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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Besides the state of our country and the world, I have also been thinking a lot about home-schooling my preschooler. I began the home-schooling journey back in March, when we first decided to keep him at home. We are still paying for his daycare now, so it was always intended to be a temporary home-schooling setup, but this fall we decided to continue home-schooling, as I will not be returning to teaching in a classroom this year. (I am still doing some virtual/no-cost tutoring just to help out with families that have greater learning or financial needs than us, but it only happens a couple of times each week, while my two kids are napping.) We are still paying for his daycare for now, but emotionally I am prepared for the possibility that my son would be at home with me at least through January, and possibly through the end of the school year, which would land him straight in Kindergarten next year.
To begin with, I was a reluctant home-schooler. I feel confident about my ability to teach my child anything that I know, but I think 1. he needs the socialization that comes with being in a formal school setting, and 2. it is not necessarily good for him to advance too quickly in any academic area, because it could result in boredom with school down the road, or a fixed mindset about learning. But, given that my son was already home with me for months on end, I decided that we needed a little bit of structure to our days, in order for him to not start jumping off the walls. I followed his school's general structure of going outside twice a day to play, and designating regular lunch and nap times, and reading lots of picture books throughout the day, but I wanted the days to have a little bit of academic focus to tie the days together with meaning and purpose. I already had a book from my neighbors, called Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, which I had kept because other teacher friends of mine had raved about it in teaching their own preschoolers to read. I am all for trying to do what I can, with what resources I have, so I started to slowly make our way through that book of reading lessons. Flash forward, my 4-year-old did finish it, but it was a bit of a painful process. It was a combination of his stubbornness and mine; on the days when he struggled with the mechanics, he would push himself to read two lessons instead of one, because he did not want me to tell him it was time to stop; and on the days when he was just clearly defiant, I would power through half a lesson just to stick to the daily routine. In hindsight, I should have obviously mixed up the extremely boring book lessons with hands-on activities and Bob books -- which I did incorporate subsequently, and I saw my son's engagement go way up, as did his reading fluency. Hindsight is always 20-20, but it is a little embarrassing to say this as an experienced teacher, that it took me so long to realize the format was not really working for my son and that there were better alternatives. In the beginning of March, I was just trying to survive each day. I came up with a daily schedule that was incremental by 45-minute blocs of time. I knew at all times of the day what we were supposed to be doing, and having a detailed schedule quickly brought routine and comfort to both me and the kids. (My baby was still home with me, but it was a big adjustment for her to have her big brother around all day, everyday. It was also a big adjustment for me, because my daughter had to receive help with completing PT exercises multiple times each day, because of her gross-motor delays.) I also decided quickly that we should do a variety of activities. Besides being outdoors regularly and reading lots of books, I also incorporated hands-on science activities and bought a book on how to use scissors for daily preschool cutting practice. Those first days flew by quickly, until the scissors lessons ran out and I was exhausted from trying to do super innovative science lessons everyday. So, we entered Phase 2 of homeschooling. I dropped science, and started working in more extensive actual play activities. My son was starting to enjoy jigsaw puzzles, so we spent a couple of months really working on his skills of thinking strategically to assemble new jigsaw puzzles. He was able to independently play for longer and longer, and we also worked actively on learning to ride a bike when we were outside everyday (with some bribes on my part, since my preschooler really is physically risk-averse). During this second phase was when we introduced a lot of dancing and singing, at first everyday, and then it tapered to when my son was feeling really in the mood for it. As my daughter grew older and more mobile (a little after her first birthday), I began to remove the play pen for a period of time everyday, to ease both kids into sharing toys together. Eventually, she dropped a nap and they got on the same nap schedule, and the play pen was stored away. I would say that, right now, we are in Phase 3 of home-schooling. The kids do a pretty good job of alternating between individual play (in the same space) and communal play. In the mornings, I still do an academic lesson with my son -- we alternate between practicing reading and doing some math each day, but the lessons only last about 15 or 20 minutes. (I will write about the math that we do on another day.) I am trying to incorporate more creativity into our days, because I don't want my son to grow up to be too rigid. A few weeks ago, we painted rocks and shells, and I was thinking up mime scenarios to act out with the kids everyday, to encourage my toddler's artistic risk-taking. Last week, we had a group chalk session, where I asked my son to contribute ideas to my drawings, and he in turn took some pieces of chalk and added on his own abstract contribution. (The baby also scribbled on the side, which is good for her fine-motor development. A few weeks ago she was not able to hold the chalk to make any mark, but I could see that she is getting stronger recently after a lot of fine-motor practice / OT.) In another post, I will talk more about the math that we do, because as a math teacher, I feel so passionate about exposing our young kids to math (either informally or formally, whatever you feel comfortable with), the same way you would expose them to early reading experiences! But I am also curious what has worked for you, if you have tried to "homeschool" your young kids? |
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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