The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
Lern 2 read n00b
ElJeffe
Registered User, ClubPA regular
Registered User, ClubPA regular
So we're teaching our daughter (4) to read and write. She can already write all of her capital letters, and we're working on writing her lowercase letters. Here's where things started to get complicated.
Now, I've heard from various sources that teachers are super-duper anal about ensuring that students write their letters very particularly. They must look the same, be formed the same, and so on. So my wife and I figured that we would teach Maddie proper form. We have a few school-friendly workbooks of the sort where you trace the letters and then write them yourself and so on, and we're using that.
Now, Maddie can, for example, draw a really good looking 'b'. It looks pretty much exactly like these little typed 'b's. But it doesn't look like the officially sanctioned 'b', which consists of a vertical stick with a complete circle attached to it (circle drawn clockwise, not counterclockwise!) Similarly, she can draw a capital 'A' that looks identical to the one in the book - but she draws the diagonal lines in a single up-down stroke, whereas the book instructs you to draw those lines in two strokes, top-to-bottom each time.
At first, we were trying to get her to adhere to proper form, and generate perfect little clones of the letter in the book. But she was getting frustrated and wasn't having any fun with it. Finally, my wife and I said fuck it and let Maddie draw her letters however she wanted, and she had a blast, went through a bunch of letters, and learned how to read and write a few words.
So, questions:
A) Are schools really that anal about adhering to proper form and procedure on letters?
Is there actually a good developmental reason for this, outside of 'it's easier to make sure everyone's up to snuff when they're all little clones of one another'?
C) If we teach Maddie to write letters that don't conform precisely to Official Standards, and she learns to read and write accordingly, is it going to have any negative side effects other than that she might have to relearn to write a few letters down the road? I suspect she'll be the type to roll her eyes at the idea and go along with the Official Letters with sort of a "fine, here's your silly fucking stick-circle 'b', you happy now?" mentality.
Basically, she has a fierce independent streak and is ridiculously creative (she's a pretty brilliant artist for a 4 year old, and is great at making up stories and music and the like), and I don't want to stifle that. At the same time, I want to make sure she's not going to be boned when she gets to kindergarten.
Now, I've heard from various sources that teachers are super-duper anal about ensuring that students write their letters very particularly. They must look the same, be formed the same, and so on. So my wife and I figured that we would teach Maddie proper form. We have a few school-friendly workbooks of the sort where you trace the letters and then write them yourself and so on, and we're using that.
Now, Maddie can, for example, draw a really good looking 'b'. It looks pretty much exactly like these little typed 'b's. But it doesn't look like the officially sanctioned 'b', which consists of a vertical stick with a complete circle attached to it (circle drawn clockwise, not counterclockwise!) Similarly, she can draw a capital 'A' that looks identical to the one in the book - but she draws the diagonal lines in a single up-down stroke, whereas the book instructs you to draw those lines in two strokes, top-to-bottom each time.
At first, we were trying to get her to adhere to proper form, and generate perfect little clones of the letter in the book. But she was getting frustrated and wasn't having any fun with it. Finally, my wife and I said fuck it and let Maddie draw her letters however she wanted, and she had a blast, went through a bunch of letters, and learned how to read and write a few words.
So, questions:
A) Are schools really that anal about adhering to proper form and procedure on letters?
Is there actually a good developmental reason for this, outside of 'it's easier to make sure everyone's up to snuff when they're all little clones of one another'?C) If we teach Maddie to write letters that don't conform precisely to Official Standards, and she learns to read and write accordingly, is it going to have any negative side effects other than that she might have to relearn to write a few letters down the road? I suspect she'll be the type to roll her eyes at the idea and go along with the Official Letters with sort of a "fine, here's your silly fucking stick-circle 'b', you happy now?" mentality.
Basically, she has a fierce independent streak and is ridiculously creative (she's a pretty brilliant artist for a 4 year old, and is great at making up stories and music and the like), and I don't want to stifle that. At the same time, I want to make sure she's not going to be boned when she gets to kindergarten.
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
ElJeffe on
0
Posts
C) She'll be fine. Nobody writes in a standard form by the time they hit middle school.
Basically, just look at your own handwriting. You don't do stick-with-circle-B and you're doing okay. She will too. A teacher here and there may get frustrated for a while, but eventually they'll give up.
