I have had a brain dump that I wanted to write about, but have not had the time or energy to do so. So, here we go. It's mostly for myself in hindsight, but maybe it will be interesting to another parent.
My son, who is 4.5, is just starting weekly feeding therapy with an SLP. That's a statement that probably requires a lot of unpacking, but basically he is so averse to trying new foods, that we decided to get him help. When he was about 1.5, he started skipping lunches at school on a daily basis. My husband recommended that we offer him frozen-food entrees every night, after we offered him something else to eat off of our plates. Sounds reasonable, right? If you have a kid who is a picky eater, you might guess what happened next. Soon, the frozen foods were all that he would eat. Fast-forward three years, he was becoming more and more choosy. He started to refuse things like pizza, or Mac n Cheese that is not a particular brand. I decided one night to say to him, that if he refused to eat any of the pizza his dad had made especially to his taste, then from that night on, we would stop offering him any frozen foods. He would just have to eat our food everyday. My child and I are similarly stubborn. That night, he refused to eat. For the next five nights, he skipped five dinners in a row because he did not want to eat the same food as us. On the 6th day, I weighed him to get a baseline weight, and I called the pediatrician, worried that all of this food protesting was going to cause permanent issues. The nurse at our pediatrician's office advised us to stay on course. She said, "Don't offer him a separate dinner. Keep dinner conversations light, and don't talk about who is eating how many bites. Call us back if he starts to lose weight, or if things have not gotten better in a month, but it should sort itself out." Over the next month, things did get better... until they got worse again. He started to eat parts of our dinner, until he started to skip entire dinners again, several times in one week. We tried to keep dinner conversations light, but "how many bites" and "I definitely won't eat" were the only things our son wanted to talk about. Desperate, I looked up feeding therapy help and got connected with an SLP who does virtual sessions within our insurance network. Well, we are only one week in. I really have no idea how well it will or will not work, but I will say that it has already alleviated my own anxiety to have someone who is qualified guiding us through this tricky transition. From the time when we stopped offering frozen food until now, our son has made some progress (small in my eyes, but probably huge to him). He will now eat parts of most of the dishes that I cook, even though it's just a few bites some nights (more on other nights). The SLP diagnosed him with an oral-motor delay as well, that may be impacting his eating of complex foods. She is optimistic about being able to help him make improvements in eating; I am optimistic as well, because after the first session with her, his attitude towards new foods has already shown a small positive improvement. (I could be wrong about this, but it's my maternal intuition, anyway.) But, this post isn't about the feeding therapy. It's actually about something that I have been thinking about, related to being a parent. A friend said to me at some point, that her child (like my big kid) struggles with taking risks and growth mindset, and she struggles between letting him be himself and trying to help him improve. I have been thinking a lot about this in the context of L starting therapy. It is incredibly emotional for a child to start and receive therapy at this age, because at a deep level, we all want to be loved for who we are, and requiring on-going therapy seems to suggest that who we are needs to change / is not enough as it is. (My younger child has also received a variety of therapy services, but because she is so young, she does not experience those complex emotions.) It helped me to reflect upon the fact that they are really not mutually exclusive -- I can both love someone (including my child) unconditionally and want to actively help them grow as a person. My husband and I have had a similar discussion before. One time, he gave me some feedback about the way I communicated, in the middle of an argument. To which I said, "Well, that's just how I am! You were okay with that about me before, and now you are not okay with it?" He replied, "That's not who you are. That's what you have always done, it's not constructive, and it does not have to be what you do, moving forward." His statement was hard to take at the time, but it's true -- what we have always done/been, does not have to define who we are/what we do moving forward. I can both love my child unconditionally, and help him to see that he is risk-averse and that he needs to practice taking small risks everyday. I can love my child unconditionally, and help him to get the therapy that he needs. Just writing this down for my later self. PS. I was quickly talking about this with my husband in the car yesterday. My husband goes a step further and says, "I think because we are their parents and we love them unconditionally, our role is to help them to become better versions of themselves." I also agree with that. To help someone make a fundamental shift in their natural inclination (like helping my big kid become more of a risk-taker) is a really tough task; you have to leverage a ton of relationship with that person, and who better to do it than a parent?
