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.

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

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

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

getting a move on

We are mostly moved into our new apartment -- or at least, it is more and more resembling a liveable space and less a precarious cardboard maze.

We did a bunch of the move by bicycle.

I hauled flattened boxes generously donated by Sasha & Ezra's parents

For about three weeks, we spent our days off packing boxes, labeling boxes, and pedaling boxes the mile and a half to our apartment. Or just roping random pieces of furniture together in bike trailers and pedaling the load slowly over potholes and train tracks.

we borrowed this awesome trailer a couple times from the bike shop where HB works

For me, moving by bike wasn't so much about badassery or green energy or being a hot alternative hipster mess; it was mostly just the practical solution to wanting to move stuff during our month of double occupancy, when we don't own a car.

We did rent a u-haul for the stuff we just didn't have the equipment to safely move by bike -- couches, mattresses, that sort of thing. With help from my parents and our favorite housemate RK, we spent all of Saturday driving the u-haul back and forth and getting stuck waiting for literally every train that chugged through the city that day. (We moved RK's stuff too, to her new apartment.)

The best thing about our new apartment is the location. It's walking distance from a weekend farmer's market, a daily produce stand, our favorite bakery, our favorite brunch place, a good pizza place, a community garden (which has a 3+ year wait for a plot, dammit), and the park that hosts our city's chapter of Food Not Bombs. Our apartment is also just a few blocks from the apartment where RK and our other favorite former housemate E will be living! We had hoped for a close proximity but hadn't prioritized it at all; we just got really lucky.

we took a picnic dinner to the park last night to watch the clouds at dusk

Our apartment has some other good features, like front steps for my ambitious tomato container garden, a gas stove (which we have to light with a lighter half the time?) and enough space in the living room for me to cram both my desk and my drafting table into a corner. And a bathroom we're not sharing between five people, and a kitchen that will stay clean when we clean it, and windows that are less than a century old.

It has some weird built-in-the-1920s oddities too, like a bathroom sink with separate taps for cold and hot water, and a door in the bedroom closet that leads not to Narnia but to the toilet, and approximately three electrical outlets in the whole damn place, but it has charm, you know?

We took around freshly baked cookies to introduce ourselves to all our neighbors last night because we are those people. So far everyone's really friendly but a lot of them smoke cigarettes on their porches, which is frustrating because it's technically a non-smoking property and I'm a sensitive and delicate butterfly. One apartment has kids (!), one has a hilariously bug-eyed chihuahua named Nibbler, and one was so full of pot smoke that I'm pretty sure my hair still smells like it after the sixty seconds it took to hand cookies through the doorway to the extremely delighted occupants.

Stay tuned as we continue trying to adult.

Hugs,
-MP

Athena does the park

We've had a few hot, sunny days this week, so I've packed Athena into the stroller for a few glorious two-hour stints at the park. Often when I've brought her to the park in the past she'll spend the majority of the time just standing and staring at the other people there. Or sitting and staring. Or holding onto my leg and staring.

But with these longer park dates, she spends the first half hour in observation mode, then she starts to explore the play structures. She likes the baby swings and climbing the stairs to slide down the toddler slides. She has been a fan of bark chips for weeks, but now she has discovered daisies too.

And she's starting to interact with the other kids! Today, Athena and this two-year-old named Violet took a shine to each other, and followed each other around the playground babbling. Violet kept saying "Baby!" and gently hugging Athena. It was adorable.

I can tell that she likes the park because when it's time to go, she screams bloody murder as I strap her into her stroller. (Waving "bye bye" to the park seems to decrease transition-time shrieking.)

High fives,

-MP

goofy foot

Ezra's favorite way to sit in his high chair is with one foot -- his left foot, specifically -- wedged up against the edge of the tray. Goofy kid.

High fives,
-MP

apparel

Ezra is starting to assert some opinions about what he wears, and tries to put on some of his clothes himself. Mainly socks, shoes, and hats, and by "tries to put on" I mean he sort of jams them up against the appropriate body part. But still! Progress! Emerging personality!

This week he was insistent that he wear this ridiculous pink and red striped monstrosity on his head. It is either a froufy costume bag, or possibly his sister's hat -- I'm not sure which.

I think he rocked it.

Hugs,
-MP

made for walkin'

Ezra has finally, finally started walking for real. Athena went from zero to walking in like three days, but Ezra took his own sweet time, and wanted a lot of practice before making the switch from primarily crawling to primarily walking. He's been using rolling toys, dining room chairs, and big people fingers for like, two months. For about three weeks he's been (adorably) walking a few steps unassisted between one encouraging person and another, then collapsing joyfully into their outstretched arms. Just this week he finally decided he could take more than three steps at a time by himself, without coaxing, and go just about anywhere he pleases. He is thrilled with himself.

On one of our sunny days this week, I stripped Ezra down to just a t-shirt, initially thinking he might like a chance to air out somewhere it didn't matter if he took a wee on his own feet. It turned out he hated the feeling of the grass on his bare bum, so anytime he fell down he immediately popped back up, usually with an offended shriek. I left him pantsless for two hours, and he spent the entire time wobbling around the backyard, and occasionally trying to climb things.

