to beatbox his way through The Pout-Pout Fish and Chicka Chicka ABC. These sing-song books have stood the test of time, and my daughter loves them, too! A few books that we love for dancing include Hokey Pokey Elmo (my one-year-old recently learned to turn herself around during this song, which is amazing) and From Head to Toe by Eric Carle. We also love rhymes at our house. We started our son on the beginner Dr. Seuss books (gifted to us by our neighbors when our son turned 1), but have since moved on to various intermediate Seuss Books (all hand-me-downs from neighbors), even though some of them are significantly longer than the beginner books. He loves the stories, the pictures, and the rhymes. For his recent birthday during COVID shelter-at-home, I actually executed my idea of drawing Dr. Seuss's Birthday Bird (a character from one of his intermediate books) on our sidewalk during his nap. He loved it and was able to enjoy the chalk drawing for weeks before it was washed off by the rain! The rhymes in Dr. Seuss's books were so good for his language development, that he began making his own rhyming phrases using non-real words by the time he was in preschool. Intermediate Dr. Seuss books also have pretty sophisticated vocabulary, which I try to remember to highlight from time to time. As a toddler, L liked to multi-task while listening to our reading of books and would crawl around instead of sitting on my lap while I was reading. To check in on his attention, I began to purposely switch out words, "We looked! And we saw him -- the dog in the pants!" and he would immediately correct me, "No, the cat in the hat!" It quickly became a running joke; every day, with every book, we would read with so many intentional errors, and L would keep correcting each one. At some point, he became impatient and would recite entire pages to us from memory. Around age 3, we started talking about the feelings of the characters, because I realized that although L could memorize the text, he often could not articulate the characters' motivations. With some encouragement and modeling, he began to use words like "mad", "sad", "happy", and "scared" to explain what is happening in the books. Sometimes he said "frustrated", but I was not sure he actually knew what it meant. I loved the Busy Bus books for this, as well as The Giving Tree and Giraffs Can't Dance, but pretty much every book we read, it was possible to ask him about the characters' emotions. This was when I began viewing picture books as a means to an end, as a lens to understand the world around us. Since then, we have used picture books as a launchpad to talking about: racism (Knock Knock by Daniel Beaty and The Case for Loving by Selina Alko); election (Amelia Bedelia's First Vote by Herman Parish); homelessness (Trupp: A Fuzzhead Tail by Janelle Cannon); and blended families (Tumbleweed Baby by Anna Meyers). I have some books coming from the library that are about gender roles and sexual orientation (I am Jazz and Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress). As I discussed in my previous post, I have also used picture books to open doors to mathematical discussions, and I find that books are great at all ages for opening dialogues to new topics. When we potty-trained, I loved Super Pooper and "Bloop, Bloop!" Goes the Poop from the huge stack of potty-training picture books I picked up from the library. Similarly, in transitioning to big brotherhood, L really loved reading Where do Babies Come From? by Jillian Roberts and Hello in There by Jo Witek before his sister was born; after she was born, Ginger by Charlotte Voake and Babies Ruin Everything! by Matthew Swanson were favorites in our house. We read Babies Ruin Everything! so many times, that I felt like L was definitely affirmed in his angst toward the new baby, while we were both able to laugh about it.
