From: Dossy (dossy@panoptic.com)
Date: Wed May 15 2002 - 20:14:26 MDT
On 2002.05.15, J.W. Harris <index@cox.net> wrote:
> I want my son to be smarter than me. But I'm lazy.
Funny, I think my two year old daughter is already smarter
than me! :-)
> My son is 3.5 years old, and can barely recognize a few words.
I hear boys develop slower than girls early on, but my daughter
can carry on simple conversations with me -- surprisingly, even
over the phone while I'm at work and Mommy puts her on the phone.
Did you start by baby-babbling to your son, or speaking to him
like a adult with very limited vocabulary? We made policy to not
speak baby-talk and it seems to have helped. We also started
teaching our daughter American Sign Language from about 18
months and she learned 3-4 words in sign -- sadly, we kind of
stopped once she started speaking, which is something I regret
once in a while.
(No, neither my spouse nor I knew much ASL before -- we were
learning it as we were teaching it. Perhaps that's why we also
stopped teaching it, since we didn't already know it beforehand.)
> However, he loves computers.
My daughter loves computers, too. We got the Baby Smartronics
keyboard that sits on top of a regular PC104 keyboard and she
loves to play it, nearly daily. We also recently got her the
Little Tikes PC Cruiser -- a USB steering wheel that comes with
a really cheesy little game which she enjoys immensely.
She's been able to work the DVD player (we have it in the
entertainment unit about 2 feet from the ground) since she
was old enough to walk, around 14 months or so. She would
pop DVD's out of their case and pop them into the player
by herself. Frustrated my wife who was afraid our daughter
would break the DVD player, but I'm all for her learning
anything she can whenever she can and can risk a $170 DVD
player in the process.
> 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, [...]
I do something similar -- I run screen, so I just switch to one of
my screen sessions that runs a 'tail -f /var/log/syslog' and let
her pound away. She'll usually walk into my home office and say
"daddy, push the 'o'?" which means she wants to type. The first
letter on the keyboard she learned was, obviously, "o" ... over the
last 3-4 months she's learned o, i, u, y, c, e, and q. I have no
idea why she learned these letters first (pretty much in that order,
too) ... I'd simply say the letter as or after she pushed them and
she pushed them fairly randomly at first. Now, she'll just hold
down each of these 7 keys. Hmm.
> Does anyone know of any open source programs (preferably linux-based)
> to teach toddlers reading?
I always swore that when I finally had kids I'd stop writing lame
software and start writing toddler games. Sadly, lame software
pays the bills and I can't see writing toddler games making enough
money.
I'd certainly be happy to work on a free, open-source children's
game framework, though. Could be lots of fun and I already have
an in-house tester that'll work for ice pops! :-)
> I would much prefer console-mode (ncurses/slang/plain text/whatever)
> over GUI, but it's not *quite* a religious obsession.
>From what I've seen of my daughter, for kids under 3 I'd strongly
suggest a colorful GUI (lots of primary and secondary colors) with
big soft sans-serif fonts. I'm not sure that audio cues (noises
or other sound effects) are important, but I'll experiment more
with that. My daughter doesn't seem overly interested in the
bleeps that her games make at her currently ...
> If I have to write it myself, any advice on UI? Remember, the target
> audience is only 3.5 years old.
I've recently fallen in love with Ruby and just tonight have started
learning the FOX Toolkit and FXRuby. Originally I would have suggested
Ruby/Tk, but FXRuby looks _really good_ and even easier than Tk,
if that's even possible.
> What age should I start teaching my son a second language?
Birth. Totally serious. The sooner you start, the sooner they'll
learn it. There is no such thing as too early.
Charlene's first language is obviously English, but she's regularly
exposed to Japanese (sadly, not in our home) and I'm trying to get
Korean spoken around her more. We go through cycles of trying to
teach her German, Spanish and I'd like her to get exposed to more
Afrikaans although the practical value of this is small, but it's
part of her heritage ... and ideally I'd like her to learn Hebrew
as well, but I'm not sure how I'd teach her that without learning
it first ...
> (HUMAN language, not C or Perl...)
I very nearly added K&R C to her nightly reading list, but decided
against it until I could teach her basic math first. I'd hate her
to get to school counting in binary and doing pointer arithmatic
before she could tell people how old she is ... ;-)
> 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?
Not sure. I'm sure plenty of research proving and disproving any
such benefits are abundant ... I haven't been motivated to look, we're
going to teach her as many languages as she'll tolerate regardless.
I can't see any possible negative effects so I'd rather hedge my
bets ...
> I'm interested in teaching my son a second language BEFORE he learns
> that it's supposedly hard.
Usually if they're immersed in additional languages (spoken daily)
before 8 years old, they'll pick them up really quickly. The key
is the immersion, the constant exposure -- it helps if the language
is spoken instead of English in the home, I'm talking that much
immersion.
We're thinking of sending our daughter to a Japanese day school when
she finally does go to school, just for that immersion. We're still
toying with that idea, though.
> 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.)
We've been teaching our daughter basic math since very early on, maybe
12-14 months old. We'd count everything, we'd play with a foam clock
where the numbers pop out and count from 1 to 12. We'd count pieces
of food on her plate, we'd count anything we could. We counted in
English, Japanese, Spanish, German and recently in Korean. She can
count to about 14 in English and 10 in Japanese and to about 4 in
Korean. She still hasn't gotten the hang of arithmetic yet, but
we're working on that -- watching Sesame Street seems to be good
for this.
> 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.
Can he count both up and down? Start by simply making him count
a set of things, then count a second set of things, then put them
together and count the whole lot. I wouldn't even begin to teach
it as "arithmetic" but just counting. Once the counting skill
develops, then simply take two sets, have him count both, put
them together and instead of asking him to count the whole lot,
ask him how many are there. He may either be quick enough to count
in his head or will naturally have discovered addition on his own.
Start with small sets (one item in each) and progress upward.
Don't forget to work on subtraction at the same time -- once you
add one and one together, don't just do it again, ask him to count
the two, take one away and ask him to count what's left.
> 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...
We're still very serious about home-schooling our daughter. It's
not going to be easy but I think the benefits might be well worth it.
If this discussion isn't appropriate for the Extropians list, I'm
more than happy to continue this conversation off-list with you,
J.W. ...
-- Dossy
--
Dossy Shiobara mail: dossy@panoptic.com
Panoptic Computer Network web: http://www.panoptic.com/
"He realized the fastest way to change is to laugh at your own
folly -- then you can let go and quickly move on." (p. 70)
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