Sugarcake Diary

Homeschooling and the Voyage of Self-Discovery

2012-03-01T19:54:00.002-05:00

As I said in my last post, I recently ran across a quote from a writer I had never heard of before, David Albert, which impressed me so much that I rushed off to the library to go find his books. I've now read two of them, Homeschooling and the Voyage of Self-Discovery, and And the Skylark Sings With Me. Neither one of them seems to be the one from which the quote was taken, but nonetheless I was very glad to have read them. Albert spends quite a while expounding on the benefits of homeschooling and contrasting them with the limitations of the school environment, and does so engagingly and convincingly, but I've already bought that argument, so that isn't the part that was most relevant for me. Some of the content - well, quite a bit of it, in And the Skylark Sings With Me - veered away from discussion of homeschooling methods and into a proud dad's raving about his beloved daughters. But he is so clearly and sincerely besotted with his children that you can't really hold it against him :)

I'm going to add here a few quotations from Homeschooling and the Voyage of Self-Discovery which I found particularly insightful, so that I can refer back to them later when the books themselves are back at the library. His ideas don't translate immediately into a to-do-list or a lesson-plan, but I found them helpful as I continue trying to define exactly what my aspirations are for the girls' education. I love a lot of the ideas behind child-led learning - I think we'll lean more towards unschooling than to school-at-home - but the more child-led things get, the more difficult I think it would be to make any kind of assessment about whether the child's education is progressing towards something. I'm sure at any given moment, I could come up with reasons for why the child's current activities are valuable, but would there be a discernible overall direction or progression...? I think the quotations below will help me view a frameless kind of educational plan through some kind of a framework.

p.49: "Whenever we are stuck in our homeschooling routines, whether it be around math or anything else, I am learning not to be frustrated with my children, but to step back and ask myself three questions: Have I provided what is necessary so that my kids can discover the beauty in what they are learning? Have I given them opportunities in the present to use it? Do they have models in front of them to which they can aspire if they put in the necessary learning effort?"

p.84-86: "Learning requires structure ... in the mind, ... the mental architecture that allows us to engage and make sense of the world around us. ... This structure takes the form of what might be thought of as 'conversations.' ... As children develop, different conversations come to center stage, engaging them most fully in putting together, for themselves, a structure that makes sense. These five conversations are:

the conversation with nature and the natural order;
the conversation with the past and with history;
the conversation with the present and the world of convention and, especially, social convention;
the conversation with the future;
the conversation with Oneself.

I am convinced that these conversations, taken together, represent the individual and unique, yet fundamentally human, need to search for truth, not as a machine-like apparatus registering facts, but in the mastery of material and spiritual life."

p.98, explaining what he means by the 'conversation with Oneself': "I call this the conversation with Oneself, to stress the intimation that one may have that the self is larger than one's own individual ego. If you are of a religious frame of mind, you may think of it as a conversation with God or the Divine, or, as I like to think of it, with the Inward Teacher."

"Right answers"

2012-02-23T08:20:00.001-05:00

I've mentioned before that one of the reasons I'm so interested in homeschooling is that I don't want the girls getting tied up in the concept of "right answers" which seems to drive so much of the school experience. And today I stumbled over a post that sums up exactly what I mean. For example:

"...Looking back at my school experiences, it is difficult to see what purpose the cult of right answers, which extended far beyond the world of mathematics, served, other than as an odd kind of social sorting mechanism. The successful competitors (including me) sat on the edges of our seats, ready to perform our next trick and obtain a herring from our trainers, the less successful got hungrier in the back until many forgot what food was."

This is a quotation from a book by David Albert, whom I had never heard of, but whose homeschooling books I will definitely be searching for in the library iA!

What's Basbusa reading?

