Two pictures

A photo taken by Linnea:

The red light on the washing machine.

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A photo taken by Ailbhe:

Linnea's waiting-for-supper drawing of a fairytale castle on a hill, with three turrets, a prison underneath which is very dark and bad, and an underground tunnel. The slightly alarming fairy has butterfly wings.

No, thank you

The other day, as Linnea was eating her supper, I said "Your friends who are in school - they are all five, like you."

"Yes."

"The other children who are five are all learning to read and write, at school."

"I don't want to do that."

"OK. Let me know if you want to."

Her cousin in Sweden is also learning to read and write, because she is seven.

Please stop, you're making your brain too tired

On Thursday Linnea played with the Cuisenaire rods for an hour and then spotted the Nrich website over my shoulder, usurped my place at the computer, and spent two hours doing puzzles, sometimes with the Cuisenaire rods to help her.

She wouldn't stop. When we made her stop she played her chocolate game instead, which isn't much different, really. In total, she spent about three and a half hours doing sums and logic puzzles with shapes and patterns.

Afterwards she was tired and cranky, but she's also getting her six-year molars, so that's not proof of anything.

On Friday she didn't start until closer to four, so she stopped naturally when her daddy came home at five.

Criminy.

Games

Linnea will be five soon, and Emer is two and a half. So today's trip to Eclectic Games was more interesting than they were when both children were much younger.

Linnea played with Chocolate Fix and did the first six puzzles quickly enough to surprise the properietor, and Emer played with a Rattlesnake game involving magnets. Magnets are marvellous toys.

I was interested enough by Linnea's concentration on Chocolate Fix that I really want to buy it for her, now. But will I wait and give it as a birthday present, or just get it right now for her immediate gratification?!

They also had a go at learning to use a vending machine, and Linnea condescended to write some letters on a card for me, though they didn't make much sense to me. (AXIA, if anyone is wondering. She really likes an X).

New Year!

Linnea is four years eight months old now, apparently. I find it hard to believe, myself. And
what is she doing?

She's definitely learning to be more conciliating in her interpersonal relationships - children who cry or shout at her are very likely to get their way unless she's totally confident that they will still be her friend tomorrow. She clearly offers compromises and gets upset when they aren't listened to.

Her favourite protest at home is "You are a Gnoring me!" and her favourite insult is "Now you are nuis-less," (also "Don't be so nuis-less.") She's toying with "You're a stinky poo," too, but that's for fun rather than to express unhappiness or frustration.

She's more and more interested in learning to read and write but still not interested in being Taught. Similar with maths - she's adding, subtracting and multiplying single-digit numbers all the time, but doesn't like us initiating a session of it, though we're expected to drop everything and answer "what is seven nines?" at her lightest whim.

I gave her window crayons recently and she drew some lovely stuff on the bay window. I must brave the cold without my gloves and photograph it. It's very bold and confident; there's a house and a snail and a sun and some waves.

She'd like to learn to knit but doesn't like how fiddly and difficult it is. She has short needles and lovely mixed-colours yarn, thanks to Nana, but hasn't stuck it out as far as knitting a whole stitch yet.

Her grasp of anatomy surprises us sometimes - she told us over Christmas that her ribs are the bones which protect her heart and lungs because her heart and lungs are soft and squashy and bones are hard. Presumably that was in a book or on telly but I didn't know she knew it.

I said "I like spending time with you, Linnea," today, and she responded, thoughtfully, "But not when you're cross."

True enough. Don't like much when I'm cross.

Testing times

Linnea is four-and-a-half now and we met the woman who used to be our local librarian, before the library closed for refurbishments. We met her at the rehomed Singalong session in the church next door to the library, and she was delighted to see us. She sat down to chat to Linnea and very quickly she asked "How old are you?" and "How high can you count? Can you count up to twenty?"

Linnea, brilliantly, said "No, I don't have twenty fingers. I only have ten."

Some discussion of toes ensued.

Then the librarian asked "Are you going to teach her her times tables?" to which I said "I'm sure she'll learn them when she sees they're useful." "Oh, because I learned mine and I can still remember instantly - instantly! - any of them."

All I could come up with in response to that was "I can't."

Oh, and I showed her how to do the nine times tables on her fingers.

And then Linnea borrowed her fingers to make more sets of three and did some multiplying.

(Linnea is very focussed on three times four and four times three at the moment.)

I was struck by academic-testing-as-conversation, indeed.

Gory Stories

I just realised I left the bit about reading scary, gory sections (to Linnea, 4y6m) from books hanging. The pig-butchering and headcheese-making scene in Little House in the Big Woods went down well, but the book got incredibly boring at the sugaring-off dance, so we've left it for now. We'll come back to it again, later, I think - she likes to flick through it and look at the illustrations of the parts we've read and "read" them to Emer (2y3m).

When my naughty little sister was good has no scary bits.

We are now in another phase of no-no-don't-read-to-me-mummy. She has also decided that she can't write her name - and has never been able to write her name - this has always been so, this will always be so - perhaps we'll read 1984 next.

