Working on creative projects

One of the things a school loves to give out are projects - whether it is for fancy dress, classroom charts, art exhibition projects and what not, there are a lot of creative assignments that come our way. The easiest would be for us to just do it ourselves and send the whole thing with our little ones. After all, art work can be long and tedious and kids can be messy and get bored easily. 

What I like about Anoushka's school is that they there is always a lot of lead time when it comes to creative projects - usually a minimum of 3 weeks if not more. It gives me all the time in the world to settle on ideas and then manage to get Anoushka involved in making it as well. Here is a look at some of the projects we worked on together. 

In Junior 1 or Upper KG, she had to participate in a fancy dress competition. As I normally do, I got online, and showed her a couple of fancy dress images online. She took a shine to the Egyptian queen. And so we got down to it. I had the white gown part stitched with a local tailor - the rest was all hand work. We picked up all that we needed at Itsy Bitsy in Banashankari. Once we marked out the red chart and cut it to shape, we handed it to her and taught her how to place the golden ribbon and stick it down. Without doubt we had a huge mess on our hands and it took around a week to get through it all, but by the end of it, all the dirty work, was literally done by her. 

Her headgear was beaded. I punched the holes into the crown and taught her to measure and cut the string and tie it into the holes. Next I told her to bead the string any which way she wanted. I helped her tie of the edges. The outfit turned out great in the end and when the judges pulled her aside to ask her about the costume and how it was made, she was able to tell them all that she had done. She did win a prize for this and well deserved it. 

In Nursery or Lower KG, she wanted to be a dalmation puppy. Once we had all the white clothing we needed, it was the task of painting on the black circles. I marked out the circles for her, stuffed the shirt and tights with paper so nothing seeped through and she spent the next 10 days or so painting one circle at a time. Even the cap is her work. It was a "woof"tiful effort by her. The trick was to let her be every time she got bored with, which was usually 15 minutes later. 

Then Anoushka went through this phase where she volunteered to make charts at school for her class. So much so that when I went to the school for a PTA meeting the teacher apologized saying that Anoushka was so enthusiastic about it she did not want to say no and that she was not sure what kind of schedule I kept to be able to work on these. That's when I told her not to worry at all, all the work is done by Anoushka under my supervision, so if she asks for her, let her know that she is responsible to get the work done. The first chart was on kinds of animals and the second on kinds of plants - these went up on the wall over a year ago now and that's why these photos look as bad. But in both cases, she chose the photos online, she cut them out once printed, and stuck them in the boxes I marked out. I showed her how to do the border on one and she did the rest. I left the color combinations up to her.

By the time we were done with these two charts, she brought home another assignment - that of making a chart on the life of Chacha Nehru which had to have a small note on him as well. I wish I had the photo for that one, but I don't. I wrote the whole note for her in pencil and asked her to write over it but the catch was that she had to read the word first before she wrote over it. This time round, I didn't have to bother with placements and sticking, she did that all on her own. Same with the borders that I made her do, she chose the color and the pattern. Got her to read and do art work - BooYaa!

And for the December holidays this year she was given the task of creating an underwater scene in a shoe box. Good thing we were going to Mangalore - I was conned into buying a new pair of shoes to get the box, since an existing shoe box did not cut it for Mademoiselle Artist. We had strict instructions from the school that everything had to painted, cut and drawn and colored on  with chart paper. So she painted the background blue and I helped bind the box. Next we stuck on glass paper to give it that deep blue hue. Sudhakar is great with the cartoon faces and so he did that - she cut out, colored and stuck everything in place. Bubbles she did with silver glue. When we went to the beach, she collected sand and shells and used that as well. This was one project, where she actually came up ideas on her own - she wanted to fix in small pillars and balance the lid over it with fish hanging down so it would look a slice of the ocean. 

I have seen that it does take time to get these projects done, but at the end of the day, these too help with getting them to think and work on their own. And that apart that I too love working on stuff like this with her. 

