I know it's off-topic, but I'm going to talk about what my 5.9-year-old daughter is learning these days.
Morganne is now an unschooled first grader. Right now, she is sitting on the sofa, reading a children's Spanish/English dictionary. She is puzzling out the English and Spanish words on the pages, looking at the pictures and playing around. I don't know if she knows she is reading, but she sure sounds like it.
Her favorite subject is still fantasy play. She loves to read stories about other little girls and loves to pretend to be them. We have been buried in Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy, Tacy and Tib books and Morganne has picked up vocabulary and historical information from reading them.
Morganne now constructs simple Spanish sentences from the words she knows. She loves to speak Spanish with anyone who can do so and often answers out questions in Spanish.
One of her current favorite things to do is to have math tests. She will ask her father to give her math problems, which she carefully writes down and solves. I don't know how she does multiplication or why her answers are usually correct. When her answers aren't correct, they are close.
Another current favorite activity is to write team rosters for her imaginary baseball league. She picked this up from her 13.9-year-old half-brother (who taught himself to read by reading baseball cards). Morganne's team always has a phenomenal record and includes her favorite softball star, Desiree Knipfer (a young woman from nearby Soquel who set the all-time US strikeout record last spring).
Habla su gato espanol? Si no, por que no?
Excellante.
Sorry I haven't been participating in the usual philosophical discussions. Somehow philosophy just doesn't compare with reality these days.
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Heather Madrone. All rights reserved.