Early in this blog I believe I addressed our participation in the Mozart Experiment. You know the old yarn about playing Mozart for small kids all the time and they do better at math and science and music when they are older. Partly I did it because I am a firm believer in background noise. I need it to sleep. Without it, EVERY noise in the world around me wakes me up, no matter how inconsequential that noise might be. Plus, I figured it would also cover up more consequential noises, like us coming up and down the stairs or whatever else might be going on in the house while the kids are trying to sleep. And, so, the choice was either to play a variety of popular music or something with a bit more cultural staying power. And going with Mozart MIGHT have added benefits, so why not?
Well, now we're finally getting to the age where we might be seeing some payoff, if such is forthcoming.
And, actually, I'm not entirely sure what to think. Gabe is actually pretty good at math. He can add and subtract numbers as long as the total isn't more than 20 with pretty fair regularity. Which, to my way of thinking, seems pretty impressive for a kindergartener. I can't even remember when I learned to add and subtract, but I can't imagine we started learning it before 1st grade. Maybe 2nd. Things were MUCH easier in school when I was a kid. Frankly, I think their expectations on these young kids are a bit unrealistic and might be breeding a generation of kids who fear and hate school.
I'm kind of afraid this is what's happening with Gabe, and might be one of the reasons why he's wanting to stay home from school now.
They put a pretty heavy emphasis on kids being able to pretty much read by the time they get out of kindergarten. They have a list of a few dozen sight words that they have to know, but they've also got to be sounding words out and, well, pretty much reading by the time they are done.
Again, that wasn't even really an option when I was five years old. We didn't even begin to tackle that kind of thing until 1st grade, and I think it was at least 2nd grade before any of us were really reading reliably well.
Anyway, Gabe hasn't made a ton of progress on his sight words yet. His writing isn't really progressing very quickly either. I just don't think his brain is where it needs to be developmentally yet to process the information and get his hands to work the way they need to for him to be fully successful with this stuff, and I think it might be frustrating him enough that he wants to stay home from school.
And, really, it is a bit unfair. I mean, I always sort of figured he was going to have some attention problems throughout his school career. He's high energy and has never been known as a ponderer of things. PLUS, he's one of the youngest kids in his class. There are kids almost a full year older in there, and of course those kids don't have any problems reading or writing.
Nonetheless, we've been spending time with a stack of sight word flashcards trying to get him to commit them to memory. And I have to admit that it is one of the most frustrating exercises I've ever experienced. We will sit with only five cards. Show him each card, have him sound them out, and then repeat the cards a half dozen times. Same five cards. And last week we did the same five cards for the entire school week. And he's yet to memorize four of the five cards. And the fifth one he's kind of unreliable on. He's fidgety and uncomfortable and visibly miserable the entire time that we're working on these cards, and we can't seem to find a good way to get him to remember what he's doing.
I blame Mozart. He made Gabe good at math but compensated by making him suck at reading.
Except, Norah has also been listening to the same music and . . . well . . . I won't be the least bit surprised if Norah gets these sight words knocked out before Gabe does. Unlike Gabe, who's all over the place and barely paying attention while we're working on these words, Norah's attention has been pretty well locked in, and I'm pretty sure she has stopped saying what the words are when we show them just because she doesn't want to get in trouble for giving them up to Gabe. She might be a prodigy or something. At the very least, I suspect she will have FAR fewer troubles adapting to the academic aspects of school life than Gabe is having.
It will be interesting to see how the rest of this school year plays out.
Saturday, January 19, 2013
Progress Report
The school experience is proving interesting for all of us. It's . . . weird. Part of me can think back and remember experiencing the things that Gabe is going through, but I often can't, for the life of me, remember what I did (or what others did) to help me figure out how to do things. And I think we're getting to see some glimpses into what Gabe's (and Norah's) schooling future is going to be like.