I also enjoy reading some books with L that challenge him to think beyond the literal text. You would think that metaphors are too abstract for kids, but L seems to understand when I talk about the stories being actually about something else. Some examples I can think of include: Yertle the Turtle; The Giving Tree; My First Kafka; and This is Not a Picture Book! Upon my nudging, L was able to appreciate the figurative language used in the gorgeous writing of Owl Moon, and told his dad that the book uses words to "make it feel like you are there." In Every Moon is a book whose text is a beautiful poem; it is a bit abstract but imaginative. My son likes it, and we have talked about the recursive nature of the book. What If... by Samantha Berger is a book gifted to us on L's second birthday; the author's note at the end is so special and re-frames the book to be about both creativity and perseverance, that L asks me to read the author's note to him every time. I also enjoy reading occasional books to the kids in other languages. We had a hand-me-down Clifford book that is bilingual in both English and Spanish, that is a hit with both of our kids. They actually love hearing me read the same book in Spanish and Chinese! We have a copy of The Color Monster pop-up book in French that was a gift from my sister, whose partner is French. I translated the book into written English (a tedious task -- I should have probably Googled earlier to find that there are already English versions online) and then I translate it orally to Chinese on the fly. I generally read all story-heavy English books by translating it into Chinese on the fly, but now that L is reading some English chapter books on his own, we often alternate reading different pages, and usually I do that in English in order to keep the flow going. Other books that have been well-loved in our house include classic series like: Elephant and Piggie; Knuffle Bunny; Olivia the Pig; Clifford the Big Red Dog; Corduroy; and Alexander (a la Judith Viorst). L loved Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day so much that I ended up checking out all of the Alexander books for him from the library. A couple of the later books were twice as long as the first Alexander book and were clearly intended for a slightly older audience, but L loved them all the same. (Alexander, Who Used to Be Rich Last Sunday also has a lot of wonderful references to coin values. Great math link, even though the items are priced way too low by today's standards!) L also loves We Hate Rain! by James Stevenson, and that was among his first exposure to graphic novel-style books. We have also read Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and The Magic School Bus: Inside the Human Body, which L liked but I thought were meant for an older reader. I have particularly enjoyed watching L looking closely at pictures in books over the years. Some of his books have almost no words, and the entire story is told through a carefully crafted sequence of pictures! The first such book that both of my kids love is Higher! Higher! (currently one of my daughter's favorite books) by Leslie Patricelli. When we read it together, my daughter has opportunities to high-five me and to wave at the different characters that appear. She also says, "盪!" ("swing") and "高" ("high"), because she loves the swing theme in the book. The books I like for close reading of pictures include: Oops by Arthur Geisert; In the Town, All Year Round by Rotraut Susanne Berner; and Busytown by Richard Scarry. My husband does not have enough patience for In the Town, All Year Round, but it is one of my favorite books on the shelf. It was gifted to my son by one of his classmates' mom, and it is just a marvelous book. There are a couple of dozen scenes of the same town throughout the entire year, and you can trace the storylines and friendships of a dozen characters through those scenes. In each season, there are also some vehicles and themes that tie the whole season together, and there are usually elements of surprise tucked away at every turn-of-page. It is exquisitely illustrated. Maybe because L is used to looking closely at pictures, he often astonishes me with his attention to detail. For example, once when we were reading the book Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site, he stopped me on the page when the bulldozer was tucked into bed to tell me that, actually, the digger sleeps on the other side of that wall. He proved his point by cross-referencing different pages of the book to show me that the illustrations on all the pages are all spatially coherent. Recently, I noticed (after reading Sheep in a Jeep for like 300 times) that one of the sheep has a brown head through most of the book. I asked L if he knew where it was from, and he said matter-of-factly, "Yeah, it was because he fell (head-first) into the mud in the beginning of the book." Similarly, in A Hippo's Tale, he cross-referenced pictures from multiple parts of the book to tell me that the initial setup of the beach already showed where Mrs. Hippopotamus's hut is located, because you can verify the details from later in the book to know that that is her hut in the corner of the page spread. I am always pleasantly surprised by his attentiveness to the pictures. I am sure that is good pre-academic practice for school somehow, like for the sense-making that we want our kids to have across all the courses. Recently, I have been thinking about how L is ready to learn science through his books. By chance, we came across two neat science books from Little Free Reading Libraries near us: The Open Ocean, a