Along with not being able to read again comes a leap in personal hygiene and grooming. And more begging for a bruvva.

To market, to market

We help out at a local travelling cooperative market (local, organic and/or fair trade foods) from time to time. This morning we went to help them set up in their town centre location; Rob and Emer went first and Linnea and I came along later.
Emer helped face the goods forwards on the shelves, largely off her own bat (no, we don't ask much of a two-year-old, but she tends to offer a great deal) and Linnea put out scoops for the dry goods, set paper bags out by the various sets of weighing scales, and even priced things with the price-gun, very carefully and effectively.

Usually when we shop Linnea selects foods and brings them to me to weigh, or counts eggs into half-dozen boxes for me to put in the bag. Emer carries things around.

I don't know what they are learning from this, but it's valuable, useful work, so they must be learning something. And they like doing it.

Sums

After buying shoes, and arguing about snacks, while walking through the centre of town, Linnea to me: "Two and five is seven, Mum."

Me: Yes.
Linnea: And three and four is seven.
Me: Yes.
Linnea: And six and one, that's seven too.
Me: Yes, it is. Six and one is seven.

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Much later, I realised that this adding up to a number in lots of different ways is something I've seen mentioned in books and magazines as a stage in learning maths. Which is fine.

I'm not sure which stage it is.

But at least now I know she's learning something I can call maths when people ask.

Fools in old-time hats and coats

Well, it was all my own issue. Linnea was quiet and attentive during the description of killing and eating deer, then more involved - active - something - for the description of building and using a smokehouse. The part which really disturbed me, as a child, is the pig-butchering, and that's coming up soon. We Shall See.

Linnea is very pleased that they had a dog to protect them from the wolves.

Growing accustomed

The children around us are getting used to being at school six hours a day. I'm not, but they are settling down ok.

And we're working out what is best for us, too. We need to go out less, I think; my children want to spend hours at home playing with lego and reading books and dancing.

I'm trying to make a handy to-read pile for the four-year-old as we can get through fairly large chunks in one go. Someone else I know is reading "Little House In The Big Woods" to a much younger child and I am going to flick through it to see how bad the butchering / beestings incidents are, because Linnea will notice if I skip whole chapters. She tends to hand me the book open at the page we were last on (presumably using the numbers?) when it's time to start reading again.

Edit: On page four she looks out her window to see two dead deer, and the butchering goes from there to the end of the pig bit, on and off. Now, she knows about meat-eating animals, and that people are made of meat, but me and my ex-vegetarian sensibilities are a little concerned that she'll react more or less like I did when I learned where meat comes from. I was a terrible, tedious bore, but at least I could eat dairy products. A vegetarian four-year-old would really complicate things on us here.

On the other hand, looking at the very first illustration, a Garth Whatsisname one of Laura skipping along waving her bonnet, and Mary walking primly along with an armful of flowers, I
see that I was set up from the very beginning to want to hit Mary in the face with a lump of green, stringy, slimy seaweed and stuff some crabs down her dress.

Looks like summer!

The weather is warmer and drier than it's been for weeks. So on Friday Linnea ran out of ERAPA to head to the bus-stop, looked at the leaves on the ground, and said "LOOK, Mum, it's AUTUMN!"

I love autumn, I truly do, but I wanted summer.

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Since then, however, the weather has been lovely and warm and bright and dry, and not only have I done a ton of laundry but we've played outdoors (even me!) and had a picnic and
done all sorts of things.

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We're planning a museum visit. The days are filling up. September still feels like a beginning to me, even though I haven't been in a school for um. 13 years? More?

Well, I certainly didn't teach her THAT!

We were negotiating pocketmoney. I said, "How many is twenty?"

She held up her hands, fingers spread out, looked at them, and said, "Two tens."

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Sometime, I will scan in the diagram she drew for us to make her a baby brother. I think my favourite bit is the pubic hair; her father really likes the egg in one colour with the swirls of a contrasting colour around it to symbolise the baby growing bigger and bigger.

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She likes to write her name and her sister's name, in secret. She doesn't like doing it when I suggest it. That seems reasonable...

Motivation

My daughter has absolutely ZERO motivation to write her own name. Her friend's name? THAT she needs to learn.

So there you go.

Book larnin

I realised as I was updating my livejournal that today contained a wealth of education which looks like education, rather than the usual kinds which don't. Linnea is 4 years old. I quote and paraphrase:

On the bus, Linnea was quite verbose about threading the various parts of Reading together, which streets go where and lead to where and what happened in which buildings. She doesn't often talk to me about what's going on in her mind so that was lovely. She also has a better grasp of the geography of the other side of town than I knew.

This morning both girls did sticking and gluing. Linnea also dictated a postcard inviting a friend over, so I wrote that out (and later Rob posted it). After lunch I needed to go to hospital for a blood test. Linnea decided she did not want to come and watch me having blood taken; she at first said she would cover her eyes but I asked if she would prefer to wait in the waiting room and that was a much better option for her, so I checked with staff and that's what we did. And she gave me a little lecture on not leaving rubbish lying around and made sure to put her drink and packet in the buggy when she was finished with them, for whatever reason.

