by Rose on January 13, 2011
We have been officially homeschooling for over 6 months. We started in the summer because my husband wanted a test run before “real” school started and we were committed. I call the last 6 months the “learning curve” months. These are where I learned a lot about my daughter and even MORE about myself. How I wanted to teach and how my daughter actually learns were not always the same thing. Some subjects like history and science went beautifully. Other subjects like math and reading were a screaming up hill battle with neither of us happy with how it was going.
I started wrestling in my mind with two opposing parenting philosophies. On one hand I was very committed to positive discipline. I believe children should learn to love learning because they want to do the learning. I did not want to resort to threats, bribes, punishment, etc just to get my daughter to sit down and do a reading lesson. From the times we’ve both lost our temper with each other over it I was definitely already forgetting some of the rules of positive discipline.
On the other hand our current method was NOT working. There was no way she was going to voluntarily sit down to do math and reading. It was a convincing balancing act based way too much on my authority as a parent to get anything done! (Aka, I was becoming a school dictator… one of the very things I was trying to avoid from public school.) I started hearing in the back of my head feedback I’d gotten from other sources. “You need to teach her (aka make her) focus.” “You need a school desk and school like space so she knows it’s time to learn.” “Children need to be made to (aka forced to) learn that it takes lots of hard work to get to the fun part.”
With all this going on I decided to take a look at the big picture. What was my end goal for teaching my daughter? For me it’s:
Create a life long learner who, provided with the right tools, will happily teach herself anything of value and interest.
To get to this goal she needed to know the basics like reading, writing, math, scientific method, etc. You can’t teach yourself something without being able to read about it. However you really aren’t going to want to teach yourself something if you have a negative association with books. If every time you pick one up you think of your mother making you sit down to LEARN TO READ OR ELSE! I decided positive discipline was what had worked for us so far and I needed to make it continue to work. If I wanted a child who loved to learn I’d better teach her in a way that she loved. I didn’t need to change her. I needed to change myself.
To reach my goal I made two new teaching rules:
1) Any failure to learn, even if it looked like goofing or distraction, was a failure in the teaching method or teacher and NOT the child.
2) All subjects needed to be changed until they were so fun she would beg me to do them. 
3) I needed to carefully watch and follow the direction my daughter was leading. She knows her interests better then I do.
It is amazing how quickly a mental shift can make a change. With in a day reading lessons started going better. I realized right away that she wasn’t goofing just to goof. She was goofing because she hated to admit she didn’t know something. Just taking time to review what she should say if she was stuck had her admitting that instead of “goofing”. We backed up a few lessons and things got better.
However the biggest breakthrough came when I realized how well math had started going. We had invented a game based on the book “The Little House in the Big Woods”. We used our math book as a cookbook and our blocks as pieces of meat. Then we did exercises to prepare meat to be smoked just like in the story. After each exercise she tosses her blocks in the smoker (a basket). Randomly she runs off to tell Pa that a bear or panther has come out of the woods. Then she comes back to do another. We both have lots of fun and in all that she is learning her addition facts faster then I ever thought possible!
We recently expanded it out to reading lessons as well. Last reading lesson we were water fairies creating water droplets to fill a puddle for kids. Sounding things out created water drops (little balls) and when we dumped a handful in the puddle (hula hoop) we had to run and hide from the kids and make more drops by reading more. She has fun and she learns.
It is amazing how hindsight is always 20/20. Looking back I worried how my active, imaginative daughter would do in a school setting. Our earlier wars with math/reading showed exactly what would happen, very very little! However once we used her need to move and imagine as part of the lesson they become the asset they should be. What was getting in her way was exactly what she needed to advance. I just had to relax the controls enough to see it.
As my reward I now get to hear:
Mom, mom, can we please do some of that really, really fun homeschool!!!
by Rose on October 27, 2010
Today my 5y old C was watching a cartoon which was trying to teach the value of forgiveness. In it Tiger accidentally broke Panda’s painting. Even after Tiger fixed it Panda refused to forgive him. Tiger was sad because Panda stayed mad at him. In the end other friends helped convince Panda to forgive Tiger and Tiger was happy again.
