today’s installment of the mouths of babes
May. 1st, 2020 03:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2SpoeFZ
we’ve kind of settled into a routine of like… the Required Schoolwork happens on the computer one at a time with MathMom
and I do workbooks or whatever with whichever kid isn’t working with her
and while the Required Schoolwork is probably hitting the basic uhhh… ok like if educational requirements were the Food Pyramid, whatever those are
mostly what I’m doing is giving them practice doing basic reading and writing in the guise of the fun workbooks and also writing letters.
My own mother has been the best correspondent, sending each child a postcard every week or so. Girl, 5, has written back pretty faithfully. Boy, 7, is much harder for me to wrangle into writing, but he’s eager to please with the workbooks. He and I work together less often; his online assignments are more time-consuming. Today I let him cut out paper shapes because the workbook had a thing on lines of symmetry and he really obviously wanted to play with scissors, and I thought, anything that improves his fine motor skills is a huge positive. I did get him to do a fair amount of reading, as well, and while he’s really fond of wildly guessing what a word is based on a single letter (not necessarily its first letter), if you can get him to focus he is perfectly capable of reading, so the more he’s motivated to practice that, the better.
The girl is pretty good at writing letters, and will focus and do it if that’s what I suggest. So today we wrote to her paternal grandparents. I’ve discovered that if I use a ruler and draw lines about an inch apart on a sheet of blank typing paper, she’ll write really legibly and fill the sheet. I’ve also discovered that if I just let her spell things how she wants, she mostly does a reasonable and cute job? so I offer to write down complicated words for her that are relevant to what she’s going to want to write about, and offer occasional corrections if I think it’s important, but what I mostly do is take a little sheet of paper and write down a transcription of what she’s writing as she says it out loud to sound things out, so that I can enclose that to her correspondent, so they can be sure to respond to what she really said in the letter. I just feel like that’s more rewarding for her, and if I were getting earnest heartfelt letters from a kindergartner, I sure as hell would appreciate a transcription from someone familiar with her thought processes!
So to her grandfather, who is in Lower Manhattan confined to an apartment, she wrote, “Stars! I hope you serviv the viris love you grandpa [lastname]”, and drew a half a page full of stars to go along with it. (I enclosed a transcription and also the explanation that clearly, we’re talking about it where she can hear, but like, she’s too smart for us to lie about it so yeah, she knows everyone’s worried and it’s particularly dangerous in New York City. I also pointed out that the only two words I helped her spell or sound out at all were “stars” and [lastname]. No, she can’t spell her own last name, and I’ve worked on it with her before; when I mentioned this to her, she said, verbatim, “I rarely use it.” LOL you can tell her family’s got hilarious speech patterns.) Then she said, out loud, to me, “but I don’t know what grandpa looks like?” and I said “he visits all the time? Your dad’s dad?” and she said “ohhh you mean [his first name]”, which I thought was so hilarious that I also wrote that to him.
I’m in a better mood today; partly because they were well-behaved today, and because in working with them I was able to really notice that they’ve improved hugely in their reading and writing, and even if they come out of this whole nonsense traumatized (like a lot of kids are gonna be) they’ll also come out of it literate, which is huge for their future academic successes. They’d been worrying the boy’s got a touch of his dad’s dyslexia, as he’s rather behind the benchmarks, but it’s become clear he just needed more attention than his mother or teacher was able to give him, and now that there’s no choice but to give him one-on-one attention, he’s really past that crisis and will probably be caught up perfectly well to most of his classmates by the end of this. Which is fantastic. He badly, badly wants to see his friends, but he’s such a sunshine kid he’s mostly doing fine. The girl, well, this isn’t helping her anxiety and codependence, but she’s also gone from not reading well at all to very clearly competent at it. So, good.
I also got to do some cooking, which is a thing i like; the diet here is just… slightly off from what I’m used to, and it was good to make something familiar.
