This blog is called Post-Apocalyptic Homeschool because I obsessively collect and stockpile used children's books just in case I need to personally educate a small village after some sort of catastrophic scenario where all the other books and technology and book-obtaining means of all kinds have been destroyed, such that the only reading materials left for miles around are the piles of books in my garage. Sensible, yes?
Now that we're properly back in the swing of things and I have a plan, it's time for new choking hazards trays. (I joined a mailing list that hints that despite persistent Montessori protestations about their benefits, all of these activities cause child-care inspectors to fly off the handle. In some places, objects like the smallest box of the pink tower have been known inspire reprimands. I see both sides of the debate, but in this case I'm lucky that I can decide for myself about my son's likelihood of choking. For the record, he likes to tease me because he knows I'm neurotic about choking hazards, but none of this stuff is something I'd worry about with him at this age.)
Anyway, for the current trays, I put together the following arrangements of junk from the garage:
Baby-food jars and three colors of wall anchors for a sorting activity.
A water bottle and a bundle of coffee stirrers for a modified "clothespin drop"
Inspired by the success of the coffee pouring, dried kidney beans from the bulk bins at Sprouts, plus two Japanese teacups and a sugar spoon, for a scooping activity. The kiddo loves this one.
I love watching him work studiously at all these tasks--he takes it all seriously and it's adorable!
Blame Mayim Bialik. I read her blog faithfully, and last year she posted that her six-year-old boy is color blind and that she missed the signs. Ever since I've been On Alert for color blindness. I'm not pushing colors as a general rule, but I won't lie, I was happy to find that BabyCenter topic assuring me that any given kid without a family history of color blindness is in all likelihood not color-blind, he's just not developmentally there yet.
Anyway, I swear I'm more than happy to do colors by osmosis, but Mayim's cautionary tale has been Haunting Me. Happily, the Internet is prepared for this contingency!
I found a site offering a special (free, hallelujah) color blindness test for children and toddlers. Kids need different tests than adults, because the traditional Ishihara color perception tests for color blindness (plate one is pictured above) are based on identifying a number hidden a field of colored dots. Kids who don't know their numbers yet would be confounded by this, regardless of their color perception.
The kid's color blindness test (which apparently originally appeared in Field & Stream magazine) has a bunch of cute little animals, and Jackson found the bear, the deer-cow and the bunny with no problem, so we're almost certainly in the clear. Yay!
1. Generally speaking, this guy is a Glenn Doman/Your Baby Can Read acolyte, and I think the Doman method is largely a creepy and fraudulent literacy cult, but this guy amended the methods sufficiently that I think his ideas deserve be considered separately.
2. As a rule, I doubt I'll be preparing flashcardy PowerPoint presentations on subjects of interest to my kid, but his child's enthusiasm for "naming the world" and delving into details about particular areas (and just accumulating vocabulary!) made me change my current "acquistion policy" on DK Eyewitness books. Heretofore I've been passing them up at used bookstores just because I didn't think I wanted to start stockpiling material on every nonfiction subject under the sun. I figured we could cruise the library as the interests surface, and we will, but this guy's experience also made me think sometimes children just like to graze information, and I think having a few (supercheaply acquired) "visual encyclopedias" on hand couldn't hurt.
3. The part of his system that I thought was fairly smart and that I'd potentially apply (years down the road, mind you) is the phonics-rule example-set flashcards. Here's how he outlined the method:
I figured that if we were going to do flash cards, I might as well arrange them phonetically, as this would be most likely to teach him the rules of phonics. I found some suitable-looking word lists in the back of Rudolf Flesch's Why Johnny Can't Read. (I had no better reason for choosing this volume than it was what I had on hand; I couldn‘t find any comparable lists online.) It was fairly easy to make the cards. On one side of the cards, which are about 2" by 4", I put the word in large print, and on the other side, a picture representing the word. I printed four cards per 8.5 x 11 page.
After about six months, we had gone through hundreds of words and over half of Flesch‘s phonetic rules. My boy gradually learned to read (sound out) many hundreds of words. I was careful to pick words, from Flesch‘s word lists, that I knew he understood when spoken, or that I could explain. I did explain quite a few, so it became a great vocabulary lesson too—his vocabulary increased by leaps and bounds, as he used words that were on cards. I ended up making over 1,000 cards, and in the end he was reading thousands than that, even before we finished using cards, about a year later or so.
Sanger explains his method in much further depth in the subsection "1.3. Phonics flashcard method." and it's an interesting read if you're into that kind of thing.
4. Last but not least, I skimmed Sanger's 65-page rebuttal of anti-early reading arguments, and gleaned that he didn't find much merit to any of the arguments. I'm going to bite my tongue on the topic, generally, but I will say that I have read countless Amazon reviews lately that say something to the effect of: "I am a reading specialist/speech therapist/kindergarten teacher/school principal/special ed coordinator, and I am using this product to teach my baby/toddler/three-year-old the alphabet/phonics/reading/mind control." I think perhaps I'll do as they do and not as they say...
