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Posts

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

  56. Games
  57. Adolescence
  58. Honestly
  59. Why?
  60. Jump, Jive an' Wail
  61. Massage
  62. Bathroom Policy
  63. Sleep and Respiratory Issues in Infants
  64. Taking care of "mom"
  65. Some Baby Basics
  66. Tigger, The Great Hotdog Hunter
  67. The Invisible Majority
  68. Third Culture Kids
  69. Playing Fair
  70. Social and Emotional Issues in Gifted Youth
  71. Bored Gifted Kid Syndrome (TM)
  72. Motherly Love
  73. Feeding the Need
  74. Genes
  75. Home Training
  76. The Pink Panther Bathroom
  77. Wired for Science
  78. The Ladder
  79. Elevation
  80. Tie a knot in it
  81. Memory Lane
  82. On: Labels
  83. Crazy Conclusions in Early Childhood
  84. I think the kids are mostly alright. It's the world that changed.
  85. Grocery Shopping in Quarters in Germany
  86. The Hand Licking Incident
  87. The Dripping Sarcasm Voice
    88.
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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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