My nightmarish time with reading

I was a voracious reader when in school and college. 4 to 5 books a week was a norm. So can't really blame me for being a little over-enthusiastic about getting Anoushka to read. By the beginning of this academic year, Anoushka's text books already had small sentences in it. I thought, getting her to read small story books would help her get a better grasp of the language and the ability discern words or work around pronouncing it.

And so I made it a point to pull out small books from her collection and get her to start reading. She found it fun initially, but a day or so later began to whine about not wanting to read. Anoushka also has this thing of being very uncooperative when she doesn't want to do something. There are times when she would pronounce the word perfectly - in phonetics and then refuse to put it together.

I stubbornly plodded on (even on hindsight, I am using the word stubborn, because that was what it was) and made her sit down each day to read. I had a feeling that perhaps if she would just try a bit harder, she would be able to read decently and perhaps even develop an interest in it. But, nothing of the sort happened. There were tears and howls and a lot more.

Then... one day, I was at ballet class and while chatting with the other mums there, I heard about how each one of them went through a similar phase with their little ones. All of them told me the same thing - till the age of 6 or 6.5 none of their kids were interested in looking at a book, but miraculously past that age they all took to reading. What each of the mothers never gave up on though - was taking time out to reading the children everyday.

I went home with a new realization that day and decided to use some reverse psychology. That evening, at our usual reading time, I pulled out an Enid Blyton, settled her next to me, opened the book and began reading to her. She had this look of shock on her face and stopped me at once asking me why she was not being told to read. I told her that she had tried enough all these days and that I would rather she enjoy the story than cry through it. That's why I was reading to her.

She looked her happiest that day. The next day I did the same with another book, and half way through the story, Anoushka asked me if she could read alternate lines. I told her to go right ahead. We then progressed to her reading a page and then me a page. We also have some books that have text and then picture with conversation bubbles. She reads the bubbles while I do the text.

Today when we watch serials on TV and the English sub titles are on, we play this game where I tell her to read any and as many words as she can when the text is scrolling. I have found it helps with her speed in recognizing words. Today, she pulls books out on her own, attempts newspaper headlines and reads untaught lessons from a school book.

As for stubborn me - mission accomplished!! Though a lesson I did learn was that sometimes you need to take a step back and see whether the approach is right or not. In my case it was not, and I found another way of getting through to my baby.

Reading her clues from the Easter Egg hunt I organized for her earlier this year

Managing Languages

Lots has happened in Standard 1 this year, despite this being only my second post for this academic year. As I mentioned in my earlier post, at the beginning of the academic year we were given a choice of languages - Hindi or Kannada that could be pursued till Std 4. I was ecstatic and took on Hindi, because I can handle the language much better.

And then the classes started. One of the first things I realized after the first quarter is that how good the teacher is also matters a lot. The homework was pretty regular... and after a while I realized a bit too regular. We finished the entire alphabet string (वर्णमाला ) in 2 weeks flat. 5 letters a day as homework. I let Anoushka do it unsupervised and was initially happy that she was finishing her homework so well. Its just that I had a nagging feeling that something was not right.

So one day I sat down with her and asked her to write down the alphabets. Orally she was perfect. When it came to writing, I realized that she was approaching it from the creative writing point of view - literally creative writing. She would construct a letter like she was drawing a flower. It struck me then, that she was referring to it all as drawing - "I will draw अ  and then ए ". I realized at this point that while the teacher seemed to have progressed to two letter words, my daughter was clueless as to what the difference between ब and भ was.

When we did meet the teacher and very subtly discussed this issue, she brushed it off with a simple - "oh the portion is vast and there are so many children, the parents will need to help too". I found that a little strange since they are doing just alphabets, matras, two and three letter words this year and nothing more. 9 months to get through it gradually, especially the basics seemed good enough to me. So I decided to take on the challenge myself.

