Water Displacement

Elena initiated a lesson in water displacement today when she asked why the water level went down when people got out of the spa at the party yesterday (I love how she remembers these things she's curious about and asks us the next day). I showed her the basics of water displacement using a glass full of water and various objects. She seems to get it pretty well.

Puberty

Elena has been getting lessons in puberty, sparked by her questions about how exactly her body will develop to look like a woman's. I will not go into detail in the blog about this because I don't want our blog to show up when people search for prurient terms. Suffice it to say she asked questions that got her a fair bit of detailed information.

No voice update

Elena has gone from having a deep smoker's voice to having almost no voice at all. Since she's still in good spirits, this has been a good learning opportunity. We've been discussing vocal chords, how they work (including watching videos of actual vocal chords) and the swelling that is currently keeping her from being able to produce sounds. Fun science lesson!

No Voice

Elena is sick, and has lost her voice. She sounds worse than a smoker. It's very strange to hear this relatively alto voice coming out of my three year old.

She's generally cheery though. It isn't wearing her down very much yet.

Castle Park

My parents took Elena to Castle park, a nearby smallish amusement park, while Erich and I were busy singing at a wedding. She LOVED it. She was very enthusiastic about the rides, though she preferred the physically exciting ones to the psychologically exciting ones. My parents mistakenly took her on a dark "shoot the bad people" ride that was not a hit. My mother tried her best to reassure her that it was all pretend and that the bad people weren't going to hurt them. Elena's response at the end was "If they weren't going to hurt us, why were we shooting at them?" Good girl.

"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.