In between my travel write ups (we did too much traveling this summer--I've got New York and Washington DC to add now!), I should catch up with actual goings on. Such as my son's graduation from Children's House to the Elementary Class.
We've kept him in his Montessori School, so he's in a mixed age six-nine classroom, but it's the equivalent to first grade. I.e. moving from pre-school to honest-to-goodness school.
The significance of this transition hadn't occurred to me until August when we got the class supply list, featuring binders and notebooks instead of paints and kitchen roll. It really hit me when we had the parent orientation evening, and we were talked through expectations such as... homework.
In many ways, up until this point, I've considered the children to be at school to learn practical skills and socialisation. Any academic advancements have been a bonus. Yes, I stressed about his reading, but there was always the feeling that it didn't really matter. And now it feels like it does.
It's still Montessori, it's still child-led, so my son will still go at his own pace, and there isn't really a specific standard in each subject that they have to achieve in the three years of elementary. But there is an expectation now that they will stay in line with the rest of the country--and there's an element of preparing them for a non-Montessori academic future, with work-sheets and tests and such like.
And the aforementioned homework. Homework is not really Montessori, which is designed around using materials that are in the classroom and not the home. His teacher's solution to this is to get the children to work at home on the stuff they need to burn into their memories for the long term.
For now, my son's homework is one or two worksheets a week to practice his 'math facts' (multiplication tables, 0-9 sums, etc.) In a few more weeks, spelling will be added to the mix--two nights of studying the words, and two nights of choosing his own activity out of a range from 'write your words from shortest to longest' to 'write a poem using your words.') This will mean something to do every night of the week.
He is taking this development with all due cheer and enthusiasm. I am all anxiety (well, outwardly, I strive for a mask of cool confidence, but inwardly I'm first-world-probleming 24/7). My own homework practices at school were atrocious and thus I am resolved for my children to do better. I want to have a routine time where he sits at the table and does homework, and I am available to help him, discuss it with him or otherwise show interest--but equally, I've got to find something to keep my daughter engaged without distracting him at the same time.
So far it's been very easy because he doesn't seem to have a problem with maths. (That in itself is interesting because up until now, he's always done maths with concrete materials: unit beads, ten bars, hundred squares and thousand cubes, etc. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time he's sat down with a piece of paper and done it in his head--and he can. My husband and I were both mathematically inclined, so this might just be genetic luck easing the transition, but it was fun to listen him read the questions dramatically as if it was the most insane thing he'd ever been asked before declaring: "Well, it has to be [answer].")
I am more worried about how the spelling will go down, but then again, this is just the tip of a fifteen-year long iceberg. It's going to get tough eventually... I should enjoy staying afloat while I can.
The other thing that's starting to concern me is keeping up with his British peers. Technically, he's skipped a year in the US system (it's really a little more blurred thanks to the Montessori system and his early start in that), but in the UK, he'd be starting 'proper' school this year too. The BBC recently ran this article on the new national curriculum, which made me realize I should be keeping an eye on what he's expected to know there.
From my own experience (educated in the US from the age of nine to eleven, before returning to the UK for high school), the US is perhaps more academic than the UK at the primary level... but that was twenty five years ago. To use the examples cited in this article, I know my son will be learning fractions, though computer coding was not mentioned in the elementary class overview! Handily, my husband's a computer guy and I'm sure there are all kinds of apps for that, but what else lurks in the pages of the National Curriculum?
My first thought was to panic, download a PDF of Key Stage One expectations, make extensive notes and start googling downloadable worksheets, to keep my son abreast of the UK standards...
And then there was the second thought which is that I have better things to do with my time, so does my son, and my whole thing about Montessori is that I don't like forcing children to a standard anyway.
So I probably will try to keep aware of what's going on in the equivalent British class. But I'll also acknowledge that there will always be gaps he'll have to bridge when he starts school there. And that's OK. He's going to have huge blind spots in his history and geography, but let's seize the opportunity we have to learn about American history and geography.
Right now, the most important thing is his enthusiasm for learning. That's what I want to celebrate and sustain for as long as possible. Besides, almost six years on from his birth, there are still few things more enjoyable than watching him learn and discover the world around him.
Showing posts with label Montessori. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Montessori. Show all posts
Sunday, 7 September 2014
Thursday, 26 September 2013
Settling into the School Routine
It's been a few weeks now since both children started back at school: my two year old daughter to the old school, less than five minutes from our house; my four year old son to the new school, twenty minutes from the house. We've managed to get the school run down, and I'm finding it less tedious than I expected. I download podcasts to listen to when I'm on my own, and on the way there, when it's just me and my son in the car, we talk.
It's a twenty minute stretch when neither of us is distracted by anything else that needs doing or anybody else that wants our attention, and it's an absolute delight. Mostly we talk about how he's going to be an astronaut one day, (I have instructed him to video-chat me from the space station and told him he'd better not bring me his laundry when he gets back to Earth), but all kinds of topics come up as we discuss things he's trying to get his head around.
For a while now, I've been vaguely worried about how to bond with my son now that he's outgrown the cuddly stage (which my daughter is delightfully ensconced in). As it turned out, all I needed to do was to find some peaceful one-on-one time--though that's no easy feat!
Anyway, my son has settled into his new school, although he is not impressed by having to work in the afternoons as well. He was absolutely shattered for the first couple of weeks, though that seems to have eased, thankfully. He's still starving when he gets home, and packing the lunch is an ongoing problem (I can't find an acceptable sandwich alternative to peanut butter, and it's looking like we might just have to do pasta everyday.)
Still, I'm pleased with the level of communication I'm getting from his teachers, and although we're still feeling our way into the school, so to speak, I think we made a good call. I'll be going in to observe in another couple of weeks, and this weekend, I am volunteering to help at a school event.
Surprisingly, the transition was harder on my daughter. There was a last minute class-change, and now she's in a different room with different teachers and a much bigger class. She misses her old teacher and still doesn't seem to have transferred her affections to her new ones, which is a great shame. On the other hand, she has adjusted to the new routine now, and I was able to observe her last week which reassured me that she was perfectly comfortable in her new environment. She has a 'best friend', and unlike her brother, she likes to talk about her day, bubbling over with the same litany, regardless of what actually happened.
More regrettably, she's sort of dropped her nap. Not completely, but she used to go down without a problem between 12:30 and 1. Now that's not happening, and unfortunately, we have a limited window before we go to pick her brother up. If she's not asleep by 1:30 (and maybe even that would be too late), it's not going to be worth it for her to go to sleep. So I've given up putting her down and instead she sleeps in the car when we do the afternoon school run.
It's frustrating because she doesn't get to sleep out in the car before we have to wake her, and then she always wakes up insanely cranky. Still, it's working quite well as an interim step, when she's not really ready to drop her nap, but no longer needs the full ninety minutes either. Now I've just got to get used to a daily routine that doesn't include getting my daughter into bed after lunch.
Also to an afternoon routine where our starting location for activities is at my son's school. There are plenty of parks along the route home, so generally we pick a playground, spend an hour there, then head home to tidy up and get dinner sorted. It doesn't sound like a big deal, but it's surprisingly jarring to be at a different end of town, and I don't feel that we've quite streamlined the process yet.
So to sum up: much change to our daily routine; we're still getting used to it.
Further to my last post on Disney Princesses, we're going to be doing Disney on Ice this weekend, which I'm genuinely excited for, since I've always liked ice-skating and I hear good things about the show. I also hear bad things about the attending merchandise onslaught. Fingers crossed we survive it!
It's a twenty minute stretch when neither of us is distracted by anything else that needs doing or anybody else that wants our attention, and it's an absolute delight. Mostly we talk about how he's going to be an astronaut one day, (I have instructed him to video-chat me from the space station and told him he'd better not bring me his laundry when he gets back to Earth), but all kinds of topics come up as we discuss things he's trying to get his head around.
For a while now, I've been vaguely worried about how to bond with my son now that he's outgrown the cuddly stage (which my daughter is delightfully ensconced in). As it turned out, all I needed to do was to find some peaceful one-on-one time--though that's no easy feat!
Anyway, my son has settled into his new school, although he is not impressed by having to work in the afternoons as well. He was absolutely shattered for the first couple of weeks, though that seems to have eased, thankfully. He's still starving when he gets home, and packing the lunch is an ongoing problem (I can't find an acceptable sandwich alternative to peanut butter, and it's looking like we might just have to do pasta everyday.)
Still, I'm pleased with the level of communication I'm getting from his teachers, and although we're still feeling our way into the school, so to speak, I think we made a good call. I'll be going in to observe in another couple of weeks, and this weekend, I am volunteering to help at a school event.
Surprisingly, the transition was harder on my daughter. There was a last minute class-change, and now she's in a different room with different teachers and a much bigger class. She misses her old teacher and still doesn't seem to have transferred her affections to her new ones, which is a great shame. On the other hand, she has adjusted to the new routine now, and I was able to observe her last week which reassured me that she was perfectly comfortable in her new environment. She has a 'best friend', and unlike her brother, she likes to talk about her day, bubbling over with the same litany, regardless of what actually happened.
More regrettably, she's sort of dropped her nap. Not completely, but she used to go down without a problem between 12:30 and 1. Now that's not happening, and unfortunately, we have a limited window before we go to pick her brother up. If she's not asleep by 1:30 (and maybe even that would be too late), it's not going to be worth it for her to go to sleep. So I've given up putting her down and instead she sleeps in the car when we do the afternoon school run.
It's frustrating because she doesn't get to sleep out in the car before we have to wake her, and then she always wakes up insanely cranky. Still, it's working quite well as an interim step, when she's not really ready to drop her nap, but no longer needs the full ninety minutes either. Now I've just got to get used to a daily routine that doesn't include getting my daughter into bed after lunch.
Also to an afternoon routine where our starting location for activities is at my son's school. There are plenty of parks along the route home, so generally we pick a playground, spend an hour there, then head home to tidy up and get dinner sorted. It doesn't sound like a big deal, but it's surprisingly jarring to be at a different end of town, and I don't feel that we've quite streamlined the process yet.
So to sum up: much change to our daily routine; we're still getting used to it.
Further to my last post on Disney Princesses, we're going to be doing Disney on Ice this weekend, which I'm genuinely excited for, since I've always liked ice-skating and I hear good things about the show. I also hear bad things about the attending merchandise onslaught. Fingers crossed we survive it!
Thursday, 6 June 2013
Pre-school Decisions
So as I stated in my last post, we've made the decision to change schools. This wasn't an easy decision, because there are many things we (and they!) love about their current school, but in the end, our reasons for leaving were non-negotiable.
However, I was adamant that we were staying in Montessori education, so I asked around and got a recommendation for another school from somebody who had worked there as part of their training. I visited it, loved it, and fortunately, that decision was a very easy one. It's twenty minutes away instead of two minutes away, but I always knew I wasn't going to find another school so close. I'm just going to have to make that adjustment. (I am very unenthusiastic about the school run taking the better part of an hour instead of its current ten minutes.)
Complication number one was that they don't take toddlers. They aren't licensed to change diapers or even help a child undress and clean themselves after an accident. All children must be potty-trained with no more than two accidents per month. While it's possible that my daughter might be at that level by September (though I doubt it), I certainly don't think she's ready to tackle the full-blown children's house class yet (three to six year olds).
We pondered our options, of putting her in daycare or just taking her out of school altogether until January. In the end however, we have decided to let her continue on at her current school, for one more term. Come January, though she won't quite be three, she'll have done a full year in the toddler class, and I expect she'll be fine for Children's House, though we can revise our options again when we get there. (I am fairly sure her current school would change her to the full year if we asked.) Right now, she's perfectly happy where she is, and I don't see the need to change her routine for a single term.
Complication number two was an odd one. The new school wanted my son to start on their kindergarten programme.
To Push or not to Push
Just for background here, my son is four and a half. Going on the national standard, he would not have been expected to start kindergarten until the fall of 2014, so this is effectively skipping him a year. Kindergarten hadn't even been on our radar.
On the other hand, the Montessori system doesn't synch perfectly with the standard one--that's why it's a kindergarten programme, not a kindergarten class. By morning, he will be in the same 3-6 year old mixed class that we intended to enroll him for. The difference is that the older children stay through the afternoon as well and have a second, academic-focused, work cycle after lunch (plus some other opportunities).
Now, while I naturally think my son is extremely bright, I don't think he's any sort of child prodigy. The old school had not talked about starting him on kindergarten this early (although they tended to err later rather than sooner with such things). My initial reaction on hearing this news was that I did not want to push him. It wasn't that I thought he wasn't capable of handling the work so much as the load.
His prospective teacher admitted that he was younger than she had originally thought--probably because he was friends with one of the boys in her class. Said friend is only a few months older than my son, but he has an August birthday. I had never really appreciated before that, technically, they were in different school years, even if there's not a big difference between them academically.
For Montessori purposes, they are in the same class and will be doing the same work--the friend is a little ahead of my son in most areas, but they could certainly work together on several materials. And when my son came in to work with the teacher, she felt he was where she expected her kindergarteners to be.
I did wonder if it would make more sense to start kindergarten in January, when my son would be five and would have completed two of the expected three years in the Children's House. This would let him settle in to the new school before making the switch to afternoons as well. However, when asked, my son (who was utterly dazzled by his new school) was quite excited at the prospect of staying at school through the afternoon. I think he's aware that this is a big kid thing, and is eager to be so grand.
The teacher said that he could start the extended day in January if I wished, but she thought he was ready now. She also assured me that if she changed her mind after a few weeks, he would be able to switch back to mornings only. Finally, she told me that the school had a number of four year olds in the kindergarten programme, so he would be with his peers.
That last was what decided me. I feared being a pushy parent, but even if he was exceptionally gifted, I would want him to stay with children his own age as much as possible. I was also a little wary that the school might just be trying to get him in the more expensive programme to get the extra tuition fees, and obviously I can't be sure that this isn't the case... but I don't think it is.
Finally, whenever we do go back to the UK, his education is going to be interrupted for a short while anyway, so I'm more than happy to have him a little ahead of the curve. It feels like we have a buffer against future problems.
I do feel a little ridiculous saying he's starting kindergarten in the fall, but I need to get over it. This is going to be nothing compared to university applications.
Logistics, Ahoy!
Having him stay at school until 3pm will completely change our daily routine though. Up until now, our afternoon plans have hinged on when his sister wakes from her nap. Now they'll start from when we pick him up and they'll have to be accessible from his school. We're not going to be able to keep their gym class up, for a start, and I don't yet know if we'll change classes or change gyms. Fortunately, we don't do any other extra-curriculars.
Of course, this is only going to get worse in January when my daughter starts at the school as well. It's going to be one thing driving ten blocks to pick her up from school at lunchtime and then going back out for her brother at three. It's going to be quite another to spend forty minutes on the round trip to drop them off by 9, forty minutes to collect her at 12 and forty minutes to collect him at 3.
The most convenient option is to have her lunch and nap at school, so I'm picking them both up together, but that's a lot of extra fees for her to sleep through. Also, I don't think there's any alternative should she drop her nap. In other words, the nap will be enforced on her whether she needs it or not, which could create a different set of problems for us in the evenings.
Anyway, we are very much crossing that bridge when we come to it. Thankfully, it's going to be a relatively short term problem, but it's going to be a royal nuisance as long as it lasts.
Also a problem? Finding a week's worth of packed lunches for my son when peanut butter sandwiches are banned. It's not a huge surprise, since most schools don't allow peanut butter these days, but his current school doesn't have a problem with it, and they're just about his favourite thing to eat. I am going to need some serious research on packable meals before September rolls around.
But right now, I'm trying to deal with the thought that tomorrow is his last day at the old school--something which is giving me many more pangs than it is him. I really need to take a leaf out of his book and be excited about what's to come rather than mourning what will never be again.