Anoushka has always responded well to worksheets and colorful forms of study and I built up her entire syllabus this way. We started from scratch. I managed to transform the thought that Hindi is about writing and not drawing. We worked on the correct structure of writing the alphabet and then the sounds. It took close to a month to get the base perfect, but we got there. She knows the वर्णमाला better than I do know (I still need to refer to the textbooks). Another thing I made it point to do was explain the meanings of each word. I believe that once you understand the meaning, its easier to recall the word and place it in a sentence. My idea is to get her to think in Hindi as well.

I turned to my best friend Google and found several sites that had some great worksheets. Have compiled a set here that you may find useful. All at this link.

What I also realized along the way is that Anoushka's textbook was frankly the best guide around. It was organized well - started with pronunciation, the correct way of writing the alphabet in the form of dotted lines and then a progression to words with that letter. It beat the teacher's strange way of just writing on the board and expecting children to copy it down and learn. What cheesed me off even more is that for the recent term exam, the children's notebooks were taken away for correction 2 days before the exam, when there was a holiday in between that could have been well utilized. All words for dictation were in the notebook.

I know ICSE is tough, and the portion for first standard is not as simple as it looks. But what I have realized is that with just the daily homework and a thorough run through of the text book during the regular school week, a few question papers just before an exam are all I need for Anoushka.

Oh yes! When Anoushka managed to get an A+ in Hindi despite having answered orals and written tests right after a blazing fever, the teacher advised us to expose her to more Hindi serials and movies so that she gets the hang of how the language is spoken. We do that and watch Hindi films on occasion and now that her basics are in order, she does seem to follow a bit. But what is definitely needed is constant practice. How do you mothers handle language?

The end of one, the beginning of another

I just realized that the last post I put in here was in February, when we were just wrapping up upper KG and were welcoming the summer holidays. A lot has happened since then. Anoushka went through summer vacation - attended her yearly tradition of summer camp at Planet Kids, went to Nisha Millet's swimming camp for 15 days (didn't much take to it though), and then did something we were very proud of - stayed with her grandmother in Mangalore for all of 20 days without us. It was unbelievable. Here I was, all teary eyed when were driving away and she looked at me and said, you are still here only? Aren't you going?

Anyways... summer holidays were a blast for her, but knowing my daughter and how out of sight out of mind she is, I decided to give her a little summer holiday homework to do, though none was prescribed by the school. I know this sounds really mean of me, but trust me, it helped. I also think its all about the presentation when it comes to kids these days.

What worked to my advantage was that she was with her grandmother who is all for making studying fun. So everyday it was a game of teacher-teacher, where the student was given a small bit of homework - reading or writing from the books she had just completed, exercises that I had created for her, and activity books related to her level of studying. Activity books are something the pipsqueak has always loved, so that worked well for me too.

I also managed to figure out some fun games to introduce a few concepts that were going to be there in first standard - addition and subtraction. Since little miss is yet to figure out that a calculator can do work for you - I used it to my advantage. I would type out simple sums on the calculator and ask her to tell me the answer and then see if it matched the answer the device would give us. She loved the game. Works for addition, subtraction and multiplication.

Another thing I thought might help is to get the little one to type out small words on the computer. Words that I would dictate to her. To give her the feel of a computer and perhaps have fun while doing boring dictation.

And now coming to the beginning of first standard - We got a truckload of textbooks and notebooks at the time of admission. But what made me really happy was that we were given a choice of language - we could take either Hindi or Kannada and this would continue till standard 4th. Only in the 5th, will the other language be introduced. Of course, it is not going to be easy to handle Kannada then. But I have a plan in place for that as well.

Looking through the books I couldn't wrap my head around how much there seemed to be - Maths, mental maths, Computers, Science, Grammar, Language and then some more. But what I did notice was that the books were not the hard-core text kinds. Almost everything was picture heavy and aimed to teach like an activity book. For a student like my daughter that would bode well.

