Meredith started Highland Dancing this year, and has been really enjoying it. Fiona has asked if she can do it too, so after Christmas we might put her in the younger class and see how she does. She tends to be a little less confident about doing things without me, so in the end she may not be ready yet, which is fine of course. Fiona does love to watch her big sister dance though.

She also goes to a music class regularly. She is learning to play marimba. She also loves to play around with the piano at home. She learned a song on the marimba and came home and figured out (on her own) how to play the same song on the piano. She then taught herself how to play it on the melodica too. Her music teacher told me it’s obvious already that she has an ear for music.

We went to Las Vegas for two weeks in October and that was a blast. I will post more about it later maybe, but we toured around Nevada and Arizona with my dad and saw all sorts of cool things.

Other than that, we spend our time visiting friends, doing lots of arts and crafts, going for walks, playing with toys and each other (they love to play “baby”, which is basically like house, Meredith is the mom and Fiona is the baby)), and lots more. I think we are going to start going to Young Naturalist’s Club meet ups too.

One of Meredith’s favourite activities lately has been to “do fractions”. She will come and ask me, and I will give her little verbal problems (1/2 + 1/2; 1/4+1/2; etc) and she will figure out the answer. She initiated it originally and thinks it’s great fun, so we go with it. I’ve always kept the problems fairly simple, only two fractions and generally the answer is a whole or less.Well the other day we were cooking fish and there were only two pieces left. She asked if she could have a whole one and I pointed out that there were three of us wanting some and only two pieces of fish. She said, without missing a beat, “Okay, how about I have half plus a quarter, and Fiona gets three quarters too, and then you can have half. Would that work Mama?” She figured out 3/4+3/4+1/2=2 wholes in her head! I just love watching her learn and figure this stuff out.

I bake a lot (probably a little too much, I have a terrible sweet tooth), and Meredith loves to help out. I’m already seeing her making connections with fractions too. She knows that two halves make one whole. I don’t know if she really gets what that means yet, but it’s a start. The connections are forming.

My dad commented several times on the fact that she can count as high as she can, add and subtract, multiply and divide, and read and write several different words. I wonder if he was surprised because she’s not in school. So many people just assume learning can’t happen if a child isn’t actively being taught, but I believe learning happens best when it’s not actively being taught.

Another day, she was sitting obviously counting, but it didn’t really sound like she was counting. I listened to her for a minute and realized she was counting in Spanish, all the way to ten. She can count in French too, though not as reliably. She actually knows a few words in both languages, Spanish because she loves Dora the Explorer, and French because I am bilingual and sometimes read to her in French.

And I’ve said this before, but I think it bears repeating, parents go on and on to their kids about how important math is because we use it every single day, so if that is true then why are people surprised that kids can learn math without being in school? How could you not learn math if it’s so important and is really used every day? Why turn math into a charade of problems that don’t have any meaning to the child (who cares how fast the train is going and when it will get to station B, that’s what the schedule is for!), when it is so easy to immerse them in real math without even trying?

If you haven’t read Paul Lockhart’s A Mathematician’s Lament, it is a good read. Long, but so worth it.

Meredith has been enjoying painting and other arts and crafts a lot lately. But she seems to especially like painting right now. We got some primary-coloured tempura paints free from a local homeschooler. I add the colours in the sections of an egg carton, and as she paints she tends to mix them all up, ending up with varying shades of brown. I never thought much of it before. Then yesterday, she asked to paint, and as normal I got out the paints and started squirting them into the egg carton. She pointed to one and said: “Put yellow and red here Mama, so I can have orange too”.

It kind of blew me away. Sometimes it’s really simple things that remind me that she really is learning all the time, even when it doesn’t necessarily look like it. I try not to make a big deal of it when things like that happen (or make even a small deal of it), because it’s obvious that to her it’s just a natural progression. She also knew that red and blue make purple, and yellow and blue make green. Then she experimented to see what happens when purple or orange or green are mixed with each other or with one of the primary colours, as well as what white and black do (we have those too). The actual painting seemed to have been forgotten.

I don’t make a point of correcting her, but she then asked me to spell Mimi, so I wrote it too. She examined mine carefully, and then wrote it again herself:

The two first arcs are the M.

Then she drew a banana:

And “It’s a train track. Chugga chugga chugga, choo choo!” (Complete with sound effects and arm motion!)

Meredith and I were walking into the grocery store together, and I asked her if she wanted a treat. She told me she wanted a Kit Kat bar. (They have been her favourite ever since we discovered that particular store carries a dark chocolate, non-dairy version.) Kit Kat bars usually come in a bar that can be broken into four pieces.

She said to me “Mama, I want a Kit Kat bar. And I’ll share with Mama and Daddy. One piece for Mama, one piece for Mimi…” Here she paused and seemed to be thinking for a bit. Then her face got bright and she said “No! One piece for Mama, two pieces for Mimi, and one piece for Daddy.”

It was really cool to see her doing calculations already! It’s not the first time, she has done other simple subtraction and addition problems before, but it’s one of the more complicated ones she’s done.

So nope, math doesn’t worry me. In school, math is a problem that needs to be solved. It can be avoided (by skipping math, glossing over the problems, etc) and it’s hard to see the point. In the real world, math is the solution to problems that arise. You can’t avoid it, and it’s just part of life, so why would you want to? I feel it’s like reading. I don’t think that children who are immersed in the world, with literate parents, could not learn to read or do math.

Fiona has been getting up on her hands and knees and rocking since she was about five months old. She’s been creeping along on her belly and rolling around to get places since about that time. Last night, she figured out the crawling thing.

Nothing is safe anymore! She is having a ball crawling around. She crawls in a sort of half-scoot sort of way. Meredith always crawled in the “normal” hands and knees crawl, so it’s pretty cute to see Fiona’s way.

See how her left leg is bent under her? That’s actually how she has been crawling. She gets up on her right knee or foot, but with her left leg she just kind of pushes herself with the leg down. Her arm movements are very exaggerated still. She lifts each arm way up and out to move along. (Though today she’s also been getting up on both feet and crawling in a more monkey-like way too.)

I am loving each new stage all over again, though it sure seems to be going faster with Fiona. Didn’t I just give birth yesterday?

You can see an M, and then to the left two straight lines. She pointed to the first straight line (the one closest to the M) and told me that was the “I”, so I don’t know if the second one was already there, or was her doodling, or if it’s just something she hadn’t finished. She then told me that “M is for Mama too!”, and then went running off to catch up with the group.