It's a new year, and with it, I feel invigorated with new hope for the future, as well as some trepidation. Since I last posted, my son had stayed home for a while, until yesterday when we finally sent him back to school. It has been a good run at home. He worked on biking, math, and Chinese many days. After the holidays though, he started feeling sad and really missing his friends, so when the local COVID numbers became more reasonable, we sent him back to school. We are still incrementally working on Chinese with L, in order to maintain some academic rhythm to our days. I think he is now up to recognizing about 50+ Chinese characters. I still make and use the flashcards, where I put out the recent characters and their associated pictures for him to match up, but when he picks up a pair, he also uses it in a sentence. I find it is both a good way to make the review feel less tedious (more active on his part, and he can make it fun by constructing whatever sentences he wants), and also a sneaky way to encourage him to speak in more complex ways. A little while ago, I also pushed back and asked him -- my first time ever making this explicit request -- to try to speak to me only in Chinese. When he asked me why, I explained it this way: "We should always be improving and practicing something. You can already express yourself very clearly in English, so now it is time for you to practice speaking in Chinese. Once you are able to speak Chinese fluently, we can practice something else, like maybe Spanish." I found that framing language learning this way helped to avoid power struggle, because I did not say, "Chinese is part of my heritage and I think it's important for you." At his age (4.5), anything that helps to diminish power struggle is a win in my book. I also struck a compromise with him that if I notice he is trying to mostly speak Chinese to me during the day, then at bedtime, I would read to him bilingually. Else, I would read only in Chinese, since he needs the extra Chinese exposure. He thinks that is a reasonable compromise, and overall I have noticed a really good effort from him most days. When he forgets, I remind him either with an exaggerated, "Haaa??" or I give him a sentence starter in Mandarin, by translating the first part of his thought into Mandarin. He responds pretty well to both forms of reminder, and I am so proud to see that his language grasp is slowly improving. (He now asks me to teach him transitional phrases like "because" and "therefore", instead of just saying them in English, interleaved with Chinese. I think that is a really positive sign.) We have been biking and hiking a lot as a family since I last blogged, which has been a sanity-saver, because during this COVID winter we have not been seeing many friends, even outdoors. We also went sledding twice since winter started. Since my son was out of school between Thanksgiving and mid-January, for two recent weekends in a row, we have met up with his daycare friends for a playdate on bikes. Super surprising to me is that my son, who is physically VERY anxious to take risks, is actually a pretty confident pedal biker now. I honestly attribute it to him learning to bike on hand-me-down cheapo bikes that cost either nothing or just $20. He is on a free-to-us 16-inch bike at the moment, and it has a solid frame and weighs quite a lot. It is far from the fast, light bikes that I initially considered buying for him, but he has adjusted to it and rides it up a small, steady hill (130 feet of elevation over a mile) without resting. That particular route to the park includes some minor street riding as well, along a quiet street, and one time he was ahead of me at an intersection (I was walking his baby sister in a stroller) when I saw him waving to signal a driver through the roundabout. My big kid is growing up so fast! (I can't believe we are signing him up for Kindergarten right now!!) A particular delight for me recently has been to see my younger toddler blossom. Due to torticollis, she has received PT and OT help since last February, and SLP help since October. In the last couple of months, she has grown an astonishing amount, that all of her experts are ready to graduate her from their services. It has been amazing to see her improvement, and as her mom and primary caretaker during the day, I know it is no accident. More than any help she has received, she is such a determined little gal and just chooses a task and works herself at it until she gets it. She learned how to put together a jigsaw puzzle this way, over the course of several weeks, even though in my mind I thought it was way out of her reach, and similarly, just this week I saw her slaying a pretty complicated shape sorter stacking toy that she definitely could not do at the start of January. I forgot to mention Christmas, but this was the first year that my son wrote a letter to Santa. (He wrote it himself because I thought it would be a cool and semi-academic task for him to do, and actually it was pretty legible except for two important words being jumbled together. He asked for "a train" and Mercy Watson chapter books. "Santa" gave him train pajamas and two Mercy Watson books, which he promptly started reading on Christmas.) We dropped the letter off, and he was able to get a personalized response back in the mail! He was pretty excited that Santa's elves commented on his good manners in saying "Please" and "Thank you" in his request. We managed to make it a special Christmas, filled with many new traditions, even though we definitely missed traveling to visit the grandparents. Lastly, we are embarking on some new endeavors at the moment. I am currently food-training my 4.5-year-old, potty-training my 1.5-year-old, trying to sign up for Kindergarten / research after-school care options for next school year, learning new digital-teaching tools, and simultaneously trying to find a teaching job for the fall while still being a SAHM and tutoring on the side. That's probably story for another time, but, needless to say, there is never a dull moment around here.
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'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! 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!
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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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