2012-02-16T10:48:00.000-05:00

Billy & Milly: Short & Silly is a title which gives a perfect summary of the book itself. It's about a boy called Billy and a girl called Milly, and their adventures are indeed extremely short and extremely silly. However, they have the great advantage of being easily readable by a child with only the most basic phonics and word-building skills, which Basbusa finds extremely satisfying. One sample "story" goes like this: "Room. Broom." (accompanying a full-page picture of a fancy bedroom with a broomstick in it.) "Boom! Zooooooooooooom!" (as Milly hops onto the boomstick, flies up through the ceiling (hence the "boom"), and zooooooms away. All of the stories consist of only three or four rhyming words, like this one, and the plots are correspondingly - well, short and silly. But Basbusa's a fan, and has chosen this one from the library three times now.

The Snail and the Whale is a book I saw on is Learning with Mouse's best books of 2011 list, and since we've really enjoyed several other books by Julia Donaldson (The Gruffalo, The Gruffalo's Child, Room on the Broom), I knew we'd like this one too. And sure enough, it was a very fun read. It's all in rhyme, which is Basbusa's favorite format, with plenty of humor, and attractive, busy illustrations. The story describes a snail who longs to see the world, and hitches a ride on the tale of a whale in order to explore with him. The snail is awed by the size and splendor of the sights he sees, and is feeling very small and insignificant, when suddenly he finds that he, only he, can come to the rescue of his gigantic friend.

I think I must have read Pierre: A Cautionary Tale sometime myself, because it seems very familiar. So excuse me if this is such a classic that it's old news to everyone else! Although the title describes the books as being "in five chapters and a prologue," each chapter is really only a page long. It's a poem about Pierre, whose only response to his doting parents, and even to a hungry lion, is a jaded "I don't care!" And so the lion ate Pierre. But don't worry, his parents get him out again! Basbusa liked the story, liked the rhyme, liked the small size of the book (as always!) and liked how fast the "chapters" race by, giving her frequent opportunities to announce "Chapter FOUR!" or "Chapter FIVE!"

Listen to my Trumpet! is another of Mo Willems' Elephant and Piggie books. I should really stop reviewing these now, because basically I say the same things about each title, but this one is definitely my favorite so far. I found myself giggling through it, which is a first (although Basbusa finds almost all the books in this series very entertaining). I won't spoil the plot by explaining exactly what happens, but even leaving the story aside, there were several other things we liked about this one. Basbusa liked checking the shape of the speech- or thought-bubbles to see whether Gerald's words were spoken aloud or not, and we had some interesting chats about why Gerald might have chosen to keep some of his thoughts to himself, and why he was "ummm..."ing so much while trying to find words to say aloud. I also liked that the sounds Piggie makes on her trumpet are spelled out in ways that are very encouraging for beginning readers: made easier through hyphenation, and made stress-free because they're nonsense words anyway. (For example, "Bl-ARK! Vr-ARP! Sn-ARK!)

Linking up with What My Child is Reading and Read-Aloud Thursday.

What's Basbusa reading?

2012-02-09T07:33:00.000-05:00

A Few Blocks has been one of the biggest hits we've had in our house lately. The story describes a sister and brother's short walk to school - but since Ferdie, the little brother, is in the middle of three different games at home and doesn't want to go at all, his sister, Viola, has to coax him there. She turns their walk into a game of superheros, and then of pirates, and then of knights and princesses... before running out of inspiration herself, when Ferdie steps up to return the favor. Basbusa adores this story because pretend-games are her favorite activity, and she loves watching the two children invent new surroundings instead of the ones they find themselves in. The illustrations are beautiful, too, with the real world in black and grey, but the children's imagined world in pretty pastels. For me, the caring relationship shown between the two siblings was another reason to love this book.

I found Andrew Henry's Meadow on somebody's list of vintage books that their child enjoyed, and I'll be checking out more of her suggestions as soon as I can remember where the list was! Andrew Henry, the middle child of his family, is an enthusiastic and talented inventor, but somehow his family don't seem to appreciate the giant contraptions he keeps building in the middle of the kitchen or hooking up to their sewing machines. So he decides to run away to a hidden meadow, where he builds himself just the kind of house he has always wanted to live in. He is soon joined by other children who have likewise have found that their parents disapprove of their somewhat eccentric interests. Andrew Henry builds each one a house corresponding to their passions and needs, and soon there's a whole little village of children in his meadow. But of course their families are terribly worried, and eventually find them and bring them back home, after a joyous reunion. Basbusa liked the story overall, and especially liked looking at all the different houses Andrew Henry built for his friends, and choosing which one she'd like to live in herself.