delightful pop-up book by Bernadette Gervais and Francesco Pittau and Benny's Animals, a wonderful chapter book by Millicent Selsam about classification of animals. Eric Carle has a book Pancakes, Pancakes! that has a page that illustrates how water and a pair of gears work together at the mill to turn grains of wheat into flour. As he grows, I look forward to how his books will grow with him. Once L got through the 100 reading lessons and all of the Bob books and the few beginning reader books I bought for him (What This Story Needs is a Pig in a Wig; A Pig, a Fox, and a Box; Elephant and Piggie set; and The Cookie Fiasco), he has been dipping his toes into reading some chapter books that I have checked out from the library. For chapter books, L has been reading the Mercy Watson series, which I feel lukewarm about, but my son apparently adores. I think that he likes the series partly because I made up a musical jingle for Leroy Ninker's silly "Yippie-I-O" rhymes. It has been a challenge balancing reading Mercy Watson with L and not neglecting his little sister, however, because each of those books can take us 20-40 minutes of continuous reading. (If he co-reads with me, it can take a long time, but even if I read it straight-up, each book can take 20+ minutes.) As soon as we finish one of them, he wants to pick up another one. I feel both happy that he is now emerging as a mature reader and sad that my first baby is growing up. What books do you love for your kids? In my previous post, I talked about how I noticed that my son had stagnated or maybe regressed in his math development at school for about 6 months, by the time he turned 3.5. I began taking an interest in working with him on math at home. I started with counting practice, and since he loved being read to, I wanted to look for some books to encourage and elevate his interest in math. Here are some books that have emerged as my favorites and a little bit about why I liked them. The first is One is a Snail, Ten is a Crab. Here is a kid reading it out loud, so you can see what it's all about. My son loved how silly it is, and he began to pick up on the pattern that if you are looking at 60, you can peek at the first digit to know that 60 is 6 crabs! He was able to look at 100 and say, after a couple of times through the book, that it would be ten crabs, because if we cover the last zero, what remains is 10. The book was an excellent bridge to us doing some practice on the western abacus. After we had read the book consistently for a few weeks, I got a free hand-me-down abacus from my neighbor, and we started playing with each row of ten on the abacus being a "crab." My son was able to say, "28 has twenty, and that is two crabs, or two tens!" and we would move two rows of the abacus over to get 20, and then count up single beads 21, 22, 23, 24, ... until we get to 28 (see picture of abacus below for 28). A lot of repetition later, he now understands both how to quickly represent any two-digit quantity on the (western) abacus, and how to look at the abacus and identify the quantity numerically. This practice has helped him to understand the magnitude of two-digit numbers, not just how to sound them out (which, if you recall, he mostly learned from being interested in riding busses). As the child grows, I can also see One is a Snail, Ten is a Crab growing with them, because the book actually also includes principles like counting-on from a known quantity and the commutative property of multiplication. The child in the video I linked to above does a stellar job explaining those mathematical connections. I would say this book is worth buying, even though I checked it out from our local library (and coincidentally got to keep it for several months, during their COVID hiatus). Another really great book that I have enjoyed is Press Here, which we also picked up for free, I think from a Little Free Reading Library. It is such a wonderful book that even my one-year-old daughter loves to flip through it and to read it with us. The book is highly interactive, and takes you through almost a video game-like series of interactions. It has some basic event counting, like, "Press the yellow dot 5 times," or "Clap 3 times!" and some qualitative math, like when you clap, the child can see that the dots grow bigger. It also has some pattern recognition, because on one page, it briefly mentions that two elements in a pattern got mixed up in the dark. It was a really great discussion with my son about how we can figure out which two elements are mixed up. Overall, we love this book and I would recommend buying it. My son learned to count collections of objects up to ten in school, mostly, but in terms of reinforcing counting at home, the books that I like are the following: Tumble Bumble, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and Spot a Lot Vehicle Adventure. I love Tumble Bumble because it does counting-on, which is basically the idea that if we already know how many items we have (say, six), and we add one more, the child should be able to increment the existing count instead of counting all over again starting at 1. When I first started working with my son at home on counting, I noticed that no matter how many fingers I put up on my hands (say, I put up 5 fingers on one hand and 2 more on the other), he would always count starting from 1, even though he could already tell me that one full hand is 5 fingers. It took us a lot of consistent practice to count-on from known quantity, instead of starting over from 1 every time. Tumble Bumble counts the total number of animals without starting back at 1, so it makes a