Balaji of Bbthots writes a guest post for Saffron Tree. Check out his review of Quicksand Pony.

Guess what book we are currently reading at home? Clue is the picture below. You guys have time till Tuesday, Jan/12/2010.

Edited to add: Alice’s adventures in wonderland, A pop-up adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s original tale by Robert Sabuda.

Suki, San bingo. The two of you get three hi-hip-hurrays each.

SV, Kowsalya, thats why I strategically put three tea cups in the pics. 😉

Chox, I had my be riding on you. What with me asking you about simple Alice in wonderland for kindergartners. In fact I wanted to add in the post “Chox is not allowed to comment”. Tiger who came to tea-eh? Recommended by you, five starts from amazon, will check it out from the library.

DDMom, that is a good suggestion, will ask them to email me instead of commenting. Reg the plug-in pls chk the comments for this post.

Boo, Goldilocks? Was this purposeful misdirection? Oh master riddle cracking ex-MTB, puzzle breaking machine, cross word superstar, did you say Goldilocks on purpose?

It was business as usual at work. We had just put the younger children for their AM nap, the older ones were engaged in work. The loud noise made me think that there was action going on in the elementary upstairs. But it dawned on me with the sudden movement. Earthquake.

We did the usual emergency routine and thankfully we were able to return to the usual routine, if you could call it usual and go on about your routine.

4.1 is relatively small. Probably mother Earth just sighed, stretched or sniffed when compared to the wrath she has unleashed in many places. But something being with children changes the whole deal. Mind being a monkey jumps and leaps and leads you to places where you don’t want to be. Children, though they do not have enough life experiences to fear the what if, are pretty acute on latching on to adult emotions. For the rest of the day they were a bit off put.

I am with Chula and Mieja in the same campus. So a quick peak through the window was a HUGE blessing. I did not fear their safety, for they are in the best possible care. But just their smiling faces soothed me, chasing all the unspoken fears. As soon as I could, I called R and we touched base on our family’s emergency routine. He said, ‘I will come and get you and the kids.’ And we had a good laugh.

Technorati Tags: earthquake

Chula: Amma, tell me about Lebanon.
Me: Errr…Lebanon?
Chula: I want to know about Lebanon.
Me: Okay, why do you want to know about Lebanon?
Chula: Because, I don’t know about Lebanon. That is why I want to know about it.
(Told with a sigh, eyes rolling, hand shaking and intonation as if explaining it to Rainman)
Me: But I don’t know anything about Lebanon
Chula: Googal it amma.
Me: What it?
Chula: Googal it.
Me: What is google Chula?
Chula: It is something that lives in our computer and when we ask a question it tells us an answer.

So we know about Googal, inspite of not introducing Googal formally.

Technorati Tags: google

The few mainstream movies Chula and Mieja have seen are Dasavatharam, Sound of music, Lion King, Hornton hears a who and Finding Nemo. Only Sound of music has earned the children’s approval. Chula, of all people cries and screams that she is scared.
Me: (Before bed time, I was pointing to a DVD R and I were planning on watching)These movies(regular Hindi/Tamil/English) are only for adults. It might be scary for you. So we watch it after you and your sister go to bed.

Lost in translation: Chula goes to school and tells her teachers, “My mom and my dad put my sister and me in bed and watch adult only movies.”

Silver lining, as some one pointed out, at least it wasn’t, “we all watch adult only movies as a family.”

With this humorous note, adieu 2009 and welcome 2010.

Inspired by Satish’s review in Saffron tree, some time last year we got the book Tanka Tanka Skunk from the library. When I picked up the book, Chula was not a self-reader. Montessori reading follows a certain pattern. For a long time the reading skills are dormant and they suddenly start reading. Many children start writing before they start reading. When you carefully analyze the process of reading it is amazing how we all even started reading. Print is made of sentences in a particular pattern. In most languages print is from top to bottom, left to right, right side up and front to back. Books are made of paragraphs, paragraphs are made of sentences, sentences are made of words, words are made of phonemes (group of letters, that may or may not be stand alone and that form a sound which is a part of the word) and phonemes are made of letters and letters are symbolic representation of sound. The grasp of the phonemes and sound of words/letters is the bridge between language and literacy where the child realizes that print can be read and speech can be written down. I am tempted to go on more about language development, but I will be digressing. Montessori reading follows a certain pattern that is developmentally appropriate and there are lot of aids like sand paper letters, sound discrimination activities and aural exercises that aid in language and literacy development. One fine day all this come together and the child starts writing phonetically and reading.