For Basbusa, I think the biggest attraction of Creepy Castle (and others by the same author, such as Naughty Nancy Goes to School and Adventures of Paddy Pork) was that the books themselves are so small. 5" by 8", maybe? She loves miniature books, no matter what the content! (Come to think of it, when she was a toddler, one of her favorite books was an empty miniature photo album, which she "read" over and over and over again, pointing out completely invisible goats and flowers...) But leaving aside the size of the book, these stories are exciting and accessible wordless adventures that Basbusa can easily figure out on her own from the illustrations. My only criticism is that the mice look a little too realistically ratty for my taste!

I think Mr. Pine's Mixed-Up Signs was another suggestion from that vintage list? The plot isn't exactly thrilling - a sign-painter loses his glasses, gets all the signs in the town mixed up, and then sorts them out again - but Basbusa liked it a lot, I think because it was so easy for her to "read." There were plenty of signs with words she knows, like "stop" and "go" and so forth, and the rest of the text was simple enough that she could improvise even if she didn't know the real words. I wouldn't actually have recommended this if it were just up to me, since I didn't find it particularly enthralling, but it definitely made Basbusa's list of favorites.

Linking up with What My Child is Reading and Read-Aloud Thursday.

More homeschool planning thoughts...

2012-02-05T11:50:00.000-05:00

As time goes on, I'm feeling less worried about plunging into homeschooling in the fall. (I keep reminding myself that it will really only be a minor splash at most, since Basbusa will only be four, but in my head it still feels like it will be a plunge of epic proportions!) The two elements I was most concerned about were my own ability to establish some kind of routine, and finding opportunities for regular social interactions for Basbusa, and those two things seem to be sorting themselves out a bit.

I've managed to find three other moms with daughters near Basbusa's age, who are all interested in setting up a weekly playgroup. (One of them even has a daughter just one day younger than Kunafa!) We'll be meeting next week to let the girls play and to chat about what kind of structure each of us has in mind, but I'm crossing my fingers that it will work out well. Plus, there's now a bi-weekly playgroup at the masjid that seems like it will have staying power insha'Allah, and we've gotten to know two other homeschooling families nearby with young children.

I was worried about routines because I've never, in my entire life, managed to stick with them, no matter how loosely-structured they might be. I know that it's not essential to have a routine or schedule, but I think it might be helpful for the girls to know where we are in the day and in the week. For myself, too, I can see myself becoming easily stressed about whether I'm doing "enough" of a myriad different things with the girls, if our lives were so unscheduled that it was very hard to keep track of what we had been doing.

So, I've made a tentative schedule for what our lives might look like in the fall (which I'll post in the future), and I'm trying even now to do little bits of it. My girls have never had afternoon naps or quiet times or anything, but I've now started memorizing Quran myself after we're home from any morning activities and the girls have had lunch. They have to find some way to entertain themselves while I sit nearby, working on Surat Al Noor. It's actually working out very well, al7amdulillah!! It turns out that they're perfectly capable of finding things to do when they see that I'm really engaged in doing my own thing, and since the activity I'm engaged in is a truly worthwhile one, I don't feel like I'm a bad mom while I'm doing it :) Plus, I've noticed that the kids who are most enthusiastic about learning Quran are the ones who see their parents doing the same, so I'm hoping the example will have been useful to Basbusa by the time I start more formal Quran lessons with her in the fall insha'Allah.

What's Basbusa reading?

2012-02-02T23:08:00.002-05:00

It hadn't even crossed my mind to think about starting chapter books with Basbusa. She's only three and a half, and I'm pretty sure my mum didn't start reading chapter books with me until I was much, much older than that. But I noticed that all my favorite blogs for picture-book recommendations were also talking about the chapter books they were reading with their preschoolers, so I thought I'd give it a try.