The cartoon carried a good message:
Yet at the same time the cartoon accidentally taught a bad message:
- Your happiness depends on your friends opinions instead of your actions
I really wanted to reach in and rewrite it so Tiger leaves to play and have fun without an angry Panda. In the end Panda sees how much fun he is missing by holding a grudge, forgives him and then has fun himself.
I want my children to learn to forgive mistakes but I also want them to learn to judge their own actions and create their own joy. Their joy should not be dependent on the whim of any random playmate.
In an attempt to teach empathy it instead taught dependency.
Anyone else have experience with things that try to teach children one message but accidentally teach something totally different? Please share in the comments.
by Rose on August 21, 2010
Dear Facebook,
For a year I’ve been asking my mom to join facebook so I could easily share pictures of my girls with my family. I was even planning a blog post called “Mom, Why You Have To Join Facebook”. Her biggest concern was privacy and security and I would explain to her that with the right settings she could make her account very secure.
Then you had to start making it nearly impossible to make an account secure. It’s not the I mind the million different settings you have to click on to lock down an account. That’s annoying but I could have easily created an account for her. It’s that you will not let an account stay secure. We have a perfectly good secure account and then you role out a new feature and leave the privacy settings on it wide open.
Take the new location tagging service. Gizmodo reports that the default setting is friends can tag your location. Thank you for making it so no random stranger can tag me but do you really think I want anyone announcing where I am except me? Imagine one friend typing the simple “Bumped into so-and-so when leaving 1st St offices.” and another friend reading that and realizing “Wait that’s her OB’s office. I bet she’s pregnant!” The wrong tag in the wrong place and something that’s supposed to be private is suddenly not.
So how does this apply go getting my mom on facebook? Well, while I’m happy to do the annoyingly complicated process of setting up her account I don’t want to be a long term facebook privacy administrator. So I make her account safe and a week later you release yet another feature where friends can do X. Either I’m monitoring everything and keeping her account safe or sooner or later her privacy will be violated and it will be my fault for saying “Hey, facebook is safe!”
So facebook, if you want to see my mom start using your product or anyone else a little (rightfully) privacy nervous you need to fix your policy. You need to post a stated policy that new features are always locked down and we have the option of turning them on for friends or the world. Until you make this safe I’m going to have to tell my mom, “Yes you are right. Don’t worry I’ll keep emailing you the pictures.”
Yesterday we had some unexpected excitement in the form of a Tornado Warning (cool picture). I learned several important lessons:
- A Tornado Warning means you should be seeking shelter. In our case the windowless basement laundry room.
- If you ever find your self googling the term “What should I do in a tornado warning” the answer is NOT sit at your computer googling “What should I do in a tornado warning”
- Everyone is capable of being incredibly stupid in the face of an emergency. That’s why we’re supposed to have emergency plans. Even if you NEVER get tornadoes in Idaho.
If you find yourself, like us, in the category of “I should really get around to planning that emergency plan” here’s some homework. DO IT! I’m going to start reading the FEMA Are You Ready Guide this weekend.
So Why the Tomatoes and Torpedoes?
After the storm we had one of C’s friends over to play. The two of them were discussing the storm. It went like this:
C: “Guess what! We had to hide in the basement because there was a humongous tomato! It was huge! I was really scared of the tomato but mommy told me we would be fine.”
P: “I’ve seen a torpedo before! It was on the TV. It was huge and the torpedo was spinning all around.”
C: “This was a real tomato. Right here. When a tomato comes you have to hide in the basement because it can break the windows.”
That’s right folks. When the killer tomatoes come to get us remember to hide in the basement.
21 Months
Nothing beats the joy of my 21 month old when presented with a spinny dress. It’s so overcoming she may spin in uncontrollable circles just because she looked at the dress. (This can make dressing her quite the interesting challenge.)
