bead spelling

After a full day of school, Sasha often isn't terribly enthusiastic about focusing another hour and a half of her attention on practicing her literacy skills. She often wants to do things like jumprope or play on the swings or sing and dance or work on a craft project. However, she also knows that our tutoring time is designated reading and writing time.

But Sasha is clever. She has started figuring out ways to incorporate reading and writing into these other activities. And she knows that as long as she can find a way to include reading and writing, I'll almost certainly say "yes" to whatever she wants to do.

Recently, she really wanted to make a necklace. So she proposed a spelling activity. Each bead she picked up correlated with the next letter in the word she was spelling aloud.

Although this just looks like a regular necklace, she made it by spelling night, bright, slightly, might, knight...

High fives,
-MP

bingo

Made Sasha some Bingo sheets with our latest word set (words with gh).

This game is super easy to make, since you can draw a grid and fill it with any sight words you're working on learning, and use nearly anything for markers -- I had some colorful gemstones on hand, but pennies or legos or dry beans or torn scraps of paper work just as well.

Hugs,
-MP

Bananagramarama

I introduced Sasha to a new literacy game recently. I actually got the idea from El, whose son (close to Sasha's age, and also in a similar developmental stage in regards to literacy) invented a similar game himself using a Scrabble board and tiles.

There are only two rules:
1. Players take turns using letter tiles to invent new words. Only made-up words count, no words that are already real words.
2. You have to say your word out loud and give it a definition.

A big area of development for Sasha right now is phonemic awareness, which is basically the correspondence between letters and sounds. This shows up in both her decoding efforts (also known as "sounding it out") and her spelling and writing attempts.

This variation on Scrabble or Bananagrams is great for helping kids work on their phonemic awareness. Yes, the words are silly nonsense words, but that takes the (enormous) pressure off of reading or spelling the words "correctly." But the game still has players working with the basic building blocks and rules of the written English language. It doesn't feel as intimidating as spelling and reading "real" words, plus it makes kids feel powerful to invent their own words -- the sillier-sounding, the better -- and definitions. Providing literacy opportunities for kids where they can feel powerful and in control helps build their confidence in their emerging reading and writing skills. For kids like Sasha for whom literacy is a challenge and a frequent source of anxiety, I cannot overstate how essential it is to prioritize confidence-building activities like this one.

When we played, at Sasha's request we just turned all of the letter tiles face up and chose whichever letters we wanted; you could also play a version more like Bananagrams or Scrabble, where players receive a certain number of face-down tiles at the beginning, and replace them with more randomly-selected tiles as they place their tiles on the board. The grid paper in the photo was something I made to provide Sasha with a little bit of structure; lots of our words extended off the edges as we continued playing. As an added challenge, you could color-code the board and add a points system like Scrabble (or just use an actual Scrabble board!).

As her own extension of the activity, Sasha suggested that we use our invented words to create a secret language. She diligently wrote down every word we created and its translation, and then constructed sentences in code. She had a lot of fun with this activity, and we'll definitely keep adding to our secret language dictionary as we replay the game!

Hugs,
-MP

Gamifying Literacy, take 2

It all started when I found this little thing at my local game store.

So my challenge was to build a board game around it. I wanted to make a game that was more complex than my last board game; involves some math (and ideally skip counting, since Sasha is working on that concept in class); incorporates strategy and not just probability; requires players to read, write, and move their bodies; and would provide a platform for players to become more familiar with sentence anatomy (nouns, verbs, and adjectives).

Here's what I came up with.

Sasha Says, ep. 23

"The teacher wasn't actually a bad teacher, just the class was misbehavinged."

"You know how I'm a barefoot walker?"

"I look like Santy because I have the same initials. I'm twins with Santa."

"Sometimes I like to see the smell, you know?"

"I wish my hair sticked up. If it was as long as Rapunzel's and it sticked up it could hit the ceiling!"

"I was such a grubber when I was a baby."

"I like to really mess up my hair."

Hugs,
-MP

Twister with a twist

Sasha said she wanted to have our tutoring session at home this week. Usually we're in a cafe, which has its advantages (no toddler or dog or neighbor kid interruptions) and its disadvantages (limitations on resources, space, noise).

At home, Sasha got really excited about the idea of "making a game." After some initial blanking on how the game should work or what it should be about, Sasha realized we could adapt one of her existing games into a reading game. We perused the game closet and she picked Twister.

We selected a bunch of her flash card words to write on strips of masking tape. When I spun the spinner and called out the combination ("Left hand blue!") she had to read aloud the word on whichever circle she picked. (We also tried a version where I just called out a word and she had to hit it, but that was much more physically challenging.)