And, I heard from my coworker. The camera store managed to get one of those small-business grants, so they can reopen when it’s allowed. In the meantime, there are things that I could do working from home, if I stop by the store and pick up some materials, so maybe I’ll do that next week, and the fact that I still haven’t heard back from the dep’t of labor about my fucking unemployment won’t matter as much. Moreover, this means that going forward I could do more remote work, which would make my stupid fucking part-time commute to the farm actually possible.
That’s assuming they need/want me, of course! I don’t know the situation at the farm well enough to even really predict what’s going to go on, there. The first chicken slaughter is the last week of May. It’s possible they won’t want/need me since I’d be coming from such a distance and then would have to isolate afterward. I don’t know what the responsible thing to do is. I miss them, and feel isolated from them, because I am, and I just don’t know what’s going on.
But I feel a little more… IDK, hopeful, after that conversation.
Also Dr. F had some free time and wasn’t exhausted, tonight, so he played some Witcher 3 and MathMom kept saying ‘hair… so fluffy’ of Geralt, which was hilarious. Several power-ups were achieved but what amused me most was that Geralt upgraded his boots and gambeson, from the extremely stylish but low-stats set he starts off the game in, and the newer stuff has better stats but looks scruffy as hell. “He’s just getting comfortable,” Dr. F said.
“He looks like he’s wearing Uggs and four layers of wool socks,” I said.
“Like I said,” Dr. F said, “comfortable.”
(His job is fucked. Well, his is fine, but his institution. The hospital is finally realizing they need to furlough employees to save money… at the exact moment that the state is allowing them to resume elective surgeries, which make them revenue… but require staff. So somehow, they’re going to fire everyone and also then do a whole shitload of work??? it’s not great and wasn’t well-planned at all. So he’s like… well… I mean… I’ll have plenty to fucking do, but like, what the hell guys, they’re cutting everyone’s pay and want us all to work overtime concurrently with the pay cut? Pretty fucked.)
(And like. This is all sort of assuming a second wave of infections isn’t imminent.)
we’ve kind of settled into a routine of like… the Required Schoolwork happens on the computer one at a time with MathMom
and I do workbooks or whatever with whichever kid isn’t working with her
and while the Required Schoolwork is probably hitting the basic uhhh… ok like if educational requirements were the Food Pyramid, whatever those are
mostly what I’m doing is giving them practice doing basic reading and writing in the guise of the fun workbooks and also writing letters.
My own mother has been the best correspondent, sending each child a postcard every week or so. Girl, 5, has written back pretty faithfully. Boy, 7, is much harder for me to wrangle into writing, but he’s eager to please with the workbooks. He and I work together less often; his online assignments are more time-consuming. Today I let him cut out paper shapes because the workbook had a thing on lines of symmetry and he really obviously wanted to play with scissors, and I thought, anything that improves his fine motor skills is a huge positive. I did get him to do a fair amount of reading, as well, and while he’s really fond of wildly guessing what a word is based on a single letter (not necessarily its first letter), if you can get him to focus he is perfectly capable of reading, so the more he’s motivated to practice that, the better.
The girl is pretty good at writing letters, and will focus and do it if that’s what I suggest. So today we wrote to her paternal grandparents. I’ve discovered that if I use a ruler and draw lines about an inch apart on a sheet of blank typing paper, she’ll write really legibly and fill the sheet. I’ve also discovered that if I just let her spell things how she wants, she mostly does a reasonable and cute job? so I offer to write down complicated words for her that are relevant to what she’s going to want to write about, and offer occasional corrections if I think it’s important, but what I mostly do is take a little sheet of paper and write down a transcription of what she’s writing as she says it out loud to sound things out, so that I can enclose that to her correspondent, so they can be sure to respond to what she really said in the letter. I just feel like that’s more rewarding for her, and if I were getting earnest heartfelt letters from a kindergartner, I sure as hell would appreciate a transcription from someone familiar with her thought processes!