4.5 Years
Privacy is an interesting concept when 4.5y old. For example the following conversation had in the bathroom after C raced in right after me:
Mom: “Honey, mommy shut the door because I wanted privacy.”
C: “Oh Mom, I am so sorry!”
(Races to door and slams it shut with much enthusiasm… while still standing in the bathroom)
C: “Fixed it mom! Now let me tell you…”
Nutritional labels give us the raw facts but they can make it hard to put things in perspective. What exactly is 16g of sugar? Is that a bad thing?
I like to compare labels with a known junk food to get perspective. For sugars my favorite is a Snickers Bar. I think most people will agree a Snickers bar is candy and not an acceptable breakfast or healthy snack. (I’m not arguing it can’t ever be a snack or treat just that it’s not a healthy one.)
So what does a Snicker bar look like from a sugar point of view? According to the nutritional information on amazon
a Snickers bar contains 280 calories and 30g of sugar. (For the curious 4.2 grams of sugar equal 1 teaspoon so a Snickers bar contains a little over 7 teaspoons of sugar.)
The main problem with comparing this information to other products is the serving size and calorie counts differ. Take for example a product marketed as a healthy breakfast to go, Cheerios Honey Nut , Milk ‘n Cereal Bars. According to it’s nutritional information on amazon
a Milk ‘n Cereal Bar contains 160 calories and 16g of sugar. At first glance that’s a lot less then the 30g in a snickers. However if you look at the calories the Milk ‘n Cereal bar contains a lot less “food” as well.
To fairly compare the sugar levels you have to compare sugar for the same number of calories. To make the change first we need to calculate the grams of sugar per calorie for the Snickers. I switched that to grams per 10 calories because it will make the math for comparing it to other products a lot easier. (I’m assuming you want math you can do in your head while standing in a supermarket. In my case math I can do in my head while I child is half hanging out of the grocery cart screaming “MOMMY YOU ARE STARVING ME!!!!”)
(Total grams sugar / Total calories) * 10cal = grams per 10cal
Snickers: (30g / 280cal) * 10cal = 1.07g per 10cal
For easy super market math this can be rounded to a Snickers containing 1g of sugar per 10 calories. To figure out how much sugar would be in a Snickers with the same number of calories as the target food divide the calories by 10 and multiply by 1 or to make it simple just drop the 0 off the number of calories.
For example let’s go back to the Milk ‘n Cereal bar that’s 160 calories and 16g of sugar. An equivalent Snickers bar with 160 calories would also have 16g of sugar. Suddenly instead of looking like the healthy breakfast it’s advertised to be it becomes a vitamin fortified Snickers bar.
Here are a couple other foods compared:
These show some interesting results. The granola has a lot less sugar then an equivalent Snickers. However the Oatmeal is almost as bad. What shocked me was the nice “healthy” organic products (Fruit Snacks & Chocolate Milk) had significantly MORE sugar then an equivalent Snickers bar! I knew chocolate milk could have a lot of sugar but I never realized it was worse then even a Snicker!
Now while running these comparisons there are a couple of warnings to keep in mind. The first is even though something has less sugar then a Snickers that doesn’t make it healthy. I use Snickers as the obvious junk food line. If something hits the Snickers point it is really really sweet. Even at less then Snickers the granola is still over a teaspoon of sugar poured on 1/2 cup of food.
The second is that this comparison only works on processed foods where the sugar comes from refined sources like sugar, syrup, juice concentrate, etc. The comparison can make some very healthy whole foods look really bad for you. Take for example an apple with 65 calories and 14 g of sugar. An equivalent Snickers would have only 6.5 g of sugar. That looks a lot healthier if we just compare the numbers. However “An apple a day keeps the doctor away”. Apples have all their sugar tied up with fiber, vitamins, minerals, macro nutrients we haven’t even discovered, etc. In that form the sugar is given to the body in a form it is used to absorbing with a ton of other things it needs. If we took the apple, pressed out and filtered the juice leaving the fiber and a lot of nutrients behind, concentrated the pure juice and then used it as sweetener then we’re talking pure candy again.