She's still working on discerning left and right. You can't see it in the picture, but she had me write a big R and L on her corresponding hands and feet to help her figure out which to use on each turn.

She had a great time with this game, and really took ownership over this project. One of the best things I can do as a tutor is to recognize and support opportunities for Sasha to be her own teacher, to tap into her own ingenuity and resourcefulness in meaningful, fun ways.

High fives,
-MP

gamifying literacy

Every week when planning Sasha's literacy tutoring session, I invariably trawl Pinterest for ideas before I do anything else. And invariably, I throw up my hands in frustration and end up doing my own thing. Because most of the "literacy" or "reading" pins in the Kids category aren't innovative games, or sensory-related writing activities, or anything that sounds like it would actually be fun -- just worksheets. I never want to see the word "printables" again, ugh. And this time of year, a lot of the available worksheets aren't just unimaginative, they're racist too. Double ugh.

So this week I did what I usually do when Pinterest serves as anti-inspiration: I made my own activities.

Sasha, like most human beings, enjoys games. Our usual flashcard matching games have gone a bit stale, so I made a new game. A board game. With dice and cards and everything.

This game is super simple. Roll the dice, move your piece (dinosaur toys, since I've got a bit of a collection going), do what it says on the space you land on. I made three stacks of cards: one stack of sight words Sasha is still working on, one stack of sight words Sasha has already mastered (the ones with smiley face stickers), and one stack of sentence cards. The sentences are all derived from or related to the books I've read aloud to Sasha over the course of the last year (Harry Potter #1-3, The Spiderwick Chronicles, Dealing with Dragons, and Holes). The game takes about 10-15 minutes from start to finish to play, and it took me about 45 minutes to make (including writing all of the sentence cards -- I already had the two piles of sight word cards from our previous tutoring sessions).

Here's the gameboard.

Sasha loved the game. As soon as we finished she asked to play it again. Three times in a row. The element of chance provided by rolling dice and the goal of progressing along the path from start to end helped to alleviate the "chore" feeling that can come with reading flashcards and random sentences.

Sasha asked me what the game was called, and when I admitted that I hadn't named it, she got out our markers and dubbed it "run to the end." She especially liked the "whirlpool" spaces, and would enthusiastically spin her dinosaur around and around before tipping it over from "getting dizzy" when she landed on one. She even suggested, after the third consecutive game, that we start keeping a tally of how many times we each won.

This game will definitely be making a reappearance at future tutoring sessions.

High fives,
-MP

intrinsic

An amazing thing happened today: Sasha interrupted as I began to read aloud to say, "Stop! I want to read it!"

Take a moment to process that. Let your color wheel spin.

This is the same kid who, a month and a half ago, balked at any invitation, request, or requirement to read aloud. Even words she was familiar with, even books she's muddled through dozens of times, even favorite stories. Even everything I custom wrote for her. Regardless of if they appealed to her sense of humor or her current interests. This kid did not want to read. It was hard and she didn't see the point of it.

I've been gone for just over a month, and I come back and she is leaps and bounds ahead of where she was when I left. In terms of reading and writing ability, but also in terms of the stuff that's harder to measure: initiative, and confidence, and persistence. Sure, she's still way below grade level, but that doesn't matter. She's reading and writing because she wants to. She's keeping a journal. She's writing fluent sentences with best-guess spelling. She's trying new words when we play Hangman. She's checking library books out that are right at her "growth" level, and she is reading them.

I am so proud of this kid.

High fives,
-MP

Sasha Says, ep. 22

"I saw a honeybee with its pockets full of pollen."

Sasha referred to her mom's stainless steel to-go coffee mug, which Sasha was using for a smoothie, as a "metal water bottle"

On the (humid) weather: "It's really sweaty today."

While playing: "Even dinosaur friends eat each other." And, shortly thereafter: "Now you're a t-rex zombie!"

Sasha was pretending her dog was a horse she was training, but felt she needed more dogs (to be more horses). I suggested she be a dog, and she said with a tone of great incredulity, "Me, be a dog? I'd rather be a high-ho farmer" -- without a shred of irony.

As an airplane rumbles by outside: "Shut up, cloud!"

Hugs,
-MP

Reading with Sasha

Since summer started, I've been tutoring Sasha once a week in literacy skills. Girl will happily sit and listen to me read aloud for literally as long as my voice holds out -- which is several hours, by the way -- but ask her to sound out the simplest word in the title of the next chapter and she completely shuts down. I've really been digging deep into my creative well to come up with unorthodox reading and writing activities for her to try during our tutoring sessions, all centered around specific sets of vowel sounds introduced sequentially.