And so on June 3rd my little one officially entered Standard 1. A new school building, a new van and set of friends, a new teacher, a new environment and new timings. I honestly didn't know who was more nervous  me or Anoushka. Turns out, age is catching up and my nerves are getting the better of me. 

Revision Time!!

Its that time of the year when things are winding up and the schools want to test how much their teachers have managed to get into the heads of their little wards. Anoushka being in Junior 1 (Upper KG) has what they call evaluations and they are not exams with marks and question papers, but more an assessment. She did not have it last year, but this year they sent in a 4-sheet notification with the portions outlined for reading, writing, spelling, maths, languages and even drawing and catechism (in our case) / moral science for the others. It basically covered the portions done in the last quarter, so with this in hand, I felt a little more confident in trying to help Anoushka with her revision.

But then came the hitch... Anoushka is in this phase now where she believes that nothing should be taught, it will all miraculously come to her when she is asked a question - so when I tried asking her to read, she would... but mainly because it was the same lesson read in class and she knew the flow. The minute it came to the little box at the end that had the new words in the lesson that they had learnt - that is where she would get stuck... and then frustrated. Add to that, my little one is the epitome of being the drama queen - so getting stuck at one spelling means letting the waterworks loose. It took a day or so till I lost patience and then a few yelling matches later realized I was not getting anywhere.

So the next day I told her strategy one - the next time baby, you do not know the spelling, don't cry... try laughing, the spelling might come back to you. Well what do you know.. it actually worked... for all of 24 hours.. One day we had spellings flowing left, right and center and they were all perfect... with our home sounding like the laughter club was having a special session... the next day we were back to waterworks.

So I tried the usual phonetics way - each word that she did not know, I would approach and tell her phonetically and she would get the answer. It worked a while but then the mistake I did here was try and get her to attempt the phonetics herself. After all she has exposure to it from Montessori... that backfired on me as well. Phonetics is not really pushed in school at present and the teachers use repetition and writing to teach spellings and words... so I took a leaf out of their book... each spelling that she did not know, I would ask her to write down 5 times. This repetition helped.

But if repetition had to work for me, I didn't have much time, because evaluations were already on. It took a night of restlessness and then I hit upon an idea... kiddie question papers. I fashioned question papers that covered bits of all the portion - a little EVS, spelling, math exercises, opposites, plurals etc. Each paper a day is different and the final set of papers covers the entire portion.

I found it worked on several  levels - since they have to look at the board for questions and very smartly (they think), copy half the question in the answer, it helps with the reading and the ability to copy from the board, which is also a task. Anoushka actually started reading each word since it was in no order that she was used to. I used a thick, straight font to make it look like the fonts in her textbook. I never thought she would take to them, but she actually loves doing the papers now. I fashioned similar ones for mathematics.

Now little Miss wakes up in the mornings and without any egging (I swear) from me, picks up the papers and goes through them again. She is fresher in the mornings and so whatever she made a mistake with the previous evening, I repeat and it gets through to her.

Here is a link to the papers I made (I will keep adding to it as this week progresses) ... it covers the portions in her school and some of the English stuff is from her textbook, but the rest of it could possibly help other moms. Its not going to be that easy going further and any advice you guys have on what I can do is most welcome.

Concentrating on concentration

Almost every mom I speak to seems to have the same issue - this total lack of concentration when it comes to anything related to school. Mind you, its not a blanket thing, this lack of concentration. Bring out the color pencils and Anoushka can sit for hours together. Read her stories and she will fight sleep tooth and nail the whole night if she can get us to read that long. But the minute you plonk her down for home work or some reading practice and there you have it... "I need to pee, my back is scratching, I want to sharpen my pencil..." I even have a few classic ones..."my pencil is slow, the homework is taking tooo long..."

