LifeLearners

My favorite Professor

i love one of my professors this quarter-- the complete antithesis to my other one.
Prof I is quiet introverted, and deliberate. She is dignified, intentional and intense. She is dressed to the nine in a suit, with ruffled blond hair and the years of experience show on her in a grounded dignity.
She is a blast from my Semiotic days of Lacon and Derrida. She read The Unsayable too, and it's our little secret between us, she is obsessed with semantics and signifiers as i am.
She speaks in lyrical, completely complex sentences, so poetic and so well composed, i am furiously transcribing them verbatim.
She is spacy, lectures in a stream of consciousness and is completely unstructured.
It's funny how different Professors get a rise out of you, but she just strikes a chord.

Working again

Just when i finally weaned off the adrenaline from work, i landed another gig.
i am always so amused at how God's timing. He always gives me my heart's desire, when i don't need it anymore, when i am not pining for it to give me my identity. It's always a place of challenge for me, when i am desperately needing to work, or now when i am gathering up my wits again to get into the groove of consulting.
But i am grateful and bemused. Trying to be faithful to whatever God puts in front of me, thankful for the work, for the ability to pay my way through school -- faithful in the small things. In BSF, we learn about how Jesus needed 30 years to prepare for 3, 30 years of small tasks before He performed His first miracle, 30 years of being unseen.
Thank you Jesus, help me to give You glory and do it in Your strength.

TouchMath

Funny the things i get a kick out of: stumbled on a new method for teaching Math: TouchMath.
It's tactile, multi-sensory and works with kids with learning disability and autism.
i love the manipulative quality of it.
Here is how it works.

Interesting Article on Charlotte Mason

One of the core pillars of homeschooling
http://amblesideonline.org/CM/M1_5a.html

New idea to try

Idea i got from another HS-ing mom

I love Charlotte Mason's ideas on teaching reading, she teaches
sight words in context from the beginning, say use a familiar poem
like Humpty Dumpty, Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. Teach the child a
line at at time, the child not only learns new words in context, but
they have immediate success, which is a big deal in and of itself.

meant to add, if you like the idea of cards, you can create or write
each word on a card and then have the child read the words and
recreate the sentence "Twinkle, Twinkle little star." Each day review
the previous day's sentence and see if there are any words in the new
day's sentence that they already know. Keep it positive, they'll pick
it up quickly. I would think that visual kids would typically do well
at this.

HTH

Notes on Reading

Nally's first " homework" is to read to us for 5 minutes everyday.
So we thought the Bob Books experiment arrived just in time.
Today though, we started with the book without going through the cards. She got through most of the book and then stumbled through the last pages.
Again, the simmering frustration of an encountered failure. My child started kicking and twitching again. i sense her abandon the task and start guess wildly.
Perhaps it's too stressful a set up for her.
Next steps:
Take the stack of index cards and do her morning game with them.
Have her play match-the-cards to train eye recognition.
Have her lead the matching game with Aidan
Read book right after.

拔萝卜奶奶 (Carrot Milk)

Aidan's taken a liking to carrot-juice.
The cutest thing is that he calls it "拔萝卜奶奶" which is literally translates into "pull the carrot-milk". We've always called carrot by their favorite song " 拔萝卜( a song about a dog pulling at a carrot )" and it's so amazing for him to map it to a brand new beverage in his 2-year old brain. You know they're really grasped a language when they are branding their own beverage !

One ounce of Quiet Time=One ounce of patience

It's funny how my quiet time in the mornings directly correlate with my patience with the kids. They have been wearing on me lately. Aidan with his incessant, unrelenting nagging and even Nally's polite " Excuse me mommy" has been making me sigh " Yes what Nally ? "
But today, just 10 minutes of quiet time gave me more patience for the day. It helped me relax and not throw my usual tantrum at BSF, because my first born is innately a Zen, mindful, reflecting, slow-motioned contemplator and is impossible to hurry, no matter how hard i yell.
Today i managed to get them both to BSF, just before i get turned away from my class. i got to watch them play at the playground while eating lunch. We got to drive the car-cart at Safeway which was a treat for them. i got to muster up all my energy to drop them home and then take Nally for gym.
i had been planning to take her for a mommy-n-me visit and she had suggested the same " Can we go to the coffee shop and write ? ". We had sat there, while she did her kindergarten workbook, and me chat with daddy.
We had gone to do some errands on University. We had come home and done some marble-art work. We had done some water experiments in the bath. We had read Noah's ark in Chinese and learnt about how our body worked. i had lasted till bedtime.
Present, patient, awake, aware and not yelling.
Nothing short of a miracle.

There is One God

Nally: "  There is only one God"
Tania: " Really" ( impressed by Bible Study Fellowship's monotheistic education ) " How come there is only one God ? "
Nally: " Because it'll get squishy in the sky "

Number Line with Nally

Nally and i did number line today and again i am struck so much by my child's learning style.
i made a "neighborhood " number line and put each number inside a house. We had 2 counters - mr. rabbit and mr. duck and we were going to visualize each addition sum by saying " if we are in number 2's house and take 2 steps. Who's house will we be in  ? "
And i knew the  child had missed her nap and was slightly fragile.Nally has always been reasonable and logical beyond her years and fatigue is the only thing that give me glimpses of what i am missing as "typical 4-year old behavior ". So i was open to stopping whenever she lost focus.
Which she did right from the start: she was tapping all the numbers, she was messing around with the counters and i was biting my tongue trying not to let on that i was really annoyed. i was torn between deciding she wasn't getting it or she was just fooling around. Finally i rescinded and said " It's ok Nally, we don't have to play this game if you don't want to ".
That's when she said she wanted to play the computer, of which after a slight pause i said "no, not until you're done with this game. " i winced a little as i said it. i am still of the school of "stopping when your child wants to stop". i am still hyper vigilant about setting up a bad vibe around learning. But what i didn't expect was what happened.
She wailed. She screamed -- in true no-nap volumes; and i sat there and listened to her, worrying less about the volume than the fact that it was provoked by a learning situation and that she would be "scarred for life" from number lines. Daddy is holding her. Daddy is distracting her. Daddy is offering to take a bath with her.
Then my 4 year old stops, composes herself and says " No... i want to play this game ( pointing to the number line )".
Bemused, i set it up again, and we go through 5 visits ( sums ) in 2 minutes and she gets them right every time.
" Now can i play computer ? " she asks.
" Of course" i say speechless. And she was off.
i am completely floored- less by the fact that i had a child who could grasp a mathematical concept quickly than by the realization i don't have one of those curious, intrinsically motivated, love-learning-for-the-sake-of-learning  homeschooler. True to Nally's style, she never lets on that she's learnt anything except when it's a means to her getting what she really wants.
So much for my externally motivated child.
NB:
Later her commentary about the experience was " Sometimes when things are hard, you wait a while and it becomes easy ".