We've done lots of reading and writing that engage different senses, as well as games like Hangman, Bananagrams, and match-the-flashcard-to-the-spoken-word.

writing in sand with a chopstick; we've also done fingers and feet

writing on felt with yarn segments

yes, that is a playdoh sculpture of the sea

  ...but she still fights it the entire two hours set aside for tutoring. She likes this stuff better than simply laboriously sounding out skull-numbingly dull Bob books for the frillionth time, but she'd still much rather be doing almost anything else. She stalls, she whines, she bargains, she toys with anything not bolted down, she literally lays down on the floor and covers her face. Coaxing her to read is a monumental act of patience and persistence.

I did some research on it several months back and I'm fairly certain the kid has dyslexia. She's got just about every symptom on the books. I was all jazzed to teach myself how to be a dyslexia-specific tutor for Sasha, but when I brought it up with her parents, they noncommittally shrugged and said that their "instincts say she's just on a slower path." I talked with Sasha's first grade teacher at the end of the school year and he agreed she was showing some signs of dyslexia. He asked me to encourage her parents to get her tested so that, if needed, she could get an IEP (individualized education program) for second grade. Unsurprisingly, they decided not to test her. They prefered to wait it out, see how regular tutoring went, maybe reevaluate sometime in the unspecified future.

Well, here we are at the end of summer, and she's made a little progress, but not a whole lot. She still balks at any opportunity to develop her literacy skills. Even when we're engaged in imaginative play and an opportunity arises for low-pressure writing -- such as writing tickets and placards for our "art gallery" -- she'll almost certainly decide we don't need to do that part even when it was her idea to begin with, or she'll opt for scribble writing. (Scribble writing is an important pre-literacy "representational thinking" skill, but typically kids start incorporating actual letters once they begin developing phonemic awareness around age 3 or 4.)

a classic example of Sasha's scribble writing

 The thing is, I'm not equipped to tutor her if she has a learning disability unless I get specific training for it. And if her parents don't want to explore that possibility, I'm kind of stuck. So, with the start of second grade looming, I plunged back into googling things like "my 7-year-old hates reading" and sifting through the resulting avalanche of parenting forum advice.

Through parent recommendations, I found an online program that looks like it might be a good fit for Sasha -- very short daily lessons, game-based, lots of actual rewards mailed to your actual door, funny characters, British accents. And designed with dyslexia in mind, but not exclusively marketed that way. It's got a complete moneyback guarantee at any time, and stellar reviews. So I mentioned it to Sasha's parents.

And they seem willing to try it out!

I'm really relieved, because I've felt like the burden of teaching Sasha how to read and write has fallen squarely on me, but unless she gets instruction tailored to kids with dyslexia (or whatever cognitive challenge she's got going on), she just won't make much progress. This online program could be the solution.

All this has made me reflect on how I intend to parent my own potential future children. I do hope that I'll be the kind of parent who, when someone close to my child says, "hey I think your kid has a learning disability," that I will take it seriously, do the research to see if it seems likely, and try to address it appropriately as early as is reasonable. I hope I don't instantly dismiss it.

I hope this online program turns out to be the Thing That Works, and that someday Sasha will enjoy reading as much as she enjoys being read to.

High fives,
-MP

the best big sister

Sasha is such an awesome big sister to Ezra. I love watching their relationship development as Ezra gets more and more capable of participating in Sasha's play.

Hugs,
-MP

experimenting

This summer I'm babysitting Jaden for a few hours a week, and he has become my official test subject for science activities for four-year-olds. I've been getting all these great ideas for preschool science from my Young Child as Scientist grad school course, and from good ol' Pinterest, but since I'm not based out of a classroom, I haven't really had an outlet for my kid science excitement. (Most activities I get stoked about -- and can realistically carry out in someone else's home -- are a little too juvenile for Sasha's sophisticated tastes.) So I got Jaden's parents' permission to experiment on their kid.

grooming the nerdling

For Sasha's birthday (in April) I made her a Hagrid card because she especially likes when I read in my Hagrid voice. When you open the card it has a drawing of the slightly squashed birthday cake Hagrid made for Harry's 11th birthday. Things in Hagrid's pockets (all things he actually has in his pockets in the books): newspaper, coins, string, dog biscuits (actually cat food because it's smaller), keys, a letter for Harry, his magic pink umbrella, slug pellets, and a wooden flute. It would have been even better if I'd found tiny metal key charms and a drink umbrella, but other than that this was pretty much what I envisioned.

Anyway, I just found these pictures on my phone and thought I'd share, several months late.