When we read Tanka Tanka Skunk, Chula was putting all this information together. In the book, they beat drums as the elephant and the skunk dissect words. Alligator would be A+lli+ga+tor, split in to four and hence four beats. She really enjoyed doing this. So during long car rides I used to give her long complicated words like Mississippi, ignoramus, cathartic, persnickety and ask her to beat to it and also names of her classmates. She was so fascinated that my appa’s name had 6 beats to it. We all had fun doing this. Dec 2008 we were making holiday cards for Chula’s teachers. She wanted to write her name, which she did from memory. But she put the pencil down, clapped her hands and kept repeating the words “Dear” -> “Di+yer”-> “D+i+y+e+r” and wrote “Diyer”, she has phonetically spelt her first word, all by herself. I was amazed.

March 2009, we were at a store and I was paying at the counter. There were lollipops arranged in a glass bottle with a sticker that said CANDY. Chula wanted one and I dismissed her saying, “Oh, you are just asking it because it looks pretty. Do you even know what it is?” and she said, “Hm. That is candy amma. It says that on the box. C.A.N.D.Y. Can I have one?” That was the first time she read to me. Today all she needs are books and can sit with them for hours, except that I must not say something like, “Can you read this book, I have some chores to finish”, in which case, she would crib, whine and insist that I read it to her. Anyways, it was amazing to see how she started reading and writing.

Now it is Mieja’s turn. She can write her name, all letters present. And she is trying to spell. So it goes,

Amma, what is KE+O  T+R+U+C+K?
Keo truck?!
No silly that is cow truck. Okay what is P+G  T+R+U+C+K?
Pg Truck?
Nooooo, that is pig truck.

So I get to enjoy this process for the second time. Lucky me.

Technorati Tags: self-reading in preschoolers, montessori reading, tanka tanka skunk, phonemic awareness, print awareness, phonetic awareness, phonemes, spelling phonetically, how children begin to read and write

It is a boy.

Yes, it is. Chula and Mieja have named him Harry, thanks to all the Harry Potter stories I tell them. In fact I am surprised they didn’t want to call him Hagrid, because Hagrid is their true love.

Okay more about Harry. He is red. He is a beta. He swims in his gallon tank with blue stones and a fake plant. He eats his own fish food flakes. Oh I forgot, Harry is temporary.  He is the school pet and we are taking care of him during winter break.

This Harry fella seems to be an extremely lazy character. He is A.L.W.A.Y.S sleeping. I mean the dope doesn’t even eat the pinch of fish food flakes we give him every couple of days. I say it is laziness purely from the  boy factor. If I put a fish couch in that fish bowl, he would happily roll in it. But R begs to differ. He says Harry is ‘dull’ because Harry is constipated. Yes, you all heard me right. ‘Beta can become constipated from dried fish flakes and must be fed freeze dried blood worms’ says Google-baba. So R is pushing for freeze dried blood worms. Oh, boy R is getting a little too attached to Harry. May be he thinks Harry being a boy and all will some how restore the estrogen <-> testosterone balance in the house.

R has taken up the duty of feeding and cleaning Harry. Today morning while cleaning the tank, R says, “I don’t want to dump the dirty water from the tank in to the toilet. If Harry falls in to the toilet, we have to get him before he swims away and it might be tough.” I had to set him right by telling him that if Harry falls in to the toilet, we flush him down and get a new red beta from PETCO and name him Harry and if there are plans of diving in to the toilet there is no ‘WE’ involved.

Chula and Mieja thought that Harry would come swimming to the glass wall of the fish tank and kiss their finger tips from the other side of the fish tank. Now they are getting a grasp of reality. They look at the tank, prod it, tap it and exclaim, “Oh, Harry you are still alive??! Were you sleeping?” and get on with their lives.

So folks, put your hands together for Harry Belldrin Tomas (hm-hm, hm-hm, hm-hm, that is what the girls have christened him) and I am hoping Harry does not die on me, not when I am “taking care” of him.

PS: So……. how many of you fell for the ‘New addition’ post title?

Read review at Saffron Tree.