good math discussion, once your child is developmentally ready for it. I love The Very Hungry Caterpillar because it is a beautiful story that even very young kids can enjoy (we love many Eric Carle books here, mostly or all gifted by the grandparents, and even my one-year-old loves this particular book), but I also appreciate how the book is so cleanly laid out, so that on each page, we can count the objects in a different order (left to right, or right to left), in order to emphasize that the count remains the same no matter the order of objects. It is also very clever that the fruits being eaten in subsequent days physically overlap in this book, because you can visually see that 4 strawberries is just one more fruit than 3 plums, and that 5 oranges is just one more fruit than 4 strawberries. Developmentally, that understanding definitely comes later than simply counting the number of objects in a collection. Spot a Lot Vehicle Adventure is a good resource for daily practice of counting. The pictures are vivid, and there is a lot of stuff to count on every page, actually too much to get through in one sitting for a young child. My son loves vehicles, and for a while he wanted to read this book and count the objects in it every night before bed, and he would actually always count until he was exhausted and expired. There is not much of a story line in this book, and on some pages the objects are a bit tough to keep track of (because the instances don't all look the same), but it was still really good practice for him to try to stay organized by counting from left to right or from top to bottom in a page. Overall, I would recommend it if your child likes transportation and needs a little encouragement to count regularly and carefully. When my son learned to read, I bought him some beginning reader books to celebrate his accomplishment, and one of the books that I saw on a beginning readers' list is a math story called The Cookie Fiasco. I remember once gifting this book to a friend's child, so when I saw it on the list, I immediately ordered it, excited to have an excuse to add it to our collection. It has been fabulous for us! My son loves reading this book with me, and he now reads it to himself or to his dad. Because we have been regularly using the terms half and quarter with him while eating bagels at home, he is able to follow the math in the story and can tell me at the end of the book that each friend eats 3 quarter pieces of the cookie (even though the book never mentions the word quarter). Amazing! As a middle- and high-school math teacher who has seen so many kids intimidated by the idea of fractions, I love how this book contextualizes fractional division in a really fun way. Other math books that we enjoy include: Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons, which talks about zero and the idea of subtraction; Five Little Monkeys Make a Birthday Cake (there's not a lot of math in it, but my son enjoys observing that they definitely used too many eggs); and Round is a Mooncake, which is about shapes and has references to Chinese culture, which I appreciate, of course. We don't have this book, but obviously Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed is also about counting down, contextualized in a story so the child can see that counting down corresponds to having one fewer. I think a lot of times young kids get exposed to counting up, but not as much to counting down in their preschool life, so anything we can do to encourage their facility with counting down is going to be great for their mathematical development. (For example, when we are lifting our two-year-olds out of the bath or out of the high chair, we can always count down, "10, 9, 8, ...., 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.... blast off!" We can make it fun, but this helps them to internalize the sequence backwards, which will make subtraction operations easier down the road.) Honestly, books and math -- what's there not to love?
My son's earliest numerical understanding was that the answer to "How many do you want?" was either 1 or 2 (which simply meant plural to him -- anything over 1 was considered 2 by him). We took a long road trip of about 3000 miles shortly after he turned 2, and during the many hours in the car, I started playing a number game when offering him snacks in the car. I would ask him if he wanted 1 or 2 (or sometimes 3) puff snacks, and then BOOM! pop open my palm and give him that many at a time. At the time, I don't think he understood what 1, 2, or 3 meant, but I remember that he giggled a ton at the exchange. Later that year, maybe when he was 2.5, I was amazed to find that L had internalized counting 1 and 2 objects. He could look at 1 or 2 objects and immediately tell me how many there were, without counting, and he could do so while the car was quickly driving past 2 objects. This ability to internalize small numbers, I only very recently learned, is called subitizing. I remember thinking that L must be working on subitizing at daycare, because certainly at home we did not ever talk about math at that time.