It's been fantastic! We read a chapter a night by the light of her night-light, while she's tucked up in bed, which we could never do with picture books because Basbusa would insist on sitting up and leaving the lights on so that she could see properly. Plus, when she's stalling during the last stages of the going-to-bed process, the phrase "but don't you want to find out what happens next to ...?" has proven nearly magical. Or, as a last resort, I wander nonchalantly past her as I head for the bedroom, reading aloud as I go, "Chapter Nine: The Thunderstorm...." She comes dashing along after me, not wanting to miss a word of her story!

During the day, Basbusa takes these books and "reads" them aloud for literally an hour at a stretch, making up endless, convoluted stories as she flips the pages. She occasionally uses the illustrations as inspiration for plot-twists or sub-plots, but really she's off in a world of her own. (An excerpt I overheard today went something like, "'What are you doing with all that blood?", she exclaimed. 'You are making a big mess." In a fit of rage, they galloped off on their horses." (?!?!?!)). Basbusa has been spending lots of time making up stories lately anyway, but she seems to find flipping through the chapter books a big spur to her imagination.

So here's what we've read so far. All these books have very short chapters with plenty of illustrations, and not-too-complicated plots, so they're just about right for Basbusa's current before-bedtime concentration-level.

The biggest hit so far is Milly Molly Mandy Stories. Milly Molly Mandy lives in an English village in about 1920. Each chapter of the book narrates not so much an adventure in her life - because nothing very dramatic happens to her - but rather an incident in her ordinary comings and goings. The charm of the stories lies in the way the author describes these happenings, so that a trip to the village shop to run errands for her family becomes just as momentous an event for the reader as it is to Milly Molly Mandy's own six-year-old eyes. Basbusa was entranced, and we'll definitely be looking for the sequel.

Lotta Makes a Mess, like Milly Molly Mandy, is a book I read during my own childhood. Astrid Lindgren is best known for the Pippi Longstocking stories, but we tried those, and they're definitely a bit beyond Basbusa for the moment. Lotta, on the other hand, was just right. In the middle of a tantrum, Lotta, the youngest of three children in her family, takes a scissors to the sweater her grandmother has knitted for her. Horrified by what she has done, she decides to leave home, and moves into their next-door-neighbor's garden shed. Basbusa could totally sympathize with Lotta's going further than she had meant to, mid-tantrum, and was round-eyed at the idea of her actually leaving home and living by herself - until night-time came, and the garden shed got very quiet and very dark.... It looks like the same book is also sold as Lotta on Troublemaker Street, in case your library has title and not the other.

I knew we just had to get Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf when I saw it recommended online (where?!? I was sure I'd bookmarked it!). Basbusa loves playing run-away-from-the-big-bad-wolf so much that her preschool teachers had to ban the game in her classroom, so I thought this book would be just her thing :) And sure enough, she did enjoy it. Like Milly-Molly-Mandy, each chapter is a stand-alone story, which is ideal for pre-bedtime reading. A few of the stories were a little bit too complicated for Basbusa, and I know some of the jokes went over her head, but most of them were just the right brand of silliness.

My last two suggestions are well-known and well-blogged-about. So I'll just mention that we, too, like everyone else who's just beginning chapter-book read-alouds, liked My Father's Dragon and The Storm. (I was a bit surprised that Basbusa liked The Storm, actually, because it seemed to me that the pace of the action was verrrrrry slow, but that didn't seem to bother her.)

Linking up with What My Child is Reading and Read-Aloud Thursday.

How will I know if it's working...?