1) Pretty much on a daily basis, Gabe is making up stuff that happens at school. Every day, on the way home from school, I ask him what he did and he will say, "Nothing." So I will press with more specific questions, like if he had P.E. or Art or what he had for lunch or who he played with at recess. And then he will tell me something. Because I've had no reason to doubt what he's saying, I've taken everything he's said at face value, but several times in the past couple weeks, I've followed up with something that had to do with his original response, and find out that he was making up what he said initially. For instance, yesterday he said that they were having recess inside because it was still cold outside. This morning, I dressed him in a lighter coat, figuring that he would be fine if they were going to be playing in the gym instead of outside. At which point he admitted that he had actually played outside yesterday and might need a big coat. Which baffles me. He said he was "teasing" me. Why? I asked and he had no answer, which he often doesn't.
I suspect that he's honing his lying skills. Which I have mixed feelings about. As I've discussed before, I'm not sure how I'm supposed to feel about my kids' lying skills. On the one hand, if they are good at it, it will VASTLY complicate my life, and I don't like having a complicated life. On the other hand, being a good liar will, well, undoubtedly help them throughout their lives. It's an ugly truth, but it is a truth. I HOPE that they will only use their skills for good--to get out of work or to con an evil super-villain into revealing his master plan so they can thwart it--but that's all I can do, really, is hope.
I suspect this because:
2) Gabe is already trying to get out of school. I'm not sure what's brought it on, but ever since the Christmas break, he's been VERY eager to not have to go to school. Which is unfortunate. Up to this point he's pretty much loved everything about school. But he even dabbled with saying he was feeling sick this morning so that he could stay home (and he dabbled with it again this afternoon, saying he had a sick stomach, so that I would go to the store and buy him a bottle of Sprite, which he decided was all that he was going to drink from now on). I get where he's coming from. I had a storied past of faking sick to get out of school. I didn't DITCH school, mind you. That would have entailed falsifying documents saying that I was excused and all sorts of complicated things--way more effort than the payoff would have been worth. I simply faked sick, which was, in itself, excused and pretty simple (thanks to Mom going along with it as she did so often). Sure, in high school it meant that, instead of ditching class and going out and doing something fun (which is what I assume the point of ditching must be) that I was, for all intents and purposes, just taking the day off to lay around in bed and read comic books, but people have different priorities, I guess.
But I had rather hoped that he wouldn't want to start taking sick days and missing school until he was at least old enough to have real homework assignments and real tests to want to get out of doing. Right now, he's just getting out of coloring and recess and eating lunch and doing some basic number and letter work. I wonder if it's related to:
3) I'm starting to get the feeling that Gabe is getting a little discouraged about some things:
3a) A little over a week ago, I picked Gabe up at the bus and then we went straight into Wichita to meet Libby at the Water Center. As soon as we turned towards Wichita instead of towards the house, Gabe got upset. Within moments, he was crying because he "wanted to go home to play." Now, this isn't entirely unusual. The last few months, every time we drive into Wichita, he's gotten pissy about it and cranky that he has to sit in the car for half an hour. I suppose it's not that surprising. He's NEVER liked being in the car. At least he doesn't cry for the entire car ride anymore like he did until he was about two years old. I think he gets car sick pretty regularly--and probably getting off the bus and immediately getting back into a car for a longish car ride can be pretty irritating. Still and all, he's always liked going into Libby's work and any complaints he's had have stopped after a few minutes. Until last week. He pouted and cried the first half of the trip and I rightly figured out that it wasn't the car ride that was upsetting him. Something else was going on.
So I pressed him for a few minutes and he finally confessed that he was having some trouble with one of the kids at school. This kid told Gabe that he couldn't play with the group that Gabe usually played with anymore. But, then, I don't know how much of Gabe's version to believe. According to him, this kid created a game that pretty much everyone on the playground played (except a bunch of kids who, when I asked Gabe if they were also playing in this group, he said no--pretty much every kid from his class whose name I know, actually). So we spent the remainder of the trip into town with me trying to figure out what was going on and trying to convince Gabe that it wasn't the end of the world. I told him that, ideally, what he needed to do was to create a game himself that was even more awesome than this other kid's game, and then all the kids in his class would want to play Gabe's game instead and this other kid would have to slither back to Gabe and ask if he could play.