Anoushka's lack of attention has scared me at times. I mean, she looks at the word "What", spells it correct and then says its "how". Textbooks read in class by the teacher have a tendency of getting learnt by rote, so I need to watch closely to see where its going wrong. Oh and we have had our share of bawling and screaming and shouting... this is after a truck load of patience, several mix and match situations of play first and then study, study and then play, play-study-play-study and many incentive based sessions as well. And then you have days like today when Anoushka is like a whole new child. All CW and HW is done already. Everything is read and spelt perfectly so much so that if I asked her random words she spelt it and then found it in the book.

But I was scared enough to cry on the shoulder of my best friend Google. I just wanted to see what the rest of the world thought. I got a few thoughts that made a lot of sense and am listing them all here and what I think about it. I would love to hear what anyone who reads this thinks and feels about these points.

The first thing - Gosh, most of the western world thinks that the minute your child can't concentrate he or she has ADHD or some other attention deficit order.. I mean come on.. can you blame the kids of today. It is a possibility, no denying it... but not in majority of the cases. So setting that opinion aside... here it is

Viewpoints on lack of concentration
The work of one psychologist I read online mentioned that concentration varies simply because the noise levels at home and that at school are two different things. For children especially in the 5-8 years category, psychologically adjusting to this change in atmospheres can result in broken concentration. So I was wondering whether playing music in the background would work. I so far have mixed results.

Another interesting opinion I came across was this - as school work progresses, the time it takes to complete each task gets longer. Our kids however can't get it into their systems to stick with the job long enough to complete it. A suggestion was to involve kids in activities that are multiple leveled - where to complete a task, they have to go through stages. This, in a while will translate into them being able to spend more time on their school work to complete it. I got Anoushka a story book that is also a coloring book. I have told her to spend a little time everyday coloring it till she is done and has a complete story book. Seems to be working as she spends considerable amount of time on it. And gradually I have seen her able to hold on longer especially with her EVS books.

This next one actually opened my eyes a bit. Kids tend to follow instructions that are short and sweet. At least for me, when she doesn't seem to be getting things right, I tend to nag and that's when most kids switch off. Short and sweet instructions work. Come to think of it, it happens the same way in school with most teachers too. I have begun the short instructions thing and most of the time manage to get the job done.

This next one too made sense to me... this educationist (I can't remember the study) mentioned that with time this concept of age-appropriate books have come. This is basically an image on a page with few words that describe exactly what is there. We get our kids used to this and the minute they are faced with their textbooks, the excess effort just seems too much and they switch off. Books of our generation had a generic picture and we had to depend on the words to know what was happening. It generated a sense of curiosity in us and encouraged us to read. I have kept away all those age appropriate books now and am trying those that are slightly higher. Honestly Anoushka does display that curiosity now.

What we can do
Now this first one has worked brilliantly for me. I have bought a kiddie clock and placed it on Anoushka's table. Every task I give her is timed, following which she loses one privilege - Story time, TV time, playtime.. something or the other. It has worked in eating and homework too. In eating we have this thing called "beat the clock" - each bite starts at one point and we have to follow the seconds hand for 1 or 2 minutes to complete. If the clock wins, one point for it and vice versa.

One child specialist said that she observed that when a group of young children are given a task, they first stand still and think a while on how they want to go about it. Only then does the chaos begin with each one. Most children like to be given time to figure out how to tackle an assignment. When I see Anoushka hesitating these days I try to give her a few minutes to think. She actually has come up with some really sane ways to go about her work.

One of the tricks recommended is to build patience among kids. And yes! I too held my stomach and laughed till I cried when I first read this. But I did try some of the suggestions one of which is when we are alone at home and the day is kind of done, I switch off all the noise making things in the house and ask Anoushka to concentrate and tell me the different sounds she can hear. It takes a few trial rounds for you get past the obvious and then you will be surprised at the things they hear. It helps build concentration and even listening power.