That same year, in the 2-year-olds class, L learned to recite numbers to 10 and learned to read single-digit numbers, 1 through 9. Although it seemed early at the time, it also seemed developmentally appropriate, because at the time, he also learned to identify some letters of the alphabet and began paying attention to written symbols in the world around us. I am not sure if he knew what the numbers meant or how to count with them, but when we would read stories at home that had numbers in them, I would often count the objects on the page out loud, and try to do so in various order (left to right, or right to left, or...) to show that the number means that's how many objects are on the page, and to imply that quantity remains the same no matter the order of counting. When my son was 2 and 3 (pre-COVID pandemic era), he loved getting on busses with just me. Before his little sister was born, he and I used to go for an entire morning just riding on public transit through the city. When he turned 3, he started learning the landmarks of our city and would narrate to me, "We are heading downtown. This is the ____ Bridge. We are now in [insert part of town]. Oh, look! We passed the [very famous landmark]. We are now in [insert another part of town]. We have to get off the bus soon, to transfer to [another mode of transport]." I had read somewhere that busses and stop signs are a good way to teach kids the power of written symbols. Long before we formally taught him any math or reading at home, he was already learning the names of all of the bus lines and learning to read their numbers and letters by sight, just out of sheer interest, and even liked looking at the bus maps while waiting for the bus with me. Many of the bus lines near us have two-digit numbers, and so by the time my son was 3.5, he could habitually sound out many two-digit numbers, even though he had no idea what "28" actually meant in magnitude. In September 2019, L moved up to the 3-year-olds room. Right before we stopped sending my son to daycare due to COVID, I learned through our annual parent-teacher conference that his daycare teacher in the 3-year-olds preschool room does not do much math during the day. (The teacher is an excellent pre-literacy and arts teacher, so I am not writing this to disparage her at all, but it is true that she seemed taken aback when I casually asked what math activities they work on in her preschool class.) The extent of the math that they do is to teach days of the week via a calendar, and they sometimes count the snacks they get. After the conference, I made a mental note to start to pay more attention to my son's mathematical development. Soon after, I found myself in the situation of home-schooling him due to COVID precautions. I actually really struggled with whether I should teach my son any math. On one hand, I think that in America (or perhaps just in certain daycare settings), there is such an imbalance between early exposure to language/reading and almost zero early exposure to mathematical reasoning. On the other hand, I have heard from many math teachers that you can really turn your own kid off from math by giving them too much pressure as a math-teacher parent. I started home-schooling by teaching my son reading and some science and deliberately stayed away from math, but eventually, I thought, "Okay, I am a math teacher. I can't be afraid of doing math with my kid. Even if it is just 5 minutes, a few times a week, I should make sure he is seeing enough math at home that he won't be scared when he sees it in school." Flash forward a few months, I have so many feelings and tips about doing math with kids at home! First of all, I have learned that even a tiny bit of math everyday can go a long way in developing both interest and confidence in a preschooler. When I decided that my son needed to see more math at home, the first thing I did was to incorporate counting into his daily routine. I started offering him a snack food everyday that he could count out. At this point, his little sister was about 6 months old, so she was eating baby puff snacks everyday, and I would offer him a bunch of her baby puff snacks if he could correctly count out how many there were. At first, we just did single-digit counts, because I noticed he needed a lot of practice counting accurately and moving the snacks from one pile (the yet uncounted) to another pile (the already counted) while incrementing the count. Then, I started teaching him more numbers past 10, so that he could count up to 11, then 12, then 13... Since the memorization of the "teen" numbers is rote, it was very important to only teach him one new number at a time, and to really practice it multiple days, before teaching him the next number. It took a long time for him to be able to count to 20, but I would encourage him to say numbers in games, like if he was about to chase me in the park, I would first have him count up to _____ before he could start chasing me, and use that to gauge his comfort in reciting the numbers. I also remember joking one day while walking home: Me: "12 is the biggest number! After 12, there is no more. That's it." Son: "No, there's more! There's... 13!" Husband: "Ohhh, right, 13. But, actually, that's it. 13 is the biggest number. There are no more numbers after 13." Son: "No, after 13 is...14!" We kept joking like this until he got to 18 or 19, and I remember thinking to myself, "Whew, it took so many weeks to get him to learn these teen numbers, but look at how far along he has come!" What I noticed, after doing the daily practice for a little while, was that my son became interested in counting everything! He suddenly was not afraid of using numbers anymore, which was an amazing and tangible transformation. Currently, I am taking an online class on how best to teach math to young kids. The premise of the class is that kids ages 2 and older are capable of reasoning mathematically, and must be exposed to concepts in a developmentally appropriate sequence. When I looked at the document that outlined their numerical development based on research, the progression was spot-on for my son. Subitizing (the ability