Spell-ing-bound

Aparna asked me how to spell "use". So I did. Surprised by how it was spelt, she said, "Oh! I thought it would it be 'yuos'. Strange!" She moved on with her play and I started thinking about how she would have arrived at that spelling. She must have added ’s’ to ‘you’. I have noticed her swap letters often when she writes and since her way of spelling “you” is actually “yuo”, “use” becomes “yuos”. It never fails to tickle me that she reads a “the” just fine and yet writes it as “teh”.

Three years ago when Aparna started writing, like many children, would draw mirror images of several letters and numbers. I wondered about what caused this and why she could not tell the two versions apart. Since I did not understand how her mental model worked, I thought I shouldn’t correct it either; so I simply let her be.

She once enthusiastically showed a story that she had written to an aunt. The well-meaning aunt immediately started pointed out all the “mistakes” – the reversed letters and the misspellings. Aparna felt embarrassed and rushed to me and said angrily, “Why did you not point out my mistakes?” I remember saying something like, “Well, I could clearly read and understand every word and sentence in your story. And that is what matters.” She must have understood that I was being honest and instantly stopped being bothered about her aunt’s remarks.

Now, when she looks at her stories that were written a year or two ago, Aparna is amused to notice how she had drawn some of her letters (and yet fails to notice that some other letters continue to stay reversed even now). As the instances of her unusual penmanship come down, as parents we feel nostalgic.

⩤⩥

We were at a restaurant with the kids and a friend. Since the wait was long, our friend started playing a little math game with Aparna (6 then). He wrote the following on a piece of paper and asked her to figure out the answer. 

 

This took Aparna unusually long and her answer was an unbelievable ‘48’! How on earth did she arrive at that? Our friend, a sensitive parent, must have decided not to put Aparna on the spot. He quickly moved on to the next problem on his list. Dev was curious to know Aparna’s logic behind the answer. He started out by asking her what the first number in the above problem was. Aparna’s reply was “66, of course!” That explained the answer; because that is the way her reversed ‘66’ would look like. Our friend was apologetic about the way he had written his ‘22’.

Math and Writing

Here is a short account of how my children started to do divisions and how it led to an unexpected learning outcome.

We had found that basic numeracy was easy for our children to acquire, so much so that we hardly remember how it came about. We never really sat down to do math with them. As she went about her daily chores, Hema had always liked to involve the children, and little by little, in the course of talking about things, both the kids acquired a sound number sense along with a good handle on how to add and subtract.

Before we homeschooled, Abhinav went to two different "liberal" schools in California for 3 years, where at the end, he was expected to do some simple addition and subtraction of mostly one or two digit numbers. Abhi was already numerically competent, so none of this interested him. Unsurprisingly, as the other parents and the teacher told us, Abhinav was rather bored in the class and was often creating trouble. However he continued to be fascinated with math and we let him explore his interest on the Khan Academy website.

One day, while playing with an addition/subtraction math practice program on the website, Abhinav, 7 at that time, got curious about a math symbol he hadn't seen before. So he asked me. I said "This is division" and then remembered my own childhood difficulties about learning this, so I added, "This is too advanced for you." He wanted me to tell him anyway, and as I was forced to respond, my sense of responsibility yielded a simple way to present this idea. I said, "6 divided by 2 means we find out how many 2's are in 6." He chewed on this unblinkingly for a couple of seconds and then said, "But you told me this was hard!" He went back online and spent the next hour or so absorbed in playing with the division practice program.

Sometime later, my daughter, Aparna, then 5, wanted to know this division thingy too. By this time I was more willing to question my own assumptions about what was hard, so I gave her the same simple explanation that I had given her brother earlier. And it worked this time as well. She was so thrilled with this new learning that over the next several weeks she would ask either my wife or me for division problems and then proceed to tackle them with relish.

