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Posts

  1. A Sound Mind in a Sound Body
  2. ADHD
  3. Je Ne Sais Quoi
  4. Decision Making Practice
  5. Intelligence, Muddy Waters and Evil Social Dynamics
  6. Face Blindness Revisited
  7. The Nature-Nurture Argument
  8. Cool Science
  9. Trauma and Genius
  10. Movies and Parental Supervision
  11. Social Skills are Mostly LEARNED
  12. Weekly Record Keeping for Homeschooling
  13. Reading Tools for Dead Tree Books
  14. The Chaos AKA English is Tough Stuff
  15. Per Pupil Expenditures is a Broken Metric
  16. Matching Coat and Shoes FTW
  17. Technology and Child Development
  18. Hothousing
  19. Teaching Writing to a Kid that Hated Writing
  20. If You Sew...
  21. Qualifications. I guess.
  22. Stand and Deliver
  23. Learning the Times Tables
  24. Factoring, Prime Factoring and Finding the Least Common Multiple
  25. Concrete Math
  26. Michele's Made-Up Math Grammar
  27. Credentials versus Education
  28. Old School Cool
  29. Math Juggling
  30. Education is the lighting of a fire, not the filling of a pail.
  31. Testing, Assessment and Education
  32. Education Quotes
  33. Free Latin
  34. The Art of Not Passing Baggage onto the Kids
  35. What Are You Actually Teaching the Kids?
  36. Social Stuff and Difficult Kids
  37. For Love of Math
  38. Kids with very challenging traits
  39. Words
  40. Clear Communication
  41. IQ Tests
  42. Facepalming and Eye Rolling
  43. Dinosaurs and Prehistory
  44. Understanding Physical Scale
  45. Letting Him Shine
  46. Santa, The Stork and Other Delusions
  47. The Truth
  48. Face Blindness AKA Prosopagnosia
  49. Curls Without Tears
  50. One Wonders What Might Constitute "Altruistic Reasons" to Have a Child
  51. When Earth-Bound Human Kids Get Rich and Famous
  52. Best Birthday Present Ever

  53. Games
  54. Adolescence
  55. Honestly
  56. Why?
  57. Jump, Jive an' Wail
  58. Massage
  59. Bathroom Policy
  60. Sleep and Respiratory Issues in Infants
  61. Taking care of "mom"
  62. Some Baby Basics
  63. Tigger, The Great Hotdog Hunter
  64. The Invisible Majority
  65. Third Culture Kids
  66. Playing Fair
  67. Social and Emotional Issues in Gifted Youth
  68. Bored Gifted Kid Syndrome (TM)
  69. Motherly Love
  70. Feeding the Need
  71. Genes
  72. Home Training
  73. The Pink Panther Bathroom
  74. Wired for Science
  75. The Ladder
  76. Elevation
  77. Tie a knot in it
  78. Memory Lane
  79. On: Labels
  80. Crazy Conclusions in Early Childhood
  81. I think the kids are mostly alright. It's the world that changed.
  82. Grocery Shopping in Quarters in Germany
  83. The Hand Licking Incident
  84. The Dripping Sarcasm Voice
    85.
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Popular posts from this blog

The Hand Licking Incident

When my oldest son was seven and in second grade, we were living in Kansas. Some time after the school year started, he began licking his hands. He soon was doing so all day, every day. His teacher wanted it to stop. So did his dad, my husband. I was a young homemaker, financially dependent on my husband, and I was feeling enormously pressured by both of these people. I also felt they both had real careers and didn't genuinely respect me. They both felt it was my job and mine alone to somehow make my son stop licking his hands entirely. I caved to the pressure. I tried telling my child to stop. I tried spanking him. I tried putting unpleasant spices on his hands to deter him. I tried grilling him about why he was doing this so I could find some solution. He couldn't explain it and the terror in his eyes was disturbing. None of it made any difference whatsoever. He continued to lick his hands all day, every day. He just tried to hide it a little better. Meanwhile, our rela...
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Crazy Conclusions in Early Childhood

From my last post on this site: One recurring theme: Bright kids of a certain age are just smart enough to jump to crazy conclusions rooted in lots of knowledge for their age but little real world experience. This seems common in the roughly toddler to preschool age range. I can readily think of a few examples of this from my oldest son's early years. The easiest one to tell is his ladybug freak out. He was about four years old and we were living in a third-floor walk-up in Germany. There were some really tall trees outside his bedroom window and one day there was a small ladybug invasion in his bedroom. He was inexplicably just terrified of the handful of yellow-and-black ladybugs on his bedroom wall. I actually laughed out loud because it seemed comical, but then I took him out of the room and closed the door and made sure he was protected from being around these bugs even though they were harmless. I kept the door shut to his room for a few days and he slept in my room u...
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The Chaos AKA English is Tough Stuff

I recently tripped across this clip of I love Lucy  where Ricky reads a children's book and keeps running into different pronunciations of ough . It reminds me of the much longer poem called The Chaos which sometimes gets called English is Tough Stuff. Wikipedia describes it as a poem demonstrating the irregularity of English spelling and pronunciation . Ricky goes on a rant about in Spanish, the same letters are always pronounced the same way. I have read that they don't have spelling bees in Spanish. That's a peculiarity of English education because of the extreme irregularity of English spelling and pronunciation. àMy ex-husband and oldest son are both not very social and they read a LOT. They both are prone to quirky interpretations of the pronunciation of words they learned from reading. As much as possible, I tried to make learning fun while homeschooling my kids. We spent a week on The Chaos while they objected to my pronunciation and looked it up only to find I w...
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