Song and motion for language development

My mom sent me this article from The Guardian: Singing to Children May Help Development of Language Skills, by Amelia Hill

As Daniel Dwase, editor of the online Child Development Guide, points out, songs with actions help children to learn "balance, co-ordination, body awareness and rhythm." The best songs with movement I learned came from Lucia's Waldorf kindergarten. At some point, I should teach you the song that begins thus:

Show me your foot and let me see your shoe
We will do what the washing women do,
We're washing, we're washing, we're washing all day long. 2X.

After we wash the clothes, we wring them out, dry them, iron them, and fold them. When we're done, I announce, "You've done such a lovely job with the laundry. Now, the rest of your family to put their clothes away." I've tried to implement this policy in real life. It sometimes works.

No Pressure...

Oh, Just Answer the Question, Honey is a New York Times article by Edward Wyatt about a new game show that features "academic geniuses" 6-12 years old answering questions for prizes. At each level of competition, the parents choose whether or not their children will advance to the next level.

Oh my. A few years ago, I watched Spellbound, the spelling bee documentary released in 2002. I was dismayed by the overwhelming pressure some of the parents put on their children to win the National Spelling Bee. (Remember the grandfather who pledged to feed 5000 people in India if his grandson won?)

Library Lady raises her own kids

Blog post: Library Lady is bringing up her kids

As someone who used to do library storytimes as a children's librarian and is now bringing her own child to library storytimes, this post resonates with me. There are no good terms for parents who work for a paycheck outside the home, those who work for a paycheck inside the home, and those who work without ever seeing a paycheck. "Working mom" implies that mothers who don't get paychecks aren't working, and "full-time mom" implies that mothers who work for paychecks outside the home aren't their children's mothers all the time. More important than labels, though, are the choices we've made, the decisions we've had to make, and the challenges that come up no matter what we do.

I'm going to do my best to avoid articles that lay guilt-trips upon mothers who work for paychecks outside of the home regardless of why they do it, or upon the mothers who work as parents without the benefits of paychecks, health insurance, etc. I'm also going to stop trying to justify the professional and personal choices I've made. All along, Bede and I have worked to make decisions that were best for our family.

I'm curious... when someone tries to undermine a decision into which you've placed a lot of thought, how do you respond? When it happens, I'm so taken aback that I come up with my witty response long after that person has gone on to something else.

Children of Summer, by Mariah Boone

Mariah Boone of LoneStarMa has a pertinent article in We the People News about The Children of Summer:

...Summers are sweet when you’re a teacher and a parent because you finally get to try to make up to your children all that time that you spent grading and planning and going to other kids’ extracurricular activities when they really wanted you at theirs....

For far too many other parents, however, summers are a special kind of nightmare. Working parents of school-aged kids who do not have handily unemployed and loving relatives nearby do not have many attractive options for keeping their kids cared for in the summer.

For the whole article, please visit this page.

Avoid hearing loss in children

From one of my recent Google Alerts:

Protecting kids' hearing starts when they're babies , by Angele Sionna:

"...For children even a mild hearing loss can lead to significant developmental problems related to speech and language development, social development and academic success," says [audiologist Pamela] Mason. "Classrooms are poor acoustic environments and are often noisy with activities, this environment is difficult to learn in especially if you have a mild hearing loss."

So how do you avoid hearing loss in children? By starting when kids are babies and toddlers, teaching to keep music, TV and other things should be kept at a decent level.

A note at the end of the article mentions that musician Justin Roberts will give the first "Listen To Your Buds" concert on November 19 at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, Illinois.

When surprise is not so much fun

Devon T, an early childhood teacher in Japan and blogger for Head, Shoulders, Knees and all that, says Remember the automatic flush toilets when it comes to introducing children to something new. There's much more, including a neat little anecdote about a teacher introducing a variant of "Pin the Tail on the Donkey" to children who might otherwise be resistant to a game that involves a blindfold. Go read!

The Dancing Shepherdess and the Faerie Queen

Here is a photo of me taken in 1978. I am wearing my shepherdess costume sans crook and kerchief:

The shepherdess costume was great for impromptu dance performances. Sometimes I gave my parents warning ahead of time, but most of the time, everyone had 10 minutes at the most to assemble for the show. Someone found music for me to dance to, and I made up the steps as I danced. I never made any money from these dances (I blame my publicist), but I did develop a knack for performing in front of other people without succumbing to stage-fright. Perhaps that's why I thought my destiny lay in acting. Acting turned out not to be my vocation (though I did have fun with the high school plays), and I tossed aside my early plans to become a ballet dancer after reading Off Balance: The Real World of Ballet, by Suzanne Gordon. Had I been what the dancer Martha Graham referred to as "doom eager" to become an actor or dancer, I would have devoted myself to the performance arts. I probably wouldn't have become a reader, though, or had time to play. It doesn't sound like a life I would have enjoyed.