2012-01-27T17:32:00.000-05:00

It occurred to me recently that I should think about what my criteria for success will be, with our homeschooling experiment. I've thought quite a bit about my long-term goals, but what about for this upcoming school-year in specific? Since the agreement we've made is to use this year as a test-case to decide whether or not to put Basbusa in "real school" for Kindergarten, I guess I should make sure to define what success would look like. Especially if it turns out that Basbusa isn't particularly interested in the minimal amount of academics I'm planning to offer her. In my mind, that definitely would not mean we had failed, but other family members might be less convinced. And I'm sure I'd run into the same self-doubt that every blogging homeschooling mom seems to be prone to at some point or other! So, here's a tentative criteria for what I think "success" in homeschooling my then-to-be-four-year-old would look like. (Selling this list to the rest of the family will be a whole other issue, but never mind that for now :)

We will have had a successful home-pre-schooling year if Basbusa...

... still loves books;
... continues to discover new areas of interest/focus ever so often, and enjoys exploring more about them in a somewhat-intentional fashion;
... is enjoying the company of other children (including, of course, her little sister);
... routinely comes up with possible answers to her own questions;
... sees herself as the primary and most important judge of her own accomplishments.

(What I mean by that last one is that I hope not to hear her asking, "Is this good?" or "Did I do it right?")

And what would be some signs that really would mean things aren't working out right? Hmmm. I think one sign would be if it felt like our lives were continual chaos and we spent our time running frantically to one activity after another. (I'm worried about my own ability to keep us to some kind of vaguely-structured routine, so this is one way I can see things going off the rails.) I'll keep thinking about this one, because I'm sure my family will ask.

What's Basbusa reading?

2012-01-26T10:24:00.001-05:00

Hurry Down to Derry Fair was just a sweet story with lovely illustrations. It's about a little boy who is bubbling over with excitement about his family's trip to their local fair, but finds himself having to wait for his mother to finish baking pies, for his sister to finish preparing her pets, and for his father to finish chopping wood. Finally, his grandmother takes pity on him, and off they go! The last page is a fold-out illustration of the whole fair at one glance, and the reader can look for the boy and all his family to see what they're doing at the fair. It's hard to say much about this book other than it has delightful illustrations and a sweet but simple plot, but if your child (like Basbusa) just loves fairs in any case, it's certainly a very enjoyable read!

Much as Basbusa enjoyed Neville, I think the main point of the plot was actually a bit over her head. The story is about a boy who has to move to a new neighborhood, and is sure he'll be miserable, with no friends and a new school. But while out on a dispirited walk to explore his new neighborhood, he gets an idea: he starts calling for "Neville!" at the top of his voice. Gradually other children join in to help, and to help each other help, and eventually the boy is at the middle of a whole group of cheerfully yelling children. The kids soon start asking about Neville, what he likes to play and whether he's nice, and sound very interested in getting to know him. They never find him, but agree to meet up the next day to keep looking. It turns out, after the boy has gone home delighted with all the kids he's met in his new neighborhood, that the boy himself is Neville.

How much of this plot did Basbusa get? Well, she got that all the kids were looking for someone called Neville. I tried a few times to explain that this was the boy's smart way of making new friends, but she didn't really get it, and I didn't want to spoil her enjoyment of the story by insisting on full comprehension :) Which left me wondering why exactly she liked it so much, given that her version of the plot was really pretty thin! She liked the kids' attempts to yell as LOUD AS THEY POSSIBLY COULD, and she liked how different fonts and colors were used to show the different kinds of "Neville!"s for each kid. Other than that, I think the big draw was simply that it was an example of group dynamics and kids interacting. She seems fascinated with the details of social interactions these days.

I'd definitely recommend this book for a slightly older child who was able to sympathize better with a child's worry over making new friends. Just one note - there was one sentence I always skipped, in which Neville gloomily anticipates that all the kids (and the teacher!) in his new school will make fun of him and be mean to him because he's new. Basbusa hasn't yet figured out that kids can intentionally say hurtful things, and I'm not in any rush to heighten her awareness.