So next time you are walking down the grocery store or staring into your pantry try this little experiment. Glance at the label and drop the last digit off the number of calories. If the number of grams of sugar in the product is close to or greater then that number be warned. You have a Snickers in disguise.
So what foods did you find that turn out to be surprisingly sweet? Share them in the comments.
(All amazon links are affiliate links. However I do NOT recommend buying the products I link to on this post.)
This weekend my 4.5 year old daughter ran up begging me to play dentist. (Her 21 month old sister had very quickly gotten tired of a game that involved sitting still and having your mouth poked.) I asked her if I was allowed to read a book in the dentist chair since I often brought one to real dentist appointments. She said sure. So for the next 30 minutes I was REQUIRED to rest on the couch slightly propped up reading a book. The only cost was about every 5 minutes someone would run over after spending lots of time checking my X-ray and gently poke a toy in my mouth.
BEST GAME EVER!
(Btw, if you’ve noticed my slightly sporadic blogging style, aka not blogging for months and months, I’m going to experiment with very short quick articles and see if I blog slightly better that way. )
by Rose on November 2, 2009
Engadget has an opinion article Entelligence: Of ebooks and suburban moms. It discusses a debate at Engadget headquarters on if the latest generation of ebook readers are going to be a hit. Specifically if suburban mom’s are going to start buying them in mass. The article has some great discussion on current technical issues with ebook readers. It does however miss one crucial point. As far as I can tell no one involved in this debated talked to a suburban mom about what she thought.
While it pains me to admit this I think my minivan, 2 kids, 2 cats, white picket fence, etc puts me square in the suburban mom category. (I fought that minivan kicking and screaming all the way to the dealer… but that’s another story.) So first, I agree with the author. Suburban moms are not going to suddenly flock to dedicated ebook readers. However I have to totally disagree with his reasons why. Sure cheaper prices and nice features will always make a product look better then another product but they are by no means the gate for your normal suburban mom.
Let’s put this in perspective with a story of when I’d need an ebook. It’s out running errands if both kids fall asleep in the car or some other major life miracle occurs. (At this point the world might be ending so the ebook may suddenly seem less important.) To get out the door I’m going to be balancing:
- a 1y old
- a 4y old
- overflowing diaper bag
- reusable grocery bags with at least 2 fragile returnable glass milk jugs
- the shoe half on one foot
- the coat the 4y old refused to wear
- the coat I never had time to put on
- the preschool field trip notice form I grabbed at the last minute with my pinkie finger
At this point I have about a 90% hit rate of remembering and fitting in my iphone. A larger dedicated ebook reader? It’s just not going to happen. It’s already lost because:
- It’s too big. Think tiny tiny corner of the diaper bag. Think iphone hidden stealthily in one hand so 4y old doesn’t see mom reading cool toy versus larger ebook reader not hiding at all.
- It’s too fragile. One water bottle leak or curious 1 year old and my iphone is toast. Would I actually be crazy enough to put two pieces of expensive, fragile electronics next to each other?
- It’s too forgettable. I can barely remember a cell phone that contains the grocery list, directions, etc. The chance off remembering anything single use? Slim!
Case in point, I have a lovely amazon kindle sitting in a drawer. My husband uses it for business trips. I read my last ebook on my iphone in 200 little increments when I could sneak in the time. The kindle was never touched.
Basically, until a dedicated ebook reader can be folded up into the space of a 5×5 deck of cards, thrown like a baseball, bounced off a concrete floor, and pop back into my hand working it’s not going to hit the suburban mom market. Not when my iphone can do the same thing and there’s a chance my daughter might not notice that mommy is having a moment of me time.
