Pregnancy: on the list of things people don’t tell you

For some reason, I forget every time I get pregnant that I will be absolutely miserable for the following 9-10 months. For all women, that misery is different. For me it mostly sits in having an upset stomach, either nausea, heart burn or both, for the entire time. I am a little less than half-way through a third pregnancy now, and if I didn’t forget, I doubt I would ever get pregnant again. I’m excited about the little person coming, but I could do without the discomfort of getting there.

Been Awhile

It’s kinda been awhile since I posted anything. At the moment, I’m just posting because I read an article about a group of suspects from a boarder town in Arizona, one of whom just confessed. I can’t believe how stupid these guys are. You just have to read it.Suspect in Arizona boarder slayings confesses.

Part Twelve of Many: The Montessori Life: Teaching Addition

Once the children start to get the hang of one’s, tens, hundreds and thousands, you can start introducing addition. It’s pretty simple: you come up with two four digit numbers that do not require you to carry. When you’re demonstrating have one child get the beads for one of the numbers from the bank and have another child get the beads for the other number. Then on the mat, lay out one number with the Thousand cubes to the farthest left, then the hundred squares, then the tens strings, the units and finally the cards with the zeros overlapped on the right side. Follow the same process with the other four digit number. Now group together all of the thousands and have one child pull out the card that shows how many thousands there are. Follow the same process with the hundreds, the tens and the units. Overlap the zeros on the cards and read the number to the children. At that point simply say, “________ (the first four digit number) plus _________(the second four digit number) equals _________ (the four digit number that the groups combined to make). Would you like to record that?” and present the children with a paper that has spaces to write down the addition problem they just solved.

Part Eleven of Many: The Montessori Life: Teaching One’s, Tens, Hundreds, Thousands

Children as young as two start recognizing the significance of what we call a specific number and the value of that number. In our home, we started by telling the kids to use two hands when they carried something and counting the hands they had holding it, “one hand, two hands.” It didn’t take long before they understood. Preschool age children don’t struggle with concepts so much as abstractions. If you can present information in a concrete way, they’ll catch on. In Montessori, after the children have started associating numerals to specific values, the next step, whether it’s in preschool or kindergarten, is showing them the values in different places in numbers with multiple digits.

Bead Work:
The first step to this work is introducing the different parts of it. A single bead indicates one unit. Present the bead and tell the child that it is one unit and show him the corresponding card with a one on it and then place it below the bead and to the right of the child.
Now, count out ten beads verbally, one at a time: one unit, two units, three units… and pull out a string of beads that indicates one-ten. (You can also count each bead on the ten) Now pull out the card that says “10″ on it and place it below the one-ten, just to the left of the one unit, and put the 10 beads away that demonstrated that 10 units is the same as one ten.
Count out ten tens one at a time: one ten, two tens, three tens… and line the strings up next to each other so they make a square. Put a bead hundred square over the top of the strings so the squares are lined up with each other. Explain that 10 tens is the same as one hundred. Pull out the card that says “100″ and put it below the hundred square just to the left of the ten card and put the 10 strings of ten away.
Count out ten hundreds one at a time: one hundred, two hundreds, three hundreds… and place them on top of each other so they make a cube. Place the thousand cube next to the hundreds and let the child investigate them both so they can see that 10 hundreds is the same as one thousand. Pull out the thousand card and place it below the thousand cube to the left of the hundred square.

We normally lay out works from left to right in the order we do them, because that is the direction we read. The reason we don’t with math is that, we read from thousands down to ones, and not the other way around. Don’t worry: the child doesn’t understand the theory behind how works are laid out, so they aren’t confused. Just accept as a teacher that this work is demonstrated backwards from the others and let it go.

Because the ideas are shown in a concrete way with only loose ties to the arabic numerals, kids are quickly able to internalize the tens, hundreds and thousands. This way when they start learning addition, they can go immediately to 4 digits because in their heads whether it’s four digits or one digit, it’s the same principle.

Part Ten of Many: The Montessori Life: Classroom Seasons

One of the aspects that preschool and kindergarten age Montessori teachers find themselves trying to express to their kids is the passage of time. From a philosophical perspective, time is a human construct but it’s a necessary part of daily life both for dealing with our society’s obsession with punctuality and for recognizing seasonal changes. There are a few things that teachers can do for small children to get this idea across:

1. Have a days of the week song. There is one you can sing to the theme from the Addam’s Family.
There’s Sunday and there’s Monday
There’s Tuesday and there’s Wednesday
There’s Thursday and there’s Friday
And then there’s Saturday
Days of the week (snap snap) Days of the week (snap snap)
Days of the week, Days of the week, days of the week (snap snap)

There’s also one sung to the tune from My Darlin’ Clementine
Sunday, Monday
Tuesday, Wednesday
Thursday, Friday
Saturday
Sunday, Monday
Tuesday, Wednesday
Thursday, Friday
Saturday

Usually you sing one of these songs with either clapping or yelling for the day you’re currently on. Then on your calandar you should say something to the effect of “Today is Tuesday, so yesterday was Monday and tomorrow must be Wednesday.” It’s also helpful to show the progression of the date within the month.