However, I was adamant that we were staying in Montessori education, so I asked around and got a recommendation for another school from somebody who had worked there as part of their training. I visited it, loved it, and fortunately, that decision was a very easy one. It's twenty minutes away instead of two minutes away, but I always knew I wasn't going to find another school so close. I'm just going to have to make that adjustment. (I am very unenthusiastic about the school run taking the better part of an hour instead of its current ten minutes.)
Complication number one was that they don't take toddlers. They aren't licensed to change diapers or even help a child undress and clean themselves after an accident. All children must be potty-trained with no more than two accidents per month. While it's possible that my daughter might be at that level by September (though I doubt it), I certainly don't think she's ready to tackle the full-blown children's house class yet (three to six year olds).
We pondered our options, of putting her in daycare or just taking her out of school altogether until January. In the end however, we have decided to let her continue on at her current school, for one more term. Come January, though she won't quite be three, she'll have done a full year in the toddler class, and I expect she'll be fine for Children's House, though we can revise our options again when we get there. (I am fairly sure her current school would change her to the full year if we asked.) Right now, she's perfectly happy where she is, and I don't see the need to change her routine for a single term.
Complication number two was an odd one. The new school wanted my son to start on their kindergarten programme.
To Push or not to Push
Just for background here, my son is four and a half. Going on the national standard, he would not have been expected to start kindergarten until the fall of 2014, so this is effectively skipping him a year. Kindergarten hadn't even been on our radar.
On the other hand, the Montessori system doesn't synch perfectly with the standard one--that's why it's a kindergarten programme, not a kindergarten class. By morning, he will be in the same 3-6 year old mixed class that we intended to enroll him for. The difference is that the older children stay through the afternoon as well and have a second, academic-focused, work cycle after lunch (plus some other opportunities).
Now, while I naturally think my son is extremely bright, I don't think he's any sort of child prodigy. The old school had not talked about starting him on kindergarten this early (although they tended to err later rather than sooner with such things). My initial reaction on hearing this news was that I did not want to push him. It wasn't that I thought he wasn't capable of handling the work so much as the load.
His prospective teacher admitted that he was younger than she had originally thought--probably because he was friends with one of the boys in her class. Said friend is only a few months older than my son, but he has an August birthday. I had never really appreciated before that, technically, they were in different school years, even if there's not a big difference between them academically.
For Montessori purposes, they are in the same class and will be doing the same work--the friend is a little ahead of my son in most areas, but they could certainly work together on several materials. And when my son came in to work with the teacher, she felt he was where she expected her kindergarteners to be.
I did wonder if it would make more sense to start kindergarten in January, when my son would be five and would have completed two of the expected three years in the Children's House. This would let him settle in to the new school before making the switch to afternoons as well. However, when asked, my son (who was utterly dazzled by his new school) was quite excited at the prospect of staying at school through the afternoon. I think he's aware that this is a big kid thing, and is eager to be so grand.
The teacher said that he could start the extended day in January if I wished, but she thought he was ready now. She also assured me that if she changed her mind after a few weeks, he would be able to switch back to mornings only. Finally, she told me that the school had a number of four year olds in the kindergarten programme, so he would be with his peers.
That last was what decided me. I feared being a pushy parent, but even if he was exceptionally gifted, I would want him to stay with children his own age as much as possible. I was also a little wary that the school might just be trying to get him in the more expensive programme to get the extra tuition fees, and obviously I can't be sure that this isn't the case... but I don't think it is.
Finally, whenever we do go back to the UK, his education is going to be interrupted for a short while anyway, so I'm more than happy to have him a little ahead of the curve. It feels like we have a buffer against future problems.
I do feel a little ridiculous saying he's starting kindergarten in the fall, but I need to get over it. This is going to be nothing compared to university applications.
Logistics, Ahoy!
Having him stay at school until 3pm will completely change our daily routine though. Up until now, our afternoon plans have hinged on when his sister wakes from her nap. Now they'll start from when we pick him up and they'll have to be accessible from his school. We're not going to be able to keep their gym class up, for a start, and I don't yet know if we'll change classes or change gyms. Fortunately, we don't do any other extra-curriculars.
Of course, this is only going to get worse in January when my daughter starts at the school as well. It's going to be one thing driving ten blocks to pick her up from school at lunchtime and then going back out for her brother at three. It's going to be quite another to spend forty minutes on the round trip to drop them off by 9, forty minutes to collect her at 12 and forty minutes to collect him at 3.
The most convenient option is to have her lunch and nap at school, so I'm picking them both up together, but that's a lot of extra fees for her to sleep through. Also, I don't think there's any alternative should she drop her nap. In other words, the nap will be enforced on her whether she needs it or not, which could create a different set of problems for us in the evenings.
Anyway, we are very much crossing that bridge when we come to it. Thankfully, it's going to be a relatively short term problem, but it's going to be a royal nuisance as long as it lasts.
Also a problem? Finding a week's worth of packed lunches for my son when peanut butter sandwiches are banned. It's not a huge surprise, since most schools don't allow peanut butter these days, but his current school doesn't have a problem with it, and they're just about his favourite thing to eat. I am going to need some serious research on packable meals before September rolls around.
But right now, I'm trying to deal with the thought that tomorrow is his last day at the old school--something which is giving me many more pangs than it is him. I really need to take a leaf out of his book and be excited about what's to come rather than mourning what will never be again.
Monday, 6 May 2013
Making a Giant Board Game (with Montessori Pink Reading)
Quick post as we're treading water here. Potty training going swimmingly, children sick again, and endless cold weather. Not really cold weather, but that taunting weather... where it's just cold enough that you have to wear a jacket, and I have to persuade my daughter to wear her trousers, even though she's suddenly decided that all of them have become uncomfortable, and it's really still too cold for sandals, but I've put them into them anyway because their shoes are worn out and I am not buying winter shoes in May!
Anyway, the winter's given me plenty of time to expand upon our repertoire of indoor activities. My son adores board games, and a couple of months ago, I had this moment of inspiration: I could build him a giant boardgame using our foam floor tiles (you've probably at least seen these around in alphabet form).
I'd also been trying to find ways of getting my son to use his newfound (and very limited!) reading skills without repeating what he does at school. So my next idea was to make cards for each tile, so when you land on them, you have to do what the card says. And when I say 'cards,' I mean 'pieces of paper with handwritten text' because I know that the more effort you go to, the less your children will appreciate it.
My son loved the result.
I built the above layout around our playtent. If you land on the tile in front of the tent door, the card says 'zip' so you unzip (no nitpicking!) the tent, go through and come out of the side entrance, further down the board.
There are several other props scattered around the board, next to the relevant card. My son places the cards, and then I put the props down.
We move around the board by throwing a die. Because we only have twenty-six tiles, it doesn't take long to finish a game, so we normally play it two or three times in a row, which gives us more chances to land on any one card. Most cards are just a straightforward action, though a few move you forward. One has you miss a turn, but I haven't had the nerve to put in one that sends you back!
My son is on the 'pink reading' at his Montessori school, which means he can (if he concentrates) sound out three letter words with phonetic spellings. At school, he mostly does concrete nouns, so for our cards, I spent a day or two brainstorming three letter verbs, with a few other words thrown in.
I can see us continually updating this game as the children get older, making it more elaborate. God knows what it will involve by the time they're in college.
This is the list of cards that we currently use, with italics explaining where necessary. Not all of them are strictly phonetic, but my son has them all figured out by this point. There are less than twenty-six for the simple reason that I ran out of ideas. Further contributions will be gratefully accepted!
Cut - scissors and paper provided
Dip and dab - Dip sponge in dish of water and dab on paper towel provided.
Dig mime digging (I am still trying to figure out a tidy method of indoor digging!)
Fan - fan provided
Go to red - go forward to the next red tile.
Hit triangle / cymbal / drum
Hop 2 - hop forward two spaces
Hug your fellow player
Hum
Jig
Jog 2 - jog forward two spaces
Mad - make an angry face
Nap - miss a turn
Nod your head
Pat a cat - toy cat provided
Put on a hat - hats provided
Rub your hands
Run 3 - run forward three spaces
Sad - make a sad face
Sip water provided
Sit
Tap a tambourine
Zip purse or go through the tent
And on the final tile:
Win
Anyway, the winter's given me plenty of time to expand upon our repertoire of indoor activities. My son adores board games, and a couple of months ago, I had this moment of inspiration: I could build him a giant boardgame using our foam floor tiles (you've probably at least seen these around in alphabet form).
I'd also been trying to find ways of getting my son to use his newfound (and very limited!) reading skills without repeating what he does at school. So my next idea was to make cards for each tile, so when you land on them, you have to do what the card says. And when I say 'cards,' I mean 'pieces of paper with handwritten text' because I know that the more effort you go to, the less your children will appreciate it.
My son loved the result.
I built the above layout around our playtent. If you land on the tile in front of the tent door, the card says 'zip' so you unzip (no nitpicking!) the tent, go through and come out of the side entrance, further down the board.
There are several other props scattered around the board, next to the relevant card. My son places the cards, and then I put the props down.
We move around the board by throwing a die. Because we only have twenty-six tiles, it doesn't take long to finish a game, so we normally play it two or three times in a row, which gives us more chances to land on any one card. Most cards are just a straightforward action, though a few move you forward. One has you miss a turn, but I haven't had the nerve to put in one that sends you back!
My son is on the 'pink reading' at his Montessori school, which means he can (if he concentrates) sound out three letter words with phonetic spellings. At school, he mostly does concrete nouns, so for our cards, I spent a day or two brainstorming three letter verbs, with a few other words thrown in.
I can see us continually updating this game as the children get older, making it more elaborate. God knows what it will involve by the time they're in college.
This is the list of cards that we currently use, with italics explaining where necessary. Not all of them are strictly phonetic, but my son has them all figured out by this point. There are less than twenty-six for the simple reason that I ran out of ideas. Further contributions will be gratefully accepted!
Cut - scissors and paper provided
Dip and dab - Dip sponge in dish of water and dab on paper towel provided.
Dig mime digging (I am still trying to figure out a tidy method of indoor digging!)
Fan - fan provided
Go to red - go forward to the next red tile.
Hit triangle / cymbal / drum
Hop 2 - hop forward two spaces
Hug your fellow player
Hum
Jig
Jog 2 - jog forward two spaces
Mad - make an angry face
Nap - miss a turn
Nod your head
Pat a cat - toy cat provided
Put on a hat - hats provided
Rub your hands
Run 3 - run forward three spaces
Sad - make a sad face
Sip water provided
Sit
Tap a tambourine
Zip purse or go through the tent
And on the final tile:
Win
Wednesday, 1 May 2013
Life without Nappies: potty-training the second time around
This weekend, we've been potty training. When I potty-trained my son, I was so apprehensive about it and so stressed throughout the process, even though it was relatively smooth. This time, I am pleased to report that I struggled to muster any concern over the proceedings whatsoever.
The Theory: How and When
When it comes to potty-training, my advice is to pick the method that feels the most comfortable for you, because if you're stressed over it, that's going to pass onto your child. The biggest key to success in potty training is not to stress your child!
However, I need to qualify my advice with the statement that you will get stressed if you've never done it before (and quite probably even if you have). You won't be able to figure out what worried you so much in retrospect, but you'll almost certainly be a wreck at one point or another while potty-training. It just comes with the threat of human excrement being spread around your house.
So your best bet is to pick whichever method is the most intuitive for you. The one you feel you understand and agree with the theory behind it. That way when things don't go by the book, you can adapt the methods to suit your situation without losing the principle.
Speaking of avoiding stress, I'm not a huge fan of the Signs that Your Child is Ready lists. If you're anything like me, it won't matter how much they tell you your child doesn't need to exhibit all the signs, you will still worry over whether they're showing enough of them to warrant potty-training. As far as I can tell, what they all boil down to is this:
One trend I do seem to notice is that younger children are more likely to take it in their stride than older children, although it's not like I've done a proper survey on this. I know I've always wanted to beat the 'terrible twos' which usually kick in around two and a half.
My Theory
I've always quite liked the option of not potty-training, because your child will train themselves sooner or later (which usually seems to be at the age of three, but I've not researched this). However, I like the environmental and financial savings of potty training earlier; it gives you more pre-school options too. (I wouldn't advocate rushing potty-training just to send your child to pre-school, but I wouldn't recommend limiting your options by avoiding potty-training either.)
Let's not underestimate the lure of being done with nappies!
I'm a big fan of the cold turkey, straight into underwear approach, which has the Montessori advantage of Control of Error (i.e. the child can tell when they've peed). Based on my experiences as a teacher, it's the most effective way. It's also the basis of a lot of these three day potty training techniques, which many people insist are a con and too much pressure on the child, but that really depends on what you're intending to get out of the three days.
In my view, three days at home, out of nappies and having accidents is as much to train the parent as the child. While the child becomes used to the act of urinating and practices the skills required to use the potty successfully, the parent learns how long their child goes between relieving themselves and the tell-tale signs of when they need to go. (Actually, in my case, it's mostly how long they can last before they need to pee again. I am really really bad at picking up on "I need to pee!" behaviour.) And, of course, getting used to cleaning up accidents.
By the time the weekend is over, you should know enough to adapt potty breaks into your usual routine and be able to go out with minimal risk of accidents. But it does mean a fairly intensive weekend of focusing on the child, keeping on top of laundry, hygiene etc. There's pressure on you and that can transfer to pressure on the child as well. There are many other ways of going about it.
If you want to try the cold turkey approach, I started with the ebook available here. I liked several of the author's philosophies, such as leaving the potty in the bathroom, so they learn to account for that travel time. Please note that this approach is not best suited to carpeting. Our entire downstairs is hardwood, and planning some outdoor activities don't go amiss either!
No Frills Preparation
My daughter's been interested in her brother's potty since she was about 21 months (she's not quite 27 months now), but I wasn't ready. For me the best time to potty train isn't so much age as season. Warm weather means less clothes and the ability to have 'accidents' outside, which is a huge saving on clean-up.
I did buy my daughter pull-ups when she insisted on sitting on the potty whenever I changed her into / out of her pajamas (since her brother usually used it then too). I thought I might as well let her have some practice at other times even if I wasn't ready to focus on it. All that did was convince me that pull-ups are a pain in the arse. Nappies are just so much easier to use--pull-ups have the convenience of access, but are ironically difficult for a child to pull up and down. My daughter never used them as intended and we went back to nappies.
I already had in most of what we needed from training my son: potties, step-stool / seat adapter, waterproof mattress covers, absorbent pads for the sofas, travel potty. All I needed to buy was underwear (one pack for her bedroom, one pack for the downstairs bathroom and one pack for school).
I knew I wanted to train her well in advance of our trip to the UK this summer, because on a transatlantic flight you want to be sat next to a toddler with as much experience of bladder control as possible. However, come Friday, both my husband and I were feeling very run down (my husband was definitely sick, and we assume I had a touch of it as well) and there was part of me that really could not be arsed to do potty-training. On the other hand, I knew this was going to be the last free weekend for awhile, and I'd hate myself if we didn't do it.
She had to stay in nappies for the morning anyway, when she went to school, and then I let her have her nap before I took them off, and then she was a bit cranky when she woke up... finally, at 3pm, I gave myself a mental kick up the backside and put her in underwear.
No Frills Experience
And that was more or less that. Both my husband and I were so sleepy and docile we struggled to care, once we got past the stage of viewing her as a ticking time bomb (waiting for that first pee is truly edge-of-your-seat entertainment). We just couldn't keep focused on her, and as she spends 90% of her time bouncing and dancing around, it was pretty difficult to judge the state of her bladder anyway. But we were ready for it. When she had an accident (to her great confusion) I would whisk her to the potty, wipe her down, give her fresh underwear, clean up the mess in the living room--and go back to the sofa.
In some ways, this was great because I stayed so zen about it. I told my daughter to let me know when she needed to go potty, and we told her she is supposed to pee in the potty, but we didn't do rewards, and we didn't try to get her to drink as much as possible to give us all extra practice, and we didn't coax, and we didn't get agitated when she had her accidents. We just dealt with it as it came.