Technorati Tags: preschooler saying sorry, spunky girls, girl power, breaking good girl stereotypes

Part 1 of many.

All posts from this series.

I have always wanted to be an artist.

I most definitely have the passion and the patience for it. But the environment I grew up in was different. I was expected to read my academic books and when I got bored, I had a choice of minding my own business without bothering the adults or browse through the college level books that were crammed in my house.

After I was born my father did his M.Phil and then his Ph.D in organic chemistry. This with a full time job as chemistry professor. The man would happily skip to college to do another degree in this ripe age of 64. For heavens sake, he did his M.Ed after he finished his Ph.D because he was going in to withdrawal. Last phone call, I became aware that he enrolled for Tamil Vedham class on Sundays because he is bored and misses learning. *Rolling eyes*

All this meant that my amma had extra responsibility at home. Oh! add two of my amma’s sisters to the equation. Yes, my two chithis were staying with us and went to school. When I was born the older chithi was 15 years old and the younger one was 13. Later the older one stayed with us and did her med school and the younger one did her engineering. Plus there were the usual obligations for my amma from both her mother’s side and in-laws side. So this translated to more expenses, lesser money, even more work for amma. So unless I was drawing something on my record notebook or for my school assignments, it was highly frowned upon.

But I wouldn’t exactly call it an environment devoid of art. My amma was an expert in kolam, embroidery, basket weaving, stitching and an occasional pencil sketching. When I say kolam it is not the small and simple apartment kolams. I am talking the 4 to 5 feet diameter free hand kolams, with symmetry. May be it was because my amma has been doing all this since she was six or seven, it had already become a daily chore and may be she just wanted to get it over with and move on to the next in her agenda. Or may be because my amma being the oldest daughter, she had been the ‘teacher’ for her four siblings. Though I was her first biological child, I was her last baby, so may be she thought she had time. Plus amma comes from the belief, ‘Kan parthu kai seiyanum’ which translates to you must look at how it is done and start doing it. Both my chithis studied ALL the time, but when they did an occasional art like painting a piece of pottery or drew something, they were awesome. Perfect work, absolute symmetry, great perspective…all this without any kind of practice.

So I must say that I kind of wanted to do art. Though I had owned only a couple of sets of sketch pens, one set of water colors and a few color pencils all through my childhood, I did it in a small way I could. The pictures in my record note books were outsanding. Then there was this phase in college where I was head over heels in to making my own greeting cards. But they were mostly cutesy stuff. So I wanted some one to hold my hands to do serious art.

I took art lessons when I was 23. My first formal exposure being water colors. At the time I took the class, I don’t think it went well at all. I found it so very hard to control the medium. I could follow the demo to some extent, but observational drawing/painting and drawing from memory were Greek and Latin. Perspective left me perplexed. Then there was capturing how the light falls, depth, color mixing, technique, layering, form and movement. I would recreate at home some of the techniques such as masking, texturing, sponging but from my experiments I found I had three limitations.
-I couldn’t bring out the depth.
-I was too careful with the paint. Every time I squeezed out paint, I found something holding me back. “Got to be careful, do not waste” mantra kept ringing again and again in my head. “What is wrong with not wasting?” one might ask, I will come back to it later.
-I was always copying. I would like a painting or a photograph and would want to recreate it.

Around this time, I saw Bob Ross on TV and I was dumbfounded. He made it look like a piece of cake and I believed that acrylics were my destiny. Unfortunately it was a very short-lived experience. I needed step-by-step guiding and the teachers I had were amazing artists but poor teachers. What seemed basic to them was a giant step for me and the gap couldn’t be bridged at all. So I stopped acrylics in 12 weeks.

Oh I must mention the one stroke painting phase! Inspired by Donna Dewberry, I painted everything in the house. Flower pots, plates, lazy susan, wood storage boxes, serving trays…. 😀

Next in line was oils and I must say that I loved it. Th teacher was amazing. All along I had worked on a white canvas, layering it with dark colors. But this time the teacher started me off with a black canvas and helped me bring out the light with every step. The fact that I could finish a portrait was a big deal for me. I was able to come up with a finished product that had depth, but I still had the other two limitations.  This was around the time I was having my miscarriages and some old wife tale about heavy metals in oils and smelling turpentine fumes put a complete stop to any further development.