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It's probably obvious, but one thing that works well with teaching students any concept is to vary up the method of delivery. The more you can approach the same concept from multiple angles, the more engaged the students will be, and engagement translates to focus and mastery. This is true in teaching anything.
I try to use this in working with my son at home, as well. After he went back to daycare, I continued to work on Chinese with him everyday. I find that it helps both me and him to have a variety of ideas for review, so here are some that we use:
We are now up to 70 learned characters, and he really does recognize them all! It's very exciting. I know that he still needs to ramp up on different fonts, but I feel like that is easier to teach than teaching a character from scratch? Our daily practice has also made a difference in his pronunciation and oral vocabulary. I look forward to him being able to independently read simple Chinese books some day! Regularly, there are questions posed in the bilingual parenting group (of which I am a member) about how to encourage your child to speak more Chinese back to you. L's Chinese production ebbs and flows, but I have been on a re-booted effort to actively encourage his speaking recently and have had a lot of success. Today, I adhoc recorded a casual, unscripted lunch-time conversation with him. In this conversation, you can hear that although he still naturally slides into English conversationally, I keep gently nudging him to come back to speaking Chinese by offering sentence-starters that mirror what he has just said in Chinese. He is encouraged then to repeat himself in Chinese. I try to do this in every conversation I have with him, and I have noticed it making a big difference. (At first he did feel frustrated sometimes, because he didn't have all the words, but I try to not criticize his phrasing or pronunciation and to model what can be said in that situation, and over time it has gotten easier for him to switch between the two languages.)
Here is the link to our (imperfect, unscripted) conversation if you are curious what that sounds like. I hope this offers some ideas to another parent out there! 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.
At the moment, miraculously, I feel the least anxious that I have felt in months! We sent our son back to daycare for about a month, and then a few days before Thanksgiving, I decided to pull him out again. We told him that he would stay home with me for at least two weeks after Thanksgiving and for two weeks after Christmas, but in reality, I am prepared to keep him home all through December and mid-January if the local COVID numbers don't look good. I was really hoping that his daycare families would be cautious for Thanksgiving, but he came home the week of Thanksgiving to let me know that most of his friends were planning to go over to someone's house for Thanksgiving dinner, and that one of his daycare families kept one sick and coughing twin at home while sending the other one to school. The combination of those two pieces of news was just a wee bit too stressful for me, so I was honest with my son and asked him if he would feel alright if we kept him home even for the few days before Thanksgiving. He responded brightly, "Sure," much to my relief and surprise. So, back to being holed up with just our sweet and screamy little family, for a little while. Even though my kids are loud and needy and they suck up all of my energy, I really enjoy having both of my kids home. We have had a rare stretch of sunny, dry weather this week, and my son was able to get back on his pedal bike for the first time in about two months. This week, he has been riding his bike, while I push his little sister in a trike stroller, to go to a park a mile away from our house. It's a decent ride because it's uphill to the park and downhill back, and because he was out of practice, the first day I had to push his bike uphill for the last few blocks leading up to the park. After the first day though, he has been able to make it there and back, and is quickly re-gaining his confidence on the bike. (We don't have a fancy bike for him. Actually, the bike he rides is heavy, rusted, and very basic. It has back-pedal brakes and no gear-shifting, the handlebar looks quite worn, and I got it for free. So, I empathize when he finds the hills challenging and thinks hopping on and off the bike is cumbersome, but I also think it builds... stamina?!) We usually spend most of a dry morning getting to the park, playing, and getting back. I do squeeze in a short math lesson every few days, mostly to keep him thinking mathematically. Speaking of math, L is doing very well with visualizing quantities under 10, which makes this math mama very proud! For example, if I show him a picture of 7 dots, he can quickly tell me that he sees 7 dots, because he sees 3 and 3 and 1 more. I am starting to work with him on making subtractive statements like, "I have 7 dots on my card, and you have 2. I win this round (of War) because I have FIVE extras!" With only a little bit of help from me, he also has learned to skip-count by 2's, up to 10. He says, "2, 4, 6, 8, 10!" and actually understands what it means to count by 2's, so I am now trying to add on a bit more, to encourage him to skip-count by 2's up to 