On the way home we went to a cafe with a layered jigsaw of boy - clothes, muscles, internal organs, skeleton - and we talked about what kidneys are and how they are connected to the bits she already knows about (bladder, wee, tubes, etc). She found it strange that they are easier to feel at the back than the front.

And then very late in the day there was a complicated conversation about time, and how we can't make it go faster than it does. We have friends arriving in four days. This is not the day after tomorrow, no matter what we do. How sad :(

All about...

Dinosaurs. We are all about dinosaurs at the moment. Rob and Linnea both know 67 times more than I do about them. I don't think either of them would be terribly impressed by the cardboard pterodactyl costume in which I once incarcerated my sister.

And Linnea still swears up and down that she cannot read. Nope. Can't. I don't mind much since she has conceded that she can keep her underwear dry all day and all night. The whole reading thing is so emotionally loaded - it's like I have a responsibility, as an early-reading bright parent, to have an early-reading and bright child; early reading is in fact often used as evidence of brightness, and its lack implies... Hmph.

I do realise that number two daughter is getting far less art input than number one daughter, presumably because I have less time to keep the house clear enough - hopefully the new wipe-clean flooring (replacing, of all things, acrylic-mix beige fitted carpet!) will help me allow them more messy art. Though I will never become reconciled to washable (hah!) markers.

Outgrowing Nursery: A Very Negative Child

Well! We were ill the week before half term and then it was half term, so L was away from her two-days-a-week nursery for two weeks. The change was striking. She relaxed. She started to admit to knowledge again. She got really interested in dinosaurs and boasted about her knowledge. She started to draw again, and draw well, not at the peculiar regressive standard she had been at for a few months. She asked me to help her with a complicate dinosaur collage.

So the first Monday of the new term rolled around and she said she didn't want to go, so I phoned the nursery and asked to speak to her key worker, because I wasn't sure nursery was still the best place for her. I ended up speaking to someone I don't know at all whom I was assured was The Manager. She told me that Linnea doesn't do anything she's asked to do, doesn't use any of the offered opportunities, doesn't join in the group activities, doesn't socialise, and "is very negative - I don't know if she gets it from you."

That seemed fairly clear cut. The child I live with is outgoing, sociable, friendly, and definitely not negative unless provoked.

So she hasn't been to nursery and she's thriving on it. She's doing her maths book and reading to herself and generally being lovely. She's friendlier and less stressed. And I'm happier, too.

It's sad, because I really liked that nursery and I loved her key worker, but she outgrew it quite quickly, I think, and it wasn't good for her any more.

I'm so pleased the L I love is living with us again. And that we have so much more free unscheduled time. We've been painting again!

Doubts

Since she's four, I've been hearing more and more than she ought to be at nursery. And that shemust start school soon. More and more and more. And I'm also hearing about friends' children who are reading, writing, hang-gliding etc, at the same age and younger.


It's hard to remember that Linnea responds badly to being tested and prefers to keep anything she's ever been tested on a secret. I know she can read because she's done both word recognition and letter sounding out - but she swears now she can't do it. And it seems to be true. Part of me thinks I've failed and part of me thinks she's working on some new skill to do with reading, where before she did rote shape-recognition and guesswork, she's now trying to figure it out from individual letters and she doesn't quite like it as well because she can see the bits she doesn't understand.

Praise is hard to navigate. It makes her fail on purpose.

All of this makes me think school would be a bad idea for her. But also that I'm a total failure, because goodness, a four-year-old who can't read! I could read at four. Loads of my acquaintances children can and do read at four. Where have I gone wrong?

And let's not discuss bladder control.

They teach each other

Emer is learning make-believe much faster than Linnea did, and it's because she watches Linnea doing it. She copies what Linnea does - hard-legged plastic animals prickle their way up my shin and down my thigh and across the vast plain of my abdomen. Emer says her animals stop for mama milk; Linnea tells me to stop talking and be a lake.

Emer went from half a dozen words in daily use to thirty or more in less than a fortnight. She's experimenting with little two-word sentences. She has hauled out all her old words (she used to learn a word, use it for a week or so, then put it away while she learned a new one) and is working on some more.

Linnea likes to read signs, when we're out, and responds incredibly badly to criticism - correction or criticism (sometimes it's hard to work out which I've perpetrated) can result in a total lockdown and refusal to attempt further academic-type work.

Emer doesn't always want to learn what Linnea wants to teach. Linnea is learning to cope with this.

I don't WANT holes in my eyes

[crossposted from elsewhere because I initially forgot this existed]
Today I had to make Linnea a model of the human eyeball and demonstrate pupil dilation in different light levels. I made a ring of my hands and showed how the iris works, and looked at "the dark inside my hands" and the light outside the window so she could see different pupil sizes. She was interested, made her own models, drew some diagrams, and said she didn't WANT a pupil any more because she wanted eyes with no holes in.

Right.