"How do you spell that word?"

Elena has recently been asking us to write words down, asking us how they are spelled. In particular, she does this whenever she can tell that she is mispronouncing the word. For example, for a long time, she has pronounced "communion" as "minion." Recently, when I tried to correct her by getting her to repeat it after me, she asked me, "How do you spell it? Write it down." I wrote it down. She looked at it, pronounced it correctly, and hasn't turned back with the pronounciation. I don't think that she's really able to read the whole word, but she can see that it starts with a /c/ sound, and that's what she needed. She's also using this to better pronounce the word "spaghetti."

Opposites

I have neglected to do anything with opposites with Elena up till now. It seems she grasps the concept quite well. Or at least, when she doesn't want to rhyme the word instead. She correctly came up with acceptable opposites for dirty, loud, wet, happy, and fast.

Does anyone have any ideas as to similar thinking/categorization games I could play with Elena?

Math

I asked Elena a couple days ago, "What's one plus two?"

She replied, "Three!"

"Good job!" I replied. "What's one plus three?"

"Four!"

"Good!" I said, impressed. "How about two plus two?"

"One!"

Hm... we'll need to work on that one...

On a different occasion, I wrote for her "1 + 2 = " and she wrote "3".

So, she's getting it. It's starting to come. But I must get bead material soon, or at the very least, some form of manipulative. It's just so expensive. Even making it from scratch. I wish I had the ability to forge spherical 6mm glass beads, but I don't.

Reading progress

Remembering that the primary purpose of this blog is to give us a place to track Elena's academic development...

Elena has lately been reading Bob books. The first series of Bob books makes a whole story using only short vowels, which are largely in her grasp now.

She has also been loving going to Starfall.com and doing the reading activities there. Lately, we have been working on the idea that sometimes letters don't make the sounds she's used to, focusing on what happens when a silent E is added ("rat" versus "rate"). She has had a difficult time making this leap, but yesterday, she made significant progress with this and was able to do a number of silent E words in the Jake's Tale story. "Find the silent E!" has now become a fun game for her. And it helps that starfall has a nice song for each one ("The silent E at the end of a word makes the [letter name] say [long vowel sound]" to the tune of "Here we go round the mulberry bush").

Elena has also recently picked up on of her Spanish language books and was going through it with me. She would ask "What's 'dog' in Spanish?" when looking at a picture of a dog and I would suggest sounding out the Spanish word to find out. It seemed to make a fun detective game that she was largely able to solve herself. This is not at all the sort of language immersion that I would have hoped for, but she is at least starting to learn that everything has a name in other languages. It's also an interesting multicultural compentency exercise for her: sometimes, she will give me a book to read to her that's in Spanish or Italian, but when I start to read it in the language in which it's written, she'll say "No! Don't read it in a language, just read it normal!" Lately I've been trying to explain that what she speaks is a language, too, just like Spanish and Italian. It seems to be sinking in, at least to some extent, though it's hard for her to understand that English, which comes so easily to her now, could be equivalent to another language.

She says the funniest things

Me: (gnawing playfully on her arm)
ER: Papa?
Me: Yes?
ER: Don't press on my skin, because it has bones inside.

Playing games

Go fish, crazy eights. She loves go fish. We got into a good rhythm, and she's able to tell when she has pairs. After a while, I didn't have to look at her hand to make sure she was doing it right.

Gardening and composting

I have not paid much attention to our worms. I have not really fed them very often (I'm estimating that I give them a new tray of food about 1x/mo, if that). But they seem to have survived quite well and have done their work making the super-concentrated compost that we need to augment the incredibly poor soil we have here. In the areas that have been my parent's traditional gardens, my mom has typically bought store-bought gardening soil to add in, but we're working on expanding our edible plantings into other areas of my parents landscaping, some of which have never had any soil amendment. We're trying to get more nutrients into the soil (hence the compost), and we're also trying to help water stay in the soil rather than running off of it (it's rock hard!). So Erich's been aerating as much as possible, and we've been mulching a lot, too.

