Erika is 6
This isn't a comprehensive update on Erika -- that would be the sum total of my tweets about her, since tweets capture the things that go through her head better than anything. Maybe I should consolidate them into one post and put them up here. Anyway, Erika is now six. She turned six on the day of my parents' arrival (my dad was here too for a week on his way back home from Michigan State University, where he worked in April).
This year Erika finished kindergarten (for my non-US friends, that's the first year of formal public education in the US, kind of like grade zero). She can read books meant for children twice her age. She also likes being a little know-it-all who'll tell you that the proper continents are not Europe and Asia, but Eurasia and Australasia (though she's wrong about the latter -- Australasia is a region of islands in the Pacific, not a continent). At the moment she's on a geography kick. She likes to ask people a "trick" question: what is the capital of the world? Then she reveals triumphantly that there is no capital of the world. Same for the president of the world.
She likes to play way more computer games than she should. Unfortunately, most of them are just brain candy, like Barbie dressup, or pet grooming, where you blow-dry a poodle by passing a mouse cursor over it. I tried to teach her programming with Scratch, a children's programming environment that teaches software concepts by way of colorful puzzle pieces that snap together, each representing a programming "unit", such as a loop. It lets you set an avatar against a background of your choice and animate it, making it dance or wave or something. Unfortunately, Erika has found it to be more work than fun. But I need to get her back to it. I want to push her beyond her immediate interests, but I don't want her to get an early impression that programming is a dull chore. That would only put her off of it. It's a fine line to walk.
Erika's knowledge of Lithuanian language has improved since my mom has been here; Erika now not only understands Lithuanian, but sometimes says simple sentences in it (2 words at most). At the very least, she inserts Lithuanian words into English sentences. That's better than nothing. She can also read Lithuanian children's books, taking into account different pronunciations of the same sounds in Lithuanian and English (one is a phonetic language, the other is not). How much of it she understands is a different question. :-)
She can do addition and subtraction of small numbers well enough, and even some multiplication and division; but oddly, she does better with numbers 4 and 5 and their multiples, than with most other numbers. She can tell you how much is 4 times 4, but if you ask how much is sixteen plus sixteen, she'll be off by a multiple of four. Of course, the programmer in me is pleased that she is partial to a power of 2. :-) And this is an improvement over a time not too long ago when, if you asked her how much is 3 times 5, she would answer "35". I can vaguely recall when I was of similar age and made the same mistakes. So, Erika often shows some glimpses of understanding multiplication and division, but not yet consistently.
This year Erika finished kindergarten (for my non-US friends, that's the first year of formal public education in the US, kind of like grade zero). She can read books meant for children twice her age. She also likes being a little know-it-all who'll tell you that the proper continents are not Europe and Asia, but Eurasia and Australasia (though she's wrong about the latter -- Australasia is a region of islands in the Pacific, not a continent). At the moment she's on a geography kick. She likes to ask people a "trick" question: what is the capital of the world? Then she reveals triumphantly that there is no capital of the world. Same for the president of the world.
She likes to play way more computer games than she should. Unfortunately, most of them are just brain candy, like Barbie dressup, or pet grooming, where you blow-dry a poodle by passing a mouse cursor over it. I tried to teach her programming with Scratch, a children's programming environment that teaches software concepts by way of colorful puzzle pieces that snap together, each representing a programming "unit", such as a loop. It lets you set an avatar against a background of your choice and animate it, making it dance or wave or something. Unfortunately, Erika has found it to be more work than fun. But I need to get her back to it. I want to push her beyond her immediate interests, but I don't want her to get an early impression that programming is a dull chore. That would only put her off of it. It's a fine line to walk.
Erika's knowledge of Lithuanian language has improved since my mom has been here; Erika now not only understands Lithuanian, but sometimes says simple sentences in it (2 words at most). At the very least, she inserts Lithuanian words into English sentences. That's better than nothing. She can also read Lithuanian children's books, taking into account different pronunciations of the same sounds in Lithuanian and English (one is a phonetic language, the other is not). How much of it she understands is a different question. :-)
She can do addition and subtraction of small numbers well enough, and even some multiplication and division; but oddly, she does better with numbers 4 and 5 and their multiples, than with most other numbers. She can tell you how much is 4 times 4, but if you ask how much is sixteen plus sixteen, she'll be off by a multiple of four. Of course, the programmer in me is pleased that she is partial to a power of 2. :-) And this is an improvement over a time not too long ago when, if you asked her how much is 3 times 5, she would answer "35". I can vaguely recall when I was of similar age and made the same mistakes. So, Erika often shows some glimpses of understanding multiplication and division, but not yet consistently.