Finally got some of the paperwork shifted that’s been bugging me for ages. Discovered that the letter from the tax office is not because they don’t know what I’m doing, but because they think I might be due a refund! The bank has sent them the wrong details about my redundancy, so rang them up and was slightly rude again…4th time this week 🙁
Big varied from being lovely and helpful to being sent out of the room for being grotty. She voluntarily did JP, but today wouldn’t read (“I can’t read” sigh). We walked round to post some stuff though, and she wanted to play I Spy with sounds which was a first so that was good.
We’ve talked quite a bit about numbers today, and about how she could help me more around the house. She’s well into the idea of having her own jobs – thank you MMM! So now she does drinks for her and Small at meal times, and I’m working on the idea that she could help with sorting out her clothes and so on from the washing.
Small varied today – took him down off the sofa a few times, but also found him climbing up on the chair so that he could do some drawing at the table. He loves to go out as well, so he should be ever so happy tomorrow when we go out for the whole morning. And with that in mind, I’m off to bed.
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4 responses to “pulled it back a bit”
reverse Psycology worked so well on J: I “wouldnt let” her read or write till after she was 5 and by that time she had built up such a massive urge to do it , I have never had to pursuade her! Just turned seven, she’s now starting to read to herself and gobbles books from the library. I’m trying to be the same with F, but its very hard to be so restrained! he’s started on Letterland stage 1,(just recognising letters) but its “not really reading”!! and we’ll take our time.
Have to ask! How do you ‘not let’ a child learn something? What do you do when they’re asking “what’s that letter?” or “what does that say?” or “I want to write my name on this picture?”
I try to let my children do things in their own time; I’ve never had to persuade them to learn something either. I couldn’t do the ‘sit down and teach them every day’ approach, but I don’t quite see how the reverse is any better? Maybe it sounds more extreme in a couple of sentences than what you actually did, lol.
ok, Alison, I know it sounds a bit strange, to put it mildly! (Maybe I need someone to invent an ‘ironic smiley’ emoticon???)I think what I was trying to say is that at that age I didnt have any expectations of Jem learning to R&W as she was at a Steiner Kindergarten. So I didnt have any literacy-related toys, workbooks, etc, which in some peoples eyes, eg my mother’s, was depriving her of the opportunity of learning, which of course it wasn’t, as, of course, I answered q’s when they came up and responded to her curiosity. I just wanted to make sure she was really ready and not being pressurised by other people’s expectations of “the Norm”. I suppose to me literacy wasnt very important at that stage as I had every faith that it would happen in good time, which it did.
Ah, well that does make more sense 😉 For me the main impetus and pleasure of HE is all to do with not wanting them to ‘have’ learn stuff at some prescribed age, so I can certainly empathise with the not wanting to put any pressure on. I decided when Poppy was a toddler that I wasn’t going to try to ‘make’ her learn to read (and soon realised I probably couldn’t anyway, lol!), and seeing her discover so much over the next few years from the books and games around her was great fun 🙂 But overall I think the whole ‘language/literary experience’ is far more important to young children than the actual mechanics of reading.
Of course, none of our theories seem like much help when you have a child like Big, who has been nagging Jax for about a year now about learning to read, LOL!