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On Being That Weird Girl
On Being That Weird Girl
Being called weird used to hurt. A lot. Kids call each other names all the time but sometimes a word sneaks through the armor and cuts you to the quick. Growing up I was called weird by a lot of kids. Eventually they stopped as social groups became more defined and we didn’t try to mingle with kids outside of our cliques. What if you are an outlier though? I was the odd ball in a lot of cliques…
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The Adapted Home
These past few months since attending the PG Retreat have been filled with emotional change for our family. After 3 years of trying to figure out what it was exactly that made our family so different, now we KNOW. We’ve found our tribe, our family, our people. With it has come a few small shifts in our perspective that have made large shifts in our daily life.We stopped trying to be normal.…
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Life Skills Monday
The homeschool year is progressing and the calendar is getting fuller by the day. As a family of four we are busy with many trips and events but we are also continuing our year of saying “no” to invitations. This pull back has allowed us to focus on what we truly want in our days and what is just too much. Day-to-day things are as intense as ever with our two whirling dervishes learning…
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An open letter to Farrah Alexander
An open letter to Farrah Alexander after her Huffington Post piece dismissing giftedness.
I was getting myself ready for bed tonight and I made the mistake of checking my Facebook feed one last time before turning out the lights. I didn’t know that seeing a link to your Huffington Post piece was going to cause me a myriad of emotions; mainly anger and sadness. Mostly though I want to start with an apology to you. I want to apologize to you because you are hurting. Clearly you are…
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The First Day Of School
The First Day Of School
As summer winds down and the hope of cooler weather and fall leaf-looking fills my heart I get the excitement of back-to-school planning in full. I used to love shopping for scented markers, the perfect gummy eraser, or new lunch box. I adored the lists and new snappy binders I got to take home from the office supply store. As an organizer, back to school shopping was a dream even if the…
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Raising Readers
Books will always hold a sacred space in our household. When I think about moving the first thing I dread is the weight of all those boxes filled to the flaps with mysteries, adventures, love stories, and more. Yet with each move, every book comes along. I couldn’t imagine leaving them behind. Now that we are a homeschooling family my husband and I have used it as permission to build our library…
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This week we followed up on our multicultural learning by travelling to Africa. I’ve always wanted to travel to Africa and now my kids do too. We started Tuesday with a trip to the local library and our Give Your Child The World passport in tow.
It is simple enough to go through the book and pull out the names of books you want to pull from the shelves. Not so simple is doing that with two toddlers who have their own ideas of fun in the library. The oldest figured out the Dewey Decimal System recently and has been using the computer to look for books of interest. He is constantly hogging the children’s visual catalog and pulling all the Nate the Great and Cam Jansen books to the screen then running to find them on the shelves. He seems to have become a fan of orange-haired detectives like himself. Younger brother is busy doing his best to empty all the puzzle boxes or DVD cases. He is more destructive than creative these past few months. While they keep themselves busy and prepare more work for me, I quickly scan for titles. This Tuesday I happen to have backup in the library. What a difference a second set of hands can make! It might explain how I found two full bags worth of books on Africa!
With our 14 new titles in the bags we headed home. I pulled out the large wall map last week and we have been taking the time to find each continent as we go through things. With Africa we started talking about the scale of the land. The diversity of the populations and landscape diversity are vast. I noticed that no books on Egypt were present and I assume that it will fall into a Middle East section. Also, since this is current rather than historical, we skipped the Egyptology. Trying to explain how large a continent is to a child is difficult but we managed a good understanding via comparisons.
Most of the books celebrate the beauty of stories and rural traditions. For You Are A Kenyan Child was so sweet. My son asked why they played soccer with a rag ball instead of a soccer ball and we got to talk about income and rural life. With Anansi the Spider we discussed the trickster theme and how it appears in many cultures. We all know someone who is sneaky or tricky.
Animal diversity is a large part of the African mystique. Hippos, giraffes, elephants, and so many more creatures great and small clearly set Africa apart from other regions of the world. We integrated our sensory needs by making a bin of jelly beads and putting animals in. Both kids got to use tongs and scooping tools to retrieve the animals. We said their names and placed them on the map. Each child got to guess which animals were from Africa and which were not. It was so much fun that my kids did it over and over.