20. Recently, he looked at our scrambled Advent calendar and re-arranged the drawers to be in the correct order. He also told me that he counted there to be 12 Advent drawers on each side of the train, which made a total of (he counted) 24 drawers, "because 2 and 2 make 4!" It is so fun to hear him making his own mathematical observations, even though he would probably not peg himself as being particularly mathematical. We have also been continuing with our Chinese lessons, which happily only last about 5-10 minutes per (week)day. I alternate daily between doing 1 or 2 new characters out of the Sagebooks, and just doing review. When we review, L either fishes out the characters to form a sentence that I dictate, or he reads sentences that I create. I think we are up to about 35 characters now that he recognizes, and the best part is that he is still enjoying it! We are moving at the right pace for both him and me, and 5-10 minutes is just the amount of focus I can get from him at the end of a day, with his rambunctious sister running around. (See below - picture from about a month ago!) Lastly, I am a proud mama today of my son, because he learned to zip up TWO of his jackets by himself. He did those two zippers each once yesterday and twice today! He also recently learned to put on his socks without stretching them out. He's just emerging to be a big kid all around. So proud of this kid! Now, if he could just be consistently nice to his little sister...
A couple of days before Halloween, my son went to the bathroom to pee one morning after eating breakfast and noticed there were a few drops of water on the bathroom floor, presumably from when one of us had washed our hands earlier. He came outside to grab the kitchen rag to wipe the bathroom floor, and when told that we didn't want him to use the kitchen rag in the bathroom, he broke down sobbing. He sobbed so hard, that it could not have been about the rag or the water. It was not the first time in recent weeks when he had broken down crying at the drop of a hat. I held him and asked him what was wrong, and eventually it came out in broken pieces, that he just felt desperately sad about being at home without seeing his friends. He had been home with us from the start of March to the end of October, with only a handful of interactions with kids his own age during that time. My son, who is normally a bright and happy child, was really struggling mentally to cope with what seemed to be a permanent predicament.
It broke my heart. A week or so prior to this, I had grieved when we saw other kids at the park and he ran away from them. I had grieved when his bestie saw us outside and ignored his multiple attempts to say hello. I had grieved when we were over visiting a newborn's family, and the older child sprayed a few drops of liquid on his neck and my son had cried and screamed. My husband and I had a long chat that day of the bathroom sobbing incident. We decided after consulting our pediatrician, (tons of) mom friends, our daycare director, another daycare parent, and a friend who works in public health in our city, that we would send L back to school even though it means greater COVID exposure risk for our family. We made that decision because our son's mental health was clearly suffering, and at age 4, we had asked him to be at home for 8 months with no end in sight, and it was cruel to continue to shut him off from the world when he did not have the emotional capacity to cope with the indefinite wait. Once we made the decision to send him back to school, it lightened my own mental load immediately. We sent our son back to daycare on October 30, and within a couple of days, he went back to his normal, chatty, rambunctious, and happy self. It was a really tough decision, as the COVID numbers in our area are still going up, and there are some outbreaks at local daycares (not ours yet, thankfully). We plan to keep him out of school for a couple of weeks after Thanksgiving and after Christmas, assuming that other families will be seeing extended family members during those holidays. We try to balance the risk by sending him to school for only the first half of everyday. At school, the kids nap without their masks on, and I wanted to avoid that needless exposure. So, he wears his mask during the first half of the day and then I pick him up after lunch, while his little sister is napping at home. It's not perfectly safe, of course, but I feel like daycare is a necessary risk, considering that we don't know what the next school year will look like and whether there will be another long stretch of time without regular peer interactions for L. As I know is true for every family, parenting in 2020 is just being stuck between a rock and a hard place. I was incredibly grateful to read today that one of the vaccines in the works has the potential of being 90% effective. Last week, I was immeasurably happy that the Biden-Harris ticket won the election. Among other things, it gives me a glimmer of hope that our country could be on track to curbing the spread of the virus in 2021. Keeping fingers crossed for 2021. '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! 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?
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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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