Soon, I was beginning to get bored with this routine and had to think up something new to keep my own interest from flagging. I started making certain formulaic stories that featured a seriously math-challenged dad and his two children, a girl and her little brother (an example will follow). The stories always climaxed with a division challenge that stumped the hapless dad, and then the two kids would easily do the division and present the solution to the astonished dad. In the telling of the story, I would stop it just before the problem was solved. Then I allowed Aparna to have a go at it first, and I remember clearly how her face would be agog, waiting for this moment. She would scrunch up her face in total concentration and then furiously start calculating. And finally when she had the answer, be very tickled by how the dad in the story can find this so difficult. We must have played this game for months and Aparna never got tired of it.

While she had been interested in many things, Aparna had never wanted to write. This situation changed suddenly last year when she picked up a little notebook and wrote a story about the math-challenged dad. The story is reproduced below with Aparna's permission. (Please note that the story has been reproduced exactly, alternate spellings and all.)

So ultimately, what had started as a math activity, ended up becoming an exploration of the writing process.

- Dev

How many autos? (A story by Aparna Jain)

One [day] the father went to a big big parck. With his family. On the way thay had to take 3 buses 2 autos. Instead of sitting he started to count the autos. After they were ther they let the kids go to the playgrond and ther was a session you can make somthing and go sell it so they went ther. The kid's friends had com so the kids played. whith ther friends. This session was about organic food. When it was lunch time ther was organic food so they ate whith everyone. When they went back home the kids asked ther dad what did you count anything today.

Oh! When we wher going ther in the bus I counted the autos weels, 96. How many autos?  Now readers figure out the answer.

Note to non-Indian readers: The "auto" referred to here is a three-wheeled taxi common in India.

Is “CAT” not “DUCK”?

Abhi being my first child, I was quite ambitious about teaching him. I liked the idea of how English was being taught using Phonics. Since I didn’t learn English that way, I was quite interested in this new method. I watched a children’s video of LeapFrog on Phonics and liked it immediately. Abhi and I watched the video together a few times and before long he had all the sounds right. Armed with this new skill, I was all set to teach Abhi to read/write English. He was less than three then. This is how our conversation went:

Me: “hey Abhi! Do you want to learn to spell words in English?”

He: (probably didn’t understand what I was talking about) “okay!”

Me: “Now, what sound does the letter C make?”

He: “\k\”

Me: “And the letter A?”

He: “\a\”

Me: “And the letter T?”

He: “\t\”

Me: “Now we have three sounds – \k\, \a\, \t\. Can you put them together?”

He: (draws a blank)

Me: “Can you repeat the three sounds in quick succession – \k\, \a\, \t\and again \k\, \a\, \t\?”

He: (faithfully follows my instruction)

Me: “okay, do you recognize the word that you are trying to say?”

He: (no answer)

Me: “I can join you in repeating these sounds and this time we will say these three sounds, one after the other, a little bit faster than before”.

He: (is lost. In my eagerness to teach him, I fail to read his cues)

Me: “Now do you know the word that we are trying to say? I will give you a hint. It is a small animal that we see around often.”

He: (relieved that he has found the answer that would please me, his face glows) “I know! It is DUCK!”

I was totally flabbergasted. It took me a few seconds to hug him and laugh with him. This was a moment of revelation for me. I realized a lot of things that have helped me and guided me since then:

- learning is not necessarily linear -- just because he learned the individual sounds, it didn’t mean that he could put those sounds together

- learning without an appropriate context is meaningless

- trusting the child’s instinct and enjoying child-initiated learning, whenever it happens

Luckily, for him and also for me, I stopped “teaching” him after this episode. The insight that I gained helped Aparna too (In which I realized that it is not necessary to “teach” reading).

-- Hema

In which I realized that it is not necessary to “teach” reading

We were living in California when Aparna was five. She had been going to a pre-school for three years. There was no reading or writing taught at her pre-school. I was busy with a multitude of things and didn’t have the time to sit down to teach her either. Looking back, my inability to teach her proved to be fortuitous.