2. Clock works can be very helpful for distinguishing the passage of time, but even more so when you can associate certain times of day with a specific schedule the kids have regularly (every day is best). So if every day at school, your classroom has recess at 11:30, has lunch at noon or has work time at 10:10 after circle, the children start recognizing the different times as significant, and when the progression is always the same, they see the schedule and eventually the clock and understand what the significance is.

3. Seasonal change is marked by certain things you can observe out the window, but frequently if something out of character with your region happens, like getting rain in January in New England or having 80 degree weather during November in the West, it can confuse very little kids about what the seasons really are. It can help for teachers to have a paper tree on the wall that has buds in spring, green leaves in summer, colored leaves in fall and snow on it during the winter. I have a town on the wall that we decorate with snowmen and lights during the holidays and we make paper people who go swimming during the summer. However you decide to show seasonal changes, it should be something consistent that the children help making the decorations. If you laminate the pieces of your tree, it will last much longer and be much more resilient to 3-year-olds who want to touch it incessantly with messy hands.

Thanksgiving

I have a deep-seated belief in God, and I wanted to take a minute today to thank Him for everything that is going both wrong and right in my life.

A few days ago, I felt like the world was out to get me, but after a day of reflection I feel like the things that aren’t going quite the way I would like are just a prelude to drastic positive change in my life. In short, I’m about to be inspired.

As for everything else, I believe that all of our lives are a product of the choices we have made. I have made some pretty stupid choices, and my personal goal in life is to cultivate a more positive environment. Because this is something I really want, my Heavenly Father has put some things in motion that are about to make pieces of my living situation unbearable. The reason, I believe, is that if things get progressively worse, I’ll do something proactive to change the situation and thereby make my life better. I think it’s the divine version of tough love, and it’s the philosophy by which I pattern my life.

I have 3 fabulous gigs that allow me to make money to support my family. I’m really thankful for them, because I like being able to buy groceries for my kids, and to be able to plan for Christmas. I’m really thankful for the roof over my head. It is possible that I might not have it tomorrow and so I think it’s really important that I appreciate it today and not worry about that eventuality until it appears on the doorstep. I am also thankful for my kids’ health and that neither of them is accident prone. I’m very glad to have all of the basic needs for my family met and I’m thankful to have a positive attitude that allows me to be happy about today and not worry about things that might happen until they do happen.

I believe in a God who has a hand in our lives. I believe that there are eternal laws that we must strive to follow, and when we can’t quite live up to them, Jesus Christ has atoned for our sins, faults and flaws and makes up the difference. I believe that the Holy Ghost gives us spiritual promptings and guides us to do good things and to avoid things that could be to our detriment. I’m so grateful to have the influence of all three of these persons in my life. I’m not sure how I could live without them.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Using Rockbox on an iPod while you’re running Windows is like putting a Ferrari engine in a Geo Metro

I had what must qualify as the most bizarre experience of my life when I started experimenting with iPod editors that run on Linux. By the way, Apple, I would like to make a formal request that you write an iTunes software package that runs on Ubuntu.

So, I played around with some editors. I tried Amarok, which I didn’t fall in love with mostly because it’s native to KDE and my Linux is Gnome. I also tried Banshee which didn’t read my iPod. Ever. I was really aggravated. Then I tried Hipo. Hipo seems to like to rewrite tags on songs that have never been edited. I was unimpressed. Then I fell in love with GTKpod. It had no problem reading the files on my iPod, it let me edit tags and it allowed me to create playlists. It doesn’t have a player, but I still have rhythmbox, so my life wasn’t exactly shattered by that, and the only function I really needed it to fulfill was the tag and playlist editing.

So, either as a result of that or something else, my iPod firmware suddenly no longer recognized that I had any files on my iPod. Rhythmbox could still read all of the songs and recognized all of the playlists, so as long as I had a USB connection to my computer, I could still listen to music, but I couldn’t listen to music on the iPod itself with headphones or in my car.