to recognize small quantities without counting) is the first skill in the developmental sequence, and it is extremely important. Young kids before Kindergarten need to learn to subitize up to 3, to be able to successfully access the Kindergarten curriculum. Once they can subitize up to 4, research suggests that they can often figure out how to count larger collections of objects, but if they cannot subitize, they would start to develop math gaps in Kindergarten. We can think of subitizing as the initial foundation for number sense, and every parent can help our kids build the ability to subitize by using the language, "Do you want 1 or 2 chicken nuggets?" and then offering that many. Once the kid has internalized 1 and 2, then ask, "Do you want 1, 2, or 3 slices of apple?" and then handing them that many. Keep giving our kids ages 2 and older the opportunity to hear those small numbers and to see the corresponding physical objects. This post is getting long, so I will keep writing in future posts about what I have done with my son to build up his math skills at home. Stay tuned, because I have many thoughts about this! It's fall, and I love fall. I love when the leaves change color; I love the breezy, dry fall days; and I love Halloween. This year, I wanted to make the fall season feel special for my children, even though they are not going to school. I decided to pull together Halloween costumes for the kids, even though trick-or-treating may not happen this year. I offered my son a few options: Elephant & Piggie; a train; something generic like a tiger; or a train signal. He was exuberant about the prospect of being a train signal, so we have been working on this costume together the last few days. He helped me cut, paste, paint, and color in parts of his costume with a marker. I had to let go of my perfectionist tendencies, but I am really quite happy about the joint effort thus far. (PS. My son proudly told my husband, "Dada, I colored this in. You see that C, I, and N? That's me. I did that." It's funny that he thinks it needs to be clarified. I also decided that we would make a series of Halloween crafts throughout the month, and use them to decorate our living room. (We have a little bit of reusable Halloween decorations that I can dig up, but I feel like it would be fun for him to make the bulk of our decorations this year, since he normally would do the same at school.) I found a site with lots of easy ideas here, and made a run down to Joann's Fabric to get supplies during my kids' naps this week. I helped my son make a spider with googly eyes earlier this week, and tonight we did a family crafts night after dinner, and made three different skeletons to hang up. Can you guess which one is my son's? We have also begun learning to read Chinese characters! I bought a single book from Sagebooks 500, which is like the Bob Books of Chinese, designed for native speakers who wish to learn the written language. I bought one booklet (Set 1, Book 1), used, from a local parent, for like $5 or $10. I wanted to just try it and see whether my son would be interested at all, because he has shown a lot of interest in speaking and practicing Chinese lately. We are only three days in, but thus far he has been really excited to do the lessons everyday! The system seems like it will work well for him, so much so that my husband who is really budget-minded has supported the idea of buying the entire system to be shipped to us internationally. (The entire system costs about $550, and teaches 500 of the most common Chinese characters. Similar to Bob Books, the kids are empowered to read illustrated short sentences and leveled books independently, after learning a new character in each lesson. It receives raving reviews from parents, but I still have not yet decided if I would order the whole system new or if I should hold out to buy it used.) I decided that I would start to make and use matching cards with L to help him reinforce his visual memory of the characters, and today was the first day that we used the matching cards I made, and he was totally into it! I would show him a picture, ask him what it shows, and he would say it to me first in English then in Chinese, and then go find the character that represents that object. Overall, I still really enjoy spending time with the kids at home everyday, and cherish this once-in-a-lifetime chance I have to be my kids' teacher. I have also signed up for a free online class on teaching early childhood math, that I think is going to be really helpful for me in terms of working on math at home with my kids and bridging the gaps between my identity as a mom and a high-school math teacher. I have just started the course, but I am encouraged to see that the early concepts in the course map almost exactly to what I have seen from my son, and what I have done with him at home based on my math-teacher instincts and research. More on early-childhood math later, but the premise of that online class is that most kids are ready to explore mathematics starting at age 2. That is absolutely what I believe already!
I have thought more about mental health during the past six months than I had ever thought about it previously. Mostly, I worry about the mental health of my four-year-old, who was pulled out of school in March and has since been isolated from his friends, save for some occasional playdates outside. I reflect on my own mental health as well, in the age of radical politics, existential threats, and in the context of a biracial marriage. Some days, it feels like a lot, even though I think I am a naturally buoyant and unflappable person.
