State of Erika at 5 years of age
My little girl turned 5 a week ago. I am amazed how eager she is to read and write. She does both things all the time, spontaneously and with no prompting on my part. She reads all the signs in sight, and scribbles little one-sentence "stories" about princesses, girls, mothers and sisters, as well as her day care friends. She can't yet spell words correctly, much less master punctuation. Even the concept of a space between words still escapes her. She is just as likely to run words together, as separate them with a space.
The irregular rules of English spelling make the learning curve especially steep. Erika often tries to figure out how to spell a word from individual sounds, and makes conclusions that are logical, but wrong. For example, she'll be trying to sound out the word "baby": B, A, E, B, E. And so she'll write: "baebe hookraid oldtaem" -- that's "baby who cried all the time". If English language was phonetic, she may be writing correctly in no time. As it is, she'll have to master a million of arbitrary rules before she can write fluently.
I just hope her desire to read and write won't be stomped out when she starts school. It's a common lament among parents that school, with its "teaching for the test", one-size-fits-all approach that's geared towards the lowest-performing students, and pointless busywork, kills a child's desire to learn. I don't think it necessarily has to be that way -- I grew up in a school system where one-size-fits-all approach was also standard, and tailoring curriculum to individual children was unthinkable (both because of student/teacher ratio and for ideological reasons); but in my opinion, genuinely curious students were able to make school interesting for themselves. But I'm not familiar with American school system, so I can't speak.
She recently surprised me by knowing 2-times multiplication tables. For single digits, at least.
She is adjusting to two-household living situation well enough. The main thing she doesn't like about living with me is that I have an apartment, not a house. Her dad got the house in divorce. Obviously, he has more space, but I think she's mainly thrilled about dad's house because it has two floors. She loves being able to roam up and down. So she keeps asking me when I'm going to buy a house. I tell her houses cost a lot of money, and I can't buy one right now; I omit that I am deeply ambivalent about ever buying real estate again, since I don't want to be saddled with mortgage and the headaches of the housing market ups and downs.
Even as she's making progress in the academic front, sometimes she surprises me by how much she's still a child in her reasoning, and how much of the fundamental knowledge of the world she has not yet absorbed. For example, the day after spending her 5th birthday with me, she went to dad's house. She told me excitedly that she was going to tell dad she turned five! I said, do you think he doesn't know? She replied: No, he didn't see me turn five, I was at daycare that day!
The irregular rules of English spelling make the learning curve especially steep. Erika often tries to figure out how to spell a word from individual sounds, and makes conclusions that are logical, but wrong. For example, she'll be trying to sound out the word "baby": B, A, E, B, E. And so she'll write: "baebe hookraid oldtaem" -- that's "baby who cried all the time". If English language was phonetic, she may be writing correctly in no time. As it is, she'll have to master a million of arbitrary rules before she can write fluently.
I just hope her desire to read and write won't be stomped out when she starts school. It's a common lament among parents that school, with its "teaching for the test", one-size-fits-all approach that's geared towards the lowest-performing students, and pointless busywork, kills a child's desire to learn. I don't think it necessarily has to be that way -- I grew up in a school system where one-size-fits-all approach was also standard, and tailoring curriculum to individual children was unthinkable (both because of student/teacher ratio and for ideological reasons); but in my opinion, genuinely curious students were able to make school interesting for themselves. But I'm not familiar with American school system, so I can't speak.
She recently surprised me by knowing 2-times multiplication tables. For single digits, at least.
She is adjusting to two-household living situation well enough. The main thing she doesn't like about living with me is that I have an apartment, not a house. Her dad got the house in divorce. Obviously, he has more space, but I think she's mainly thrilled about dad's house because it has two floors. She loves being able to roam up and down. So she keeps asking me when I'm going to buy a house. I tell her houses cost a lot of money, and I can't buy one right now; I omit that I am deeply ambivalent about ever buying real estate again, since I don't want to be saddled with mortgage and the headaches of the housing market ups and downs.
Even as she's making progress in the academic front, sometimes she surprises me by how much she's still a child in her reasoning, and how much of the fundamental knowledge of the world she has not yet absorbed. For example, the day after spending her 5th birthday with me, she went to dad's house. She told me excitedly that she was going to tell dad she turned five! I said, do you think he doesn't know? She replied: No, he didn't see me turn five, I was at daycare that day!