Writing

From flashcards, we constructed the beginning of a story:

once there was an ancient
tower it fell down

And she copied it out with lines to indicate word gaps and zig-zags to indicate "continued on the next line":

once|there|wAs|AN ∫
ANCieNt|towEr|it|fEll ∫
down

And she called Emer over to look at every E; Emer was very excited by them, it's very important when someone writes an E or an e.

Cutting out

This is the hole that Emer cut. I drew around a toilet roll insert, then, without my guidance, she put the picture on top of a piece of playdough, stabbed a hole in it, and cut from the hole as close to the lines as she dared.

Where I come from

This shows the Earth, with special focus on England (with a dot to show where she comes from) and Ireland.

Entirely from memory.

So exciting!

I know someone who can read, Nea, Nea,
I know someone who can read, oh, Linnea love!

Linnea has been wanting to be able to read (as distinct from wanting to learn to read) for some time. But nothing I did to help her seemed to help. Then I discovered the pleasant but unchallenging Peter and Jane ladybird books and she was much less reluctant. Now we are doing a little bit day by day and she is definitely getting it.

She feels badly when she can't do it, when she isn't completely certain that she knows a word. She whispers them, or says them without breath in her voice so the word is inaudible. But as she gains confidence, using these books where she doesn't care about the story or what the book actually has to say, she is delighted with herself.

It is also possible that my good opinion no longer counts for nothing, but I'm reserving judgment on that; that really would be a sea-change.

But my first born daughter has discovered that her ability to read is a skill she can hone and improve, and she's taking pride in it.

Freedom to learn

Providing unstructured, unsupervised time for the children sounds like it should involve very little, like me drinking tea and picking my toes and reading the whole internets.

Ahahahahaha.

I am this close to eliminating it from our lives. Let me see how I feel when I've forgotten about the mud.

Basic Literacy

Most of the advice says one should give children interesting texts to learn from, thing which are worth reading. This was entirely the wrong tactic with my daughter - it raised the stakes too high. She'd like to practice on books she doesn't otherwise care about, books without story or plot, which are no more interesting the first time than the fiftieth.

Enter "Peter and Jane."

I quite like Peter and Jane. They don't ask much, they have a fairish balance of usually-gendered activities, there's a black-skinned baby doll, they seem like real children.

But the books are boring. That's exactly what we need.

James and the Giant Terrifying Nightmare

The other day, my eldest daughter, who usually doesn't want anything at all, ever, handed me Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach and asked me to read it. We read the first thirteen chapters non-stop.

She was devastated, but didn't want me to stop. The protagonist's parents died when he was four (essential starting point for all children's literature, getting rid of the parents) and her face froze up a bit. Then the aunts were cruel to him and she cried. Eventually she couldn't speak or finish eating her banana and tears ran down her face and I had my arms around her as I read, but she didn't want me to stop and so I continued.

We reached the point where he's inside the peach and realises that he's now in the company of friends, and that's where we stopped.

Later, she asked, "It's not true, is it?"

She didn't mean the talking insects. She meant the cruelty.

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Since then she has refused to let me read the book, even now all the scary parts are over and it's just the nice parts. She's very very thoughtful on the topic of aunts (she has five lovely aunts and a several very nice great-aunts too).

I'm going to suggest we all watch the DVD tomorrow, instead. It can't possibly be as scary as what happened inside her head when I read the book to her, and it might help reframe it all in a more digestible way, so that we can finish reading the book and move on.

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Some children like Dr Who. She is afraid that he is lonely, and doesn't like to look at the monster masks in Waterstone's bookshop. Actual moments of peril just about finish her off.

And television violence upsets her, too.

I wonder sometimes whether I should try to desensitise her, but I don't think so, really; I think I should, at this stage, protect her. She does ok now with promises that the hero of the piece really will be ok in the end. But she hates seeing headlice washed down the plughole, because they might get lost in the dark down there.

Reading, writing and 'rithmetic

The Oyster has been immersed in two things lately: (1) maths, and (2) writing books. I want to note down some of this stuff before I forget it, because it's cool.

Maths

Following on from this post, the 1 2 3 5 4 thing sorted itself out pretty quickly (without intervention, incidentally). The synaesthesia receded in importance, and the Numberjacks mania played itself out. So, thankfully, did the bit with me writing out pages full of numbers for the Oyster to colour in. He occasionally does that himself these days. Sometimes he just does the multiples of 11, because he likes them. He went through a brief phase of writing out the times table (or as he put it, a row of "counting in ones", a row of "counting in twos", a row of "counting in threes", and so on), but that petered out fairly quickly. He knows most of the products up to around 100, I think.

He spent a week or two as an infinity denier. At first he decided that the highest number was called Niall (love that!), and that Niall plus 1 was 0. I think he now gets that you can never stop counting. He's interested in very large numbers. He likes billions and trillions and quadrillions and bazillions. I like the way that even though a bazillion doesn't exist, we can still make statements about it (e.g. it's even, it's a multiple of 10, it's a positive integer greater than a trillion, it's 1 followed by a multiple of 3 zeroes, and so on).

