snack time is math time!

I don't know what Sasha's kindergarten "Montessori-inspired" classroom was like last year, but for whatever reason, she's behind most of her first grade classmates in both literacy and mathematics. Kid can't say or sing the ABCs straight through or reliably count to 20, let alone do spelling or addition and subtraction. And her homework this week included all of those things.

Sasha's dad keeps talking about hiring a tutor, but hasn't gotten around to it. We have all been transitioning Sasha to a "homework first, movies later" policy. Sasha's dad bribes her with "treats" (coloring books and the like) if she does any extra reading beyond the daily 15 minutes required by her teacher, which works sometimes. We're doing a Reading Scavenger Hunt every Wednesday in lieu of flashcards or early reader books.

Her reading skills are slowly but definitely improving.

Math, though. Math is something I haven't done with her much, since up until now the homework packet has been primarily an oops-we-put-the-whole-thing-off-until-Thursday-night ordeal, and I work for Athena's family on Thursdays.

This week, as Sasha poured herself a bowl of bunny grahams for her afterschool snack and we turned to her math homework, I was struck with the memory of doing "snack math" in first or second grade and loving it. Whether we were counting with M&Ms or goldfish crackers, I loved getting to eat my work at the end of the session. So when mental math and counting on her fingers clearly weren't working well (Sasha only has 10 fingers after all, and the homework had her adding up to 15), I suggested we use the grahams.

 from google images

It totally worked to have the tactile visual aid, and Sasha loved when the homework asked for her to "take away" some number, because it meant she got to eat that number of grahams!

Definitely recommend, would do again.

High fives,
-MP

reading recipes

Sasha has been really struggling with learning to read. She still mixes up some of her letters, the most mysterious to me being f and i. She knows about five sight words, one of which is her own name. She drags her feet doing her 15 minutes of reading homework each night.

I remember how frustrating and tedious it was to learn how to read when I was her age. She has the same set of Bob books I had; I hated those books because the stories were so boring, and Sasha seems to feel the same. (In my case, my slow reading was at least partially to blame on my eyesight; my reading improved by several grade levels within two months of getting glasses.)

But Sasha likes stories. She likes being read to. We just finished the first Harry Potter book, and I've promised to find a copy of the second one to start reading to her. I may have her sound out a few words per page of The Chamber of Secrets so that she's involved in reading a more interesting story than "Dot has a hat."

I've been trying to come up with creative ways to integrate letter recognition and rudimentary reading skills into other activities so that it doesn't feel like reading, doesn't feel like a 15 minute timer, doesn't feel like homework.

So today, I wrote out a chocolate chip cookie recipe, packaged up and labeled all of the ingredients and most of the equipment we would need, and biked it all over to Sasha's house. After school, after some regular ol' dollhouse and dress up playtime, and after doing 10 minutes of her assigned reading, we whipped up a batch of cookies. She liked measuring and dumping and cracking eggs, and she loved mixing the dough with her hands!

She wasn't thrilled when I asked her to sound out the words on the recipe paper, but she was a champ at just straight up matching recipe words to container labels, and then recognizing the ingredient in the containers ("that's brown sugar!"). Good enough for a first go.

I wonder, if I wrote and illustrated a book for her that's all about things Sasha can do, like "Sasha can cook! Sasha can kick! Sasha can sing! Sasha can read!" if that would be a more exciting story for her to read than "Mat sat." I'll let the idea bake for a bit.

Hugs,
-MP

Popcorn

Sasha's school does "Popcorn Fridays." But it's so early in the school year that Popcorn Fridays haven't started yet. So when I picked Sasha up on Friday, we decided to make popcorn as an afterschool snack! She asked me if I knew how to make popcorn "from the seeds" (meaning not a microwavable bag, I assume) and to do it "without burnting it." I'm thankful I taught myself this very same skill about six months ago when I decided to give popcorn with nutritional yeast a try, since I had already been eating nutritional yeast on just about everything else that would stand still long enough and had never developed an appreciation for microwave popcorn.

I let Sasha scoop out the coconut oil (after we threw out the burnt coconut butter we first mistook for coconut oil -- they're not the same thing!) and measure and dump the popcorn kernels. This was the result.

We ate it all.

High fives,
-MP