I read Big Sister and Little Sister at some point during my own childhood, but had long forgotten the name of the book, and I don't think I ever knew the name of the author. Fond memories of the story were all that remained. But I was so glad to stumble across it again, for my own sake as well as for Basbusa's! It's the story of two sisters who are love each other very much, but whose relationship is beginning to change: the Little Sister starts to feel that she doesn't need to be taken care of so much, and that she'd like to try a little more independence. So she secretly goes off to hide in the meadow by herself - only to discover that her lonely and worried Big Sister also cries sometimes, and also needs to be comforted. From that day on, both sisters took care of each other, "because Little Sister had learned from Big Sister, and now they both knew how." Such a sweet story, and an idyllic model of the relationship between sisters. Basbusa enjoyed it many times over, and I hope she and her own little sister will always be as close as the girls in the book!

The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything is clearly way out of season, since it's a Halloween book. We ordered it around Halloween, but were at the very end of a long list of requesters at the library, so Halloween was long over by the time it was our turn. That didn't bother Basbusa, though! She read this one over and over again, and since the text is repetitive, she soon had it memorized and could "read" it to herself with no help. It's a tale of a little old lady who is pursued through the forest by a pair of shoes, a pair of pants, a shirt, a pair of gloves, a top hat, and ultimately a big scary orange pumpkin head. She bravely defies them until a BOO! from the pumpkin finally breaks her nerve - but she soon comes up with a good solution for herself and for the scare-happy clothes. We'll make sure to get to the top of the list for this one next October!

Linking up with What My Child is Reading and Read-Aloud Thursday.

What's Basbusa reading?

2012-01-19T10:27:00.000-05:00

I saw Library Lion recommended over at Supratentorial, and we absolutely loved it. It's the story of a lion who wanders into a library, and, entranced by the stories and books, soon makes himself at home - until, in an attempt to help his friend the head librarian, he gets banished from his beloved library. All turns out well in the end, but along the way there's a touching story about friendship, a discussion of the power of rules and regulations, and, of course, the joy of libraries. We go to the library maybe four or five days a week, so that's a message we can sympathize with! Basbusa and I both loved this one, so we also checked out a new book by the same author, Argus. It was ok, but nowhere near as charming, in my opinion. Basbusa liked it, but didn't ask for endless re-reads.

I can't remember where I saw The Lorax recommended, but I would never have gone browsing through the Dr. Seuss shelf spontaneously. Dr. Seuss wasn't huge in Ireland when I was a child - we had The Cat in the Hat, but that was it, as far as I can remember. More recently, I had glanced through some other titles in our library, but wasn't wild about them, and assumed that The Cat must have been the pinnacle of the author's work. Oh my goodness, how wrong could I have been? We loved the Lorax. Basbusa still spontaneously recites bits of it (at least a month after we returned the book to the library), and refers to "gluppity glup and shloppity shlop" quite matter-of-factly when encountering goo in everyday life :) The story - just in case there are others besides me who have happened to miss this one - tells the tale of a nefarious Once-ler, who gradually chops down a whole forest of Truffula Trees in his quest to make himself rich selling thneeds, despite the vociferous protests of that friend and guardian of trees and barbaloots, the Lorax. It's a light but thoroughly heart-felt introduction to the idea of industrial pollution through an exciting and engaging story, told in poetry that rises to a level far above that of the well-known but well-worn Cat.

Pickle-Chiffon Pie was an accidental library find, and it was one of the most enjoyable once-upon-a-time stories we've read so far. The plot is the fairytale classic of three princes competing to win the hand of a beautiful princess, but the imaginative nature of the illustrations and of the competition itself - to find the most unusual thing in a very unusual forest - make the story both delightful and funny. Prince Bernard is initially certain that he will beat Princes Musselbaum and Wellred with his discovery of a Three-Nosed Snozzle who knows how to make the king's favorite dish, pickle-chiffon pie. But then he spots three baby Snozzles, hiding behind the trees while he leads their father (mother?) away, and can't bring himself to split up the happy Snozzle family. Of course, the tale ends up with a happily-ever-after, along with rewards for thoughtfulness and kindness.