Even though I never dressed up as a faerie queen* for Halloween, I still got to pretend I was a queen 364 days a year. I made crowns out of aluminum foil, cardboard, and sparkly buttons. The irridescent green and blue skirt I wore for my three-minute performance in Aesop's The Peacock and the Crane** also served as the main attraction of my Freya costume two years later. While school life was dreary and difficult, my play-time was rich and full of imagination.

I've decided that I had a good childhood.

*I was too haughty to be a mere princess.
**I have no recollection of my crane co-star calling me a "dunghill cock," at least onstage.

May-Pole

Many little girls in my part of the world have a fascination with princesses. When I was a little girl, I had a fascination with queens. I didn’t spend a lot of time with other children until first grade, and I don’t think I had even heard of princesses until that time. I knew about queens from Queen Sara on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood ("Don't judge me!" as Nonny would say), and I liked the idea of wearing a crown and holding a scepter just fine. I made my own crowns out of cardboard and aluminum foil. I put up signs saying that people could bow or curtsey to the queen (i.e. me). Except for my grandfather, who said that he would curtsey if need be, no one obliged. I did not banish anyone to the dungeon, though. Noblesse oblige, after all!

In second grade, I attended a first through eighth grade school in Newhall, West Virginia. For some reason,* the school celebrated May Day, complete with the May-pole dance, and a full court. Each grade chose a nominee for May Queen, then got her school photo pasted to a potato chip canister whereby we were supposed to put our coins inside for the person we wanted to win. (The school was always fund-raising, and this contest was yet one more way to get money.) The girls who didn’t win became May princesses, and got to hold court with the Queen on May Day.

My teacher asked me if I wanted to be the 2nd grade May Queen nominee. I surprised her and myself by saying, “No, I want to dance in the Maypole dance instead.”

My teacher was startled (as was I) and muttered something about my not necessarily getting to have that choice. Still, a few days later, my classmate Crystal and I became the 2nd grade representatives for the May-pole dance. We got to leave class periodically to go to the gym with the other dancers and learn to weave the long ribbons into an elaborately braided pole set on top of a car tire. We danced to a scratchy record that played “Greensleeves.” On the actual day of the performance, we got a bit muddled when the person who brought the Maypole to the center of the gym set it down slightly differently so that we couldn’t find our proper ribbons, but we were able to find our places (eventually) and start again.

The parents in the audience got to watch all of the performances, as did the first grade queen and her court of princesses in their frothy dresses. While I was dancing, I felt a brief pang that I hadn’t decided to be in the court because the performers showed up, did their dance, and went back to their classrooms. Still, I was so glad to have been a part of the dance. Even at the time, I didn’t know where I had heard of May-pole dancing, but I knew I wanted to be a part of it. For me, the May-pole dance was a bright moment in an otherwise traumatic** second grade experience. I am thankful that I got to dance.



*I think it might have had something to do with May 1st being Labor Day in some parts of the world. I lived in a coal-mining town, so this reason would have made sense. I don’t know for sure, though.

**Until 1994, West Virginia allowed corporal punishment in the schools. My teacher would have sessions where she encouraged kids to tattle on each other and then the "culprits" would come up and be paddled in front of the entire class. I am not kidding.

Thirty-Four Things, Part II

Last week, I wrote out the first half of the list of thirty-four things I knew about myself. Today is my 34th birthday, and as promised, here is the second half of the list. Yorkshire Pudding requested “sex, drugs and rock and roll” in part II. I shall do my best to oblige.

Thirty-Four Things, Part II

18) Sex: I was not impressed by my first kiss (too sloppy). I was not impressed by my second kiss (too aggressive). I was ready to throw in the towel until I experienced my third kiss. It was lovely. I dated the guy for far too long simply because he was such a great kisser.

19) Drugs: The few times in my life in which I smoked had more to do with the boys I fancied than anything else. Each round of cigarette smoking ended up exactly as before: illness a la food poisoning. Eventually, I realized (a) cigarette-smoking really wasn’t for me (b) I needed to have crushes on boys who didn’t smoke.

20) Rock and Roll: When I was 14, I met Joan Jett. Ulric and my mother went with me to the concert, and they were (perhaps) the youngest and the oldest members of the audience. Afterward, I was determined to meet my hero. A newspaper reporter doing a story on Jett had an extra backstage pass, and offered it to me. Not only did I get to go backstage, but the reporter was able to manage it so that my mother and brother could come backstage too. I got autographs for all of my penpals, and Joan Jett gave me a leopard-print bandana.

21) For the first 6 years of my life, I lived in a house in the woods that didn’t have hot running water or flush-toilets. Our house was heated by a coal-stove. I suspect this experience has much to do with my befuddlement over how others find camping “fun.”

22) When I see digital time, I mentally convert it to analog. The numbers don’t mean as much to me as the position of the hands on the clock.

23) I am extremely prone to motion-sickness. As a result, I had mediocre reference skills in grade school and college because I avoided microfiche and microfilm. I am thankful for the full-text articles in databases that became more accessible just as I started graduate school.