When I needed a break I got the chance to turn on the tv and pulled up Tinga Tinga Tales. If you haven’t seen these, I highly recommend them. The stories are done in the art from Tanzania and look like batique art in motion. The tales are African cultural tales about animals and are produced in Nairobi. Originally a BBC show, it has been bought by Disney and brought to the USA. They are absolutely beautiful. I find myself constantly inspired by the art and simple designs. For the kids it was a nice visual play with a great and funny story mixed in.
As we wrap up the week I wanted to reflect on what a gift this has been to have a guide to opening our hearts and minds to the world. It is one thing to read stories from all over the library but it is another to find them in groups so that they build upon each other and give meaning to entire regions of the world. We had such meaningful conversation about skin color, ethnicity, culture, jobs, language, food, economic disparity, and much more thanks to reading by region.
Join us next week as we travel to Europe with Give Your Child The World.
Travelling to Africa This week we followed up on our multicultural learning by travelling to Africa. I've always wanted to travel to Africa and now my kids do too.
Why I Don't Buy Learning Toys
Why I don't buy learning toys and what I focus on instead.
Learning toys are such a part of modern childhood. We can lace letters of the alphabet and work on that hand-eye coordination while sneaking in letter learning. We can buy “learning phones” that look like a tablet and have all sorts of buttons which make sounds. Baby rattle microphones highlight just how well our little darlings can screech when excited. The list is endless in our modern…
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When my husband was growing up he had only one answer to the question “what do you want for your birthday?” That answer was always LEGO.
Christmas gifts? Lego.
Any and every holiday that involved gifts…Lego.
Thankfully his mother saved every single kit and we now are the proud owners of an anthology of 80’s and 90’s Lego. Remember Benny from The Lego Movie? Well, we have a lot of original Bennys around our home. I am pretty sure we could pay a few mortgage payments with those complete sets. Never going to happen though. Those bricks are priceless.
He built a working auto rack for his elevated city train. Age 3
By the way, storing Lego is big business around our home. My husband told me his secret and I’m going to share it with you just in case your kids are as devoted as mine. Large ZipLoc bags…tons of them. Keep all the pieces to each kit with their respective manuals in large bags. File them by theme in storage containers. It is that easy. While occasionally a set gets used for another creation, our visual-spatial family always knows where the pieces truly belong. Having a missing brick is a crime around here and is punishable by endless nights searching.
Like father, like son is the saying that applies in our home. Both of our boys seemed destined to be Lego master builders from the start. Our oldest completed his first kit while 2 and his brother is right behind him. They might have small hands but the imaginations are big on these boys!
In my quest to find everyday heroes for our children we came across Parker Krex. In 2015 he was the youngest CEO on Shark Tank. Check out this article from the Chicago Times. Great minds think alike because we store our bricks the same way! We have been subscribing to his monthly boxes for almost a year now and we have been happy with every single kit. My son absolutely loves hearing the doorbell ring on the 10th of each month. Everything in the house stops and it is BrickLoot time!
Since our kids are asynchronous their building abilities, imagination abilities, and creating abilities have developed on different trajectories. To start, the ability to turn each page, spot the new brick locations and place bricks was developed. He could sort his colors and pieces and place his bricks to create a final piece easily at 2. Once finished though, his mind hadn’t developed to play with it fully. That didn’t come until later. Once 3 our son developed imagination for make believe and we started seeing him make noises and act out scenes. That was more neurotypical in timing. Between the two periods he was filling his mind with how to build the world he saw. He was a little squirrel stashing his acorns for winter.
Rendering the real world is the greatest and hardest part of Lego. When you build with simple bricks you are forced to abstract the world to architectural terms then develop imagination to make them come alive. When LiteralA was 2 he didn’t have enough knowledge of the building blocks of the world so he couldn’t sit in front of a pile of bricks and create. He needed that year of following the instructions to build his artist’s vocabulary.