Second child syndrome helped hugely here, because she was so used to seeing her brother use a potty that was available for her to use. In fact, I'd deliberately left his potty out long after we could have switched him to the big toilet, just so she would be used to the concept. However, we have this step-stool / seat adapter on the toilet in their bathroom and she prefers that to the potty. My son was the other way around, but having them go in the big toilet is so much easier that we've ordered another seat for downstairs and I plan on removing the potties altogether. Being done with nappies and potties? Sounds too good to be true. Let's see!
Anyway, she was confused but unfazed by the state of affairs on Friday. On Saturday, she decided to deal with it by learning bladder control, lasting five hours at one point. That's pretty much been the status quo ever since. She's not going spontaneously, and for the first day she resisted any requests to use the potty outside of our established routine. Now she's generally compliant, she has no trouble peeing on it (which is wonderful after dealing with a boy and having to make sure everything's pointing downwards), and is very pleased with herself for doing so.
I'm still trying to avoid sending her to the potty when we're at home though, because with my son I caved to that pressure, and the result was that it took months for him to reliably take the initiative himself. I'd love for my daughter to figure it out now, though if she doesn't get it in a couple of weeks, I suspect I'll go back on that principle.
She's a little behind where my son was at this point, because we actively encouraged him whereas in her case, I want her to do it for herself and not for us (how very Montessori of me!). But for the most part, it's been easier taking it more slowly. Rather than focusing on this three day deadline, it's just been an adjustment to life without nappies.
Ongoing Problems
With my son, night-time training was never a problem. He was dry through the night straightaway (he was doing that even in nappies). About two weeks after potty-training, he started wetting the bed as a ploy to make us come in and clean him up. We were going through some stay-in-bed issues with him at the time, and we chose to put him in pull-ups overnight for a few months until those were dealt with. That worked out perfectly, and we've never had a problem with him since.
Of course, what this means is that I have no idea how to deal with bed-wetting. So far, my daughter has wet the bed four out of five nights, though only one of those involved rousing me in the middle of the night to change her. I took a tip from my friend in layering the bed, putting a sheet and a mattress protector over the one already on there. This lets me just pull off the top layer and let her go back to sleep on the next one, but I am not planning on doing this for months.
Right now it seems that rather than learning to hold her bladder through the night, she's learned to sleep through wetting herself. Since she's always dry when we go to bed around 10pm, I'm going to start waking her up then and getting her on the potty, see if that makes a difference. I am totally open to hearing other basic tactics... Worst case scenario, we stick her back in pull ups at night and have another go later in the year. Having a two year old wet the bed is hardly something to stress over.
Less easy to work around is the pooping issue. Poop is really where the three day potty training scheme does fall down, because it's unlikely your child will poop enough in those three days to get the hang of it. It's also really unpleasant to deal with in underwear. I've got my tips for clean-up now, but ultimately, there's no easy way of doing it and there's always a lot of clean-up.
The good news and the bad news is that my daughter isn't worried about pooping. In fact, she's pooping three times a day, and taking it so much in her stride that I rarely notice she's doing/done it. We had our first trip out Monday afternoon, and she managed to poop in her carseat... which then got onto her carseat.
The other bad news is that my sleepy, zen-like state has worn off and I'm now in slight-headache state. Oh, and our four year old son has not developed a sudden love of solitude, so our poop-clean-ups are invariably interrupted with "What are you doing?" or "I want a snack."
Basically, I'm getting stressed when I clean up the poop. It's hard not to express that frustration, and I keep venting it on my poor son because I'm trying to keep my daughter relaxed. I'm not quite at the point of feeding her a cheese only diet yet, but if she stays this prolific, something else is going to have to give!
Still, for the most part, it's gone very smoothly. She's had no accidents at school (though they are loaded up with spare clothes) and we had a successful trip to the mall yesterday, using public toilets without issue. And while I'm not quite exhaling yet, it really is fantastic to not be changing nappies!
The Theory: How and When
When it comes to potty-training, my advice is to pick the method that feels the most comfortable for you, because if you're stressed over it, that's going to pass onto your child. The biggest key to success in potty training is not to stress your child!
However, I need to qualify my advice with the statement that you will get stressed if you've never done it before (and quite probably even if you have). You won't be able to figure out what worried you so much in retrospect, but you'll almost certainly be a wreck at one point or another while potty-training. It just comes with the threat of human excrement being spread around your house.
So your best bet is to pick whichever method is the most intuitive for you. The one you feel you understand and agree with the theory behind it. That way when things don't go by the book, you can adapt the methods to suit your situation without losing the principle.
Speaking of avoiding stress, I'm not a huge fan of the Signs that Your Child is Ready lists. If you're anything like me, it won't matter how much they tell you your child doesn't need to exhibit all the signs, you will still worry over whether they're showing enough of them to warrant potty-training. As far as I can tell, what they all boil down to is this:
Your child has shown awareness of or interest in bodily functions and the process of going to the toilet.In the case of my son (trained at 29 months), his readiness signs were mostly limited to screaming blue murder when we changed his nappy. Potty-training was not a problem and considerably easier on the eardrums. Ultimately, it's a judgment call for you to make.
One trend I do seem to notice is that younger children are more likely to take it in their stride than older children, although it's not like I've done a proper survey on this. I know I've always wanted to beat the 'terrible twos' which usually kick in around two and a half.
My Theory
I've always quite liked the option of not potty-training, because your child will train themselves sooner or later (which usually seems to be at the age of three, but I've not researched this). However, I like the environmental and financial savings of potty training earlier; it gives you more pre-school options too. (I wouldn't advocate rushing potty-training just to send your child to pre-school, but I wouldn't recommend limiting your options by avoiding potty-training either.)
Let's not underestimate the lure of being done with nappies!
I'm a big fan of the cold turkey, straight into underwear approach, which has the Montessori advantage of Control of Error (i.e. the child can tell when they've peed). Based on my experiences as a teacher, it's the most effective way. It's also the basis of a lot of these three day potty training techniques, which many people insist are a con and too much pressure on the child, but that really depends on what you're intending to get out of the three days.
In my view, three days at home, out of nappies and having accidents is as much to train the parent as the child. While the child becomes used to the act of urinating and practices the skills required to use the potty successfully, the parent learns how long their child goes between relieving themselves and the tell-tale signs of when they need to go. (Actually, in my case, it's mostly how long they can last before they need to pee again. I am really really bad at picking up on "I need to pee!" behaviour.) And, of course, getting used to cleaning up accidents.
By the time the weekend is over, you should know enough to adapt potty breaks into your usual routine and be able to go out with minimal risk of accidents. But it does mean a fairly intensive weekend of focusing on the child, keeping on top of laundry, hygiene etc. There's pressure on you and that can transfer to pressure on the child as well. There are many other ways of going about it.
If you want to try the cold turkey approach, I started with the ebook available here. I liked several of the author's philosophies, such as leaving the potty in the bathroom, so they learn to account for that travel time. Please note that this approach is not best suited to carpeting. Our entire downstairs is hardwood, and planning some outdoor activities don't go amiss either!
No Frills Preparation
My daughter's been interested in her brother's potty since she was about 21 months (she's not quite 27 months now), but I wasn't ready. For me the best time to potty train isn't so much age as season. Warm weather means less clothes and the ability to have 'accidents' outside, which is a huge saving on clean-up.
I did buy my daughter pull-ups when she insisted on sitting on the potty whenever I changed her into / out of her pajamas (since her brother usually used it then too). I thought I might as well let her have some practice at other times even if I wasn't ready to focus on it. All that did was convince me that pull-ups are a pain in the arse. Nappies are just so much easier to use--pull-ups have the convenience of access, but are ironically difficult for a child to pull up and down. My daughter never used them as intended and we went back to nappies.
I already had in most of what we needed from training my son: potties, step-stool / seat adapter, waterproof mattress covers, absorbent pads for the sofas, travel potty. All I needed to buy was underwear (one pack for her bedroom, one pack for the downstairs bathroom and one pack for school).
I knew I wanted to train her well in advance of our trip to the UK this summer, because on a transatlantic flight you want to be sat next to a toddler with as much experience of bladder control as possible. However, come Friday, both my husband and I were feeling very run down (my husband was definitely sick, and we assume I had a touch of it as well) and there was part of me that really could not be arsed to do potty-training. On the other hand, I knew this was going to be the last free weekend for awhile, and I'd hate myself if we didn't do it.
She had to stay in nappies for the morning anyway, when she went to school, and then I let her have her nap before I took them off, and then she was a bit cranky when she woke up... finally, at 3pm, I gave myself a mental kick up the backside and put her in underwear.
No Frills Experience
And that was more or less that. Both my husband and I were so sleepy and docile we struggled to care, once we got past the stage of viewing her as a ticking time bomb (waiting for that first pee is truly edge-of-your-seat entertainment). We just couldn't keep focused on her, and as she spends 90% of her time bouncing and dancing around, it was pretty difficult to judge the state of her bladder anyway. But we were ready for it. When she had an accident (to her great confusion) I would whisk her to the potty, wipe her down, give her fresh underwear, clean up the mess in the living room--and go back to the sofa.
In some ways, this was great because I stayed so zen about it. I told my daughter to let me know when she needed to go potty, and we told her she is supposed to pee in the potty, but we didn't do rewards, and we didn't try to get her to drink as much as possible to give us all extra practice, and we didn't coax, and we didn't get agitated when she had her accidents. We just dealt with it as it came.
Second child syndrome helped hugely here, because she was so used to seeing her brother use a potty that was available for her to use. In fact, I'd deliberately left his potty out long after we could have switched him to the big toilet, just so she would be used to the concept. However, we have this step-stool / seat adapter on the toilet in their bathroom and she prefers that to the potty. My son was the other way around, but having them go in the big toilet is so much easier that we've ordered another seat for downstairs and I plan on removing the potties altogether. Being done with nappies and potties? Sounds too good to be true. Let's see!
Anyway, she was confused but unfazed by the state of affairs on Friday. On Saturday, she decided to deal with it by learning bladder control, lasting five hours at one point. That's pretty much been the status quo ever since. She's not going spontaneously, and for the first day she resisted any requests to use the potty outside of our established routine. Now she's generally compliant, she has no trouble peeing on it (which is wonderful after dealing with a boy and having to make sure everything's pointing downwards), and is very pleased with herself for doing so.
I'm still trying to avoid sending her to the potty when we're at home though, because with my son I caved to that pressure, and the result was that it took months for him to reliably take the initiative himself. I'd love for my daughter to figure it out now, though if she doesn't get it in a couple of weeks, I suspect I'll go back on that principle.
She's a little behind where my son was at this point, because we actively encouraged him whereas in her case, I want her to do it for herself and not for us (how very Montessori of me!). But for the most part, it's been easier taking it more slowly. Rather than focusing on this three day deadline, it's just been an adjustment to life without nappies.
Ongoing Problems
With my son, night-time training was never a problem. He was dry through the night straightaway (he was doing that even in nappies). About two weeks after potty-training, he started wetting the bed as a ploy to make us come in and clean him up. We were going through some stay-in-bed issues with him at the time, and we chose to put him in pull-ups overnight for a few months until those were dealt with. That worked out perfectly, and we've never had a problem with him since.
Of course, what this means is that I have no idea how to deal with bed-wetting. So far, my daughter has wet the bed four out of five nights, though only one of those involved rousing me in the middle of the night to change her. I took a tip from my friend in layering the bed, putting a sheet and a mattress protector over the one already on there. This lets me just pull off the top layer and let her go back to sleep on the next one, but I am not planning on doing this for months.
Right now it seems that rather than learning to hold her bladder through the night, she's learned to sleep through wetting herself. Since she's always dry when we go to bed around 10pm, I'm going to start waking her up then and getting her on the potty, see if that makes a difference. I am totally open to hearing other basic tactics... Worst case scenario, we stick her back in pull ups at night and have another go later in the year. Having a two year old wet the bed is hardly something to stress over.
Less easy to work around is the pooping issue. Poop is really where the three day potty training scheme does fall down, because it's unlikely your child will poop enough in those three days to get the hang of it. It's also really unpleasant to deal with in underwear. I've got my tips for clean-up now, but ultimately, there's no easy way of doing it and there's always a lot of clean-up.
The good news and the bad news is that my daughter isn't worried about pooping. In fact, she's pooping three times a day, and taking it so much in her stride that I rarely notice she's doing/done it. We had our first trip out Monday afternoon, and she managed to poop in her carseat... which then got onto her carseat.
The other bad news is that my sleepy, zen-like state has worn off and I'm now in slight-headache state. Oh, and our four year old son has not developed a sudden love of solitude, so our poop-clean-ups are invariably interrupted with "What are you doing?" or "I want a snack."
Basically, I'm getting stressed when I clean up the poop. It's hard not to express that frustration, and I keep venting it on my poor son because I'm trying to keep my daughter relaxed. I'm not quite at the point of feeding her a cheese only diet yet, but if she stays this prolific, something else is going to have to give!
Still, for the most part, it's gone very smoothly. She's had no accidents at school (though they are loaded up with spare clothes) and we had a successful trip to the mall yesterday, using public toilets without issue. And while I'm not quite exhaling yet, it really is fantastic to not be changing nappies!
Tuesday, 22 January 2013
Working and Mothering
So, a couple of weeks into the job, I should probably talk about how it's going.
Back to Teaching
I have resumed my old class from before my son was born, teaching two year olds at a Montessori school. I'm basically acting as a supply teacher, covering until the end of February, something I offered to do because I had the experience and knew the materials / routine. After February, it seems fairly unlikely that I will be working before September, although I have learned not to make assumptions!
It has been absolutely wonderful to be back in the classroom. A little chaotic as I re-adjust, especially since I was accustomed to co-teaching that class, and now it's just me mostly (there's another teacher two days a week). But the adjustment has gone pretty quickly... the only thing I'm really out of practice on seems to be potty-training, or at least remembering to send the potty-trainees to the potty on a regular basis!
Still, I've been figuring out where the classroom control was breaking down, adjusting the situation accordingly (e.g. introducing more calm-down areas, such as a play-doh table that faces a wall, getting one child to 'read' to the others while I'm doing the diapers in the bathroom), and of course, familiarising the children with me and just how far I can be pushed! I noticed the first moment of classroom harmony (as opposed to me managing crises!) after a week, and this is now happening regularly. So are the crises, of course--they're toddlers, after all! But I'm at the point now where I can start assessing the children more individually and presenting new work to them.
It's all tremendously stimulating and reminds me how much I thrive in a prepared environment for these short bursts of time, as opposed to when I'm doing the child-care in my own home 24/7.
Teaching My Own Children
The crossover between home and school is my daughter, who's joined the class--fortunately, she's the only new pupil this term. I wasn't sure how this would work out; back when my son joined the class, I was volunteering as classroom assistant for a short period, because there was an influx of new children who needed more attention than one person could give. He found it very difficult to accept that although I was there, I had to help the other children. In that situation, the classroom teacher tried to attend to him as much as possible, to give him the idea of another caregiver, but for the few weeks I volunteered, he was very clingy with me in the classroom.
In my daughter's case, she hasn't been particularly jealous of the other children, nor has she needed to assert herself as entitled to any special treatment. However, it's very much been a case of: "You're my mother. I know I can push you further than that!" If, as this morning, she's slept badly and is crabby, she'll point blank refuse to put her work away, or her jacket on (thanks, sensory issues!) and will start throwing a tantrum over it, just as she would at home.
That's terribly difficult for me, because what works on the other children won't work on her. I always describe the difference between parental authority and other authority in these terms: the child knows their Mum won't kill them; they can't be so sure about their teacher. Fortunately, her lack of discipline is not infecting the other children, but I fret that it's setting a bad precedent for her... that this is how she can (indeed, will!) behave in school, and that she'll continue in this vein even once I'm no longer her teacher.
