Basic literacy and numeracy sans formal lessons

• home education

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]

[imported from livejournal and backdated]

Pocket money and birthday cards.

And that’s just two of an infinite number of possibilities. 5yo has recently started writing the names of his friends from !school group on the backs of envelopes. It all started with the first birthday party of one of them a couple of months ago, in which both 5yo and 3yo, with a little help from me, wrote “Happy Birthday from [their name]” on a piece of paper, decorated it, and then stuck it into a similarly decorated envelope, and wrote the child’s name on the front.

Perhaps the time spent on Reading Eggs paid off, 5yo only had to be told what the letters were to spell the name in question, though he needed some reminders of a couple of letters, and he wrote it himself. 3yo, I guided her hand in the writing.

After that, they spent some time at various points in the following days writing the same child’s name on the backs of envelopes. Then 5yo graduated onto the child’s sibling, working out how that name was spelled on his own. Then he asked JJ how to spell the name of one of his other friends. JJ didn’t actually know but hazarded a guess.

5yo also knows his name backwards spells a different word.

3yo knows the letters in her name, just needs to get them in the right order.

On the numeracy front, 5yo’s always been pretty decent with numbers. He’s been given money, usually JJ and other relatives chipping him change, and has over time amassed a collection of shrapnel in his piggybank.

His latest interest, he’s been wanting a sonic screwdriver, and kept demanding when we could go to the ABC Shop to look for one. I told him as I’d told him many other times he could use his own money. So he went to his piggybank and started bringing me handfuls of coins. We counted the coins with me flashing very quickly through how many of each denomination make a dollar and then adding up dollars. Eventually we ended up with $19.05. I told him he probably needed another $10. He came back with a 10c coin. I reiterated needing ten DOLLARS. A while later I heard him rummaging through his piggybank. Eventually he returned with 5x $2 coins, having remembered that 5x2 = 10.

It’s a start. Or probably more accurately a continuation. Can never really tell.

This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License