At some point around this time, Aparna suddenly expressed a great deal of interest in learning to read. She would bring her tiny books, sit on the kitchen counter as I worked, and with complete focus try to figure out the letters and words. In the beginning, she would badger me for help with almost every word she came across. It was a surprise to me that she had begun to do this without ever having completely “learned” the alphabet but in a short time she was sight-reading small words. So complete was her absorption in this new activity, she read nearly all day and everywhere, making sure to even carry some books in the car as we went about our daily lives.

It was clear to me that her reading didn’t follow a linear curve. She didn’t have a way to “grade” the books: to her reading a “level 1” book was the same as reading a “level 3” one, as long as the picture in the cover interested her. A lot of times when she stumbled upon either new or difficult words, I heard her substitute those words with other words she knew – sometimes matching the context and other times not so much. When she had a burning interest in a story she was reading, she even refused to listen to our bedtime stories, preferring instead to finish her own reading. This way, her interest and ability to read grew steadily for about six months.

One day she came to me holding in her little hands our paperback copy of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”. She wanted me to read it to her. Children often want to emulate older siblings, so her interest perhaps came from the fact that Abhi was at that time reading the second Harry Potter book. My immediate response was, “Aparna, you are too small for this book. You won’t be able to understand most of it”. She insisted I “just” read the first 10 pages to her, which I happily did. After that I moved on to my work in the kitchen. She was back in about 15 minutes, eyes red and looking obviously exhausted. She caught her breath to tell me, “Amma, I have read the 11^th page. Now, will you read the 12^th page for me?” I didn’t believe what I just heard. My inner voice said, “How could she have read and understood this book?” Again I was thinking linearly and she wasn’t. I picked up the book and started with a quick recap of the happenings on page 11. Clearly surprised by the wasted gesture, she impatiently said, “Amma, I have already read page 11. Go on to the next page!” She just needed to know what happened on page 12. And that interest kept her going.

Aparna is almost seven now and continues to be an avid reader. She stays at home with us, doesn’t go to school. We enjoy doing a variety of things together as a family – music, community gardening, cooking, reading/writing, playing etc.
-- Hema

Writing Tamil. No, wait, Hindi really.

Now that we are in Tamil Nadu, I feel the need to learn to read/write Tamil. I talk about this to my kids as well -- I ask them if they want to learn to read Tamil too. Aparna shows no interest but Abhi says he wants to write Hindi. Okay. That doesn't quite follow from the earlier conversation but nature has no straight lines and I have learned to not be surprised with this child.
Abhi says, "First, teach me the Hindi alphabet."

I reply, "I don't know the full alphabet but I can show you how to write words."

Perhaps because the older brother is interested, Aparna is now interested as well.  So I sit down, flanked on either side by a kid, and start to write some words they know. Since both of them speak Hindi we are not attempting to read/write it while at the same time trying to learn the language, which is a different order of beast altogether.
I write, "आम" and "Aam", "अभिनव " and "Abhinav", "कुत्ता" and "kutta", "भूत" and "bhooth", and so on. Along the way we make frequent stops to talk about "matras" (diacritics) or the process of attaching vowels to the consonants. Soon we have a small collection of words, with a significant number of vowels, consonants and matras. We now begin to construct new words from old. Either one of them volunteers a word, or I suggest one to write. One of them suggests "shit", so we write "टट्टी" and "tatti", and as I sound it out they both laugh. No surprises there, scatological explorations are always funny. We continue like this for about forty minutes and then it is time for bed.

The next day Abhi wakes up with an idea. He has been working on a comic strip, and now he wants to write it in two languages. As he constructs the strip, his new idea is to leave all the speech bubbles blank. He wants to make a xerox copy of the strip and come back and fill in the speech bubbles, English in one copy and Hindi in the other. The copying will come later. For now he numbers the speech bubbles and on a separate piece of paper writes his dialog, first in English and then keeps coming to me for help with writing the Hindi version.
Some of the things he writes:
"Meanwhile..." and "इस बीच...",
"Ha! I am here." and "हा!, मैं आ गया ।",
and so on.

So now he has another reason to learn to write Hindi.


- Dev