On the other hand, she's so young (technically too young for this class still), and I know full well that she's always been headstrong. Chances are, she'd have been disobedient anyway, and I've seen plenty of similar children pass through the toddler class who develop beautifully--they might always test the boundaries of authority, but they learn self-control and become better at picking their battles, and it rarely hurts their social standing or academic interest.
I'm not going to turn around and pretend her behaviour is a positive--it might be indicative of leadership abilities and thinking outside the box or whatever, but it's still a problem if I'm spending half the morning on getting her to put her work away. Nobody's getting the benefit out of the class that they should be in that scenario. However, I do need to learn not to get so twitchy just because it's my daughter. In retrospect, I wish she'd started the class under a different teacher, but this is not a sentence of doom on all her schooldays.
My son, incidentally, has loved having me at school. I don't have much to do with his classroom, but I act as playground monitor at the start and end of the morning. The toddlers obviously require a shorter work cycle, so they get more playtime, but the Children's House (3-6 year olds) can come out and play more or less at individual whim while the toddlers are having their playtime. Because I'm a big believer in getting children outside as much as possible, even on rainy days, I cram everybody onto the covered porch and do warm-up exercises and stand-up action songs for as long as I can hold their interest.
Anyway, my son likes the outdoor play in the morning, and he gets a big kick out of the fact that I'm his Mum. We did have one incident in the first week where he tried to use this to go to the front of the line, but otherwise, he's not expected any special attention. He's just excited that I'm there.
It's going to be very interesting to see how both children deal with me stopping work in March.
Work and Housework
The juggling of work and home has not really gone well. I had settled into a good groove by the end of 2012, in terms of keeping the house going, parenting and keeping some me-time, but as I said in my previous post, I'm a morning person. That's my productive time, and I used to do a lot of the housework in the mornings. Now I'm at school in the morning, which is great, because my productivity goes into my job, but by the afternoon I'm wiped.
The problem is because I know this isn't permanent, and I can go right back into my old routine come March, I'm not motivated to figure out a new routine. Instead, I've remembered the lesson of my children's newborn days and gone into survival mode. For the next six weeks, the things that have to be done will get done, but most other things will not be done as often as they should be, and as much as possible will be put off altogether.
What I'm saying is that I work only twenty hours a week, and I still can't do the housework on top of that. Do not come looking to me for advice on how to do it all, and I am thoroughly humbled by those of you who manage even my standards in a full-time job.
Parenting, on the other hand, is going well. I always tried to keep the afternoons for activities with the children. Now, I have to do a bit more worrying about housework and we have errands to run, but we're still getting out to a playground or the zoo or the botanical gardens a couple of times a week.
The only thing that's really been lost is one on one time with my daughter. My son gets individual attention during her nap, but it's unusual to have just my daughter and myself working or playing together. Right now, I don't think it's a problem, especially since she's getting so much new stimulation at school, but I will probably start making the effort to get some alone-time with her after I've finished working.
So there we go. That's how things stand for now. Come March, it'll be a very different experience again, as I try the role of Stay at Home Mum with both kids at school in the morning (there's no point in pulling my daughter out of the class at that stage). I freely admit, I'm looking forward to having so much time to myself, and at least we're fortunate enough that this won't be a financial burden. Still, I'm hoping that this will be as short-lived a phase as my current position. I'd like to have a much clearer idea of where I am heading in the long term.
Back to Teaching
I have resumed my old class from before my son was born, teaching two year olds at a Montessori school. I'm basically acting as a supply teacher, covering until the end of February, something I offered to do because I had the experience and knew the materials / routine. After February, it seems fairly unlikely that I will be working before September, although I have learned not to make assumptions!
It has been absolutely wonderful to be back in the classroom. A little chaotic as I re-adjust, especially since I was accustomed to co-teaching that class, and now it's just me mostly (there's another teacher two days a week). But the adjustment has gone pretty quickly... the only thing I'm really out of practice on seems to be potty-training, or at least remembering to send the potty-trainees to the potty on a regular basis!
Still, I've been figuring out where the classroom control was breaking down, adjusting the situation accordingly (e.g. introducing more calm-down areas, such as a play-doh table that faces a wall, getting one child to 'read' to the others while I'm doing the diapers in the bathroom), and of course, familiarising the children with me and just how far I can be pushed! I noticed the first moment of classroom harmony (as opposed to me managing crises!) after a week, and this is now happening regularly. So are the crises, of course--they're toddlers, after all! But I'm at the point now where I can start assessing the children more individually and presenting new work to them.
It's all tremendously stimulating and reminds me how much I thrive in a prepared environment for these short bursts of time, as opposed to when I'm doing the child-care in my own home 24/7.
Teaching My Own Children
The crossover between home and school is my daughter, who's joined the class--fortunately, she's the only new pupil this term. I wasn't sure how this would work out; back when my son joined the class, I was volunteering as classroom assistant for a short period, because there was an influx of new children who needed more attention than one person could give. He found it very difficult to accept that although I was there, I had to help the other children. In that situation, the classroom teacher tried to attend to him as much as possible, to give him the idea of another caregiver, but for the few weeks I volunteered, he was very clingy with me in the classroom.
In my daughter's case, she hasn't been particularly jealous of the other children, nor has she needed to assert herself as entitled to any special treatment. However, it's very much been a case of: "You're my mother. I know I can push you further than that!" If, as this morning, she's slept badly and is crabby, she'll point blank refuse to put her work away, or her jacket on (thanks, sensory issues!) and will start throwing a tantrum over it, just as she would at home.
That's terribly difficult for me, because what works on the other children won't work on her. I always describe the difference between parental authority and other authority in these terms: the child knows their Mum won't kill them; they can't be so sure about their teacher. Fortunately, her lack of discipline is not infecting the other children, but I fret that it's setting a bad precedent for her... that this is how she can (indeed, will!) behave in school, and that she'll continue in this vein even once I'm no longer her teacher.
On the other hand, she's so young (technically too young for this class still), and I know full well that she's always been headstrong. Chances are, she'd have been disobedient anyway, and I've seen plenty of similar children pass through the toddler class who develop beautifully--they might always test the boundaries of authority, but they learn self-control and become better at picking their battles, and it rarely hurts their social standing or academic interest.
I'm not going to turn around and pretend her behaviour is a positive--it might be indicative of leadership abilities and thinking outside the box or whatever, but it's still a problem if I'm spending half the morning on getting her to put her work away. Nobody's getting the benefit out of the class that they should be in that scenario. However, I do need to learn not to get so twitchy just because it's my daughter. In retrospect, I wish she'd started the class under a different teacher, but this is not a sentence of doom on all her schooldays.
My son, incidentally, has loved having me at school. I don't have much to do with his classroom, but I act as playground monitor at the start and end of the morning. The toddlers obviously require a shorter work cycle, so they get more playtime, but the Children's House (3-6 year olds) can come out and play more or less at individual whim while the toddlers are having their playtime. Because I'm a big believer in getting children outside as much as possible, even on rainy days, I cram everybody onto the covered porch and do warm-up exercises and stand-up action songs for as long as I can hold their interest.
Anyway, my son likes the outdoor play in the morning, and he gets a big kick out of the fact that I'm his Mum. We did have one incident in the first week where he tried to use this to go to the front of the line, but otherwise, he's not expected any special attention. He's just excited that I'm there.
It's going to be very interesting to see how both children deal with me stopping work in March.
Work and Housework
The juggling of work and home has not really gone well. I had settled into a good groove by the end of 2012, in terms of keeping the house going, parenting and keeping some me-time, but as I said in my previous post, I'm a morning person. That's my productive time, and I used to do a lot of the housework in the mornings. Now I'm at school in the morning, which is great, because my productivity goes into my job, but by the afternoon I'm wiped.
The problem is because I know this isn't permanent, and I can go right back into my old routine come March, I'm not motivated to figure out a new routine. Instead, I've remembered the lesson of my children's newborn days and gone into survival mode. For the next six weeks, the things that have to be done will get done, but most other things will not be done as often as they should be, and as much as possible will be put off altogether.
What I'm saying is that I work only twenty hours a week, and I still can't do the housework on top of that. Do not come looking to me for advice on how to do it all, and I am thoroughly humbled by those of you who manage even my standards in a full-time job.
Parenting, on the other hand, is going well. I always tried to keep the afternoons for activities with the children. Now, I have to do a bit more worrying about housework and we have errands to run, but we're still getting out to a playground or the zoo or the botanical gardens a couple of times a week.
The only thing that's really been lost is one on one time with my daughter. My son gets individual attention during her nap, but it's unusual to have just my daughter and myself working or playing together. Right now, I don't think it's a problem, especially since she's getting so much new stimulation at school, but I will probably start making the effort to get some alone-time with her after I've finished working.
So there we go. That's how things stand for now. Come March, it'll be a very different experience again, as I try the role of Stay at Home Mum with both kids at school in the morning (there's no point in pulling my daughter out of the class at that stage). I freely admit, I'm looking forward to having so much time to myself, and at least we're fortunate enough that this won't be a financial burden. Still, I'm hoping that this will be as short-lived a phase as my current position. I'd like to have a much clearer idea of where I am heading in the long term.
Friday, 27 April 2012
From baby to toddler
So, a month back, I posted about how my daughter had taken her first step. Remembering my son's steady progression from that first step to walking all over the place in two or three weeks, I eagerly anticipated a similar burst of determination from my daughter.
Not so much. Although she's always been more ambitious than her laid back brother, she has never been pushing to walk. Simply discovering the ability to take independent steps was not enough to inspire her.
After giving the matter some thought, I came to the conclusion that the big difference in circumstances for the second child is that I wasn't going at her pace. With her brother, I could arrange my whole day around him, taking things as slowly as I like and letting him crawl alongside me or stagger around holding my hand. With the second child, I'm rushing to get things done in between the school runs or trying to keep up with the toddler instead of slowing down for the baby. I've been carrying her a lot more, and she has had absolutely no objection to that.
So starting Monday, I changed my habits, remembering to slow down wherever possible and to do handheld walking as much as possible. On Thursday, something clicked and she started walking. Not exclusively, but she's gone from crawling as the default mode to walking (until she falls over) as the default mode. The change was dramatic enough that my husband noticed the difference between when he left for work in the morning and when he came home that night.
I've also rediscovered just how much of a jump in interaction walking makes--and how much better I am at toddlers than babies. Also on Thursday, she knocked over her brother's glass of orange juice. I gave her a paper towel to clean up the mess, and she promptly started wiping at it (with remarkable effectiveness). I then asked her to throw the used paper towel in the bin and (after a couple of repetitions) she toddled to the kitchen and did so, giving me frequent looks for confirmation and a big grin when she realised she understood what I meant.
One of my mild concerns is that I've not done much in the way of giving directions to her, so I am genuinely delighted she understood me. And lest anybody think I've got some sort of miracle child, I did have to clean up most of the spill myself--she just did a better job with her paper towel than her brother did at that age.
Speaking of spills, she's recently got the hang of drinking out of her doidy cup so I've started giving her a glass for occasional drinks, in true Montessori style. I found one at a thrift store a few months ago, that was small but surprisingly heavy. I'm hoping this means that it can survive a trip to the hardwood floor (so far untested), but the weight encourages her to use both hands to lift it and focus a little more on what she's doing with it. She's a lot more inclined to just knock things over for fun than her brother ever was, so this is something very intermittent.
But I've moved their table to the window, where it's a little closer to the shelves for carrying practice. I think I'm going to try and have them eat there more often when we're not having a family meal (i.e. snacks and lunch). She's not mastered the art of getting on and off the stools yet, but it'll be a step closer to independence when she does.
Basically, I'm in a wild burst of enthusiasm for having a toddler again, especially since my son's left that behind for the mentally draining 3 year old stage. For the first time, she's easier than he is! Yet of course, as much as I've been waiting for this, there's that bittersweet thought: "No more babies, soon she won't crawl around at all...." I don't do well with babies, and I'm tired of how all her leggings are grey and dingy at the knees, but.... still. She's been a very cute baby.
Also, she cut three teeth almost simultaneously: two molars and a canine. That explains the grumpy mood towards the end of our holiday. I am still waiting on the other canine to poke through, but she's got tired of me poking into her mouth, so for all I know it's there already.
Dampening my burst of wild enthusiasm is the sick day my son's had today. After a complete lapse in behaviour yesterday, he threw up twice overnight and then again after lunch today. So far he's kept dinner down, so fingers crossed. At least he's been much more cheerful today, and I was able to keep him occupied by building a gigantic train track all across the living room rug during his sister's morning nap.
I probably love that train set more than he does. I am not looking forward to when they outgrow it....
Not so much. Although she's always been more ambitious than her laid back brother, she has never been pushing to walk. Simply discovering the ability to take independent steps was not enough to inspire her.
After giving the matter some thought, I came to the conclusion that the big difference in circumstances for the second child is that I wasn't going at her pace. With her brother, I could arrange my whole day around him, taking things as slowly as I like and letting him crawl alongside me or stagger around holding my hand. With the second child, I'm rushing to get things done in between the school runs or trying to keep up with the toddler instead of slowing down for the baby. I've been carrying her a lot more, and she has had absolutely no objection to that.
So starting Monday, I changed my habits, remembering to slow down wherever possible and to do handheld walking as much as possible. On Thursday, something clicked and she started walking. Not exclusively, but she's gone from crawling as the default mode to walking (until she falls over) as the default mode. The change was dramatic enough that my husband noticed the difference between when he left for work in the morning and when he came home that night.
I've also rediscovered just how much of a jump in interaction walking makes--and how much better I am at toddlers than babies. Also on Thursday, she knocked over her brother's glass of orange juice. I gave her a paper towel to clean up the mess, and she promptly started wiping at it (with remarkable effectiveness). I then asked her to throw the used paper towel in the bin and (after a couple of repetitions) she toddled to the kitchen and did so, giving me frequent looks for confirmation and a big grin when she realised she understood what I meant.
One of my mild concerns is that I've not done much in the way of giving directions to her, so I am genuinely delighted she understood me. And lest anybody think I've got some sort of miracle child, I did have to clean up most of the spill myself--she just did a better job with her paper towel than her brother did at that age.
Speaking of spills, she's recently got the hang of drinking out of her doidy cup so I've started giving her a glass for occasional drinks, in true Montessori style. I found one at a thrift store a few months ago, that was small but surprisingly heavy. I'm hoping this means that it can survive a trip to the hardwood floor (so far untested), but the weight encourages her to use both hands to lift it and focus a little more on what she's doing with it. She's a lot more inclined to just knock things over for fun than her brother ever was, so this is something very intermittent.
But I've moved their table to the window, where it's a little closer to the shelves for carrying practice. I think I'm going to try and have them eat there more often when we're not having a family meal (i.e. snacks and lunch). She's not mastered the art of getting on and off the stools yet, but it'll be a step closer to independence when she does.
Basically, I'm in a wild burst of enthusiasm for having a toddler again, especially since my son's left that behind for the mentally draining 3 year old stage. For the first time, she's easier than he is! Yet of course, as much as I've been waiting for this, there's that bittersweet thought: "No more babies, soon she won't crawl around at all...." I don't do well with babies, and I'm tired of how all her leggings are grey and dingy at the knees, but.... still. She's been a very cute baby.
Also, she cut three teeth almost simultaneously: two molars and a canine. That explains the grumpy mood towards the end of our holiday. I am still waiting on the other canine to poke through, but she's got tired of me poking into her mouth, so for all I know it's there already.
Dampening my burst of wild enthusiasm is the sick day my son's had today. After a complete lapse in behaviour yesterday, he threw up twice overnight and then again after lunch today. So far he's kept dinner down, so fingers crossed. At least he's been much more cheerful today, and I was able to keep him occupied by building a gigantic train track all across the living room rug during his sister's morning nap.
I probably love that train set more than he does. I am not looking forward to when they outgrow it....
Tuesday, 27 March 2012
On the other side of the fence
Before my son was born, I worked for a couple of years at the local Montessori school, mostly in the two-year-old classroom, plus one term in the children's house (three-six year olds).