Well, I got fed up with trying to figure out how to make the firmware recognize the music again, so I installed RockBox on my iPod instead. RockBox rules all. But it doesn’t recognize the format that iPod uses for it’s playlists. So with the new firmware on my iPod, I could listen to music, but not the playlists I had previously made, and I couldn’t find any tutorials that would allow me to edit or create playlists using my computer, but while I was looking, I found a playlist converter from iPod to RockBox. It is on vcardenas. I should warn you though, that the file you download is a .zip file with a .exe inside, and you have to have Microsoft NET downloaded and installed on your PC to run it. All you who love Linux, wine won’t run this at all. You have to have a virtual machine with a current enough version of windows on it to run everything which allows you to convert you iPod playlists into a format that RockBox can read. It also means you have to enable your virtual machine to see your USB connections, but that’s another blog post, entirely.

There is also a patch, which was developed for RockBox here which allows you to read the names of the files in your playlist like the tags once it’s been converted to RockBox, rather than seeing the file names that the iPod firmware assigns to songs, but it’ll work without that, and once the songs are brought up on the screen, it reads from the tags, rather than the file name. I’m hesitant to play with the patch only because it means recompiling the software, and I’ve been the biggest wuss since I messed up my iPod in the first place.

Home learning versus public school

I am biased toward homeschooling over public school, so there are certainly going to be those who read my opinions on the subject and feel like I am unfair to the public school system. To you, I have this to say: the public school system in the United States was designed to teach children how to work in factories and get them a rudimentary education that would allow them to function in a society that required them to be able to read, write and do basic mathematics. Think about the typical classroom setup for a public school and you see the similarities between it and a factory work room, especially when you combine the need to raise your hand to say anything or ask permission to use the restroom. When you consider that there are still children who make it through the entire school system without being able to read, write or make change, in spite of the no child left behind program (which might have been more aptly named “every child left behind”), you can see my point that it really isn’t a functional system. Now, we have nothing on such a large scale that’s any better and we are constantly trying to improve it, but that doesn’t mean we should all send our children there. That said, here are some of the things I’ve been ruminating on in home learning.

Children have a natural love of learning. You can say that a baby’s job is learning. They pick up everything and examine it, shake it, and put it in their mouths to learn about it and try to understand it. Obviously, there are things that we have to keep away from them, or they might hurt themselves, but this is how babies absorb their environments. Children maintain this love of learning right up until they encounter a situation where they are forced to do something they either aren’t ready for or don’t want to do, and then they either feel like they failed or their wills were crushed. Teaching preschool age children letters and sounds and mathematics concepts is easy, if they’re ready for it. Most children have interest in something, and letting them follow that interest is the best way to keep them learning. Some children are ready to start reading very young. Others aren’t ready until later. Letting them take the lead on it, allows them to learn at their own paces and they continue to enjoy learning. That doesn’t mean that you can’t give a helping hand.

I learned fractions and conversions from my mother while we were baking. Two of these is the same as one of those. Eight of these is the same as one of those. I learned about dinosaurs (and unwittingly about other animals) from the natural history museum trips when my mother took me. I learned about 17th century New England from the trips to the historical sites when my mother took me. She never drilled me about any of it later to make sure I understood or absorbed anything. She just presented opportunities to learn and let me go from there. When it’s real, it’s much easier to see the value in your learning. When children see that it’s real, it’s much easier to capture their interest.

I found a website that provides enrichment experiences to help your children better understand the world around them. It’s called The Home Learning Coach and a subscription provides you with complete enrichment experiences to any educational style to help your children gain a more well-rounded education. You can also just look at your environment and see what there is that your children don’t yet understand. Participate with them in it and find ways to let them experience those things that they might be interested in.

T-mobile Plants a Tree When You Go Paperless for Your Billing

I just felt compelled to share. If you use t-mobile, change your billing preferences to email rather than that huge bulky envelope and they will plant a tree on your behalf. Ultimately, they’ll probably start charging for paper bills, so I would do the email thing sooner than later anyways. The tree thing is actually really cool though. I’m a fan. Way to be green, t-mobile.

Part Nine of Many: The Montessori Life: Troubled Kids in Your Classroom

For any number of reasons, you might have troubled kids in a Montessori Classroom. Traditionally, this wouldn’t be a problem if you’re homeschooling, unless you take in foster children and have license from the state you’re living in to school your foster children in your home rather than the local public school, but if you’re teaching in a private school, or you have set up a private school in your home, the chances are that at least one of your students (out of your 30 kid classroom) will have emotional problems or be otherwise “troubled.”

One of the great things about the Montessori Method is that it was originally developed for the “unteachable” (read: the poor, mentally or physically challenged) so there are aspects of Montessori that can reach out to any child. The normalization period is going to be longer for a child who acts out or shuts down but it can happen, and if you are patient and tenacious, it will happen. There are some things you can do to minimize the lean times until the child has reached the same level as the rest of your class.

-Be sure you encourage appropriate behavior and provide reasonable consequences when the child acts out.
-Be patient and treat the child with the same expectations as the rest of the class.

I promise, it will be ok. Just give it time. He will normalize, just like the rest of the children in your class did.