He knows that there are numbers between the integers, but we haven't really got into how that works yet.

He's reasonably solid on place value, as far as I can tell. Sometimes he writes out columns of numbers where column 1 is the numbers from 1 to 9, column 2 is 10 20 30 ... 90, column 3 is 100 200 300 ... 900, and so on. Sometimes we multiply numbers by 2 until we exhaust first his capacity, then mine (to do it without stopping to concentrate or write it down, I mean), then my calculator's (to display the result without resorting to scientific notation). He really likes asking me sums, or having a repeated joke such as "What's 55 plus 55 - is it tenty-ten? *giggle*"

Did you know that if x squared is y, then (x + 1) squared is y + 2x + 1? (For example, 6 squared is 36, and 7 squared is 36 + 12 + 1.) I didn't, until the Oyster got me doing squares in my head (while driving - not recommended!) up to 30 or so.

He has the hang of the number line, and can add and subtract small positive and negative numbers fairly easily, particularly if he has a number line in front of him. His mental arithmetic above 0 is pretty good. "What's 54 plus 35 ... is it 89?" he'll say, or "Is 88 plus 88 176?" Béar Eile (his special bear) turned 107 at the weekend, and he accurately added up the ages of all the humans in the house, then had a reasonable stab at calculating the difference between that number (75, for those following along at home) and 107.

Today's little nugget was when he was counting a page full of pictures, and he counted across the first row of twelve, began to count the second row, then checked himself and counted the number of rows instead. "Four twelves, what's that? Is it 48?"

He has some grasp of bases other than 10. When he was talking to Niall about them, he observed that for base 5, you only need the numbers 0 to 4 to write any number. When the Erisian was visiting, he taught the Oyster about binary - and showed him how to count to 31 on the fingers of one hand. I'm not sure how much of that stayed in, but he appeared to grasp it - and at least when he encounters it again it'll be familiar.

It was also while the Erisian was here that the Oyster asked, "Do all the twelve numbers do that thing where ... like, 1 plus 1 is 2, and 1 2 is 12; 2 plus 2 is 4, and 2 4 is 24?" Turns out they do, as long as you put the original number in the tens column and add it to whatever's there (e.g. 5 plus 5 is 10, and (5+1) 0 is 60; 6 plus 6 is 12, and (6 + 1) 2 is 72). Not sure how far up that goes. But we were very tickled that he'd noticed.

My parents got him a 1st class maths book as a present. He takes it out a couple of times a week and does a few pages of exercises. He's done them easily, so far, once I've read the instructions to him. Mostly, what confuses him is the part about being required to demonstrate how he's getting his answers. The first module dealt exclusively with addition of two numbers with an answer of 10 or less. A few pages later, there were sums with an answer of 11 or 12. Later still, the sums had answers of 13 or 14. He's now even done some where you add more than two numbers. He flipped to the middle of the book and found sums demonstrating place value with columns of dots, and sums to calculate how much change you'd have from 10 cents if you bought an item with a given price.

If he were in school, this would be the book for his third year. To me, this seems generally supportive of our hypothesis that being home-educated is unlikely to lead to academic disadvantage for our children. Actually, what I love about the Oyster's engagement with maths is that from my perspective, it seems that he's Doing Numbers in exactly the same way that he Did Trains a while ago, or Did Robin Hood earlier this year. He's following what fascinates him, in other words, which is the key idea. It's kind of thrilling to see it in action.

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Books

There is rather less to say about books, other than that the Oyster is an enviably prolific author. He has written books about Robin Hood, books about dragons, books about trains, monsters, aliens, dinosaurs, knights, numbers. He has written books in A4 and A5 size (stapled by patient relatives, often with several stapled booklets taped together); he has written tiny little books in A7 size (painstakingly assembled by me - so far, a 100-pager and a 256-pager, with cardboard covers).

By "written", I mean that generally he draws the pictures first, then asks for the spellings to write the words (which often go in speech bubbles). Recently, he has been asking only for the words he doesn't know - he can do "the", "and", "of", "book", among others, without assistance. Also, I've adopted the strategy of writing out the phrase he wants on a scrap piece of paper for him to copy, which is less hair-tearingly tedious than calling out the letters in batches of three or four.

Before beginning to write, however, the srs bsns of putting the book together must be completed. Page numbers are very important. So are front and back covers, end-papers, and the contents page. Recently he started adding barcodes (complete with little numbers written along the top), prices, blurbs, and endorsement quotes. Some of his books have had an index.

Today's titles, as a snapshot: Elementary Trains (a present for K), Spaceman George (not sure that one went very far before being abandoned), a recipe book called Oisín's Food, and a two-part series: The Story of the Skull and Further Adventures of the Skull. These latter two were for the Boy Down the Road, who is ... ah ... very traditionally socialised, and likes weapons and fighting and horror-type stuff (but is nonetheless more or less a sweetheart). The Oyster fits his material to his readership, in other words, which I find very interesting.