When my son turned two, it was a given that he would be going to the school. I don't think that the school is perfect by any means, but I'm aware of what its faults and strengths are. I knew the daily schedule, the usual songs and stories and most of the work.
There had been some staff turnover since my time there, but the head was the same and my old colleague was still in the toddler room. I had an established relationship with the people who would be teaching my children. I had also worked/helped out off and on since my son had been born anyway, deliberately maintaining my connection with the school. I had an inside track, so to speak.
This made it very easy for me to pick a school. I don't know how I'm going to manage for their next school! For what it's worth, having worked as a teacher, my number one advice for a preschool is to choose one where you feel you've got a good rapport with their teachers. At this age, I think it's very important to have a back and forth conversation about where they are with their needs and skills (not just the academic ones)--and both you and the teacher need to be able to be honest.
The transition from teacher to parent has been an interesting one. After two years of monopolising my son's life and knowing exactly what he was learning every day, it was bizarre to say goodbye to him and let him spend three hours without me. Three hours that would become a void in my knowledge of him.
It was also weird to go from being "Miss Sarah" to "Toby's Mom." Actually, some of the older children at school still call me Miss Sarah, which I take great pride in. However, I used to know the name of every child there, and that's no longer the case... although I imagine I still know more than most parents.
For the most part though, I'm comfortably settled into the parent-role now. I still get agitated about what he's doing. I went in to observe him in January, when he moved down to the children's house, and I might just have to do that again soon, but I probably shouldn't get into the helicopter-parenting habit! When I was teaching, I always felt a little silly doing parent/teacher conferences--how much academic assessment does a two year need? As a parent, I've been so grateful for the insight into just what my son is doing all day.
Perhaps my biggest problem now is remembering that my husband isn't as familiar with Montessori as I am and thus doesn't necessarily understand what we're talking about at these parent/teacher conferences. We had our second last week, and the teacher was explaining that our son had pulled out the moveable alphabet of his own accord. I chattered away to her about his abilities with sounding out words, but my husband had no idea what the moveable alphabet was. We took him into the classroom afterwards to show him.
Sidenote, I am so appreciative of my husband making the time to come to the PTCs. I know a lot don't, and it's important to me that he stays involved in the kids' education.
Let's just emphasise a point here: my son is working on the moveable alphabet. That definitely came as a surprise, since I didn't think he had figured out how to break a word into its component sounds yet. I knew he knew all his sounds (i.e. the alphabet in phonics), but it turns out he can pull out the letters to write 'man', 'hat' and 'bat'. He can't read, but he has made that leap to writing.
At home, he sometimes rearranges the magnetic letters on the fridge, but only in a random order. Still, today, I was sorting out a box of language stuff, and he pulled out some phonics cards I'd bought, saying he wanted to do those (not that he had the faintest idea what they were). The card on top was 'ar', and it showed a picture of a car in a barn with a star painted on. He said 'farm' rather than 'barn' but that worked as well.
I dug out some letters from the same box and gave him 'a' and 'r', and we arranged them in order. Then I tried pulling out 'c', 's', 't', 'f' and 'm'. He got 'car' and figured out 'star' much quicker than I expected, considering 'st' is a blend. We never progressed to 'farm' because my daughter started pulling letters out of the bag and putting them on the table. She does like practising her transferring skills.
Considering my previous anxiety on how best to teach him to read, I'm thrilled by this development, and now I've got to try very hard to sit back and not push him on it. He's definitely early on this, but that's OK. He's not a genius by any stretch of the imagination and even in literacy he might average out in another few years. But as his mother, I am so proud of him right now.
And as a teacher? Well, we'll see what next year brings. My hope is that when my daughter starts school, I'll be making a new transition to both teacher and parent. That should be interesting!
When my son turned two, it was a given that he would be going to the school. I don't think that the school is perfect by any means, but I'm aware of what its faults and strengths are. I knew the daily schedule, the usual songs and stories and most of the work.
There had been some staff turnover since my time there, but the head was the same and my old colleague was still in the toddler room. I had an established relationship with the people who would be teaching my children. I had also worked/helped out off and on since my son had been born anyway, deliberately maintaining my connection with the school. I had an inside track, so to speak.
This made it very easy for me to pick a school. I don't know how I'm going to manage for their next school! For what it's worth, having worked as a teacher, my number one advice for a preschool is to choose one where you feel you've got a good rapport with their teachers. At this age, I think it's very important to have a back and forth conversation about where they are with their needs and skills (not just the academic ones)--and both you and the teacher need to be able to be honest.
The transition from teacher to parent has been an interesting one. After two years of monopolising my son's life and knowing exactly what he was learning every day, it was bizarre to say goodbye to him and let him spend three hours without me. Three hours that would become a void in my knowledge of him.
It was also weird to go from being "Miss Sarah" to "Toby's Mom." Actually, some of the older children at school still call me Miss Sarah, which I take great pride in. However, I used to know the name of every child there, and that's no longer the case... although I imagine I still know more than most parents.
For the most part though, I'm comfortably settled into the parent-role now. I still get agitated about what he's doing. I went in to observe him in January, when he moved down to the children's house, and I might just have to do that again soon, but I probably shouldn't get into the helicopter-parenting habit! When I was teaching, I always felt a little silly doing parent/teacher conferences--how much academic assessment does a two year need? As a parent, I've been so grateful for the insight into just what my son is doing all day.
Perhaps my biggest problem now is remembering that my husband isn't as familiar with Montessori as I am and thus doesn't necessarily understand what we're talking about at these parent/teacher conferences. We had our second last week, and the teacher was explaining that our son had pulled out the moveable alphabet of his own accord. I chattered away to her about his abilities with sounding out words, but my husband had no idea what the moveable alphabet was. We took him into the classroom afterwards to show him.
Sidenote, I am so appreciative of my husband making the time to come to the PTCs. I know a lot don't, and it's important to me that he stays involved in the kids' education.
Let's just emphasise a point here: my son is working on the moveable alphabet. That definitely came as a surprise, since I didn't think he had figured out how to break a word into its component sounds yet. I knew he knew all his sounds (i.e. the alphabet in phonics), but it turns out he can pull out the letters to write 'man', 'hat' and 'bat'. He can't read, but he has made that leap to writing.
At home, he sometimes rearranges the magnetic letters on the fridge, but only in a random order. Still, today, I was sorting out a box of language stuff, and he pulled out some phonics cards I'd bought, saying he wanted to do those (not that he had the faintest idea what they were). The card on top was 'ar', and it showed a picture of a car in a barn with a star painted on. He said 'farm' rather than 'barn' but that worked as well.
I dug out some letters from the same box and gave him 'a' and 'r', and we arranged them in order. Then I tried pulling out 'c', 's', 't', 'f' and 'm'. He got 'car' and figured out 'star' much quicker than I expected, considering 'st' is a blend. We never progressed to 'farm' because my daughter started pulling letters out of the bag and putting them on the table. She does like practising her transferring skills.
Considering my previous anxiety on how best to teach him to read, I'm thrilled by this development, and now I've got to try very hard to sit back and not push him on it. He's definitely early on this, but that's OK. He's not a genius by any stretch of the imagination and even in literacy he might average out in another few years. But as his mother, I am so proud of him right now.
And as a teacher? Well, we'll see what next year brings. My hope is that when my daughter starts school, I'll be making a new transition to both teacher and parent. That should be interesting!
Saturday, 11 February 2012
De-cluttering
We had some snow this evening, with a chance of more overnight. It's the first we've had, since the winter's been so mild up until now. Last weekend, we bought a sled on clearance at Target, thinking that we might be able to use it next year. With a bit of luck, we might be able to use it tomorrow... But not too much luck. I'd rather not be snowed in for the next week!
That said, what I really need is to do some spring cleaning. If there's one aspect of Montessori that I'm very very bad at, it's the prepared environment. I do not have tidy habits.... It's something I try to work on, but I'm like a rollercoaster dieter: I'll tidy furiously, and keep up my resolutions for a week or two (usually getting frustrated by how the children will not let me devote all my attention to it), then slack off again, and the house will go back to it's cluttered state.
Of course, I do like the way Montessori emphasises order and tidiness, and part of that is because I want my children to be better at this than I am. So ever since my son was born, I've made it a priority to keep his space / things clean, clear and organised, and he has indeed been tidier than me since about the age of twelve months.
The problem is that the arrival of my daughter made it that much harder to keep up, and three years on from my son's birth, we have a lot more toys. I've also got the challenge of keeping my child-friendly environment accessible and stimulating both to a non-walking baby and a three year old.
For example, we have one of those storage units with multicoloured bins downstairs. I made sure all the lower racks contained baby-friendly stuff, while the small and/or delicate things were on the top shelf, out of my daughter's sight. However, while my son is well able to take one of the bins to our living room rug (i.e. the designated play area), my daughter can't carry them yet, so she just sits next to them and pulls everything onto the floor.
These days it's not just my daughter who's doing it. Ever since Christmas, I've been noticing that my son has been getting less focused in his play and more likely to dump toys on the floor or start throwing them. He knows perfectly well that if he wants to throw something, he should throw a ball--he'll parrot that rule back at me as soon as I bring the problem up.
The misbehaviour in itself is not what's bothering me (although I don't like it), it's the fact that it's become a rare thing to see him absorbed in his activities, and when I try to encourage him to do something, he's defaulting to a refusal. Again, not always, but it's unusual for him to be willing to do anything that's my idea.
I do need to account for the fact that nearly all of 2012 so far has been spent with some illness or other working its way through our household. As a result, I've been more tired, more distracted and more irritable (see also every blogpost this year, save for the first optimistic one!). That kind of thing is always going to have a negative effect on my children's behaviour.
Nevertheless, his sudden lack of focus is disturbing... At the beginning of the year, I was anxious about how best to capitalise on a recent interest in learning the alphabet. I needn't have worried, because he hasn't shown any interest in letters for weeks now, but it's not because a new interest has come along to replace it. He's just not wanting to do anything. At school, his behaviour and motivation have not changed; it's a home issue.
My daughter's focus has never been as good as her brother's. It might just be her nature, but I've always wondered if it's because there's a lot more distraction in her environment... the television is more likely to be on, there are more toys, I'm messier than I used to be, etc. etc. Now I'm worried that this messy environment is having a negative impact on her brother.
Whether I'm right or wrong on that score, I can't allow him to continue making a mess with his toys. Since my efforts on that line have been failing, I need to reduce the toys. My plan is to cut right back: Anything with lots of parts is going to get relegated to storage; make sure that there are no more than two things on any shelf, and try and keep the contents of storage bins to a minimum; Eliminate 'lights and noise' toys from the living area.
Step Two will require me to be more diligent about sitting down with the children and enforcing the rules: all toys stay on the rug; return toys / activities / work to their proper place when finished. I'm generally happy to turn a blind eye to toys left out on the rug, provided they're cleared away by evening, but my daughter's just starting to follow directions, so now's a good time to be firmer about the rules and certainly more consistent!
Short term, I'd like to be able to sit down and work with either child more readily. Long term, I'd like to bring some of the more complex toys back to the living area, and see them regain their novelty. But ultimately, I want to see my son regain his attention span, and I'd like my daughter to improve hers. Fingers crossed that this works.
That said, what I really need is to do some spring cleaning. If there's one aspect of Montessori that I'm very very bad at, it's the prepared environment. I do not have tidy habits.... It's something I try to work on, but I'm like a rollercoaster dieter: I'll tidy furiously, and keep up my resolutions for a week or two (usually getting frustrated by how the children will not let me devote all my attention to it), then slack off again, and the house will go back to it's cluttered state.
Of course, I do like the way Montessori emphasises order and tidiness, and part of that is because I want my children to be better at this than I am. So ever since my son was born, I've made it a priority to keep his space / things clean, clear and organised, and he has indeed been tidier than me since about the age of twelve months.
The problem is that the arrival of my daughter made it that much harder to keep up, and three years on from my son's birth, we have a lot more toys. I've also got the challenge of keeping my child-friendly environment accessible and stimulating both to a non-walking baby and a three year old.
For example, we have one of those storage units with multicoloured bins downstairs. I made sure all the lower racks contained baby-friendly stuff, while the small and/or delicate things were on the top shelf, out of my daughter's sight. However, while my son is well able to take one of the bins to our living room rug (i.e. the designated play area), my daughter can't carry them yet, so she just sits next to them and pulls everything onto the floor.
These days it's not just my daughter who's doing it. Ever since Christmas, I've been noticing that my son has been getting less focused in his play and more likely to dump toys on the floor or start throwing them. He knows perfectly well that if he wants to throw something, he should throw a ball--he'll parrot that rule back at me as soon as I bring the problem up.
The misbehaviour in itself is not what's bothering me (although I don't like it), it's the fact that it's become a rare thing to see him absorbed in his activities, and when I try to encourage him to do something, he's defaulting to a refusal. Again, not always, but it's unusual for him to be willing to do anything that's my idea.
I do need to account for the fact that nearly all of 2012 so far has been spent with some illness or other working its way through our household. As a result, I've been more tired, more distracted and more irritable (see also every blogpost this year, save for the first optimistic one!). That kind of thing is always going to have a negative effect on my children's behaviour.
Nevertheless, his sudden lack of focus is disturbing... At the beginning of the year, I was anxious about how best to capitalise on a recent interest in learning the alphabet. I needn't have worried, because he hasn't shown any interest in letters for weeks now, but it's not because a new interest has come along to replace it. He's just not wanting to do anything. At school, his behaviour and motivation have not changed; it's a home issue.
My daughter's focus has never been as good as her brother's. It might just be her nature, but I've always wondered if it's because there's a lot more distraction in her environment... the television is more likely to be on, there are more toys, I'm messier than I used to be, etc. etc. Now I'm worried that this messy environment is having a negative impact on her brother.
Whether I'm right or wrong on that score, I can't allow him to continue making a mess with his toys. Since my efforts on that line have been failing, I need to reduce the toys. My plan is to cut right back: Anything with lots of parts is going to get relegated to storage; make sure that there are no more than two things on any shelf, and try and keep the contents of storage bins to a minimum; Eliminate 'lights and noise' toys from the living area.
Step Two will require me to be more diligent about sitting down with the children and enforcing the rules: all toys stay on the rug; return toys / activities / work to their proper place when finished. I'm generally happy to turn a blind eye to toys left out on the rug, provided they're cleared away by evening, but my daughter's just starting to follow directions, so now's a good time to be firmer about the rules and certainly more consistent!
Short term, I'd like to be able to sit down and work with either child more readily. Long term, I'd like to bring some of the more complex toys back to the living area, and see them regain their novelty. But ultimately, I want to see my son regain his attention span, and I'd like my daughter to improve hers. Fingers crossed that this works.
Saturday, 21 January 2012
Going Crib-free
Last night did not go well. Something is clearly up with my daughter, poor thing. I would guess another tooth, although that's always the easy excuse.
Since this blog was not intended to be a whine-fest, I won't relate the events of last night (nor the consequently bleary today). It did, however, remind me that my daughter sleeps on a standard crib mattress on the floor, which is not what people usually expect. So I thought I'd talk about how that's worked out for us.
The mattress on the floor is actually a Montessori practice. The idea is that your child is encouraged to explore their child-safe, floor-accessible nursery at will. I'd read about this concept before having my son, and thought it sounded nice enough but decided against it. Firstly because I didn't know anybody else who had done it, and I wanted to stick with practices where I had readily available fonts of advice. Secondly because it just seemed weird having your child sleep on the floor and having to explain that to people.
I'm not a big fan of nursery furniture to start with: it's expensive, of limited use and I don't appreciate the pictures of perfectly coordinated nurseries that Toys R Us sends us. The crib (and mattress) was the only item I bought new for my son's nursery, and that was because I was too wary of SIDS to risk a second-hand one.