For a long time I had had my eyes on tanjore paintings. So I took a workshop and loved it. Again I must say that I had a wonderful teacher. I have made four tanjore paintings so far. One of which is hanging in my house and the other three are gifts. Lovely hobby, but expensive, both in terms of time and material.

Given my limitations and time restrictions I think my art experiments will be postponed for another 10 or so years. I am not giving up, because I enjoy the process of creating something even if it is a copy, but because I simply do not have the bandwidth for classes and practice. So I was clearing my art storage boxes in the garage, salvaging some stuff for the girls to use. All this got me thinking…..

What is art? How do I define MY art? How do I teach my children to find THEIR art?

Contd: Part 2 of many.

All posts from this series.

Technorati Tags: art, art for young children, art for adults, my experiments with art

This has a lot of Tamil content which will be lost in translation. Serious apologies for the non-tamil.

When I was a kid, I remember playing with my friends:

Gopala…Yen Sir ->Yenge pore? ->Kadaikku poren ->Yenna vaanga? ->Roti vaanga ->Yenna roti? ->Bun-roti ->Yenna bun? ->Tea bun ->Yena tea? ->Chakra tea ->Yenna chakaram? ->Vandi chakkaram ->Yenna vandi? ->Mattu vandi ->Yenna madu?…………..

…..and so it goes.

I remember another version, the beginning of which I don’t remember. But it goes something like this…

…Upma ->Yenna uppu? ->Kal uppu ->Yenna kal? ->Ma kal ->Yenna ma? ->Teacher amma ->Yenna teacher? ->Kanakku teacher ->Yena kanakku? ->Veetu Kanakku ->Yenna veedu? ->Maadi veedu ->Yenna maadi? -> Mottai maadi -> Yenna mottai? ->Pazhani mottai.

Basically there are many versions, but the idea is to keep the answer tied to the previous question and forming the basis for the next question. Sort of like word play.

Why this sudden nostalgia? The resident three year old A.K.A Ms.Pipi Longstockings(will tweet later on why this nick) A.K.A Mieja who is a hybrid of why-why girl and the never ending story girl has taken to a never ending loop of questions.

On a regular day this is how it goes:

Amma what are you doing?

I am eating.

What are you eating?

Breakfast.

What breakfast?

Upma?

What upma?

Aval upma.

What is aval?

Beaten rice. Poha.<I explain the whole process of making aval. But all the words I use have clearly circumvented the head, none other than the first two words have entered in to the ear of the said child.>

Why do they beat the rice?

To make aval.

What do you do with the aval?

I make upma.

What do you do with the upma?

I eat it.

For???

Breakfast or for a snack.

Amma, what are you eating?

At which point I am singing in my head “Devuda devuda ezhumalai devuda, chooduda chooduda yindha pakkam chooduda……” Inside my head because I am afraid of questions like what is devuda? What is chooduda? Why are you singing that song? What does that mean?………

Technorati Tags: preschoolers curious about everything, preschoolers asking questions, old tamil word games

Part 1 of 3 here.

Part 2 of 3 here.

(Part 3 of 3 follows)I got to be frank. When I said part three would follow, I seriously had something running at the back of my mind. What that something is I am desperately trying to summon from the notes I made, but I am failing miserably. I simply do not have it in me. I can either wait for inspiration to strike and let the blog gather dust or fess up and get it over with. So some random blah that I am hoping would tie up loose ends.

2.5 years back I did a post on preschools and the popular streams. Back then I was looking for preschools for Chula. Reading that post again, I am surprised that I wouldn’t change much of what I had written. Except that I would correct my thoughts on child centered learning. A child centered method fits for all children, provided, yes there is a disclaimer, provided the teacher is a well experienced guide. We are talking about ‘THE TEACHER’ when we say teacher. Also I had mentioned that Chula would fit better in an academically oriented program. After her spending two years in this Montessori she is currently attending, I cannot say how wrong I was in my older post. I chose this Montessori purely based on gut and looks like I chose wisely.

I also found this in my archives regarding the basics of children learning and found it very appropriate.

I have witnessed both topic based random knowledge dispersion as well as cumulative acquisition of knowledge where everything is interconnected and grows from the partnership between the student and the teacher. I thoroughly endorse the latter style, especially for the first six years I believe in on going learning without borders.

But if any one has any specific questions, do ping me.

Technorati Tags: types of schools, child centered learning, teacher centered learning, how children learn