We got a free truck-full of mulch from a tree-removal company, and have been spreading it in the orchard. It's working wonderfully. The orchard is happier, we're getting some healthy groundcover, and we actually don't have to water it as much.

First a some notes on the worms:
1. Theoretically, the worms are supposed to leave the tray with the finished castings to migrate to the tray with fresh food and bedding. I haven't really found this to be how things work. This is probably due at least in part to the fact that I haven't given them a new tray and then left them for a while to migrate. But even when there are five trays in use, the oldest one still has quite a few worms in it. So I have to get them to leave the finished compost "manually." Actually, I don't have to pick them out or anything like that. What I have been doing that works GREAT is pulling out the tray I want for its compost and putting it on top of the tray that I want to worms to move to (say, the new tray full of fresh scraps and bedding). This is somewhat contrary to the directions that have the worms always migrating upwards to the fresh tray. I then expose the finished tray to bright light, and the worms scurry downward to escape the sun (this is rather fun to watch... I picture them all saying, "Run away!"). I then pull off the top layer of relatively worm-free compost, exposing them again. They scurry further down, I pull off more worm-free compost. Eventually, they scurry all the way to the next tray. Mission accomplished.
2. Previously, I had been using shredded paper as bedding for the worms. I have not been doing this as much and have been using coconut coir instead. It seems to work much better, producing a more uniform compost without weird clumps where liquid turned the paper into a papier-mache barrier that the worms can't get through. Also, I do wonder with all the chemicals that super-white paper is treated with whether the resulting compost is quite as... "healthy" as compost made with coir. I still may continue using some paper, particularly the brown paper, but I won't be using it exclusively for bedding.

3. It's really worth cutting the food up first before giving it to the worms. Thanks to my mother's newfound interest in composting (see her blog at lonimania.blogspot.com for pictures of her super indoor composter), we now have nice compost pails and are getting into the habit of cutting up our scraps before putting them into the pails because the indoor composter really needs everything to be in bite-size pieces. Well, the worms do much better with bite-size pieces, especially with fibrous stuff like corn husks. In case it's not obvious (I guess it wasn't to me, at first), cutting up the scraps BEFORE they start rotting in the pail is WAY more pleasant than waiting until you're about to add them to the composter to cut them.

4. Our worm trays have another species in them besides the eisenia foetida (red wigglers) that we bought. They're supposed to have other creatures, but this one other species has become rather prominent. I don't know what they are. I thought at first that they were maggots of some sort, but I'm changing my mind because even though they are short, whitish, and segmented, they are flat and may have feet. I'm not sure about that--I haven't taken a close look. I was worried about them going into the garden because what if they were the larval form of something that would eat our plants (or what if they themselves would eat our plants)? But they, like the worms, run from the light, so they don't end up in the compost that I put in the garden. If any fellow vermicomposters have any idea what they may be, do comment! They're about an inch long.

That's it on the composting front. In related news, erich bought a flat of strawberry plants that I'm working on getting into the ground. My parents have some ornamental strawberries as groundcover in a couple of places, and we'd love to slowly replace them with edible strawberries. I hope they survive. The blackberry plants that we recieved from a friend seem to be surviving well. I'm hoping they grow and spread and someday bear fruit. We also have an olallieberry plant that a former supervisor gave me. It's still alive, but it doesn't look as happy as the blackberries. Even though berries require a lot of water, we decided it's worth trying to grow them ourselves, because my family goes through a ton of them from trader joes and they're really quite good for you.

Our tomato plants (and we have a lot of them, what with all the volunteer plants that came up from one batch of compost) are doing well and putting on tomatoes, but when Erich planted them, he didn't think to put up supports, so we're having tomatoes sitting on the ground. I'm trying to go around and prop them up on things.

It's a joy to finally be able to attend to the garden on a weekend like this. My weekends have been swallowed in the black hole of my dissertation for so long, I'd almost forgotten what it's like to have a real weekend. It's been wonderful.