documentation

I love documentation. My very favorite places on the internet are "mommyblogs" with really good photography and thoughtful writing. I also really like blogs that supply good ideas and tutorials for play-based learning activities. One of the things I'm most excited about for my impending teaching career is the opportunity to document children's learning. The whole reason I keep this blog is to record my experiences with kids. And even here, where I'm limited by the "not my kids, don't have photo release forms" factors, I still tend heavily toward including images when I can, whether it's pictures of the kids or of our activities.

I just finished my first couple of weeks subbing at Escuela, and even though documentation is not in my job description as a sub, at El's encouragement I've been reveling in the opportunity to snap pictures of the kids at play.

El already took the Documentation class in our grad program (I'll take it in a few months), and she's given me some really great advice for taking good photos of kids:

1. Fully engaged. Try to capture moments when kids are fully engaged in what they are doing. Often, kids won't be smiling in these pictures. They are learning, they are interacting, they are creating.
2. Story. Select pictures that tell a story without needing a caption for context.
3. Kid level. Get down at kid level. Seriously. Pictures taken at the level of children's faces have the effect of making you feel like you're right there in the kid's world, while pictures taken from above (adult level) looking down on kids feel remote and disconnected. Plus, you miss a lot of kids' facial expressions when you're mostly looking at the tops of their heads!
4. Tight shots. Practice taking pictures with tight framing. You often don't need to see a whole kid -- or even a whole face -- to understand the story of what's happening. To some degree, this can be accomplished by cropping photos you've already taken. 
5. Alternate sides. Look for moments that show a different side of a kid than you usually notice, such as a quiet kid yelling, or a high energy kid cuddling calmly with stuffed animals. Capturing these moments will help you keep the whole kid in mind, rather than letting their more dominant characteristics define who they are when you are engaging with them.

With these points in mind, I can already see improvements in the pictures I've been taking of the kids at Escuela, and I've only been at it for two weeks!

So far, most of the pictures I've taken have been on a cell phone or on my crappy point-and-shoot camera. But coupled with my upsurge of enthusiasm for taking good photos of kids is my renewed enthusiasm to learn how to properly use my fancypants dSLR camera. One of my friends who's something of an amateur professional photographer is trying, yet again, to give me camera lessons so I can progress beyond Automatic mode.

I'm very excited for where I can go with my documentation skills.

Hugs,
-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

homemade preschooler gifts, take 2

My cousin's kid just turned three, so rather than buy him a gift this year, I made him one! I try to create handmade gifts when I can. This one was super easy.

The little bag was just a piece of scrap fabric sewn (shoddily) in about ten minutes, with a bit of extra ribbon threaded through the top seam so that it cinches closed. The card is just a magazine photo gluesticked onto cardstock.

Unsurprisingly, the kid's favorite gift out of allllll of the puzzles, books, clothes, and toys he got was this little bag. Not the stuff in it, just the bag. "My purse!" he shrieked, slinging it over his shoulder and galloping off, leaving behind a wreckage of wrapping paper and much fancier gifts.

Here's what was in the bag:

Magazine photos glued onto wide popsicle sticks make a fun puzzle for little hands.

For double the fun, include a second "puzzle" on the back!

These are super fast and easy to make. Here's the tutorial I used. When the images start peeling off, you just glue 'em back down again. Maybe modgepodge them for extra durability if they get a lot of use. I'm not that dedicated.

Hugs,
-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

the return

HB and I are back from our bicycle tour! It was just the right amount of time -- I'm happy to be home, with lots of ideas about homemaking and art projects and gardening plans and kitchen endeavors.

I kept an illustrated travelogue throughout the duration of the trip, so I have a LOT of work ahead of me to finish it. "Finish it" means finalize my (often very rough) sketches, ink over 30 pages, scan and post-process everything, and then figure out how to publish the thing. Bottom rung would be a zine-style production with all of the pages photocopied and stapled together, but I'm hoping for something a little slicker, which will involve research and potentially pitching the project to a publisher? (Related: some of my work has been published in an anthology! One of my friends across the country saw my art on the cover of the book in a bookstore, called me in a panic midway through our bike trip, and, after being assured that the authors did indeed have permission to use my work, bought the book and mailed it to me as a birthday present. What a pal.)

I've missed Ezra and Sasha, and I'm looking forward to seeing them again in about a week. And, if all goes well, HB and I will probably be trick-or-treating with Jaden like we did last year, if I can pull together costumes for us in the next 24 hours.