Unfortunately, we bought a dropside crib. By the time I was pregnant again, dropside cribs had been banned as dangerous and were on no account to be used, even with a kit to fix the dropside. I did not appreciate the irony.
So more or less in a fit of pique, I declared to my husband that we were done with cribs, and the new baby could sleep on the floor. At least that couldn't be recalled!
To be fair, we didn't do that from the start. Both my son and my daughter spent their first six months sleeping in an Arm's Reach co-sleeper. I'm too light a sleeper (my daughter takes after me) to co-sleep fully, but my afore-mentioned SIDS paranoia welcomed the opportunity to co-sleep without bed-sharing.
But at six months old, my daughter was graduated to her mattress. Because she was six months, I wasn't hugely panicked about safety issues (I'd also become somewhat jaded after letting my son sleep for a year in a deathtrap). I knew she could raise and turn her own head in her sleep, and I also knew that she was heavy enough that if she slid between her mattress and (e.g.) the wall, her own weight would push the mattress away, so she wouldn't smother.
To be absolutely certain, I kept the mattress towards the middle of the room for the first few months. Otherwise, I used all the standard precautions... no blankets or pillows, and the room was babyproofed.
She wasn't mobile at this point, but she could roll. The first few weeks of the experiment had me going in multiple times a night to put her back on her bed. This was the only time I considered giving up and using the pack and play or something. But gradually she learned to stay on the bed or at least not to wake up fully when she rolled onto the carpet.
Once she did get mobile, her bed became her focal point whenever we were in her room. She would crawl onto it, and occasionally lie down and suck her thumb for a few minutes before heading elsewhere. It took longer for her to crawl off it when I put her down for naps, although these days, even when groggy, she's able to lurch off the mattress and haul herself to the door (sleepsack and all) once she's woken up (whereupon she starts banging on it to be let out).
Somewhat to my surprise, it's very rare for her to crawl off the mattress when I put her down to sleep. She'll usually give at least a short wail of protest, but she'll almost always roll onto her side and suck her thumb in an attempt to get to sleep. It's only recently that she's started crawling straight off the mattress to argue the point, and even then, that only happens when she's really opposed to her nap. Most of the time, she'll still try for sleep first.
I expect that this will become more frequent as she gets older, but it's a case of crossing that bridge when we get to it.
All that is straightforward enough... but what I've really liked about the floor mattress, is how accessible it is for me. When she has difficulty sleeping, our usual tactic is to lie down on the floor next to her, head on the mattress. She gets the physical contact she craves, and we are fairly comfortable (compare with dangling your arm over the edge of a crib for twenty minutes). Extricating myself once she seems deeply asleep enough is a tedious process, but having her hand pat my face as she settles is lovely (although can also get old if she still doesn't go to sleep).
It's also good not having to worry about when to do the transfer from the crib, something that I fretted over with my son (and something that ended up not being a big deal at all). These days, her mattress rests against the twin bed that we keep in there; there's a stepstool against the foot of the bed for when she's able to climb up. My guess is that at some point she'll want to sleep in the big bed, just like her brother, at which point, the set-up will remain the same but the mattress will become a crashpad for when she falls out of bed.
But mostly it's been such a simple exercise that I forget that there's a different way of doing things. Cribs have their uses, but I'm glad I didn't fork out the cash for another one. Floor-sleeping has worked out just fine for us this time around.
Since this blog was not intended to be a whine-fest, I won't relate the events of last night (nor the consequently bleary today). It did, however, remind me that my daughter sleeps on a standard crib mattress on the floor, which is not what people usually expect. So I thought I'd talk about how that's worked out for us.
The mattress on the floor is actually a Montessori practice. The idea is that your child is encouraged to explore their child-safe, floor-accessible nursery at will. I'd read about this concept before having my son, and thought it sounded nice enough but decided against it. Firstly because I didn't know anybody else who had done it, and I wanted to stick with practices where I had readily available fonts of advice. Secondly because it just seemed weird having your child sleep on the floor and having to explain that to people.
I'm not a big fan of nursery furniture to start with: it's expensive, of limited use and I don't appreciate the pictures of perfectly coordinated nurseries that Toys R Us sends us. The crib (and mattress) was the only item I bought new for my son's nursery, and that was because I was too wary of SIDS to risk a second-hand one.
Unfortunately, we bought a dropside crib. By the time I was pregnant again, dropside cribs had been banned as dangerous and were on no account to be used, even with a kit to fix the dropside. I did not appreciate the irony.
So more or less in a fit of pique, I declared to my husband that we were done with cribs, and the new baby could sleep on the floor. At least that couldn't be recalled!
To be fair, we didn't do that from the start. Both my son and my daughter spent their first six months sleeping in an Arm's Reach co-sleeper. I'm too light a sleeper (my daughter takes after me) to co-sleep fully, but my afore-mentioned SIDS paranoia welcomed the opportunity to co-sleep without bed-sharing.
But at six months old, my daughter was graduated to her mattress. Because she was six months, I wasn't hugely panicked about safety issues (I'd also become somewhat jaded after letting my son sleep for a year in a deathtrap). I knew she could raise and turn her own head in her sleep, and I also knew that she was heavy enough that if she slid between her mattress and (e.g.) the wall, her own weight would push the mattress away, so she wouldn't smother.
To be absolutely certain, I kept the mattress towards the middle of the room for the first few months. Otherwise, I used all the standard precautions... no blankets or pillows, and the room was babyproofed.
She wasn't mobile at this point, but she could roll. The first few weeks of the experiment had me going in multiple times a night to put her back on her bed. This was the only time I considered giving up and using the pack and play or something. But gradually she learned to stay on the bed or at least not to wake up fully when she rolled onto the carpet.
Once she did get mobile, her bed became her focal point whenever we were in her room. She would crawl onto it, and occasionally lie down and suck her thumb for a few minutes before heading elsewhere. It took longer for her to crawl off it when I put her down for naps, although these days, even when groggy, she's able to lurch off the mattress and haul herself to the door (sleepsack and all) once she's woken up (whereupon she starts banging on it to be let out).
Somewhat to my surprise, it's very rare for her to crawl off the mattress when I put her down to sleep. She'll usually give at least a short wail of protest, but she'll almost always roll onto her side and suck her thumb in an attempt to get to sleep. It's only recently that she's started crawling straight off the mattress to argue the point, and even then, that only happens when she's really opposed to her nap. Most of the time, she'll still try for sleep first.
I expect that this will become more frequent as she gets older, but it's a case of crossing that bridge when we get to it.
All that is straightforward enough... but what I've really liked about the floor mattress, is how accessible it is for me. When she has difficulty sleeping, our usual tactic is to lie down on the floor next to her, head on the mattress. She gets the physical contact she craves, and we are fairly comfortable (compare with dangling your arm over the edge of a crib for twenty minutes). Extricating myself once she seems deeply asleep enough is a tedious process, but having her hand pat my face as she settles is lovely (although can also get old if she still doesn't go to sleep).
It's also good not having to worry about when to do the transfer from the crib, something that I fretted over with my son (and something that ended up not being a big deal at all). These days, her mattress rests against the twin bed that we keep in there; there's a stepstool against the foot of the bed for when she's able to climb up. My guess is that at some point she'll want to sleep in the big bed, just like her brother, at which point, the set-up will remain the same but the mattress will become a crashpad for when she falls out of bed.
But mostly it's been such a simple exercise that I forget that there's a different way of doing things. Cribs have their uses, but I'm glad I didn't fork out the cash for another one. Floor-sleeping has worked out just fine for us this time around.
Friday, 6 January 2012
Thoughts on Reading: Unconcluded
My son, who just turned three, is currently very enthusiastic about learning his letters, which has prompted me to review everything I know and think about learning to read, and then do some more research on the internet. Which led me to looking at several pages on the war between sight-reading and phonics. (Of course it's a war. This is the internet!)
If you have never dipped your toes into these controversial waters, these are the two principle methods of teaching people to read – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the two principle methods of reading. Sight-reading (or whole language) is done by learning to recognise the words themselves – if you learned to read using flashcards, you learned with sight-reading. The idea is that you don't learn the spoken word by putting sounds together, so why would you learn the written word that way? (Reading being analogous to listening not talking.) Phonics is about learning the sounds of letters and letter combinations. When encountering a word, the reader sounds out each letter to figure out what it is.
Put even more simply, sight-reading is visual, and phonics are auditory, just as their names suggest. Most of us, even if taught via phonics, ultimately read by sight-reading, instantly recognising familiar words. However, when we come across unfamiliar words, we tend to sound them out either aloud or in our heads, trying to correspond it with our oral vocabulary.
Learning how to process phonics is a skill that develops later, so you're unlikely to have success using the phonics method in a child under four, whereas babies can be taught to sight-read several words before their first birthday (according to the DVD ads). If you want to teach your child to read very early, sight-reading is the way to go. But, as the internet will tell you, teaching your child to read via sight-reading is setting him on the track to semi-literacy, giving him irrevocable bad habits.
I tend to be a little dubious of this since I learned to read by sight-reading, have always been far more comfortable with the written than the spoken word, am excellent at spelling and a dab hand at grammar (she says, blithely dooming herself to a post full of errors). Of course, it's entirely likely that I am the exception rather than the rule, but when it comes to learning to read, my best experience is myself, and so....
The Case Study of Myself
I don't actually remember a time before I could read; I was three when I learned. According to my parents, they were using flashcards with my older brother when I started calling out the answers. Shortly after that, I started hauling the books off them when they tried to read to me (I also have no memory of my parents reading to me, thanks to this early independent streak). I'm not a genius nor particularly intelligent. I just happened to be precocious in this regard.
I do remember being dumbfounded when I was four or five and saw my classmates stumbling over simple words with the teacher's assistance. I also remember that I was five or six when I read The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett, because it surprised me that the opening chapter described the heroine as 'only seven'. (And that certainly wasn't the first novel I'd read.) Reading was just never an issue to me. I usually only had to look at a word once to memorise it, spelling and all, and comprehension was instantaneous.
That's not to say I was never taught the phonics. I can't recall how my (British) primary school actually taught reading, because obviously they didn't have to teach me, but I do remember many lessons on the different letter combinations and sounds (and variations). I loved these. I still have nostalgia for the chain of words containing a different pronunciation of 'ough' (tough, trough, though, through, thorough).
When I was nine, my family moved to the States for the first time (this is a recurring event for us, apparently), and I did fourth and fifth grade there. It wasn't until this happened that I realised all those 'alternate' spellings I came across in books, such as 'color' for 'colour' were actually American spellings. This is my own personal proof that spelling can be learned by sight-reading, despite phonics proponents' protests to the contrary. I made the switch fairly comfortably, winning the school spelling bee in fifth grade before moving back to the UK to start high school, at which point I reverted to British spellings with little difficulty.
These days, though I live in the US again, I mostly write British English, although I don't find it too hard to get into an American spelling mindset. I have more trouble following American grammar rules by habit.
But why did things work out that way for me, when for some children at least, the sight-reading method is genuinely disastrous?
Well, for starters, I'm a visual learner, and I'm well aware that my auditory processing power is poor. I excelled in languages at school, but the only ones I could pursue to degree level were Latin and (ancient) Greek, dead languages that you are taught to read, not to speak. In modern languages, my greatest weakness was the oral and listening aspect.
When I started Italian, the teacher spent the first half of the first lesson teaching us orally. She wanted us to learn the pronunciation of the words before the spelling, because Italian rules of pronunciation differ so hugely from English. "Ciao!" is a perfect example. If she started writing such alien letter combinations on the board, she risked intimidating us hopelessly.
However, I was completely lost with her oral methods. I couldn't analyse the sounds of the words well enough to commit them to memory. For me, if for nobody else in the class, it only started coming together when she started writing on the board, and I could match letters to the sounds she was making. I don't know about anybody else, but whenever I say a word, I 'see' it written down in my mind's eye; when spelling aloud, I visualise the word, and read off the letters.
Obviously, this auditory failing could be a direct result of me being taught to sight-read. I definitely suspect that my own focus on visual learning methods prevented me from developing my auditory processing power to its full potential. How important is this? After all, learning to read prevents us from developing our full powers of memorisation. But as compensation, we have a far more effective way of recording information. Had I learned to read by phonics, I might be better at listening comprehension, but there's no guarantee that the written word would mean as much to me. Personally, I have no regrets, but it's not like there's a control in this particular experiment.
I should note, I'm not entirely brain-deaf. Just as I 'see' a word when I hear it spoken, I 'hear' it when I see it written down. I used to work as a secretary, and I was perfectly able to take dictation – but I was much faster at transcribing from written notes (much preferred that method too). And it's safe to say that I'll always choose a blog over a podcast.
So, that's my experience with learning to read.... what about my experience teaching reading?
The Montessori Approach
Before my son came along, I was working at the Montessori school that he now attends. I dealt with the two year old class mostly, but I also assisted in the Children's House (three to six year olds), so I know the basics of the Montessori method of reading.
Here's a summary, although please note that I am not a qualified teacher, and as such, I was never directly responsible for taking a child through reading, although I have assisted a child with each of the materials mentioned below.
So Montessori is essentially the phonics method.
Here's the catch: Maria Montessori was Italian. Italian is a phonemic language. 'Ciao' might look like a bizarre contortion of vowels to the English-speaker, but it's entirely logical to a native. 'Ci' is always going to be pronounced 'ch'; 'ao' will always be 'ow'. Once you're familiar with the rules of Italian pronunciation, you can pronounce any Italian word you see – and you should be able to spell any word you hear!
English is, of course, not a phonemic language. Its spelling is more likely to reflect the etymology of the word and thus give a clue to its meaning. For example, 'philosophy' keeps the Greek 'ph', so if you're familiar with Greek word-roots, you know that it's going to have something to do with loving wisdom. The Italian word is 'filosofia.' Sounds very similar, but without the 'ph' clue to its origins, it could just as easily come from a Latin root and actually mean something about thread.
While I can see that Maria Montessori's Italian students would soon be able to self-correct their own spelling, this won't be the case for their English-speaking counterparts. I never dealt with this myself in the classroom, so I've tried looking it up online, and it seems that there's no standard Montessori solution for teaching spelling, although most places default to spelling lists, and of course, they teach the various letter combinations.
Why Teaching Spelling Confuses Me
When I first heard about the phonics approach (in my teens), spelling always struck me as its greatest weakness. If a child is taught to read by sounding words out, rather than remembering how they look, aren't they going to find it impossible to spell? However, phonics proponents are always insistent that it's children who aren't taught by phonics who can't spell. The prevalence of this view leads me to assume that there must be a study somewhere that proved or at least indicated this (but let's just bear in mind that I'm being educated by Professor Google).
I think the logic here is that children who learn via phonics are taught to break down words in the first place, and take note of the individual letters. Which does make sense. Also, phonics means extensive memorisation of all the letter combinations for different sounds, which will give you a vast bank of word elements to draw from.
On the flipside, the most common words are the ones most likely to break the rules, and you're going to have to teach children fairly early on that 'their' (for example) is just spelled that way. Surely memorising such exceptions is ultimately using the visual part of their brain, and thus is sight-reading? Phonics still requires spelling lists, just as children taught to sight-read still learn their alphabet.
I'm equating spelling lists with flashcards here, which might be inaccurate in the first place. To me, either one is memorising a word.
One argument that I saw mentioned a few times in favour of phonics in my research is that phonics meant you had to learn every letter combination in the English language, but once you knew them all, you could read anything, whereas sight-reading would require somebody to read aloud to you every word in the English language.
This strikes me as a ludicrous thing to say, because there is no way in hell you can figure out the correct pronunciation of every word in the English language by phonics. I can make a bloody good stab at saying any obscure word you show me, but I know there are plenty of words in my vocabulary that I've never actually heard spoken aloud and thus I have my own imagined pronunciation.
The second ridiculous thing about this is that even if you are incapable of sounding out a word to match it to your oral vocabulary, you could still learn to recognise that word in that context and thus make it part of your reading vocabulary. It's clearly a very limited usage, but my point is, you can still read/comprehend a word you've never encountered before.
