Tuesday, November 02, 2010

Quick quick

So we did this Five in a Row book about a steam shovel and I made a pan of water rattle a plate, and later I found Emer with a bag of Geomag ballbearing molecules "warming them up" by giving them ever more space. She stopped just before "and takes up ALL the space it CAN" because no, but no.

Linnea bloody hates phonics and seems to have decided that the thing to do about this is larn 'em. As in, that'll larn 'em. I sometimes wish I were raising her in a language that used internally consistent spelling. She'd prefer it.

We went to Cork for a week, on the Swansea-Cork overnight ferry; the weather was awful on the trip out (we don't know how bad exactly, but worse than gale force 8, because that's what it was on the way home again) and I had to take Linnea for a walk around at 1am so that she could see that the ship was fine. We even asked the receptionist to tell us that the noises were normal. However, I learned that my children don't get seasick. They also don't get trainsick or airsick. Just cars and buses, then.

They met their seven cousins. Astrid is the tenth grandchild. Goodness me. It's a bit alarming.

They met their great-uncle and one of their great-aunts. I need something from which to construct a family tree for them; bits of photos stuck to a huge bit of paper might work but I'm not sure. Perhaps I need to create the kit and draw the tree while they're asleep, then let them put the people in the right places. They've met great-uncles and aunts on the other side too, and first cousins once removed and second cousins, so...

One thing about the Oxford Reading Scheme is that it makes it actively reassuring to hear, when I am locked in the bathroom up to my elbows in one child's nappies, another child crying loudly, from somewhere I can't see or get to because of the naked poo-covered baby, "OH NO!"

Very reassuring words, "Oh no," in certain contexts.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'd be willing to wrangle the interface to do data entry (and first-pass record searches) on Ancestry.com to bash your known tree data into easily-outputtable formats, if you like. I enjoy doing it, and have run out of low-hanging fruit from my own tree (the rest are all more work than I'm up to this week).

Ailbhe said...

That's kind of you, but we already have all that - it's making complex relationships clear to the children I'm planning, and a tree seems simplest.

Philip Newton said...

I sometimes wish I were raising her in a language that used internally consistent spelling. She'd prefer it.

I wonder how Irish fares on that account.

I used to think its spelling system was worse than English in its unpredictability of sound from spelling and vice versa, but I've been told that the symbol-to-sound correspondences are more regular than I had thought (they're just unusual occasionally, for English speakers, plus Irish has more consonant phonemes than English, what with the broad/slender distinction, and so has different needs in order to represent them all with the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet).

Though knowing basically no Irish, I have no idea how easy it would be to learn to read it - how many exceptions there are, or whether once you've got the rules down, it's pretty straightforward.

(I forgot - do your children speak any Irish?)

Ailbhe said...

I found Irish very simple to learn to read, when I was 3. I made fewer embarrassing errors reading aloud, too - I remember some English-reading errors I got teased about for years, and none in Irish. But my children don't speak it (though they are aware other languages exist, and have spoken a few words of a few different ones at various times; we have books for them in Irish, French and Swedish, for example).

Rivka said...

I'm curious about whether "this book about a steam shovel" was familiar to you prior to Five in a Row. Here it is absolutely one of the most famous picture books of all time, probably equivalent to Beatrix Potter in belovedness and widely-readness.

Ailbhe said...

No, I'm finding Five In A Row very interesting that way - I had more American books as a child than most people I knew but they're (FIAR) almost all new to me anyway. I had heard of Ping before because of geeks I know going through a phase of buying it, but that's it. It's a very very American curriculum.

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