Hugs,
-MP

looking forward

It turns out I'm an introvert in disguise. For my whole life I've thought I was an extrovert, but nope, wrong. I'm chatty and exciteable and socially adept but I default to quiet solo activities when given the choice. I don't actually prioritize spending time with friends; I practically have to be dragged to social events. HB has been pushing me to get out of the apartment a little bit for my own good. Last week one of my favorite classmates in my grad program, El, invited a few of us to her home, and so I sternly told myself I couldn't skip it.

And so, ensconced in wicker chairs on El's deep southern-style porch, we discussed teaching philosophies, our grad program, and personal growth. All three of them are full-time employed in preschools; I'm minimally employed, flitting between babysitting and tutoring shifts, and spending the rest of my ample free time preparing for the month-long bicycle tour HB and I are planning and working on a few art/zine projects. El just started a job at Escuela, a bilingual preschool in our neighborhood, which incidentally is the preschool that Ezra just started attending. Two of my other favorite classmates also work there, one as the assistant director. All of them have been encouraging me to apply for a substitute position at Escuela for months and months.

So this week, at El's invitation, I did a two hour visit to Escuela.

I loved it.

I don't have a whole lot to compare it to, since my preschool teaching experience is limited to the three summers I spent between college terms working as an assistant/sub/floater teacher at the large, primary-colored, corporate preschool in my parents' very affluent, suburban neighborhood. My impression of that school can be summed up with "loved the kids, hated the rest of it."

Escuela felt completely different. There were no arbitrary rules, and the kids were not only permitted to explore their ideas but given the space and time to really dig deep into their projects. Transitions were gradual and followed a fluid rhythm rather than a rigid schedule, so that part of El's class was outside while four of them remained inside with their other teacher for an extra 20 minutes working on their project (tearing up leaves and petals on a light table and making "ice cream and sandwiches" with them) until they were ready to head outside. Collaboration and conflict resolution arose organically and without teacher intervention. Most of the classrooms were open so that kids could float between them instead of being locked into their own room with their own age group. And, small but important, they have a garden that the kids accessed during their outdoor play, picking and eating the produce they had been growing.

After my visit, I stopped in at the office and chatted with the assistant director (also one of my favorite classmates) about applying for the sub position. She's setting me up with the paperwork, and if all goes well, I should be starting at the beginning of November, when HB and I get back from our big trip. The sub position is a good way for me to feel it out, decide if it seems like a great long-term fit or whether I should continue looking at the other preschools on my "preschool crushes" list.

Ezra's parents are very excited that I'm applying there -- Ezra's dad keeps saying he'll tell the director to hire me and give me a raise right away, which is very sweet but a little overbearing.

I'm really looking forward to it.

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.

summer toddler

Ezra loves scooping and dumping sand. We find little heaps of sand all over the yard, as well as buckets and bowls lovingly half-filled with sand or gravel, all Ezra's doing. His mom calls it his "jobs."

I have mentioned Ezra's love of doing "jobs" in the past; lately he is very insistent that he be the one to walk the dog. This is the compromise. 

 This week Ezra made a friend at the park. They were within a month of each other's age, and spent a good 15 minutes haltingly passing handfuls of barkchips back and forth (and to me and the other kid's grandma). It was very cute.

 

Ezra has graduated from high chair to table. He is very adamant about it. And he's eating balanced meals, unlike his carbohydrates-only sister.

And we've been playing in the water on really hot days! Ezra is not a fan of the sprinkler or being in the kiddie pool, but he likes playing with Sasha (and her friends) and dropping things in the water.

Hugs,
-MP

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

making it work

Athena has been working very hard on mastering a new skill: buckling. She doesn't have the grip strength to unfasten the buckles yet, but with concentration and some serious dexterity development, she can buckle both sides of her high chair. Buckling, over and over again, is one of her favorite activities right now. She will do it, uninterrupted, for half an hour at a time, several times a day.

I have loved watching her learning process with this task. Once she mastered buckling one side (with huge proud smiles and jubilant kicking), she tried to apply the identical technique (without mirroring it) to the other side and discovered she needed to adjust her approach in order to succeed. For awhile she preferred to just buckle the right side, since she had aced it, and tended to either ignore the left side or get frustrated after a few attempts and fling the straps away. She persisted and practiced and now she can and does buckle both sides, repeatedly, with more and more fluidity each time.

This term I'm in an online-only (eep!) course called Young Child as Scientist, based on the constructivist theory that children are naturally theory-builders who formulate questions and conduct experiments to test their hypotheses. I very clearly see this methodology at play in Athena's work to solve the "how do I make the buckles fit together" problem.

In related news, grad school continues to totally rock.

High fives,
-MP