On: the joys of learning to read

Starboy is checking out his kids' meal at the San Diego Zoo. The mac and cheese came with several bags of not-great, but not-too-terrible, over-processed snacky things. (Including already-sliced apples with a sell-by date at least a week away. Yech.)

"What are these, Mama?" he asks, holding up a very kid-friendly black package.

"What do you think they are?"

"I think they are animal cookies!" Big smile.

"Why do you think they are animal cookies?"

"Well," he reasons. "The picture is animals, and I see here a /k/ for 'cookies.'" He points to the "c" at the beginning of the word.

We're doomed.

Light Table Letters

A couple of weeks ago, I saw Play at Home Mom's fantastic letter templates. I downloaded them immediately. What a fun way to play with letters!

Starboy had a great time with them, but the activity lasted maybe ten minutes. He chose these particular letters. I'll be interested to see how much of the alphabet we can make it through. I want to try the dot stickers as well—that might be a great restaurant activity!

Reading Roundup 2013.04.12

Here are some stories I found interesting this week.

Wow, don't miss this version of The Cure's "Lovesong" from this week's American Idol. Chills.

How can you set limits if you don't use threats to enforce them? Aha Parenting (Apr. 2, 2013)
Boy am I ready for these reminders.

Where ideas come from, Starlighting Mama (Apr. 3, 2013)
Hint: not from screen time.

10 Tips to raise a persistent child, Aha Parenting (Apr. 8, 2013)

Cursive handwriting bill passes the NC house, News & Observer (Apr. 4, 2013)
Hooray! I didn't realize Common Core has no cursive requirement. I guess you can't bubble-in to test it.

Creating fear in children with lockdown drills, Motherlode (Apr. 8, 2013)

Dutch kids get "driver's ed" for bikes at age 12, FreeRangeKids, (Apr. 8, 2013)
I love the common sense, and the absolute lack of faux terror that we propagate here.

"Glass Gem Compilation," Play at Home Mom (Apr. 10, 2013)
A great round-up of activities you can do with light tables and glass gems. Good resource.

Johnny Cash Columbia Catalog—63-disk box set, NPR (Apr. 10, 2013)

More news links at Newsish!

I run across a number of articles to share around each week, and in an effort to diminish my image as a militant pro-BF, AP, anti-circ, education aware, pro-teacher, anti-testing, natural (except for the Cokes and cookies), empathy parent spammer — and to simplify the inboxes of my friends — I've started a blog / feed that is articles-only called Newsish.

You may find some duplication here, and hopefully you can suffer that offense silently, with my apologies.

Should it be a Twitter feed instead? Probably. But I'm not dealing with Twitter. I don't need another format to manage; I spend too much time online as it is.

Hop over to Newsish by clicking here.

Letter recognition

Starboy is still letter crazy, even though he guesses that nearly all of them sound like /n/. I hope the madness lasts, we've got a long way to go.

I'd given him a paperclip to use as a tool for poking extraneous pieces out of foam stickers, and he bent it into a W, an M, an E. When he saw all the possibilities and wanted more paperclips to make other letters (while he threatened to scratch up my antique desk with the W), I pulled out the pipe cleaners.

I cut them into straight and curved lengths that would fit into the grooves of the Montessori letter tiles. Big hit! The added bonus is he has to focus on differentiating between the lengths of each piece, which vary from capital to small (and vary by letter, e.g. the crossbar in A).

The trimmed pipe cleaner pieces are currently being stored in a half-egg-carton, so he can sort as he uses them as well. Unfortunately I don't have Montessori "shelves," as there isn't really space for them.

I also don't have a strategy for attacking all of the letters. It's clear he's still trying to understand the differences between the "name" of the letter and the "sound" of it, between capital and small, and between cursive and print. I'd prefer to focus only on cursive, but there is very little supportive cursive script to offer additional teaching in our computerized world. So the approach so far has been haphazard. I'm surprised he's able to remember any of it.

I'm going to have to do some research to offer a proper strategy.

Letter lesson

Waldorf, for some reason, is not hot on written language and letters for preschoolers. I understand not pushing this, since there is plenty of time to develop the skills, but I don't understand the idea of denying an interested child the chance to explore what makes him curious.

Starboy definitely is expressing an interest in cracking the code on written words. "What does that say?" he pleads daily. Although my own recollection is of learning to read whole words before learning  each letter and its sound, I would have to think that I was given "sound-it-out" guidance as we went along in each story, based on how I've seen my mother read with Starboy.

So we've started some letter and sound recognition activities. With no method or plan to make it much easier for him. Luckily I'm not a strict Montessorian. Although that might help him, in terms of strategy.

We've started a multi-day project of making place cards for our family easter gathering (14 people). I found some blank cards for $1 per pack (12/pack), and got some matching glitter stickers ($3-4 per pack, you'll need more than one for a big crowd).

The bummer is that the stickers are all crammed together on the sheet, which makes finding the letter you want pretty confusing for a pre-reader. I did cut off the numbers entirely. And I encouraged him to set the stickers on a blank sheet during the hunting part, so he could see beyond the floral tablecloth. I considered cutting apart each letter, but then we'd have 26 pieces to manage, and that didn't seem conducive to success.

Some of the family names were pretty long (3 syllables) to fit onto the place card, and so I took those on while Starboy worked. He seemed to get maxed out after about three name cards, even with an additional incentive of using lenticular robot stickers for some of the names.

*This post has been shared at these linky parties. Please check them out for literally hundreds of great crafting ideas! The Magic Onions, Natural Suburbia, Frontier Dreams, Montessori Monday.

Indestructible alphabet flash cards

I'm so excited to try these gorgeous alphabet cards by Marie-Claire Camp on Kickstarter. Aren't they gorgeous? Her initial project sold out, so I've pre-ordered on the second run.

They are basically flash cards made out of food-safe credit cards, with beautiful graphic design. This photo doesn't show it, but they will have both cursive and print letters on the face. Starboy is going to love them!

Be-bop alphabet

For a nickel a try, we used the jukebox to practice some alphabet and numbers. B3 was Elvis' Hound Dog.

Starboy thought it was a swell lunch.

Thinking about learning

I was just reading a post from SweetGingerMama, a friend of ours from birthing class a few years ago, about her education philosophy. She was homeschooled through 10th grade. She lists benefits to experiencing homeschooling, and they are some we all should envy. They gave me some things to think about.

"I am convinced the sense of safety and security that home school provides in those very early years of development plays a major positive role in building a child's sense of worth and self-confidence."