24) Before I got together with Bede, I told a friend of mine that I doubted things would work out because Bede “wasn’t silly enough.” At the time, I didn't realize I was just trying to find an excuse for things not to work out, as I had no prior experience with healthy relationships.

25) I decided to become a librarian to save myself from having to train as a teacher. (In my twenties, I would have made a lousy teacher.) Hardly anyone believes me that I didn’t become a librarian because my mother was a librarian, but think about it: how many people do you know these days who actively want to do what their parents did?

26) It’s been two and a half years since my youngest brother died, and I am still incredulous that he’s gone. Some part of my brain is waiting for the joke to be over and the punch-line to be worth it.

27) I don’t tolerate bullies. I don’t have much in the way of brawn or clever, on-the-spot responses, but I do have a long memory and a boatload of patience.

28) Schroeder from the “Peanuts” comic strip and the score for the film “A Clockwork Orange” fanned my love of Beethoven. There was a time when “A Clockwork Orange” was my favorite film. It was incredibly violent, and I didn’t like the violence, but still, I was obsessed with the film. I don’t think I could watch it today.

29) When playing Monopoly, I almost always pick the iron, even though I rarely iron my clothes. I acknowledge the irony.

30) My favorite light reading is spicy historical fiction set in the Elizabethan Era or just before.

31) Although I don’t believe in reincarnation, sometimes I get the sense that I wasn’t always this fortunate.

32) I grew up with three sets of grandparents: my mother’s parents, and my father’s parents who divorced and remarried before I was born.

33) As long as you’re respectful, you can pretty much ask me any question you like, and I will answer it as truthfully as possible (or let you know that I only want to tell you part of the answer).

34) On the calendar of saints, the feast day of Alkelda of Giggleswick is March 28. I gave the name “Alkelda” to a character (Twi’lek Jedi, if you’re interested) I developed as a guest-player in the Star Wars role-playing game.

Thirty-Four Things, Part I

In one week, I will be thirty-four years old. I was inspired by an entry in someone's LiveJournal (you know who you are!) to write down thirty-four things I know about myself. The exercise was harder than I realized, because I wanted each item to contain a story within itself. So far, I've got seventeen items. I'll work on the other half this week and post the second part of the list on my birthday.

Thirty-Four Things, Part I

1) If I had to pick a fairy tale that reflected my life-outlook, it would be the Three Sillies. I wish it were something more heroic along the lines of The Brave Little Tailor.

2) In high school, I briefly considered choosing astronomy for my college major, despite my poor math grades. A friend of mine said, “You don’t need to know that much math for astronomy.”

3) When I was pregnant, people advised me to keep crackers by the bedside to help with morning sickness. To this day, the sight of a saltine makes me queasy.

4) I’ve said I’d rather endure dental work than read a mystery novel. I’ve had to pay for that remark. My mouth is a dentist’s cash cow.

5) Most of the food items I disliked as a child had to do with the texture and acidity more than the taste.

6) Most of my favorite foods come from the Middle East: stuffed grape leaves, megeddarah (lentils, rice and caramelized onions dish), little spinach pies, thyme/sesame seed/sumac spice mixture sprinkled on top of yogurt spread, lamb kabobs.

7) I enjoy devising cunning plans that are impossible to execute.

8) When I was a teenager, I wanted to be an alien “sleeper agent” who would be released from planet Earth once I had fulfilled my secret mission. I was at a bit of a loss as to the nature of my secret mission, but I hoped all would be revealed in due time. If “due time” included alien spacecraft zapping the meanies in my school, so much the better.

9) I taught myself origami because I hated organizing craft programs for the library, and I wanted to have something to do that was enjoyable.

10) When I was seven years old, I decided that when I died, I wanted to be buried with my dolls and my Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House books. I thought I really could take them with me.

11) When I am happy, I like to listen to sad songs. The reverse is not true.

12) I like having gone out dancing more than I like planning to go out dancing.

13) I think getting enough to eat is a right, not a privilege, and that people are more likely to “better themselves” when they’re not starving.

14) I like bats, but I don’t often tell people because then they give me bat-related items. (Please! No more copies of Stellaluna.)

15) My favorite part about acting in plays was the built-in after-school social life. I missed out on a bunch of the cast-parties, but I’m convinced they weren’t as much fun as the pre-performance gatherings in the dressing rooms.

16) When I tell people I can’t swim properly (i.e. the crawl stroke), they think a miracle has taken place when I start dog-paddling.

17) I want to see the constellations of the Southern Hemisphere.

Every Seven Years

After writing a few long pieces, I need to fill up the writing well again. In the meantime, here are some more photos taken at seven year intervals. Every seven years, there's a complete turnover of cells in our bodies (not at the same time, though), so the seven year intervals make sense for me. Perhaps I'll think of a story for each photo.


Seven years old



Fourteen years old



Twenty-one years old



Twenty-eight years old

Next year, I'll turn 35, and then voila, I'll be a new person again.