Back to spelling... As I said above, English spelling is more indicative of meaning than pronunciation. So as well as learning all the different sounds 'ough' can make, I remember being taught things like the suffix '-or' indicates a person who does something: doctor, professor, sculptor, actor... etc. etc. (Obviously, this example doesn't cross over very well for Americans, who confused the issue when they simplified the spelling of 'harbour', 'favour' et al. Or maybe they do still teach you that rule anyway?)
The point is that we are taught several common word elements by their meaning rather than by their sound, and that's essential to being able to spell English (learning some of the root languages helps too, but that's really not a preschool skill). Therefore, even though phonics might indeed have a trend of producing better spellers, spelling in and of itself is not an auditory process, and therefore does not depend on auditory skill (luckily for me).
My conclusion is that phonics doesn't have exclusive rights to good spelling, but it does promote the skills required for good spelling (i.e. breaking down a word into its component parts).
In Which We Go Back to the Drawingboard
After all of that analysis, there's another line of research which shows that no matter what the method used, children learn to read better if they come from high literacy households. In other words, my ability to read might not be due to those early flashcards nor my school's conscientious phoneme teaching, but to the fact that both my parents enjoyed reading and my mother kept my bookcase well-stocked.
This matches a lot of what I've gleaned about early literacy and pre-reading skills. "Read to your child every day," is one of the most frequent pieces of professional advice I've been given since becoming a mother. Other things include having books around, having books accessible, discussing the stories with your child (you don't get much literary critique out of a toddler, but he likes finding the details in the pictures).
Also, little things you might not otherwise think about. Like running your finger along the line of text as you read. This helps them to make the connection between the spoken and written word, and it gets them used to the order in which words are laid out on the page. Left to right; top to bottom. One of the tips I've come across recently, which has produced interesting results, is to ask my son to point to where I should start reading. It's obvious when you think about it that a toddler won't necessarily know....
So What's My Dilemma?
Although I've been challenging the arguments for the phonics method, I do think it's a very good way of teaching children to read, and would definitely encourage every parent to teach their child the phonic alphabet rather than the standard A B C (don't worry, they'll pick the names of the letters up as well). I've always been impressed by how the Montessori method lays the foundation skills for reading and then pulls them all together.
Clearly, there's going to be a 'but'. I didn't write all the above just to end with: "Phonics FTW!" And that 'but' is that I'm a bookworm who learned to read early, that I don't remember a time before reading, so effectively, reading has always been an intrinsic part of who I am. To me, illiteracy seems like an incredible handicap. To not be able to read is to be denied access to a vast resource and shrinks your world immeasurably.
Because of this, I place a high priority on learning to read early. I even considered those 'teach your baby to read' DVDs, although I ultimately decided I didn't want to start the TV watching habit so young no matter what the purported benefits were. School-wise, it seems to be acceptable to have children reading around age five, but that just feels too late to me. (I understand the Waldorf teaching method does reading at age eight which practically gives me panic attacks.)
Most of this is my neuroses and the always dangerous desire to treat my children as an extension of myself rather than their own people. I certainly don't want to put my children under any pressure to read before they're ready for it, nor do I want to set myself up for Failure As A Mother by giving myself arbitrary deadlines that can't be met.
Still, considering how much of our society is dependent on the written word, I can't shake the feeling that the sooner children learn to read the better. And with that regard, if my son is showing an interest in learning, then I want to capitalise on that, even if he's a year away from getting the phonics down.
Seeing as I've been drafting this post for almost a week now (family distractions not helping!), I'm going to post as is, even if I've not quite figured out my own conclusion. Considering that I am in no way qualified, perhaps I shouldn't offer a conclusion anyway!
Research-wise, I've only scratched the surface of what's out there, but here are some of the webpages that discussed the topic without negative campaigning (I can't vouch for their accuracy):
Draw and/or offer your own conclusion. I'll probably post up mine once I've decided what it is. And then a year or two from now, I'll post up another conclusion... in retrospect.
If you have never dipped your toes into these controversial waters, these are the two principle methods of teaching people to read – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the two principle methods of reading. Sight-reading (or whole language) is done by learning to recognise the words themselves – if you learned to read using flashcards, you learned with sight-reading. The idea is that you don't learn the spoken word by putting sounds together, so why would you learn the written word that way? (Reading being analogous to listening not talking.) Phonics is about learning the sounds of letters and letter combinations. When encountering a word, the reader sounds out each letter to figure out what it is.
Put even more simply, sight-reading is visual, and phonics are auditory, just as their names suggest. Most of us, even if taught via phonics, ultimately read by sight-reading, instantly recognising familiar words. However, when we come across unfamiliar words, we tend to sound them out either aloud or in our heads, trying to correspond it with our oral vocabulary.
Learning how to process phonics is a skill that develops later, so you're unlikely to have success using the phonics method in a child under four, whereas babies can be taught to sight-read several words before their first birthday (according to the DVD ads). If you want to teach your child to read very early, sight-reading is the way to go. But, as the internet will tell you, teaching your child to read via sight-reading is setting him on the track to semi-literacy, giving him irrevocable bad habits.
I tend to be a little dubious of this since I learned to read by sight-reading, have always been far more comfortable with the written than the spoken word, am excellent at spelling and a dab hand at grammar (she says, blithely dooming herself to a post full of errors). Of course, it's entirely likely that I am the exception rather than the rule, but when it comes to learning to read, my best experience is myself, and so....
The Case Study of Myself
I don't actually remember a time before I could read; I was three when I learned. According to my parents, they were using flashcards with my older brother when I started calling out the answers. Shortly after that, I started hauling the books off them when they tried to read to me (I also have no memory of my parents reading to me, thanks to this early independent streak). I'm not a genius nor particularly intelligent. I just happened to be precocious in this regard.
I do remember being dumbfounded when I was four or five and saw my classmates stumbling over simple words with the teacher's assistance. I also remember that I was five or six when I read The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett, because it surprised me that the opening chapter described the heroine as 'only seven'. (And that certainly wasn't the first novel I'd read.) Reading was just never an issue to me. I usually only had to look at a word once to memorise it, spelling and all, and comprehension was instantaneous.
That's not to say I was never taught the phonics. I can't recall how my (British) primary school actually taught reading, because obviously they didn't have to teach me, but I do remember many lessons on the different letter combinations and sounds (and variations). I loved these. I still have nostalgia for the chain of words containing a different pronunciation of 'ough' (tough, trough, though, through, thorough).
When I was nine, my family moved to the States for the first time (this is a recurring event for us, apparently), and I did fourth and fifth grade there. It wasn't until this happened that I realised all those 'alternate' spellings I came across in books, such as 'color' for 'colour' were actually American spellings. This is my own personal proof that spelling can be learned by sight-reading, despite phonics proponents' protests to the contrary. I made the switch fairly comfortably, winning the school spelling bee in fifth grade before moving back to the UK to start high school, at which point I reverted to British spellings with little difficulty.
These days, though I live in the US again, I mostly write British English, although I don't find it too hard to get into an American spelling mindset. I have more trouble following American grammar rules by habit.
But why did things work out that way for me, when for some children at least, the sight-reading method is genuinely disastrous?
Well, for starters, I'm a visual learner, and I'm well aware that my auditory processing power is poor. I excelled in languages at school, but the only ones I could pursue to degree level were Latin and (ancient) Greek, dead languages that you are taught to read, not to speak. In modern languages, my greatest weakness was the oral and listening aspect.
When I started Italian, the teacher spent the first half of the first lesson teaching us orally. She wanted us to learn the pronunciation of the words before the spelling, because Italian rules of pronunciation differ so hugely from English. "Ciao!" is a perfect example. If she started writing such alien letter combinations on the board, she risked intimidating us hopelessly.
However, I was completely lost with her oral methods. I couldn't analyse the sounds of the words well enough to commit them to memory. For me, if for nobody else in the class, it only started coming together when she started writing on the board, and I could match letters to the sounds she was making. I don't know about anybody else, but whenever I say a word, I 'see' it written down in my mind's eye; when spelling aloud, I visualise the word, and read off the letters.
Obviously, this auditory failing could be a direct result of me being taught to sight-read. I definitely suspect that my own focus on visual learning methods prevented me from developing my auditory processing power to its full potential. How important is this? After all, learning to read prevents us from developing our full powers of memorisation. But as compensation, we have a far more effective way of recording information. Had I learned to read by phonics, I might be better at listening comprehension, but there's no guarantee that the written word would mean as much to me. Personally, I have no regrets, but it's not like there's a control in this particular experiment.
I should note, I'm not entirely brain-deaf. Just as I 'see' a word when I hear it spoken, I 'hear' it when I see it written down. I used to work as a secretary, and I was perfectly able to take dictation – but I was much faster at transcribing from written notes (much preferred that method too). And it's safe to say that I'll always choose a blog over a podcast.
So, that's my experience with learning to read.... what about my experience teaching reading?
The Montessori Approach
Before my son came along, I was working at the Montessori school that he now attends. I dealt with the two year old class mostly, but I also assisted in the Children's House (three to six year olds), so I know the basics of the Montessori method of reading.
Here's a summary, although please note that I am not a qualified teacher, and as such, I was never directly responsible for taking a child through reading, although I have assisted a child with each of the materials mentioned below.
- Lots of imprinting of the left to right order wherever it can possibly be applied.
- Practice breaking words into sounds using the I Spy box. This is a box containing miniatures of real world objects (for preference use three-letter, phonetically-spelt words: fox, hat, net, cup, pig, etc). These objects are lined up, and the teacher (or older child) says: "I spy with my little eye, something with a starting sound of [phoneme]." To start with, the teacher will point to the item meant, and the child will identify it. Gradually the child will correspond the sound with the initial sound of the word, and be able to identify without the pointing. From there the clue progresses to the 'end sound' or the 'middle sound', until the child can successfully break down the spoken word into its phonemes. In my experience, most children work this out by the age of four.
- Learning letters / phonemes using 'sandpaper sounds'. Tablets showing each letter of the alphabet in sandpaper (red tablets for consonants; blue for vowels). The child learns the phoneme for the sound and practises tracing it with their fore finger. This isn't done in any kind of order, but rather the sounds most likely to mean something to the child. For example, the first sound presented to them might be the initial letter of their name, or m for mother, d for daddy...
- Writing with the moveable alphabet. Plastic or wooden letters (again red for consonants and blue for vowels) that the child can lay out on a rug (sometimes along guiding lines) to create their own simple words (often prompted with the miniatures). Spelling is not emphasised or corrected, and the activity is referred to as 'writing'. As is common with the Montessori method, the child is given as active a role as possible, and therefore they are taught how to write their own words, rather than how to read the words of others.
So Montessori is essentially the phonics method.
Here's the catch: Maria Montessori was Italian. Italian is a phonemic language. 'Ciao' might look like a bizarre contortion of vowels to the English-speaker, but it's entirely logical to a native. 'Ci' is always going to be pronounced 'ch'; 'ao' will always be 'ow'. Once you're familiar with the rules of Italian pronunciation, you can pronounce any Italian word you see – and you should be able to spell any word you hear!
English is, of course, not a phonemic language. Its spelling is more likely to reflect the etymology of the word and thus give a clue to its meaning. For example, 'philosophy' keeps the Greek 'ph', so if you're familiar with Greek word-roots, you know that it's going to have something to do with loving wisdom. The Italian word is 'filosofia.' Sounds very similar, but without the 'ph' clue to its origins, it could just as easily come from a Latin root and actually mean something about thread.
While I can see that Maria Montessori's Italian students would soon be able to self-correct their own spelling, this won't be the case for their English-speaking counterparts. I never dealt with this myself in the classroom, so I've tried looking it up online, and it seems that there's no standard Montessori solution for teaching spelling, although most places default to spelling lists, and of course, they teach the various letter combinations.
Why Teaching Spelling Confuses Me
When I first heard about the phonics approach (in my teens), spelling always struck me as its greatest weakness. If a child is taught to read by sounding words out, rather than remembering how they look, aren't they going to find it impossible to spell? However, phonics proponents are always insistent that it's children who aren't taught by phonics who can't spell. The prevalence of this view leads me to assume that there must be a study somewhere that proved or at least indicated this (but let's just bear in mind that I'm being educated by Professor Google).
I think the logic here is that children who learn via phonics are taught to break down words in the first place, and take note of the individual letters. Which does make sense. Also, phonics means extensive memorisation of all the letter combinations for different sounds, which will give you a vast bank of word elements to draw from.
On the flipside, the most common words are the ones most likely to break the rules, and you're going to have to teach children fairly early on that 'their' (for example) is just spelled that way. Surely memorising such exceptions is ultimately using the visual part of their brain, and thus is sight-reading? Phonics still requires spelling lists, just as children taught to sight-read still learn their alphabet.
I'm equating spelling lists with flashcards here, which might be inaccurate in the first place. To me, either one is memorising a word.
One argument that I saw mentioned a few times in favour of phonics in my research is that phonics meant you had to learn every letter combination in the English language, but once you knew them all, you could read anything, whereas sight-reading would require somebody to read aloud to you every word in the English language.
This strikes me as a ludicrous thing to say, because there is no way in hell you can figure out the correct pronunciation of every word in the English language by phonics. I can make a bloody good stab at saying any obscure word you show me, but I know there are plenty of words in my vocabulary that I've never actually heard spoken aloud and thus I have my own imagined pronunciation.
The second ridiculous thing about this is that even if you are incapable of sounding out a word to match it to your oral vocabulary, you could still learn to recognise that word in that context and thus make it part of your reading vocabulary. It's clearly a very limited usage, but my point is, you can still read/comprehend a word you've never encountered before.
Back to spelling... As I said above, English spelling is more indicative of meaning than pronunciation. So as well as learning all the different sounds 'ough' can make, I remember being taught things like the suffix '-or' indicates a person who does something: doctor, professor, sculptor, actor... etc. etc. (Obviously, this example doesn't cross over very well for Americans, who confused the issue when they simplified the spelling of 'harbour', 'favour' et al. Or maybe they do still teach you that rule anyway?)
The point is that we are taught several common word elements by their meaning rather than by their sound, and that's essential to being able to spell English (learning some of the root languages helps too, but that's really not a preschool skill). Therefore, even though phonics might indeed have a trend of producing better spellers, spelling in and of itself is not an auditory process, and therefore does not depend on auditory skill (luckily for me).
My conclusion is that phonics doesn't have exclusive rights to good spelling, but it does promote the skills required for good spelling (i.e. breaking down a word into its component parts).
In Which We Go Back to the Drawingboard
After all of that analysis, there's another line of research which shows that no matter what the method used, children learn to read better if they come from high literacy households. In other words, my ability to read might not be due to those early flashcards nor my school's conscientious phoneme teaching, but to the fact that both my parents enjoyed reading and my mother kept my bookcase well-stocked.
This matches a lot of what I've gleaned about early literacy and pre-reading skills. "Read to your child every day," is one of the most frequent pieces of professional advice I've been given since becoming a mother. Other things include having books around, having books accessible, discussing the stories with your child (you don't get much literary critique out of a toddler, but he likes finding the details in the pictures).
Also, little things you might not otherwise think about. Like running your finger along the line of text as you read. This helps them to make the connection between the spoken and written word, and it gets them used to the order in which words are laid out on the page. Left to right; top to bottom. One of the tips I've come across recently, which has produced interesting results, is to ask my son to point to where I should start reading. It's obvious when you think about it that a toddler won't necessarily know....
So What's My Dilemma?
Although I've been challenging the arguments for the phonics method, I do think it's a very good way of teaching children to read, and would definitely encourage every parent to teach their child the phonic alphabet rather than the standard A B C (don't worry, they'll pick the names of the letters up as well). I've always been impressed by how the Montessori method lays the foundation skills for reading and then pulls them all together.