Thank you to TechMama for first tweeting about the original article.
by Rose on August 15, 2009
If I tried to design an event that would make my 4 year old ecstatically happy I could not have done better then the Boise Cupcake Collective! This morning we attended their fundraiser for the Treasure Valley Institute for Children’s Arts. For $5 each plus any donation we wanted to make we enjoyed:
- Our choice of 3 cupcakes each
- Balloon animals
- Old fashioned lemon-aid stand
- Dancing to cool kids music (The type a parent finds themselves bobbing too instead of cringing )
- Magic Tricks
- Beautiful displays of edible art
This was the type of event that could be enjoyed by parents and kids alike. To sum up the kid friendliness of the event half the time the DJ had a very cute 2 year old in his arms. I was especially grateful to the cupcake makers who listed their ingredients so I could safely consume some.
For those who were unable to attend here’s a virtual cupcake tour. Please excuse any camera shake. These were all taken while wearing an electronic happy 11m old and supervising a very cupcake happy 4 year old.
Pirate Pig Cupcakes
Frog Cupcakes
Cupcakes as a Tropical Island
Bikini Cupcakes
Bird Cupcakes
Ice Cream or Cupcakes?
Cupcake Bouquet
Garden Cupcake
Jewled Cupcakes
Chocolate Sprinkled Cupcakes
Lemon Cupcakes
Chocolate zucchini Cupcakes
Chocolate Huckleberry Cupcakes
Lime Boat Cupcakes
Swirl Cupcakes
Pirate Chest Cupcakes
Assorted Cupcakes
Green Cupcakes
Bird on Cupcake
Artistic Cupcakes
Gluten Free Cupcakes
Toy Cupcakes
Poka Dot Cupcakes
Apricot Cream Cupcakes
Flower Garden Cupcakes
Flower Garden Cupcake
If you enjoyed this virtual tour and live in the Treasure Valley please consider stopping buy http://www.trica.org/ and making a paypal donation. (If you are out of the area feel free to donate too or find a good children’s art group near you.)
Thank you to everyone who created such a fun and wonderful event for parents and kids alike.
This month was my very first Daring Cooks Challenge! It was something I always wanted to make but was a little unsure how, Chinese Dumplings. The girls and I both had a lot of fun making them. A big thank you to Jen from Use Real Butter for doing an excellent job hosting and providing direction. Anyone interested in trying should check out her original post on chinese dumplings.
We went with a non-traditional filling mainly because those are the ingredients I had around at the time. (If you have ever tried a “quick” trip to the grocery store with a 3.5 year old and 9 month old I’m betting you will understand.) The filling was lamb and apple sausage with sauteed cabbage, onions and caraway seeds. Next time I’m going to use less cabbage and add some chopped tart apple to the sautee since the flavor was a little flat.
First we made the filling. C had a lot of fun chopping a piece of cabbage with her little butter knife.
Sauteed Cabbage, Onions and Caraway
Next we made and rolled out the dough. This part was a little time consuming but very fun. C has her own rolling pin but spent more time eating her dough then rolling. You will notice my wrappers are not exactly perfect circles. Luckily that doesn’t effect the final product.
Not Quite a Circle Dumpling Wrapper
The next step was to fill and crimp the dumplings. I was very happy with my pleats!
Dumpling with Pleats!
Since little R is still too young to handle dumplings we made her a special baby version of the filling sauteed and ground up. It was a big hit with her.
Baby Food Dumpling
Finally for the adults and big kids we pan fried them. I also tried a deap fried version but my favorite was definitely the pan frying. The deap fried was good but a pain to clean up after.
Pan Fried Dumplings
Over all this was a wonderful challenge! We had a lot of fun and I will be definitely making more dumplings in the future. (Next time I’m even going to plan ahead enough to make a traditional version.)
On a side note the leftover filling makes an excelent breakfast hash if sauteed in olive oil until lightly browned. To see more great dumplings check out the main daring cooks post.