So to her grandfather, who is in Lower Manhattan confined to an apartment, she wrote, “Stars! I hope you serviv the viris love you grandpa [lastname]”, and drew a half a page full of stars to go along with it. (I enclosed a transcription and also the explanation that clearly, we’re talking about it where she can hear, but like, she’s too smart for us to lie about it so yeah, she knows everyone’s worried and it’s particularly dangerous in New York City. I also pointed out that the only two words I helped her spell or sound out at all were “stars” and [lastname]. No, she can’t spell her own last name, and I’ve worked on it with her before; when I mentioned this to her, she said, verbatim, “I rarely use it.” LOL you can tell her family’s got hilarious speech patterns.) Then she said, out loud, to me, “but I don’t know what grandpa looks like?” and I said “he visits all the time? Your dad’s dad?” and she said “ohhh you mean [his first name]”, which I thought was so hilarious that I also wrote that to him.
I’m in a better mood today; partly because they were well-behaved today, and because in working with them I was able to really notice that they’ve improved hugely in their reading and writing, and even if they come out of this whole nonsense traumatized (like a lot of kids are gonna be) they’ll also come out of it literate, which is huge for their future academic successes. They’d been worrying the boy’s got a touch of his dad’s dyslexia, as he’s rather behind the benchmarks, but it’s become clear he just needed more attention than his mother or teacher was able to give him, and now that there’s no choice but to give him one-on-one attention, he’s really past that crisis and will probably be caught up perfectly well to most of his classmates by the end of this. Which is fantastic. He badly, badly wants to see his friends, but he’s such a sunshine kid he’s mostly doing fine. The girl, well, this isn’t helping her anxiety and codependence, but she’s also gone from not reading well at all to very clearly competent at it. So, good.
I also got to do some cooking, which is a thing i like; the diet here is just… slightly off from what I’m used to, and it was good to make something familiar.
And, I heard from my coworker. The camera store managed to get one of those small-business grants, so they can reopen when it’s allowed. In the meantime, there are things that I could do working from home, if I stop by the store and pick up some materials, so maybe I’ll do that next week, and the fact that I still haven’t heard back from the dep’t of labor about my fucking unemployment won’t matter as much. Moreover, this means that going forward I could do more remote work, which would make my stupid fucking part-time commute to the farm actually possible.
That’s assuming they need/want me, of course! I don’t know the situation at the farm well enough to even really predict what’s going to go on, there. The first chicken slaughter is the last week of May. It’s possible they won’t want/need me since I’d be coming from such a distance and then would have to isolate afterward. I don’t know what the responsible thing to do is. I miss them, and feel isolated from them, because I am, and I just don’t know what’s going on.
But I feel a little more… IDK, hopeful, after that conversation.
Also Dr. F had some free time and wasn’t exhausted, tonight, so he played some Witcher 3 and MathMom kept saying ‘hair… so fluffy’ of Geralt, which was hilarious. Several power-ups were achieved but what amused me most was that Geralt upgraded his boots and gambeson, from the extremely stylish but low-stats set he starts off the game in, and the newer stuff has better stats but looks scruffy as hell. “He’s just getting comfortable,” Dr. F said.
“He looks like he’s wearing Uggs and four layers of wool socks,” I said.
“Like I said,” Dr. F said, “comfortable.”
(His job is fucked. Well, his is fine, but his institution. The hospital is finally realizing they need to furlough employees to save money… at the exact moment that the state is allowing them to resume elective surgeries, which make them revenue… but require staff. So somehow, they’re going to fire everyone and also then do a whole shitload of work??? it’s not great and wasn’t well-planned at all. So he’s like… well… I mean… I’ll have plenty to fucking do, but like, what the hell guys, they’re cutting everyone’s pay and want us all to work overtime concurrently with the pay cut? Pretty fucked.)
(And like. This is all sort of assuming a second wave of infections isn’t imminent.)