This is just me speculating though. I'd guess the people who worked out these things did so with the goal of making handwriting as clear as possible even if your tidiness slips over the years.
I don't think kids are usually expected to write in kindergarten, just recognize which letters are which, and maybe what sounds they make.
Edit: I agree it'll really depend on the teacher. Some are real sticklers for sticking to the curriculum to the letter (or parts of letters in this case) and some (good teachers) will allow the students to develop their own ways of accomplishing tasks.
C) Not likely.
By the time she'd old enough to have to write extensively, she'll be tending towards the path of least resistance and writing everything in whatever way is most efficient to her. I can almost guarantee that the officially proscribed method is not likely to be the most efficient, based on what you've delineated so far.
I write my A's like she does, for the record.
As for writing her letters, keep an eye on what she's doing now and make sure that the symbol she draws is actually the correct letter. When she gets to school, if she has a stickler, she can worry about it then. Learning what the letters actually DO is more important at her age than learning how to do it perfectly correctly.
Of course, what this really means is that the best way for you to find out is to figure out which school she's going to go to, and call them up and ask.
I went to a catholic grammar school, though, so my experience is atypical.
Anyway, she'll be fine. If you get an anal teacher I guess she might get some flak for it.
When it comes to cursive handwriting, stick to the way it is suppose to be done for the small letters, Capital cursive letters are dumb and I just use regular capital letters to replace them when I feel like it. Seriously, a capital cursive Z is a fuckin loopy mess that no one even recognizes and I regret ever learning it.
I initially took notes in university wring in my cursive handwriting. Then I realized I wasn't learning in class by writing every word the prof wrote down and my speedy cursive handwriting was getting fast and sloppy to the point that I avoided reading it myself.
Now I have seen the light and write non-cursive bullet points, when what's being said isn't available elsewhere.
I'm not sure what direction education will take but I see typing dominating over cursive more and more in real life.
So you forget it until the SATs when they make you write that damned statement in cursive. Hardest part of the test right there.
It's becoming more and more rare that they do. Especially with the increased importance of standardized tests, schools don't waste a lot of time teaching things that won't end up on the state's test.
Personally, I learned the writing of my letters in some bizarre formats that suited me and which didn't really adhere to the "official" version of how you're supposed to write your characters.
Really, I can't say it's affected me in any negative way. It's not as if someone's going to come up to her at age 25 and say
"Well we were going to give you the job, but after looking at how you spelled out your name in that last form we've decided that our company cannot in good faith employ someone with your "specialised" needs."
And why does the T look like a goddamned J? And what the hell is up with the Q? That's not a letter, it's a fucking 2.
Okay, thanks for the feedback. We do make sure her letters look like actual letters, and she mostly writes them how I do, probably because that's how I was writing letters for her prior to getting this book. Except she likes giving her d's stripes in the round part, but whatcha gonna do?
and no if its tiny chicken scratch that you can't make out any letters, it doesn't mean i assume its right, you fail. /rant off
My signature is a line with maybe a couple of bumps on it.
Right, cursive.
Then again I'm old. And when I try to write regularly it looks like the scrawl of a first-grader. When I write in cursive I can pass for a third-grader.
I had no idea cursive was on its way out. Fascinating.
:x
Cursive is on its way out because no one can do it right. I have much empathy for pharmacists, how they figure out what the doctor scribbled on that prescription pad is beyond me. Sorry to be so cliche but it is totally true.:P
Make sure its fun, not work, else she'll switch off. Most teachers I know hope a child can write their name and get un/dressed by themselves for PE (PT?) take themselves to the loo independently, and blow their own noses. anything else is a bonus.
For paintings in progress, check out canvas and paints
"The power of the weirdness compels me."
God damn West Virginia public schools.
DVORAK is going the way of cursive on the tech side. I used to know a number of people who typed that way. Now it's very very few.
As far as school goes, I used cursive for 3rd-7th grade for all writing assignments. I continued to use it for note taking because it was all but illegible for most others and my notes were stolen from me on more than one occasion. It was like writing in code :P
That said, cursive would be up to the teacher. Good Luck teachin' the young one. She sounds smart.
A) It really does depend on her teacher, as someone previously mentioned. I wish I could comment on public school systems, but I went to a private school until 6th grade, so I don't have any of my own experiences. From years of nanny work with toddlers and their parents, however, I can say that I've never heard of a teacher being too picky about how a child writes the letter, as long as the letter is quite legible after being written.
