Spelling and Learning

The other day, AJ came to me quite frustrated: "I'm trying to teach Baby E how to read, Mommy, but she's not paying attention!"

I tried to reassure her that it's great she's trying to teach E to read, but that it will probably take E a long time to learn because she's really too young to read yet.

DH just called me from his cell phone to tell me an interesting story, though.

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He said,

I just had to call and tell you . . . something really interesting just happened. Baby E was sitting behind me in the van, playing that game she plays where she pretends people have different names. She was telling me that my name was Mommy, and making up other names for me.

I zoned out for a bit and I was just driving along humming to myself, when suddenly I realized she was saying, "Daddy, you'we Don. D-O-N, Don." She said it several times. She kept pointing to me and saying, "D-O-N, Don."

I said, "Are you spelling it?" and she said, "A, B, C . . . then she got a little mixed up."

I guess I wasn't paying enough attention to her, so she figured that if I didn't understand what she was saying, maybe she needed to spell it for me.

She does hear that particular combination of letters spelled out fairly frequently, so I guess it's not too surprising that she picked it up. She's can count to fourteen or fifteen now, too . . . though she's really only solid on the concepts of sets of numbers up through two or three. Past two or three she starts counting objects more than once, but she definitely understands how many "two" is and that SHE is two.

When DH and the kids got home a few minutes after DH's phone call, E came running to me saying, "Mommy, I need miwk!" A little later: "I'd wike some miwk now, pease."

I'm so proud of my girls . . . this was only their second week at AWANA and already they're memorizing things like old pros. M&M passed her Sparks motto and the theme verse (John 3:16) and AJ passed her Sparks motto, theme verse, the Pledge of Allegiance, and the AWANA song. All AJ has left for her entry book is the AWANA pledge.

I had worked with them on the motto and verse during our Bible lessons this week, so I knew they would pass those. But I'd only read over the Pledge of Allegiance and the AWANA pledge with them a couple of times, trying to familiarize them with it in preparation for learning it next week. We hadn't worked on the song at all.

AJ's favorite activity the last few days has been finding various places on the globe. She likes to read the library books I got that have stories incorporating travel around the world. As she comes to each mention of a place, she finds it on the globe.

She loves using the concordance and the map coordinates in the back of the atlas to find a place like Tahiti in the atlas and then use that information to find it on the globe. She'll spend long hours sitting with a book, atlas and globe, exploring them to her heart's content. Whenever there's a break in the day's activities, I can be pretty sure to find her near the globe.

Today we drew a rough sketch of the continents on a toy ball. I let the kids write their names on it (E just drew lines), and then we tried to flatten it in different ways so it would look like a map. That didn't work very well, of course.

Finally we cut it up and I showed them how difficult it is to get something round, like the world, into a flat representation like a paper map. We experimented with it to see which methods worked the best, looked at pictures of various types of map representations, noticed how any type of flattening causes some distortion, and learned how much easier it is to put a very small piece of the world on a flat map than a large piece. We also learned about latitude, longtitude, the equator, weather differences in the Northern and Southern hemispheres, and time zones.

The girls are just eating this stuff up--they love it.

M&M especially enjoyed reading about beetles today. Her favorite was the male giraffe-necked weevil, which, she informed me, lives in Madagascar and is really funny and neat-looking.

After school today, the two older girls enjoyed pulling carrots for dinner and digging potatoes in the garden while Baby E napped. M&M even volunteered to help wash the vegetables.

Both girls also planted the grape seeds and plum pits from their afternoon snack in little pots of dirt. It's fun for them to eat the fruit they helped pick the other day. I hope the seeds will grow.

M&M and Baby E have been playing an ongoing game the last several days that M&M is Baby E's pet cat or dog. M&M crawls around meowing or barking while Baby E leads her different places, pets her, and pretends to feed and groom her.

Just now I was nursing Baby E when M&M came barking up the stairs. Baby E hopped down off my lap, said, "Oh, my dog mahnts me!" and ran down the hall calling, "Hewe, Doggie! Hewe I am! C'mere, dog! C'mon! Awww, tute doggie."

I'm glad Baby E is old enough to play along with M&M in such games now. They have so much fun together in their imaginary world.

M&M and Baby E both still seem to be feeling better today. M&M only complained about her legs and tummy briefly a couple of times, and AJ only had two or three major meltdowns . . . an improvement for her lately. One was the obligatory "M&M is swinging higher than me!" meltdown that's been happening almost daily (often several times a day) since we got the swingset, and another was when AJ got her feelings hurt because M&M got tired of having AJ tell her how to draw and asked her to stop looking over her shoulder while she worked. :)

Overall, it was a good day.