I feel like such a fruit loop! I hope there are no cereal killers out there! All the cool little worksheets and activities that I was planning on doing today are just not her "thing!" I keep forgetting that she has her own natural scope and sequence and that we should follow hers and not someone else's - or the one I imagine for her. She completed the silly math worksheets that I printed out for her (up to the 12’s) in just a few minutes. She completed them just to show me how beneath her they were. Oh well, we are having some good laughs at my expense! I guess I should go back to letting her interests determine our activities and her interests guide our day – I need to be more trusting. But it is really hard! She seems to learn more and “higher level” stuff when I am able to follow her lead. Repetition insults her.
For example, my idea of school was to do some fun little work sheets that I had found on the web. She thought they were silly (actually, she's more creative than the worksheet allowed) and she decided to do some work out of her brother's 5th grade math workbook that he used years ago. By letting her do what she wanted to do, we ended up doing something that was above her 'age-level.' She loved adding and subtracting 3 and four digit numbers and asked me to create "more" each time she would work a page of problems. So, we are keeping a Math journal.
Today, August 23, 2005, I gave her several equations and she had to find the different variables (a, b, or c) to make the equation true. 2+b=7, b=? a+6=13, a=? 8+4=c, c=?
She loves adding and subtracting four and five digit numbers. This is what she wants to do for Math. I started to "stack the numbers up" by giving her about 4 four digit numbers to add. This naturally led into multiplication-division and I showed her the many different ways that you can express "division" including fractions. She believes that Math is fun, and that is my goal!
I would rather a child appear "behind" in Math and LOVE Math than for a child to be considered 'on track' while hating it.
The child who loves it, will not be “behind” for long! I was "on level" and I hate it to this day! Maybe I would have loved Math if I would have been allowed to focus on the things that I loved about it and to spend more time with Mathematical concepts, instead of just busy work.
I remember when she Kelsey learned to read; she would lock herself in her room because she didn’t want me to know that she could read. Sounds silly, but I think she had a fear of not being 'perfect,' as if she was still working on the skill and she was not ready to take it public? I caught her reading a book to her beanie babies and that’s how I found out that she could read. Back then I felt like a fruit loop too, because at this same time I was trying to teach her "a apple...." It insulted her because she already knew how to read, but she wasn't letting on to it! Has anyone else experienced this?
My digital camera is docked by the family computer and the children are welcomed to it anytime, without having to ask for permission. This 'open camera' policy means that I am always happily surprised by the lively unconventional images that I find on my camera when I finally pick it up to use it.
Each child documents their play through photographs. Kelsey likes to take self portraits or mug shots. She will take about 10 pictures of herself in various poses making different faces. She is our little family photographer. But, her subject is so cute, how can she go wrong?
Oh, to be a child!