Clearly, there's going to be a 'but'. I didn't write all the above just to end with: "Phonics FTW!" And that 'but' is that I'm a bookworm who learned to read early, that I don't remember a time before reading, so effectively, reading has always been an intrinsic part of who I am. To me, illiteracy seems like an incredible handicap. To not be able to read is to be denied access to a vast resource and shrinks your world immeasurably.
Because of this, I place a high priority on learning to read early. I even considered those 'teach your baby to read' DVDs, although I ultimately decided I didn't want to start the TV watching habit so young no matter what the purported benefits were. School-wise, it seems to be acceptable to have children reading around age five, but that just feels too late to me. (I understand the Waldorf teaching method does reading at age eight which practically gives me panic attacks.)
Most of this is my neuroses and the always dangerous desire to treat my children as an extension of myself rather than their own people. I certainly don't want to put my children under any pressure to read before they're ready for it, nor do I want to set myself up for Failure As A Mother by giving myself arbitrary deadlines that can't be met.
Still, considering how much of our society is dependent on the written word, I can't shake the feeling that the sooner children learn to read the better. And with that regard, if my son is showing an interest in learning, then I want to capitalise on that, even if he's a year away from getting the phonics down.
Seeing as I've been drafting this post for almost a week now (family distractions not helping!), I'm going to post as is, even if I've not quite figured out my own conclusion. Considering that I am in no way qualified, perhaps I shouldn't offer a conclusion anyway!
Research-wise, I've only scratched the surface of what's out there, but here are some of the webpages that discussed the topic without negative campaigning (I can't vouch for their accuracy):
- Montessori Reading at Montessori Mom
- Phonics vs Sight Reading: the most important piece of information you need to know
- The Reading Wars: Phonics versus Whole Language
- Phonics vs Sight Words at Learn for Your Life
Draw and/or offer your own conclusion. I'll probably post up mine once I've decided what it is. And then a year or two from now, I'll post up another conclusion... in retrospect.
Monday, 21 November 2011
The appeal of Montessori
Although the term Montessori is floated a lot in parenting circles on the internet, your average parent doesn't have a real idea of what it is unless their child has attended a decent Montessori school. The 'decent' qualification there is because the term Montessori is not copywrited and any learning centre can use the phrase regardless of what their methods are.
If you want to find out precisely what Montessori is, I advise you to start with the wikipedia entry and Google. The nutshell background is that it was a teaching method developed by an Italian woman, Maria Montessori, for children with learning difficulties that she went on to apply to 'normal' children with great success.
This entry is for those of you want to know why Montessori? Is it just another way for unrealistic parents to jumpstart their offspring on the path to Oxbridge or the Ivy League? Is it simply the latest fad in child-raising? Is there really any benefit to these crazy educational theories? Bear in mind that you could get a million different answers to this question, but here's my personal view.
I discovered Montessori in 2007, when I knocked on the door of the local Montessori school looking for a job. When I first observed the children, I was blown away by how much they could do practically. Carrying trays, pouring water, cleaning and polishing work – any number of things that I simply would never have expected of a child under six.
I was a ridiculously impractical child, and I can't say I'm much better as an adult. The thing that really struck me was watching children of two and three neatly roll up rugs, since I clearly remember being incapable of doing that at the age of five.
For that alone, I would have been a convert to Montessori. It's too early to be sure if my children have inherited my lack of physical coordination, but my son has mastered rolling up a rug before his third birthday. (My daughter's only nine months... I should really give her a bit more time before introducing the skill.)
However, the thing that's really held my interest is how Montessori fosters independence. Previously, I'd assumed that any such idea meant that the child was allowed to do whatever it wanted to detrimental effect. Actually, Montessori sets very clear boundaries for appropriate behaviour. Here, independence is about taking responsibility for one's own actions.
For example, children use breakable tableware instead of plastic. If they do not use their plates and glasses properly, they get broken. I remember that my son threw a plate in a temper once and was clearly taken aback when it smashed to pieces. He's never done it again. Compare that to a child who throws a plastic plate. You can shout at them or enforce some other punishment but there's nothing that's going to have the same impact of illustrating why it's wrong.
Disclaimers: There probably are children out there who wouldn't care if their plates broke; I personally haven't come across one. Thrift stores / charity shops are your friend when it comes to supplying your child's tableware! Finally, I don't exclude plastic on principle; if I see an item that I like in plastic, I'll buy it.
The first time I put Montessori to use in a real life (i.e. outside the classroom) situation was when some friends visited with their three year old son, and their little boy knocked a drink over. Immediately, he threw himself down on the floor, hid his face and started crying in embarrassment, while his equally mortified parents scolded him.
I spoke to the boy directly, telling him to calm down and we would get him a paper towel to clean up his mess. Now that he had some positive action to take, he duly pulled himself together and mopped up the spill as well as a three year old could. I'm sure the embarrassment still lingered, but because we had given him the ability to fix his own error, there was no need to dwell on it.
This is hands down the biggest thing that I've taken from Montessori and applied to my own children. When they get themselves into a situation, what skills do they need to learn to get themselves out of it? With my daughter, that might just be giving her a chance to right herself when she topples over. With my son, it ranges from cleaning up his literal messes to saying 'sorry' for figurative ones (at which point I am supposed to stop being angry with him... that's the painfully difficult part on my end).
While I have become something of a rampant advocate for Montessori, I don't believe that it's an approach that will work for every child and certainly not for every family. What I really want is to get parents thinking about their approach to childcare and what their rationale is. Maria Montessori was a big believer that you learned best by figuring things out for yourself. By extension, we'll parent best by working out our own methods. All we need are the resources for learning.
If you want to find out precisely what Montessori is, I advise you to start with the wikipedia entry and Google. The nutshell background is that it was a teaching method developed by an Italian woman, Maria Montessori, for children with learning difficulties that she went on to apply to 'normal' children with great success.
This entry is for those of you want to know why Montessori? Is it just another way for unrealistic parents to jumpstart their offspring on the path to Oxbridge or the Ivy League? Is it simply the latest fad in child-raising? Is there really any benefit to these crazy educational theories? Bear in mind that you could get a million different answers to this question, but here's my personal view.
I discovered Montessori in 2007, when I knocked on the door of the local Montessori school looking for a job. When I first observed the children, I was blown away by how much they could do practically. Carrying trays, pouring water, cleaning and polishing work – any number of things that I simply would never have expected of a child under six.
I was a ridiculously impractical child, and I can't say I'm much better as an adult. The thing that really struck me was watching children of two and three neatly roll up rugs, since I clearly remember being incapable of doing that at the age of five.
For that alone, I would have been a convert to Montessori. It's too early to be sure if my children have inherited my lack of physical coordination, but my son has mastered rolling up a rug before his third birthday. (My daughter's only nine months... I should really give her a bit more time before introducing the skill.)
However, the thing that's really held my interest is how Montessori fosters independence. Previously, I'd assumed that any such idea meant that the child was allowed to do whatever it wanted to detrimental effect. Actually, Montessori sets very clear boundaries for appropriate behaviour. Here, independence is about taking responsibility for one's own actions.
For example, children use breakable tableware instead of plastic. If they do not use their plates and glasses properly, they get broken. I remember that my son threw a plate in a temper once and was clearly taken aback when it smashed to pieces. He's never done it again. Compare that to a child who throws a plastic plate. You can shout at them or enforce some other punishment but there's nothing that's going to have the same impact of illustrating why it's wrong.
Disclaimers: There probably are children out there who wouldn't care if their plates broke; I personally haven't come across one. Thrift stores / charity shops are your friend when it comes to supplying your child's tableware! Finally, I don't exclude plastic on principle; if I see an item that I like in plastic, I'll buy it.
The first time I put Montessori to use in a real life (i.e. outside the classroom) situation was when some friends visited with their three year old son, and their little boy knocked a drink over. Immediately, he threw himself down on the floor, hid his face and started crying in embarrassment, while his equally mortified parents scolded him.
I spoke to the boy directly, telling him to calm down and we would get him a paper towel to clean up his mess. Now that he had some positive action to take, he duly pulled himself together and mopped up the spill as well as a three year old could. I'm sure the embarrassment still lingered, but because we had given him the ability to fix his own error, there was no need to dwell on it.
This is hands down the biggest thing that I've taken from Montessori and applied to my own children. When they get themselves into a situation, what skills do they need to learn to get themselves out of it? With my daughter, that might just be giving her a chance to right herself when she topples over. With my son, it ranges from cleaning up his literal messes to saying 'sorry' for figurative ones (at which point I am supposed to stop being angry with him... that's the painfully difficult part on my end).
While I have become something of a rampant advocate for Montessori, I don't believe that it's an approach that will work for every child and certainly not for every family. What I really want is to get parents thinking about their approach to childcare and what their rationale is. Maria Montessori was a big believer that you learned best by figuring things out for yourself. By extension, we'll parent best by working out our own methods. All we need are the resources for learning.
Saturday, 19 November 2011
The Story so Far
In 2005, my husband and I made the decision to accept a job he'd been offered in the States. At the time, we were newly-weds living in the UK. Obviously this was going to have a major impact on our lives, although we didn't realize quite how much. Six years later, I look back at what that acceptance has meant to me personally and find it hard to believe that my first instinct was to say "No."
There are three very specific ways in which it changed our lives. The first one was that my husband's salary would be enough for us to live on (which was kind of a necessity if we were going to uproot ourselves for the sake of one income). Being free of any dependence on my salary meant that we could start a family and that I could be a stay at home mother. That last was something I always believed in very strongly until I became familiar with the actual logistics of parenting!
Accordingly, once we'd settled down into our new home and my husband had had his contract confirmed, we went off birth control and started not-preventing a baby. And as the months went by, we started trying, and then trying harder...
Secondly, I had to leave my own job as a secretary. I had never been particularly career-motivated, and because we were planning for a baby, I did not take finding a new job in the States entirely seriously, although I did want to be doing something other than twiddling my thumbs and counting the days between periods. More or less on a whim, I knocked on the door of the local Montessori School asking about secretarial work. The next thing I knew, I'd been talked into co-teaching the toddler class with another lady.
I hadn't had any dealings with small children for a good ten years--in fact, part of the reason I accepted was that I figured it would be good experience before I became a Mum myself. I had never heard of Montessori before. Yet while I was predictably nervous and incompetent at first, I realised early on that I loved it, and after a few months had gone by, I realised I was good at it. All my life, I'd had no idea what I wanted to do when I grew up. A few months before my thirtieth birthday (in 2007), I finally figured it out.
However, we were no closer to starting a family more than a year after we'd started trying. I knew that if twelve months of regular unprotected sex doesn't get you pregnant, you're considered infertile. I also knew that my periods had always been irregular, although I'd been burying my head in the sand against that fact. My cycles were getting longer and longer, and some online research was doing nothing to help me 'monitor' my fertility.
So I went to my doctor, suggesting that I might have Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (thank-you, Dr Google). She was dubious since I was thin and not overly hairy. She told me I should probably just relax (I managed not to throttle her) but had my blood tested anyway. The results came back indicating PCOS, and after discussing our options, she referred us to a fertility clinic.
This is where the third impact of my husband's job came into play. Our insurance covered fertility treatments. We didn't realise it at the time, but that is practically unheard of. So it was that when a few months of pills didn't work, we were able to progress to IVF without having to worry about our finances. And of course, because we had the option of doing multiple tries, we got pregnant first time and had our son in 2008.
I was sorry to leave my school, but I was given the option of working part-time and bringing my son with me. Honestly, I wasn't much more than a glorified cleaning lady at that point, but being able to carry on with something I loved without sacrificing my time with my son? That's definitely having my cake and eating it too.
I especially loved the fact that from six weeks old, my son was exposed to a Montessori environment. When he started school 'officially' in 2011, he settled in easily, and I had the advantage of knowing his teachers and routine intimately.
I had always wanted two children, so in 2010, we went back to the IVF drugs. One stimulation and one frozen cycle later, I was pregnant again. Our daughter was born in 2011, by which point I had left working at the school altogether, barring occasional helping out.
So here I am. A stay at home Mum of two children, a healthy boy and girl (plus cats and a husband!). I know exactly where my career track is going but I have the luxury of choosing when to start it up again. To all intents and purposes, my wishes have come true... Do I now find out the meaning behind the phrase "Be careful what you wish for"?
Not really. It's not all as rosy as I pictured it, and I complain far more than I have any right to. But usually I feel like it's all been too easy, and I'm deeply grateful for the twists of fate that brought me to this point. There's a superstitious side of me that's waiting for my luck to run out, but for now, I'm focused on this parenting thing with a twist of Montessori.
There are three very specific ways in which it changed our lives. The first one was that my husband's salary would be enough for us to live on (which was kind of a necessity if we were going to uproot ourselves for the sake of one income). Being free of any dependence on my salary meant that we could start a family and that I could be a stay at home mother. That last was something I always believed in very strongly until I became familiar with the actual logistics of parenting!
Accordingly, once we'd settled down into our new home and my husband had had his contract confirmed, we went off birth control and started not-preventing a baby. And as the months went by, we started trying, and then trying harder...
Secondly, I had to leave my own job as a secretary. I had never been particularly career-motivated, and because we were planning for a baby, I did not take finding a new job in the States entirely seriously, although I did want to be doing something other than twiddling my thumbs and counting the days between periods. More or less on a whim, I knocked on the door of the local Montessori School asking about secretarial work. The next thing I knew, I'd been talked into co-teaching the toddler class with another lady.
I hadn't had any dealings with small children for a good ten years--in fact, part of the reason I accepted was that I figured it would be good experience before I became a Mum myself. I had never heard of Montessori before. Yet while I was predictably nervous and incompetent at first, I realised early on that I loved it, and after a few months had gone by, I realised I was good at it. All my life, I'd had no idea what I wanted to do when I grew up. A few months before my thirtieth birthday (in 2007), I finally figured it out.
However, we were no closer to starting a family more than a year after we'd started trying. I knew that if twelve months of regular unprotected sex doesn't get you pregnant, you're considered infertile. I also knew that my periods had always been irregular, although I'd been burying my head in the sand against that fact. My cycles were getting longer and longer, and some online research was doing nothing to help me 'monitor' my fertility.
So I went to my doctor, suggesting that I might have Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (thank-you, Dr Google). She was dubious since I was thin and not overly hairy. She told me I should probably just relax (I managed not to throttle her) but had my blood tested anyway. The results came back indicating PCOS, and after discussing our options, she referred us to a fertility clinic.
This is where the third impact of my husband's job came into play. Our insurance covered fertility treatments. We didn't realise it at the time, but that is practically unheard of. So it was that when a few months of pills didn't work, we were able to progress to IVF without having to worry about our finances. And of course, because we had the option of doing multiple tries, we got pregnant first time and had our son in 2008.
I was sorry to leave my school, but I was given the option of working part-time and bringing my son with me. Honestly, I wasn't much more than a glorified cleaning lady at that point, but being able to carry on with something I loved without sacrificing my time with my son? That's definitely having my cake and eating it too.
I especially loved the fact that from six weeks old, my son was exposed to a Montessori environment. When he started school 'officially' in 2011, he settled in easily, and I had the advantage of knowing his teachers and routine intimately.
I had always wanted two children, so in 2010, we went back to the IVF drugs. One stimulation and one frozen cycle later, I was pregnant again. Our daughter was born in 2011, by which point I had left working at the school altogether, barring occasional helping out.
So here I am. A stay at home Mum of two children, a healthy boy and girl (plus cats and a husband!). I know exactly where my career track is going but I have the luxury of choosing when to start it up again. To all intents and purposes, my wishes have come true... Do I now find out the meaning behind the phrase "Be careful what you wish for"?
Not really. It's not all as rosy as I pictured it, and I complain far more than I have any right to. But usually I feel like it's all been too easy, and I'm deeply grateful for the twists of fate that brought me to this point. There's a superstitious side of me that's waiting for my luck to run out, but for now, I'm focused on this parenting thing with a twist of Montessori.
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