My grad school program is based out of the Reggio Emilia approach to preschool education. One of the major tenants of Reggio is trusting children to take risks and allowing them to feel the power of their own bodies. Before thinking about it this way, I think I would have been much more likely to just block kids' access to potentially risky objects, or physically move the kid to the end point instead of letting them go through the process of trying their own bodies at something they're not quite yet capable of reliably doing without assistance. For example, Ezra wanted to look out his bedroom window but it's above his eye level. Rather than just ignore his pointing or hold him up to see out, I moved a step stool against the wall under his window and gave him the space to try it on his own. And then rather than just setting him on the top step, I guided him verbally and physically to climb the stairs himself. Soon I shifted to just verbal encouragement, and hovered my hands near him to catch him if he slipped, and let him do the whole thing on his own. He is so proud of himself going up and down those steps!

yes, he does have his hair in a gaudy flowered ponytail, the day before his mom took him in for a "boy" haircut

Similarly, Sasha's play structure in the backyard has a wide ladder on one side leading up to a platform five feet above the ground. I used to just lift Ezra to the top platform and sit up there with him, but now I help him move his hands and feet to pull himself up the ladder, which is a little too large for him to do on his own, but possible for him to do with assistance. This reminds me of scaffolding, which is a theory of learning that comes out of social constructivism -- that kids "scaffold" their knowledge when they push themselves to do things at the edge of their ability level that others around them can already do. Grad school has practical life applications!

Hugs,
-MP

first birthday board books

When each of my babies turned one, I made them a personalized board book. I have been taking pictures with my cell phone almost every day I'm with them for the past eight months with this project in mind. Out of the hundreds of shitty cell phone pictures I've taken, there were about 15-20 decent quality ones of each kid.

I used mycustomstory.com to upload photos and design each book. I filled each with very simple sentences like "Ezra plays outside" and "Athena likes to learn " to match each picture.

The babies think their birthday board books are good teething toys and occasionally fun for throwing. The parents are somewhat more sentimental. There were misty mom eyes for sure.

Hugs,
-MP

trashin' the camp

She's walking and everything that comes with it.

High fives,
-MP

workin' it

Ezra just turned one, which means it's time for him to buck up and start working for his keep.

Conveniently, he's very self-motivated, and happily assigns himself "jobs" that he meticulously completes. He's quite handy to have around.

He washes the windows.

 

He puts things away where he believes they belong, which is usually under cushions. Lollipops, alphabet magnets, socks, crumpled tissues -- really just about everything belongs under cushions.

 

He drags all of our shoes into a pile in the middle of the floor.

And he sweeps!

Hugs,
-MP

mastering

I am finally getting the hang of Athena's hair. The secret is lots of leave-in conditioner, a fine toothed comb, and cheerios (for baby distracting purposes).

 

High fives,

-MP

upright

My babies are growing up. Literally: they both seize every opportunity to pull themselves upright to stand, triumphantly, for up to seven or eight minutes at a time.

They both crawl with confident clumsiness and alarming speed toward anything tiny they hope to ingest. Mere weeks ago they just rolled and flailed.

They both have enough hair for ponytails. Well, Ezra has had enough hair for ages, but today was the first time I gave him the pebbles and bam bam treatment. (His mom thought it was great.) I've generally ignored Athena's curls because I have no experience with hair like hers, but her mom asked me to condition, comb, and pigtail it this week, and it's so stinkin' adorable that now I'll probably do variations of this every day she's in my care until she develops enough awareness to pull the hairties out herself.

These two are only two and a half months apart, so it's really interesting to watch them develop at their own rates. They're vastly different little people. Ezra is extremely social -- he smiles easily, laughs ungracefully and uproariously, and will exchange grunts and babbles with delight. Athena is much more cautious and focused in her interactions with the world. I call her my scardeybaby because sudden movements and loud sounds frighten her. I have startled her to tears on more than one occasion by sneezing. Hell, she has startled herself into tears on more than one occasion by sneezing. Ezra thinks stuff like that is hilarious. Today he was busting up because Sasha was tossing the changing table pad around. Athena smiles at her name, but she's not a giggler. She's much more likely to put on a Serious Face, little frown and all, and stare you down with such intensity it's kind of disconcerting.

The best parts of my days are usually getting them up from their naps, when they're all smiles, happy to see me and happy to be alive and growing.

Hugs,
-MP

homemade preschooler gifts: gak

HB and I got ourselves invited to the birthday party of the almost-three-year-old that HB nannies. We wanted to give him a gift that would be handmade and a hands-on sensory experience. So we decided to make gak!

After scouring online recipes and waffling about borax versus Metamucil as one of the key ingredients (borax may be harmful if swallowed), we decided to just go with borax since we had it on hand for making homemade laundry detergent, whereas we would have had to buy a big container of Metamucil just to get less than a tablespoon of the stuff for the recipe. We figured we'd put a warning label on the jar of gak to alert the parents about borax being potentially toxic. Both the three-year-old and his one-year-old sister don't put much non-food stuff in their mouths anymore, so we figured the borax gak would be safe enough. Gak is a good supervision-required activity anyway, since it's notoriously difficult to dig out of carpet fibers.

We used one of the many recipes online for flubber (one of the many aliases of gak). HB had an excellent time mucking about mixing the gak ingredients while I made the jar label, and she speculated that making the gak would actually be an awesome activity to do with kids, as long as they're old enough to keep their hands out of their mouths. The part that took the longest by far was kneading food coloring drops into each chunk of gak before we dropped each into the jar. (We figured the kids would mix all the colors together sooner or later anyway, so we didn't bother to divide the colors into different jars.)

To finish off the gift, we included a Gak Explorer Kit made from objects we scrounged up around the house: chopsticks, straws, and plastic knives slipped into a never-worn lone toe sock.

Maybe you will decide to do this for a preschooler in your life too! And if you're as mature as us, you'll save a chunk of the gak for yourself so that you can plunge it in and out of a salvaged salsa container to simulate flatulence sounds. You will spend a solid half hour doing this and giggling madly after the kid you're babysitting that night has fallen asleep.

High fives,
-MP