Literacy, innumeracy, and knowledge of the cosmos

One of our readers, RLM, asked recently whether we really were reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with Edith yet, per her book list to the right, and whether it wasn't a bit young. I should explain.

Edith's insatiable love for stories continues. We count it a mellow day if Tom and I can get into the car and get our seatbelts fastened before she starts clamoring for a story. Her teachers remark on the fact that she would sit still all day as long as someone was reading to her, that she has books memorized after one or two readings, and that when a movie is on she doesn't hear a thing around her. (She also doesn't blink, meaning she comes away from most movies with tears running down her cheeks, which gives an even more exaggerated impression of how invested she is.) When riding in the car, Tom and I try to get her to notice interesting things outside the windows, tell us about her day, or be patient enough to give us until the third stoplight to talk to each other...if only to give ourselves a bit of breathing room. But the demand for stories, in the car and elsewhere, continues apace.

When I'm weary of fairy tales, too tired to invent a Princess Edith story, and drawing a blank on family stories, I sometimes dredge up the plot of a good children's book. It turns out that most of the picture books we read at home don't make for good retelling without the actual book--too little picture-independent action. Longer, more plot-driven tales work best. Enter stories like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, told from parental memory. Edith often gets hooked on such stories and wants to see the actual books. We get them out of the library, and she studies the cover, then thumbs through, often asking that we start reading on a page with a picture. Then, when she has memorized what is happening in each picture in the book, we'll read a chapter or two from the beginning or from the more interesting sections of the book. She loves when Charlie finds the Golden Ticket, for example.

Already she is exhibiting a greater fondness for fantasy than her mother, who was inclined to stick with real people in real-life situations over magic and fantastical beasts. This past week we introduced Narnia for the first time, and Edith was captivated. She has all the books spread out on her floor and has been poring over the pictures. We've read the first chapter of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the first chapter of The Last Battle, and various sections of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the whole narrative arc of which she has taken to retelling. She also informed me that she and Aslan play together sometimes. So we seem to have a new hit, even if we haven't read a whole Narnia book chapter-by-chapter yet.

***

Given her deep investment in stories, I was somewhat chagrined this weekend to realize how far behind her mathematical skills are by comparison. Saturday she discovered a deck of cards in a drawer and asked me to show her a game with them. I decided to go with War, which seemed like it would be easy. Not so. It turns out that even though Edith and her classmates write the date on the calendar at school every day and even though she can now count into the 30s or so, Edith still doesn't recognize most of her numerals. To identify the number on each card, she usually had to count the number of items on it. We tried to work on numeral recognition while we were playing, but over the course of the game she only added 8 to the 1 and 2 she already recognized, because she noticed that it looked like a snowman.

As for which number was bigger than which each time we put down our cards, she didn't seem to get the concept at all. I tried various ways of presenting it.

"Edith," I said during one round, "if I said you could have seven pieces of cake or eight pieces of cake, which would you rather have?"

"Vanilla," she said.

"But how many?"

"Seven and eight is too many pieces of cake. I'd just have one, so I wouldn't get sick."

The next round I tried,

"Edith, if I told you I would give you three pennies for your piggy bank or nine pennies for your piggy bank, which would you rather have?"

"Mama, you're confusing me up with all these questions. Would you just tell me which number is bigger?"

She's never been one for working at something she didn't get right away.

The only comparison she found easy was between face cards and number cards. I'd told her the people cards were all higher than the number cards in this game, and she got that right away. At the end, she asked if she could have all the face cards so she could organize them into royal families and have the different families visit each other at their respective castles. We pulled them all out, and she started telling stories with them.

***

As for science education, Edith seems to be taking care of it herself. This weekend she asked us to go on a walk with her in a neighborhood we were visiting for the first time, just to explore. She talked a blue streak as she pointed out houses, examined puddles, and snuck under the low-hanging branches of a huge pine tree to examine it from inside. She kept telling us she wanted to go further and further down the sidewalk because she had never visited this neighborhood before and she liked to explore new places.

But then on the way home in the car she revised her statement. "You know, I have been there before," she amended. We expressed doubt. "Yes I have. Two other times I went under that tree. One time just like this time, and another time I went under, then came out the other side."

"You sound like you are consciously living out string theory, Edith," I observed.

"Yeah, I am," she agreed immediately.

***

Questions for Discussion: What do you do to introduce your kids to interests that aren't your own? If you love reading, how much do you read with them versus do other stuff? If you had a reasonably good time in trigonometry class fifteen years ago but don't normally spend time playing math games, how do you make sure your kids are learning basic numeracy? How deliberately do you turn home into a classroom? If your three year old loves to make up songs but still hasn't tried to draw any representational figures, is that an expression of her own personality that you should celebrate and run with? Or should you chalk it up to your own pleasure in singing and relative lack of artistic skill--and the amount of time you have spent doing each with her--and work more consciously to introduce art projects into daily life?