But I think that suggestion fell on deaf ears. I admit that it was a bit more of a complicated scheme than kindergarten politics normally see play out, but it is clearly the best option available to him. When he didn't think this was a good idea, I went with the old stand-by of "some people are jerks, and if they don't like you, then you don't need them." Or something along those lines. Probably I didn't say "jerks" and, instead, said something like "Find people who DO want to play with you and forget about any jagoffs that think they're better than you. Because, probably they are just white trash morons anyway and they might be big stuff on the playground but they'll amount to a whole lot of nothing in the real world, clinging to their high school sports moments because that is the peak of their lives. Or they are just d-bags and they'll probably get hazed to death when they start paying to have friends in fraternities in college."
Or something like that.
Anyway, this week the kid let Gabe play with him again on the playground, so probably one of the kids blew things rather out of proportions, being only five or six years old, and now they are over it because, again, they are five or six years old. But it made me wonder if he's not having more of these kinds of problems. He certainly seems to talk about playing with different kids pretty much every day he mentions something about it (usually, getting him to actually talk about what he did at school, and tell me what he ACTUALLY did at school and not making up some story, is like pulling teeth). So I'm a little worried that he's having problems finding a niche. Which can be a good or a bad thing. Some kids who don't find a niche end up being something of a niche unto themselves and people will sort of gravitate to him. Or it could mean that he's just not blending well with the other kids, and that isn't a good thing, or good feeling at all.
So there's that to worry about. But, then, there's also schooling in general, which brings us to:
3b) A possible side effect of the Mozart Experiment. Which I'm going to put in a separate post because this one is long already.
1) Pretty much on a daily basis, Gabe is making up stuff that happens at school. Every day, on the way home from school, I ask him what he did and he will say, "Nothing." So I will press with more specific questions, like if he had P.E. or Art or what he had for lunch or who he played with at recess. And then he will tell me something. Because I've had no reason to doubt what he's saying, I've taken everything he's said at face value, but several times in the past couple weeks, I've followed up with something that had to do with his original response, and find out that he was making up what he said initially. For instance, yesterday he said that they were having recess inside because it was still cold outside. This morning, I dressed him in a lighter coat, figuring that he would be fine if they were going to be playing in the gym instead of outside. At which point he admitted that he had actually played outside yesterday and might need a big coat. Which baffles me. He said he was "teasing" me. Why? I asked and he had no answer, which he often doesn't.
I suspect that he's honing his lying skills. Which I have mixed feelings about. As I've discussed before, I'm not sure how I'm supposed to feel about my kids' lying skills. On the one hand, if they are good at it, it will VASTLY complicate my life, and I don't like having a complicated life. On the other hand, being a good liar will, well, undoubtedly help them throughout their lives. It's an ugly truth, but it is a truth. I HOPE that they will only use their skills for good--to get out of work or to con an evil super-villain into revealing his master plan so they can thwart it--but that's all I can do, really, is hope.
I suspect this because:
2) Gabe is already trying to get out of school. I'm not sure what's brought it on, but ever since the Christmas break, he's been VERY eager to not have to go to school. Which is unfortunate. Up to this point he's pretty much loved everything about school. But he even dabbled with saying he was feeling sick this morning so that he could stay home (and he dabbled with it again this afternoon, saying he had a sick stomach, so that I would go to the store and buy him a bottle of Sprite, which he decided was all that he was going to drink from now on). I get where he's coming from. I had a storied past of faking sick to get out of school. I didn't DITCH school, mind you. That would have entailed falsifying documents saying that I was excused and all sorts of complicated things--way more effort than the payoff would have been worth. I simply faked sick, which was, in itself, excused and pretty simple (thanks to Mom going along with it as she did so often). Sure, in high school it meant that, instead of ditching class and going out and doing something fun (which is what I assume the point of ditching must be) that I was, for all intents and purposes, just taking the day off to lay around in bed and read comic books, but people have different priorities, I guess.
