From: J.W. Harris (index@cox.net)
Date: Wed May 15 2002 - 11:28:34 MDT
I want my son to be smarter than me. But I'm lazy.
I was reading by 3.5 years old, thanks to my grandmother reading to me
every night. (I don't think I was reading well that young -- my
memory of that part of my life is so poor I might have mostly
memorized my favorite books and 'read' along with my grandmother. But
I am SO glad I was devouring books before I hit kindergarten, and I
want my son doing the same. Or at least Googling before school age.)
My son is 3.5 years old, and can barely recognize a few words. (Pizza
is one of them...) However, he loves computers. He plays Diablo II
rather well on his grandfather's computer (okay, I hacked his
character to give it 7000 hp), and can load in CD-ROMs for The Cat in
The Hat and the Lion King, and also likes to start up MS Paint on his
own.
On my computer, I run Linux and rarely start X Windows (GUIs are for
watching DVDs...). My son likes to type on my keyboard, so I usually
hang it out of his reach. Often I'll 'cat > /dev/null' and hand the
keyboard to him so he can type whatever he likes, while I go to
another Linux box and telnet in to read my email. He taught himself
to use the mouse to copy and paste text. (Unfortunately, he's also
taught himself to suspend the 'cat > /dev/null' to get at the bash
prompt, and also to switch virtual consoles, so that I have to 'vlock'
all my sessions before handing him the keyboard.)
Does anyone know of any open source programs (preferably linux-based)
to teach toddlers reading?
If not, I've downloaded (but not yet tested) a few text reader (speech
synthesis) programs. I've been thinking, I could whip up a quick
program to accept typed input, check it against /usr/share/dict/words,
and whenever it finds a match, pronounce it. I'm assuming my son will
like making the computer talk to him, so he'll accidentally learn to
type English words rather than nonsense.
Once the basics are coded and tested, I could add an ncurses interface
so my son could use the arrow keys to move to different parts of the
screen, and use the function keys to change the color. Maybe
split-screen, and use
'lynx -dump http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=fubar'
to display a definition or three. Maybe feed the most recently typed
'word', if it doesn't match against /usr/share/dict/words, to aspell
and display the first result. Or maybe display all the aspell
results.
(Irony: 'aspell' not found by aspell -- it wanted to substitute
'Aspell'.)
Anyway, before I start coding, let me repeat my question:
Does anyone know of any open source programs (preferably linux-based)
to teach toddlers reading?
I would much prefer console-mode (ncurses/slang/plain text/whatever)
over GUI, but it's not *quite* a religious obsession.
If I have to write it myself, any advice on UI? Remember, the target
audience is only 3.5 years old.
If I have used any confusing jargon, please forgive me. I will be
more than happy to explain.
What age should I start teaching my son a second language? (HUMAN
language, not C or Perl...) I know only English myself, but I'd be
willing to learn (or at least try to learn) in order to teach my son.
I was thinking of German or lojban. It seems that most of the
websites I'm interested in but can't read are in German, and I already
use iso-8859-1 as my character set. Are there actually any proven
benefits for learning a second language in childhood?
(Hmmm. Is there an enchefinator or babelfish for lojban? Is the 'ch'
in enchefinator hard or soft?)
I'm interested in teaching my son a second language BEFORE he learns
that it's supposedly hard.
I'm also wondering when I should teach my son arithmetic. (I'm still
trying to teach him counting with sets of objects like pennies or
marbles or Legos.) I remember before I entered school, I got ahold of
my grandfather's calculator (anyone else miss red LED calculator
displays?) and played with it. I already knew addition and
subtraction, but this 'x' stuff was totally new. I quickly found
'2+2' and '2x2' both equaled 4, but noticed no other pattern other
than 'x' usually gave bigger numbers than '+'. Division I didn't get
at all. Since I didn't want to admit I'd been messing with his stuff,
I never asked my grandfather for an explanation -- and so I missed my
chance to learn multiplication and division before I entered school.
How much counting ability should my son have before I teach him
arithmetic? He still skips numbers whenever he feels like it when
saying them, and can't write them with any consistency, and still has
trouble associating these words and symbols with sets of pennies and
marbles and Legos, etc.
I don't want to push my son -- I want learning to be a joy for him --
but I don't want to wait longer than I have to either. I figure the
quicker he learns the basics, the sooner HE can decide what to learn
next. And I CERTAINLY don't want to wait for the public school system
to teach him. I saw what the public 'school' system did to my younger
half-brother...
Anyway, I think I'll wait for responses, rather than cram more topics
in this email.
J.W. Harris
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