I have never had a therapist. I am not against the idea at all, but I am actually so transparent that I feel quite free to talk to just about anyone about my problems; I feel like I can just vent socially without paying someone, most of the time, because I don't generally feel ashamed of my feelings or predicaments. When my son was born, my (generally wonderful, and very supportive) husband and I were both so sleep-deprived, that my marriage experienced a rough patch for a short stint. I (forcefully, vehemently) suggested to my husband that we should seek marriage counseling before attempting to have another kid, in order to prevent similar hiccups the second time around. My husband is a non-believer in seeking help generally; he does not even like watching YouTube tutorials or posting questions in social media groups. He prefers to just try things out on his own, then revise his strategy privately if necessary, with new ideas generated from his own head. I had to really argue that marriage counseling is not a negative thing, but should be seen as an investment in our relationship prior to making another big change. He agreed to doing it, in spite of his skepticism, but I never got my act together to find us a therapist who was taking new clients and was reasonably affordable, so that idea never actually got anywhere before, well, our second kid arrived and things actually seemed to be okay. Earlier this year, I had a crisis moment when I again considered seeking therapy. On social media, my husband's blended family was giving me a lot of grief/toxic interactions for my liberal political views, and he felt that I was fanning the arguments that clearly would lead to nowhere. I came to the realization that 1. I don't experience the BLM movement the same way that my white, male husband does. 2. American discourse has changed a lot since we started dating, that is causing external stress upon our marriage, by putting our racial identities under the magnifying glass. I truly don't understand how some people say that their marriages just sail through the years without any work. That's not me. I think my husband and I are blessed to have a pretty strong marriage, but we definitely work on it, and there have been some rocky moments over the years. At one point this year, I considered finding a POC therapist who might specialize in treating me for being in a biracial marriage, and my husband supported me in doing so, even though he admitted that therapy is not really his thing. In the end, my husband and I reached a common ground without therapy (again, because I never had the energy to find one). Upon his suggestion, I removed his blended family members from my social media account (and eventually, I would de-activate said social media account as well), and he and I committed to making monthly donations towards social justice causes. My husband also took a series of concrete steps at work to leverage his white male privilege, that resulted in expanding inclusive hiring practices, his company making a commitment to match donations to BLM, and encouraging folks to feel safe to discuss social justice on their work chat channels. Although I never set up therapy, I do feel like I was able to navigate the situation to some type of a solution, to preserve my mental health. On a smaller scale, the things that I have done to care for myself include: semi-regular exercise (a little tougher at the moment because I am asthmatic and the air has been on-and-off smoky here); a lot of outdoors time with family and some friends this summer; cutting out certain toxic social media addictions; re-connecting with old friends over video chat, email, and text; starting to blog again for regular self-reflection and just a "pause"; and looking ahead and thinking about the fall and winter holidays. I also am experimenting with the idea of drinking less at home, because I feel like I have been slowly increasing my alcohol intake during COVID shelter-at-home, and my physical health is impacted (I feel sluggish, and the alcohol consumption feels habitual, rather than enjoyable). I still need to work on getting to sleep earlier, but that's on my list, too. I also have been cautious to not take on too much. I really wanted to volunteer to tutor math this year, to help out some families in need, but I was clear in setting boundaries of when I would be available (only during my children's naps, and after carving out days to exercise). I am keeping self-care in the foreground, as we move into the winter / new year. What does your mental health routine look like in 2020, and what would you revise about it going forward? My daughter was born in 2019. She was always an easy baby, compared to our inconsolable first-born. The newborn sleep was still not perfect the second time around, but in a lot of ways, I could already tell that she was going to be a different child than her brother, right from the start. When she was about 5 months old, my husband went out of town one weekend for work. I kept the baby up for a little bit after putting her older brother down to sleep, and we hung out in the darkening living room, enjoying some 1:1 girl time after dark. The sun had set and I noticed that she was looking out the window, and I wondered if she was looking at the lights outside? Curiously, I rotated her to face the darker end of the room, to see whether she would turn her head back towards the light coming through the window. When she did not, I was a bit surprised, and continued to turn her body this way and that, only to realize that actually her head seemed to only turn to face always the same side of her body, and then back to midline. She almost never looked towards her right shoulder, past the midline. Over the course of the next few days, I confirmed this observation again and again by watching her closely, and was stricken with a deep sense of guilt.
