From: Alex Ramonsky (alex@ramonsky.com)
Date: Thu May 16 2002 - 10:16:09 MDT
I educated at home (two boys) throughout. I used a system that takes as
its guidance which bits of kids brains are developing and when. The
theory was that if something is there, exercise it and develop it, but
if it's only just started growing, it can be buggered up if it's used
too soon. The method teaches maths, music, art, languages and science
BEFORE literacy, so you can imagine how difficult and time-consuming it was!
Languages are very easily picked up but only if they are spoken
regularly. Grammar and literacy in general in a second language may take
a lot longer to grasp. A lot of physics can be demonstrated and talked
about and this leads to playing with maths. Poetry and story-telling
work very well.
A fast way into maths is geometry. Okay, you have to work backwards for
a bit to get the arithmetic up to scratch, but when your kids really
want to know which spaceship is going to run out of fuel first due to
the shape and size of the fuel tank, you can sit down and work it out on
paper...and they'll really want to know how it's done. Most of our maths
lessons began solving problems in role-playing games.
The only real things I learned about educating kids are: If you force
it, what sticks is the resentment, not the lesson, and : Everybody has
their own ideas about educating and in my experience, none of them is
totally right. Every child is different. I think most of all what I
noticed is that the more fun something is, the better it's remembered.
You have to turn 'work' into play. When you manage that it's easy.
...So I guess you're wondering what results I got? ...I now have two
teenagers. One is a computer expert and the other is a guitarist. Both
are loud. Both of them think neurology is for nerds. Both are lazy. Both
are intelligent people who I really get along with. Are they smarter
than me? Are they happier than me? Dammit, I don't know!
Good luck.
Ramonsky
J.W. Harris wrote:
[snip]
>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.)
>
>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?
>
>
>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...
>
>
>J.W. Harris
>
>
>
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