Another thing that has worked personally for us is indirect talking. We noticed that Anoushka was all ears when we talk to somebody visiting or on the phone. She loves it when she is the center of the conversation even though she does not show it. So I started creating imaginary situations where I speak to my husband or mother on the phone and tell them about how "so and so little kid did not do their homework and did this repeatedly till the parents went to the school to have a chat with the teacher." Anoushka cannot bear the thought of anyone saying something bad about her to her teacher and automatically comes on track... for a while... But not once has she mentioned hearing this conversation.

I also realized that each time I tried to get Anoushka to sit down and read she would get all irritated. It took me a while to figure out that in class, the teacher reads out the words and spells only what is important... the same goes with exercises based on each lesson. I tried it the same way where I read out what she doesn't know rather than get her to figure it out. One or two times and then she gets it herself. She just used to get angry that mommy is making me do what teacher did not. And you can't over-rule teacher's words can you.

Phew! these are just some of my thoughts on this ever-worrying lack of concentration. Tell me what you think.

Basic reading and arithmetic

Its amazing what teachers can do in the time that they have our children each time. Try as I might, I cannot get Anoushka to spell "pin" as part of her homework without having to fight with everything that can distract her. But she comes back from school with 5/5 in dictation with words like "mother", "with", "father" and more. Frustrating is an under-statement. 

Things were pretty easy this year with homework not being too taxing. But now, post the Diwali holidays, things have picked up a notch. What I have come to realize since last year and this, is that teachers put an equal responsibility on the learning process on us parents as well. If they teach them spelling, then its up to us to help take it forward. So if the kids learn 10 3-letter words in school, you need to teach them 10 new ones at home. Its how vocabulary building works I guess. The poems she has in school right now are more to string together minor words to make sentences. And homework is a continuation. 

So far I was dealing with English alone, but we now have Kannada and Hindi alphabets too and not to forget numbers up to 200. The question for me was how to make studying a little more interesting beyond homework. 

There are a couple of things that have worked for me. For English, colorful workbooks have worked wonders. All of the exercises are activities and she finds them more interesting than me duplicating homework and classwork in a separate book for her to work on. So workbooks have been my saviors. A little work on them each day has made a difference and helped her think beyond school work

When we read storybooks these days, I hold my finger over each word to give her an idea of where we are. And at regular intervals ask her to read the three or four letter words in tandem with me. It works out to being a game and helps her brush up on the words she knows.

All kids are gadget-adjusted by now and I have downloaded a couple of apps on our tablet which are number and word games for her to play. And of course, there is nothing like repetition so as and when we can, in any situation, we suddenly ask her for a spelling and she does it.

Hindi and Kannada am not having much of any issue now, since its only alphabets and she findings them pretty interesting to work on.

As far as math goes, I mentioned in a earlier post that the housie game helped me teach her sequences. Well have taken it up a notch and now have housie game sessions when her friends come over sometimes. It helps them read the numbers faster on their ticket. Getting them to call out the numbers has helped with recognition of the numbers quicker.

Anoushka came up with a game of her own when we are in the car - she loves to read out the license plates of the vehicles around us. Never thought that would help with recognition, but it did. Same way she spotted the countdown meter at signals and started counting down with it. Now I wouldn't have thought of it at all.

All this has helped with the basics... but Anoushka is a very independent child and has always put up her boundaries. I have found with time and a couple (am underplaying it here) of tantrums later that early morning at breakfast time is the best for revision. When she no longer wants to spell, she will tell me straight off and I respect that.

When she is back from school, its TV and play time and followed by homework. Every Friday evening, no matter what, I don't let her touch her books and she has come to know that. I would rather spread it out over the weekend, for better retention, than make her finish it all up to be free on the weekend. She looks forward to it now.

My current problem is how to prevent learning by rote, which seems to be happening with some spellings and sequences in reading of poems. It takes a careful eye to notice when she is reading by rote and when she actually knows what she is reading. When I figure that out, there will be another post on it.