But I had rather hoped that he wouldn't want to start taking sick days and missing school until he was at least old enough to have real homework assignments and real tests to want to get out of doing. Right now, he's just getting out of coloring and recess and eating lunch and doing some basic number and letter work. I wonder if it's related to:
3) I'm starting to get the feeling that Gabe is getting a little discouraged about some things:
3a) A little over a week ago, I picked Gabe up at the bus and then we went straight into Wichita to meet Libby at the Water Center. As soon as we turned towards Wichita instead of towards the house, Gabe got upset. Within moments, he was crying because he "wanted to go home to play." Now, this isn't entirely unusual. The last few months, every time we drive into Wichita, he's gotten pissy about it and cranky that he has to sit in the car for half an hour. I suppose it's not that surprising. He's NEVER liked being in the car. At least he doesn't cry for the entire car ride anymore like he did until he was about two years old. I think he gets car sick pretty regularly--and probably getting off the bus and immediately getting back into a car for a longish car ride can be pretty irritating. Still and all, he's always liked going into Libby's work and any complaints he's had have stopped after a few minutes. Until last week. He pouted and cried the first half of the trip and I rightly figured out that it wasn't the car ride that was upsetting him. Something else was going on.
So I pressed him for a few minutes and he finally confessed that he was having some trouble with one of the kids at school. This kid told Gabe that he couldn't play with the group that Gabe usually played with anymore. But, then, I don't know how much of Gabe's version to believe. According to him, this kid created a game that pretty much everyone on the playground played (except a bunch of kids who, when I asked Gabe if they were also playing in this group, he said no--pretty much every kid from his class whose name I know, actually). So we spent the remainder of the trip into town with me trying to figure out what was going on and trying to convince Gabe that it wasn't the end of the world. I told him that, ideally, what he needed to do was to create a game himself that was even more awesome than this other kid's game, and then all the kids in his class would want to play Gabe's game instead and this other kid would have to slither back to Gabe and ask if he could play.
But I think that suggestion fell on deaf ears. I admit that it was a bit more of a complicated scheme than kindergarten politics normally see play out, but it is clearly the best option available to him. When he didn't think this was a good idea, I went with the old stand-by of "some people are jerks, and if they don't like you, then you don't need them." Or something along those lines. Probably I didn't say "jerks" and, instead, said something like "Find people who DO want to play with you and forget about any jagoffs that think they're better than you. Because, probably they are just white trash morons anyway and they might be big stuff on the playground but they'll amount to a whole lot of nothing in the real world, clinging to their high school sports moments because that is the peak of their lives. Or they are just d-bags and they'll probably get hazed to death when they start paying to have friends in fraternities in college."
Or something like that.
Anyway, this week the kid let Gabe play with him again on the playground, so probably one of the kids blew things rather out of proportions, being only five or six years old, and now they are over it because, again, they are five or six years old. But it made me wonder if he's not having more of these kinds of problems. He certainly seems to talk about playing with different kids pretty much every day he mentions something about it (usually, getting him to actually talk about what he did at school, and tell me what he ACTUALLY did at school and not making up some story, is like pulling teeth). So I'm a little worried that he's having problems finding a niche. Which can be a good or a bad thing. Some kids who don't find a niche end up being something of a niche unto themselves and people will sort of gravitate to him. Or it could mean that he's just not blending well with the other kids, and that isn't a good thing, or good feeling at all.
So there's that to worry about. But, then, there's also schooling in general, which brings us to:
3b) A possible side effect of the Mozart Experiment. Which I'm going to put in a separate post because this one is long already.
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