I remember being at a homeschool conference and one of the "vetran moms" confessing that her daughter had made it all the way to 6th grade before dear mother realized she forgot to teach her daughter cursive handwriting.
"You know, its just one of those things you forget you have to teach them," she said. "Kind of something you kinda think they will just pick up along the way."
I have had my own such moment recently. Although I fear it was with something much more obvious that cursive handwriting.
My lovely darlings, ages almost 5 and almost 6, are doing well at math. Which is to say, their mother, who stinks at math, is thrilled that they somehow figured out how to do simple addition and subtraction problems, as well as counting to 100 by ones, fives, and tens. (I can't take all the credit, of course. There is always JEDI MATH, which they play feverishly on long car rides.) We try to learn a lot by using games and real life. Value of money? Come garage sale-ing with me for a summer, kids, and you'll have it down pat.
So...where's the part that I forgot?
Here goes. The other day we are sitting down to do something related to numbers and I asked the boys to write the answer on their dry erase boards to whatever math problem I tossed out in the air.
(Do you see where this is going?)
Except for numbers 1, 8 (the headless snowman) and 10, they're pretty clueless on how the darn things are made. Well...not completely clueless. They obviously know what they look like. And they made good effort at making them look right. But it was painfully apparent to me that even though we've worked quite hard on the concept of a gi-normous amount of things having to do with numbers...even spelling out the number words...we kind of forgot the simple matter of how to make the damn numbers.
Sigh. Up go the giant number posters. And yet another chalk mark up on the wall of "Homeschooling things Mom screwed up".
Ah. But I am so glad to have the opportunity to do so. :)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
2 comments:
Lol! Sometimes it seems so hard to remember everything involved along the way. My son had learned cursive before we pulled him from the school system, but has since decided it's a unless art. On the other hand, he can type.
Have you considered picking up those dry erase placemats of the numbers, alphabet, countries, etc, from W@lm@rt? You can also visit a local school supple store and either buy posters or just get the idea and go make your own to save a few bucks. ;-)
Happy New year! I hope you all are feeling better soon.
I happen to think that's the best way to learn things...when they are needed. They haven't had need to write numbers until now and now there's reason to learn.
Post a Comment