--How could I have not noticed this before? I felt ashamed of my previous oblivion, and was Googling madly to see what it meant that my precious daughter could not rotate her head in both directions. When my husband came back from his trip, he tried to assuage my fears. "I am pretty sure I have seen her turn her head to the right before," he said. He was as certain that I was being paranoid, as I was sure that I was not. I made an appointment with our pediatrician, but began gently stretching her neck while I waited for the still-a-week-away appointment. By the time I saw a doctor from our pediatrician's office, her neck already seemed better. The doctor encouraged me to continue to stretch her neck, and said that often the newborns will just get better with this over time. I was not convinced that she would get better "on her own", because over the next week, I saw the pain and resistance in her eyes whenever I would try to stretch her neck the way the doctor had shown me, so I made an appointment with a newborn masseuse (technically, it was a body worker who worked with adults, but who also came highly recommended by local moms for treating infant torticollis), who was able to restore her full range of motion in three miraculous visits -- or so, I thought. When she left the masseuse's practice after three visits, N seemed visibly limber and free, able to rotate her head to the right while laying on her tummy, and showed only a small bit of tenseness/discomfort when I would massage her back or shoulder. I felt so happy to have found her the antidote to her illness (or so I thought). Fast-forward to 7 months, my daughter was still not sitting up, and could only occasionally roll over in her bed, and almost always rolled in one direction only. The doctor had remarked at 6 months that she seemed to be generally on track with her development, and did not seem concerned about her torticollis. At 7 months, however, N was unable to place any weight on her left hand or be able to push her head off of the ground more than 2 or 3 inches, and I was getting quite worried. I brought her back in to the pediatrician's office to make sure there was nothing wrong with her left shoulder (as in, was there a shoulder sprain?), and this time, a different pediatrician did a thorough examination and advised me to take her to PT. This pediatrician noted that my daughter was unable to place any amount of weight on her feet, which developmentally typically happens around 4 months. She said that N appears to have a slightly weaker muscle tone on the left side of her body, but regardless, PT would be able to address the vast majority of these cases and bring her function into the normal range. I immediately contacted an early-intervention agency in our area and waited for our intake appointment, scheduled to take place in February 2020. The wait was excruciating, because I did not know whether she would ever walk, if she could not bear any weight on her feet? Finally, the day came for our intake appointment for early-intervention services. The specialists at the early-intervention intake appointment assessed N in the areas of gross-motor, fine-motor, and speech development using a set of detailed rubrics, behavioral observation, and interview with both parents. They determined that N qualified for state-subsidized intervention services. In order to qualify for these services, she needed to be either 1.5 standard deviations below the mean in that particular assessment area, or delayed more than 25% of her age in months in that area. Across the board, they noted that her torticollis had caused delays in her gross-motor development, her use of her right hand (both gross- and fine-motor development), and in her cognitive development (since she only looked left and so seldom used her right side of her body, she could not really explore her environment, feed herself, or "self-advocate" in ways that were appropriate for a 7-month-old). We set up therapy immediately, with weekly PT sessions to address gross-motor delays and monthly OT sessions to address fine-motor delays (including challenges in self-feeding). By the time N started therapy, she had already completely plateaued in development for 2 or 3 months -- an eternity, considering she was only 8.5 months old. I write about this now, because I want to say that when all of this happened, initially I felt so many negative emotions. I grieved for the assessment results -- that she truly was so delayed in her development and that the future seemed uncertain for her. Simultaneously, I felt also an immense sense of relief, that my mother instincts were not false, and I was not being paranoid at all. I felt angry that the pediatrician's office had missed several flags along the way, and that it took my own insistent advocacy to get her the help that she needed. But, over time, all of those negative emotions have faded. I look back and feel only immense gratitude -- that I trusted my instincts, that we were able to access such a wonderful organization in our area, that we were able to continue virtual services seamlessly during COVID shutdown, and that my daughter has responded so well to a variety of interventions. I also feel so incredibly hopeful for the person that my daughter has turned out to be thus far. Over the course of 6 months, she has made a tremendous amount of weekly progress, smashing every goal they are setting for her. Her journey with the PT and OT has shown me that she is both curious and resilient. She is too young for me to know exactly how she will fare in formal school setting, but what I can say is that she affirms for me (as her brother did, in different contexts) that we are each far more than the raw talents we were born with. N has had to work very hard at every skill: rolling over, sitting up, crawling, walking, climbing, pulling toys apart, feeding herself, and manipulating small objects. Every skill, every step of the way, she has practiced and focused and beamed with pride when she is able to do something all by herself, and then she would rush to do it again and again, thereby showing incremental progress day after day. She has taught me more about joy than I could have imagined, and she has a sense of humor, a spunk, and a can-do attitude that are all of her own. Looking back, the greatest lesson I have taken away from this second-time-around parenting experience thus far is to see our children for who they are, not just who we wish they were. They come to us with different gifts and also different challenges. Those challenges don't need to define their achievement, but it is our job as parents to see our children for their needs (as well as strengths), in order to help them be and feel successful on their own terms. |
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
All
Archives
July 2021
|