High fives,
-MP

Sasha Says, ep. 21

"Pretty much everyone in my family is a vampire zombie by now."

"My mom is a cleaner-beaner. I don't really know what that means."

"Art is French." (it turns out she was making a generalization based on the beret-wearing artist trope)

"I'm too old for regular parks, I just like amusement parks now."

And a mini edition of Jaden Says (I'm babysitting him once a week now):

"I wished for love and I got a mermaid!"

High fives,
-MP

tough stuff

Sasha had a big crash on her bicycle recently. Fractured her wrist, knocked her teeth around, bloodied up her knees. I babysat her the evening after the big event (but before she got her wrist cast) and, perhaps following my lead, she was totally nonchalant about the whole thing. I think after her dad's fussing, her mom's hovering, and a host of medical professionals doling out pitying "poor baby"s, she just needed someone to see her in all her injured glory splayed out on the couch during a summer heat wave and just shrug and say, "bodies are good at healing."

"Yeah," she said, touching a lip swollen to four times its usual size. "My mouth is already feeling better. I can probably eat hard things tomorrow. I'm gonna save this cookie for breakfast."

And, shortly thereafter: "I hope my bike is okay -- I haven't even checked on it!"

She is going to be just fine.

Hugs,
-MP

cycle challenge

The family that HB used to nanny for organizes a regular group bike ride for kids in our city. This time around, I asked Sasha if she wanted to do the ride with me. Did she ever!

Sasha tends toward sedentary. She prefers tv programs to parks, read alouds to running around. But at the same time, she completely idolizes me and my bicycling ways. She often says that she wants to be just like me when she grows up, "not owning a car, and riding my bike everywhere." Recently the hero-worship has won over the discomfort of physical activity. Just in the last few weeks, she's taught herself to ride her bike without training wheels, without much formal assistance or even much encouragement. She just decided she wanted to do it, and practiced and practiced after school every day until she got it down.

So with her training wheels off, the seat raised, wheels refilled, and bicycle frame lovingly buffed, Sasha, HB and I joined the group bike ride for kids!

Sasha did fantastic. She totally challenged herself in areas she has previously been hesitant to explore: riding up and down surfaces that are not perfectly level without getting off and walking her bike, riding on streets where cars travel and not just the sidewalk in front of her house, riding in a relatively straight line (important when you're in a big group!), and riding for longer than 20 minutes at a time (admittedly with very long breaks in the middle for kids to buy treats at the cupcake and ice cream shops along the ride).

Since the ride, she tells me that all she wants to do is ride her bike.

My job here is done.

High fives,
-MP

Sasha Says, ep. 20

Sasha introduced me to one of her friends using their teacher's nickname for the kid, "Clofish" (rhymes with blowfish) instead of her actual name, which is Chloe

"Let's be vampires. And spies."

"Princesses are my worst enemy!"

"Parents always say yes to playdates."

"There are a lot of nutcases here!" (It turns out she was referring to a helmet brand that lots of people were wearing on the group bike ride for kids)

"I'm feeling very unpatient."

"There are two kinds of petrified. One is like petrified wood, and the other is like in Harry Potter." (Characters in Harry Potter #2 are immobilized by a marauding basilisk)

Hugs,
-MP

charcoal art

One day I came outside to find this scrawled in charcoal from the backyard firepit on the concrete by Sasha's garage. (Ezra's name is the last one on the list.) Precious.

Hugs,
-MP

luck

Sasha is on a clover kick; whenever we're outside, she's hunting for four leaf clovers. (We've found six so far, in one specific patch in her front yard.)

Because I'm nothing if not an opportunist, I latched onto her casual interest to goad her into some biology-related inquiry and scientific investigation. We compared and contrasted the different types of clover we found, examining everything from leaf color and size to stem shape. We counted leaves, looked at spines and veins, and speculated about the evolutionary history of each kind. Sasha even nibbled on all of them to see if any tasted as good as the sorrel (which looks like a giant clover; it's the big one in the picture) does. Now on our walks home from school, she regularly stoops down to pick some sorrel from the neighbor's abundant flower bed, and chews it for rest of the walk.

Hugs,
-MP

life update (transitions, pt. 2)

We have a lot of exciting transitions happening in the next few months. Let me explain. No, there is too much; let me sum up.

Moving to an apartment with HB; major reduction in hours with Sasha & Ezra, ending care with Athena; starting regular hours with Jaden; working on a graphic novel; taking weird summer intensives at grad school; traveling in the fall; starting regular preschool teaching (hopefully) between November and January.

Okay, but here's the long version.