Of course each child is different. With our youngest son he is highly imagination driven and can regularly be heard Roawrrrrring around the house like a dinosaur. He has been making the sweet “choo choo” sounds since before his first birthday. While he is wildly ahead of his other brother in this category, he would not be able to sit and build a kit yet. Each child is such a unique gift.
For developing the minds and imaginations I have found that small projects can make huge strides. We love to build little things and talk about how they fit into our life. A sofa, a television set, a fish tank, etc. A small build a day with a little chat about it will open the eyes to seeing what is in the home and also how it is structured. This can go a long way to developing an eye for rendering. Once they can start thinking of things in their chosen medium, they can start storing data to build the world around them. While I love the large boxes of open ended brick pieces that can be any project, it doesn’t work for every kid. Sometimes a small set is the right start. Learn the alphabet of Lego design before being expected to compose on their own. In the end though, once hooked on Lego, there are never enough bricks!
Happy building to you all. Check online for our latest builds and fun from Simply Precocious.
Building a Visual Vocabulary with Lego When my husband was growing up he had only one answer to the question "what do you want for your birthday?" That answer was always LEGO.
Give Your Child The World
Give Your Child The World
We finished our very first week of an amazing new book. It is a game changing book for us. Give Your Child the World is the newly published brain child of Jamie C. Martin. She is the mother of 3 children and servant to mankind. After a personal life of travel and service to others, she and her husband became determined to give that gift to their children. When you follow along with her plan you…
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Digital Sensitivity
If you do a Google search for “Is TV bad for you” you will receive about 301,000,000 results in under a second. This is clearly a hot-button issue. I’m not going to weigh in on it one way or another but I wanted to share what we found with our highly sensitive family. A little bit of background on us. We are a family full of empathetic people. If one person is sad the whole family is suddenly…
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The beauty of kid's museums
The beauty of kid’s museums
Kids need constant supervision and interaction for a long period of their childhoods. If you’ve got constant question asking, stimulation needing, psychomotor overdrive kids you need to have a plan to let those animals run free. As a parent it is exhausting. It quickly becomes a downward spiral of frustration and more for me and many parents when you run out of ideas or desire to clean your house…
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The Anxiety Spin Cycle
The Anxiety Spin Cycle
I’ve had panic attacks for as long as I can remember. They aren’t always quiet but mostly they are silent. It is a closing of the throat or the sudden urge to vomit. It is a full body shut down where you just sit still staring into the void trying not to give up. It is overwhelming and more frequent than wanted. The day can start out great enough then little by little the dishes pile up and the…
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Pathologizing the Gifted Child
Pathologizing the Gifted Child
In our culture we love to use expressions. We hit the books or twist someone’s arm. We can loose our touch or go cold turkey if we need to. We may even look like a million bucks when we go out to blow off some steam. What about being so OCD or such a manic depressive. A control freak? Little maniac? Boys will be boys? On social media and playgrounds alike there are millions of children being…
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Infant Intensity
Babies can be a lot to handle. The crying, the nursing, the feeding, the sleepless nights, the diapers…it is a seemingly endless cycle of needs that parents have to stay on top of. Just to keep you on your toes kids like to also throw in learning leaps. What’s a learning leap? One of my favorite parenting tools has been the Wonder Weeks book and app. In the book the authors collate the data from…
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Rethinking Maths Struggles
Growing up I was ahead of the curve in many areas of my life and struggled terribly in others. I was years ahead in literacy but I also failed basic maths multiple times. I still can’t do my times tables beyond 5s, 10s, and 9s. In college I earned a A’s in Finance and Accounting but I had failed Algebra twice. I challenged Business Math in high school and passed easily but I couldn’t get Algebra…
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Review: Story of the World: Part I
Story of the Word: Part I. Building pyramids and making history come alive in our home!
Creating an education plan for my son has been painful. One of the things that makes gifted children so different from regular kids is their asynchronous development. My son is all over the map with his needs. We held to the idea that we could unschool our kids but eventually we discovered that a combination of child-led learning and old fashioned schooling was the right match for him.…
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