Today I had fever, so Dhup found me doing nothing and found this as an opportunity to catch without any distractions.
We read a book together and after that he wanted me to dictate the story so he could write. We explored so many things while writing
- When and where commas come? (Fullstop is traffic signal, while coma is wait and move ahead).
- Sometimes it comes after a word (like soon) some times after few words (once upon a time).
- How one “e” can make difference (mad and made, woman and women)? We could not stop laughing after replacing mad in a sentence where made was supposed to come.
- He wanted to remember all the spellings and exploring how he could have spell with sounds only (oven was avn).
- We also explored how capitals are used in heading, in sentence etc.
- How “M” looks funny with two gates in cursive writing.
- What makes “woman” one and “women” many?
- How writing and typing are same (in both you use fingers) and different (in both you use different muscles).
- What is a paragraph and why and how (else it is like so many people cramped in a room).
I was wondering
- This was the same child a year back – did not know how to read and write.
- Now, when he has started, noone can stop him from exploring.
- Now, his eagerness is so high that he is ready to absorb any concepts,
- Now, just one time sharing is enough for him to extrapolate his learning in any area.
- Grammar is something I was told by many that it needs to be taught. I can see him exploring, questioning and learning as he is exploring language (we cannot skip grammar when we are engrossed in the language”.
- He learnt Hindi in five days – On the day one he started with recognizing letter and day 5 he was reading Hindi story books.
- Currently he is working on Spanish and trying to teach me numbers in Spanish from 1 to 10.
- During lunch time he sits with “learn Tamil is 30 days” and entertains us with his discovery of words.
This reminds me of a quote from John Holt “Children do not need to be made to learn about the world, or shown how. They want to, and they know how”.
Yup!!! We only need to have TRSUT in them and give them SPACE.
