cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Educating Ida Ida's first day of the new school year went well (pre-school) but she wouldn't tell me anything about it. I didn't think this would start until she was 10 or so. She's going to be 4 years old in 3 months. Ida has come a long way with reading and writing over the summer. She can write her name and type it on a keyboard. More often than not she is able to read a simple word if she sounds it out. She has to go letter by letter and then put it all together but she is in fact able to read words by herself. As time goes by and she sees many of the same words again I'm sure that she will come to recognize the word at a glance rather than having to go letter by letter each time. That will speed things up. Oh yeah, Ida also learned how to use a computer in the last couple months. She has a bunch of computer games. She knows how to use a mouse, how to use a keyboard and has the basic idea of how to navigate in a windows type environment. We've done basically nothing with her on math and I'm feeling a little guilty about that. I fucking hate math is the thing. I know how to teach a little kid to read but I have no clue how to teach math. I'll let Trish handle that part. She knows about maps and is very interested in them. I really need to start her on some basic geography soon. Geography is one of those things that really had to wait until she had a large enough vocabulary to explain really far-out shit like the distance between 2 continents. She knows that we are on a large sphere called the Earth and she can recognize a picture of the Earth. But she couldn't point to North America. In fact, she probably has no idea what country she even lives in. History is going to have to wait another year or 2. Her sense of time, like all 3 and 4 year olds, is very imprecise. Anything in the past happened "last morning" and anything in the future is "tomorrow." She has no idea what exactly a year is, let alone a century. Am I wrong in thinking that a child must have a clear understanding of the scale of time before teaching her history? Or can I just start giving her an outline of paleolithic culture through books and movies and work forward from there? I mean, even if her sense of when all of these things happened it still might all be useful. Where exactly should I start with history? There are 2 points that seem to make sense. Either start with an outline of stone age culture or the big bang. I hate this shit they do in school where they act like human history began with the landing of the pilgrims. I hate the fucking pilgrims. Religious crackpots who nobody else in Europe could stand so they came here to burn witches and hang people in the stocks for not showing up in church. What a bunch of assholes. The big bang. Yeah, that's where I should start. There must be some video for kids that would illustrate the big bang to her. And also explain what stars are and how they formed out of all that gas and energy after that big bang. There's nothing very complicated about any of this. I see no reason why a 4 year old should not be able to grasp the basics of the big bang or the formation of stars and planets. The scale of the thing may be difficult for her to understand, but that's not so important right away. 10:17 a.m. - 2007-09-06 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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