Here's one of the "books" Nora wrote tonight. She wrote:
"My June is good. My June is happy. My Decembr was good." (She wrote the right page about June first, and the left page about December second.)
Nora wrote another book, but I made her stop in the middle when it was bedtime. She wrote:
"We pland to mak applsoc and somun..." (We planned to make applesauce and someone...) Someone what? We will have to wait for tomorrow for the next installment to find out what someone did. Nora took her books to bed with her and when I turned out the light and closed the door she proceeded to read them to her stuffed animals.
Some things I love about this book:
I love that Nora picked June and December. Sounds like June and December were good months, but what about the other 10? Also, is Nora clear on what month it is right now?
The other thing I love about this book (or at least watching Nora write it) is that it becomes clear that the convention of writing in a straight line from left to right is a constructed understanding. There are times when I think Nora will continue the word on the next line, because she's out of room, but she'll just keep writing even if it runs up against another word that is already there. Reading some of the things she writes can be easy if you're watching her write it, but if you just look at the finished object, it can be almost impossible at times to disentangle the jumble of letters and words going every which way. A child can be almost 5 and have several books a day read to her from the very day she was born and still not yet have internalized the straight line, back-and-forth way that we structure our writing.
It totally reminds me of an article called "students' spatial structuring of 2D arrays of squares." This is one of my favorite articles of all time. They showed how young children do not "see" the row-by-column structure in rectangular arrays that we assume. The assumption that students will see this structure is critical in our use of arrays for multiplication and area models. The article showed that this structure isn't "in" the array at all. It's a constructed understanding, one that we have so internalized that we don't realize that this isn't something you just automatically perceive. They had awesome pictures of kids' drawings that showed that some kids organized the arrays by spirals and other organizations that were mathematically unhelpful.
As von Glasersfeld said, "The cognitive organism shapes and coordinates its experience, and in doing so, transforms it into a structured world." Truly one of the most enjoyable aspects of parenting for me has been observing the ways in which this happens with Milo and Nora as they grow and assimilate their worlds. When I bump up against those times when their structuring of the world differs from my own, it reminds me again and again how everything, every last thing is constructed. It's a really awesome and powerful realization.
3 comments:
Haha, I totally relate to this! Yo is not at all constrained by writing in straight lines. Words that are supposed to be somehow connected (full names, phrases) end up wherever he wants to put them, all over the page. And if he runs out of space for some word, the rest of it could end up underneath, on top, to the left--wherever!
I think you should write a paper about this -- What does this tell you that parents should be doing? Should parents trace the words in the books with their fingers to build that understanding of straight lines, or should parents embrace the natural evolution for building that understanding? What are the relative benefits to longer term spatial perception and understanding (and development of geometry skills)? Is self discovery better than guided discovery? (I am giving a talk to a parent group in January and it would be fun to know).
I guess at this point, as a parent, I'm not worried because my guess is that this understanding is developmental and will come in its own time regardless of what I do. If she were 8 and didn't seem to perceive the left-to-right straight line structure, I'd be worried, but she's not.
When I trace lines with my finger when reading, it annoys both kids for whatever reason and they ask me to stop. One thing I've noticed is that as somebody who knows some stuff about learning and development in math, I'm much less likely to intervene or correct than most people. My understanding of the necessary prerequisite concepts that must be in place means I'm not going to correct / tell if I know those prereqs aren't currently in place, for instance. I see other parents correcting their kids about math/counting errors or instructing their kids about ideas related to, say, multiplication as a ratio measurement and I'd never do that because I know they don't yet have the structures in place to assimilate what I'm saying.
My literacy professor friend would say that what matters is simply making sure that reading and writing are fun for the kids at this age. The fact that both kids like books and stories and that Nora is into writing "books" right now is what I care about, and I don't think the straight lines stuff matters at all. I want to encourage a positive disposition towards literacy and that means letting the kids enjoy the process and accept where they are developmentally.
Interestingly, I think that if Nora doesn't have the structures in place to perceive the straight line back and forth structure, then me tracing my finger isn't going to necessarily promote that. To me, tracing my finger would emphasize a structure already in place. To Nora, it may not highlight anything meaningful at all. But eventually she'll get there, and I'm not really concerned about long term spatial perception.
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