Hi folks,
We've been rocking out here, kinda isolated in the EL aspect, in Minot, North Dakota. Would love to get in touch with any EL-oriented folks in the region!
We recently decided to start going internet-public with some of our daughter Nation's successes, to help start conversations with folks around here. It's nothing especially surprising from the other results on this forum and other EL communities, but you know how it goes.
Here's a video from four months ago at 13m/o.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/pma1rprne2cyv3s/2016-09-19%2023.45.27.mp4?dl=0Things are generally pretty similar now at almost 16.5m/o, although interest is flagging a little bit recently. Book reading sessions with the frantic focus shown here used to happen two or more times every day from 13m/o to 15m/o. Sometimes they'd last for a whole hour with nonstop energy. Now it's only every other day, and they go for one to five minutes before she gets interested in something else.
We did LR English and Chinese, and LM. She finished Semesters 1&2 of LR Chinese with interest all the way through, although she was getting kinda bored of it by the end. English was lagging behind, so we haven't finished the last half of LR English semester 2 yet. She'd rather play with the buttons on the CD player boombox. We got all the way through math with lots of interest, four types of operations, up to three operands etc, with a similar tapering off to disinterest.
I think the slowdown over the last month might be because we didn't ever implement the "puzzles" to challenge her so I think that may have she lost interest for that reason. "Which one's seventeen, this one, or this one?" Or, "Which card has 'ball'?" Never did that. We have been scrupulously avoiding "testing"... but now I'm thinking we should reconsider that strategy and start adding some "puzzle/problem-solving" back in to make things interesting and challenging again. She sometimes decides to demonstrate recognition of some written words for body parts like Tou ("head" in Chinese), but we haven't started that kind of thing systematically yet. Her receptive listening comprehension has a much bigger vocabulary, but I haven't gone about trying to measure that.
Current list of words produced in speech every day or two:
Baby, Bee, Mama, Papa, Pop, Ba (Chinese for
, Auntie, Up, Down (pronounced "bauu"), Wah!, Hua (Chinese for "flower"), Ball, Zhe-ge (Chinese for "this one", accompanied by finger-pointing), Go!, head shaking for "no", Meimei ("little sister" in Chinese - that's what her older cousin calls her), Lalala (when we're reading/singing through the "Deck the Halls" book).
A dozen words or so, I guess. She's imitated other things we've said before, but those were mostly one-off events.
While LR English and Chinese used regular scripts for those languages, I have also been showing Nation homemade books (mostly nursery rhymes in English) written in Gregg Shorthand, as in the video. I put in a lot of effort learning the Anniversary style of Gregg myself... so high hopes that it might start paying off when we start her learning to write!
Anyways, thought I'd share. XD
Cheers,
Steven
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