I thought I'd share one of my parenting experiences with you all, maybe some of you new parents will appreciate it.
My children are 18 and 20 now, both doing quite well. My older boy is at university, studying computer science. He entered college having scored 800 on the math portion of the SAT, twice, and having scored very well on the other two portions of the test as well.
As a freshman, he had an internship at one of the top companies that employ computer science interns, and each summer since, he's been hired by another top company. I can't take credit for that, but I suppose I can take credit for having taught him how to learn.
When he was around the age of two, he came home from daycare, where they had taught him to recognize the letter "O". I was impressed that they had taken the time to do that, as I had not yet considered the possibility of teaching him such things at such a young age.
I resolved that I was going to take the reins of my children's education, and not depend upon the school system for something that I could do, I felt, better. My goal was to prepare my children so that when they completed high school, they would have more choices as to what they might do with their lives.
To begin that process I invented what I called The Marshmallow Game. I purchased a set of refrigerator magnets of the letters of the alphabet, and a bag of miniature marshmallows. I held up the letter "A" to my son and said, "Do you know what letter this is?" He didn't, of course. "It's an "A". Can you say that? "A"? "A", he said. I gave him a marshmallow.
I resolved to make sure that I would not create a situation where my children grew to hate learning like this, so I kept the lessons very short, less than five minutes for sure, and I only did them two or three times per week at the most. I kept at it until he had learned all of the names of the letters.
Then I started on the sounds. "What does A say?.....it says "aaaaaaaaa"! Can you say aaaaaaa?" Yep. Marshmallow.
And: "Sometimes A says its name: It says 'A' "
It took months to teach phonics. At the age of three, I put the letters C, A, and T up on the refrigerator. "What does C say? What does A say? What does T say?" "C aaaaaaaa T" Cat!" Several marshmallows. He got it.
By kindergarten age, he was reading fluently. Instead of me reading Seuss to him, he read it to me.
I did this with both of my children, and I believe both benefited from it.
There's a lot more to this story, and if there's interest, I'll share.
Just thought I'd share in case any of you find it useful.
Submitted January 16, 2015 at 12:55PM by quivil http://ift.tt/1zm2e0m Parenting
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