C) From my own perspective, as a kid growing up with severe ADHD, I found it easier to start with things my own way, then conform to others as need be. Even for a child with a "normal" brain chemistry, I think the way you're teaching her so far is fine. I figure this way she can have some foundation, so she doesn't feel like a complete dunce when she starts kindergarten, but she can also learn at an early age how to work with others (or at least how to get them off her back :P).
Face Twit Rav Gram
I'm also the type to think it's absurd to enforce a way to write letters with the exact same result, or to enforce a single way to write a letter when others are just as legible, but then I thought the same when I was in grade school.
(1) Depends on the teacher, but as a parent, if my kids teacher had a problem with it, I'd just tell the teacher to stop being an idiot. Or a more polite version of that.
(2) No, none whatsoever. Left-handed people do their letters completely differently, for example. Chinese-style ideograms have specific stroke order, but the Roman Alphabet never has. Anyone who tells you different is making up theories to support their clone-love.
(3) Only if she goes to a school full of insane people (e.g. Catholic School), or if her writing is not particularly legible.
Are you doing any phonics as well? I've had good results teaching phonics at the same time as letters, since it seems less confusing than learning 'ay' 'bee' 'see' 'dee' and then suddenly being told 'ah' 'bu' 'kuh' 'duh', which tends to confuse kids. Is phonics something that non-teachers know about nowadays?
Also, I thought phonics was on the way out because, you know, foniks.
EDIT: This reminds me of when my cousin was learning to read. I was studying for the Instrument Flight knowledge test, and had some question about adiabatic lapse rate. He's trying real hard to read "adiabatic" out loud, and asks me whether the third A is long or short. Being that adiabatic itself has THREE different A sounds in it, I wasn't sure--I knew it wasn't long, so I ended up just telling him the sound it makes and hoping that's sufficient.
I don't know if that will be helpful to you in the future or not Jeffe.
In short, phonics is my bestest friend.
History lesson:
Old-style typewriters used the buttons as little mechanical levers to cause the arm with the letter block to swing up, squish the ink ribbon against the paper, and leave an impression of the letter on the paper. Problem is, if you typed too fast with the same letters that were close together, the arms would jam together.
QWERTY was made to actually slow down people's typing and space common letters far enough apart to reduce jamming. Thing is, now that typing's electronic, we don't need to slow people down anymore.
Enter Dvorak. Invented by Dr. August Dvorak in 1936, his layout is faster and more convenient.
Problem is, everyone is used to QWERTY, no one wants to learn the new system, practically no one makes Dvorak keyboards, etc. etc.
So it looks like we're stuck with QWERTY.
Also, it would discourage other people from using my computer.
phonics was an extremely useful tool for me learning how to read. I can't count how many times I was about to pronounce something correctly whilst reading aloud in class compared to about five failures before me. It makes word recognition easier and it allows for an easily-expanded vocabulary. In short:
re: topic
I'm not too young, but, I know that whenever I was learning to write I wrote like a fucking chicken. My penmanship is still terrible, to this day. I was never reprimanded for it, I never got any shit for it, and I certainly don't have any negative connotations from it. I just take it as a weird little defect and think about changing it, but then someone will come around and say that my chicken scratch is actually pretty sweet, so I'm like eh.
Oh wait, I do remember getting shit for it, but I was in High School. Basically, my AP English Lang teacher told me the morning after one of our papers that she had to go out and buy new glasses to read my paper. No points off, though. Heh.
I thought the bit about deliberately slowing people down was an urban myth?
It's not intended to make you type slower, but it's a consequence of other design choices.
Both were meticulously designed to maximize typing speed, but their designers had different constraints on them at the time.
Getting waaaaaaay off topic, but switch the keycaps around and change to DVORAK in your localization settings. Or, better yet, don't switch the keycaps but change in the localization settings and get really confused.
Also, if you want to guarantee that she gets interested in the outdoors:
On the plus side, switching somebody's keyboard to dvorak while they're out of the room is one of my favorite pranks.
http://dvzine.org/zine/01-toc.html
(this has been Off Topic Theatre, thank you for reading)
Jeffe, has she tried writing on different surfaces? This is totally armchair-child-development-expert here, but I'd imagine that having to write the same thing on a Whiteboard, Chalkboard, and piece of paper and trying to get them to look the same would provide an interesting challenge to her cute little motor skills.