My Name is Elizabeth was a favorite of Basbusa's right from the first reading. Elizabeth likes her name, and strongly objects to being called Beth, Lizzy, or any other variation of it. Basbusa could easily sympathize with her frustration, because Basbusa strongly prefers her own nickname, but finds people continually choosing to use her "real" name instead. She liked the story for its own sake, but I think she also liked seeing how Elizabeth eventually spoke up, and told people what she liked being called - and finding that everybody quite happily complied with her request. This book also served as a vehicle for explaining the difference between speech-bubbles and thought-bubbles, a concept which Basbusa found very interesting.

Linking up with What My Child is Reading and Read-Aloud Thursday.

What's Basbusa reading?

2012-01-12T07:41:00.003-05:00

Cat & Mouse: A Delicious Tale was slightly odd in terms of plot - after browsing through a recipe book, a cat suddenly finds herself unable to stop thinking about how much she wants to eat her best friend, a mouse - but Basbusa enjoyed it. I think she just interpreted it as another version of the very familiar I-really-want-to-but-I-know-I-shouldn't conflict, and didn't stop to ponder the issue of best friends eating each other :) The graphics made an interesting change from the usual, too, and the book ended up with a reassuringly positive affirmation of the power of true friendship. Oh, and Basbusa learned what the '&' symbol means. So, odd but worthwhile, overall.

Have you read Rhyming Dust Bunnies yet? I have a feeling it's a standard part of every preschooler's reading list, but somehow we managed to miss it until recently. Basbusa adored this one, and thought it was the funniest book ever. Three rhyme-obsessed dust bunnies - Ed, Ted, and Ned - are happily making up lists of rhyming words, and are completely oblivious to Bob's attempts to warn them of an approaching peril. "No, Bob," they tell him kindly, "'LOOK OUT! HERE COMES A BIG SCARY MONSTER WITH A BROOM!' doesn't rhyme with anything, really...." Cue much giggling from Basbusa :)

We had a cute misunderstanding with this one, too. Basbusa hadn't come across the term "dust bunnies" before, so I told her that it meant bits of dust and fluff stuck together, but explained that in real life of course they would be mostly dust-colored, not red and green and purple. A few days later, she came running to me, saying, "Mama! Mama! I found some dust bunnies!! ... but I think they're dead..." :) Oooops, guess I should also have clarified that dust bunnies aren't alive like the ones in the book, either!

Homespun Sarah was a recommendation from Amy at Hope Is The Word, and Basbusa and I both liked it and learned a lot from it. It describes life in colonial Pennsylvania from the point of view of Sarah, a young girl living in a typical family. I thought the book managed to convey a huge amount of information about what life was like, in the most enjoyable of ways. Did you know, for example, that in the colonial period, only the adults were allowed to sit down at the table to eat? The children all had to stand, and had to remain completely silent during the meal. The book is told in rhyme, and the text is a little awkward at times, but it didn't cause us any difficulties.

King Jack and the Dragon was a story about three young boys building a fort out of boxes and old sheets, and having a day full of imaginary adventures defending it. The oldest (still a preschooler) bravely plans to stay out all night, but becomes more and more nervous by the sounds of pattering mouse-feet and a distant owl-call. In the end, when a huge, four-footed shadow approaches the fort, he loses his nerve completely - but it's only his mum and dad coming to take him to bed. It was a beautiful story, and it was told in rhyme, so Basbusa did enjoy it. I think it's maybe just a little bit young for her, though, because it never did make the read-over-and-over-and-over list.

Linking up with What My Child is Reading and Read-Aloud Thursday.

What's Basbusa reading?

2012-01-07T13:00:00.000-05:00

In the interests of managing to post more regularly, I'm going to keep it down to just three or four books per post. How I'll ever catch up with my to-be-blogged-about list is another question, but it's better than not posting at all!

First up for this week is The Adventures of Taxi Dog. It's a story in rhyme about a homeless dog who is adopted by a cab driver in New York City, and then spends her time riding around with him in his taxi. It's a nice story, and Basbusa loves almost anything in rhyme. The illustrations are attractive, and there are things to look for, like the black cat who shows up in every page somewhere. But what really made this book special for us is that it's the first book my two girls enjoyed together. Basbusa's little sister - hmmm, she needs a name for the blog... let's pick another Egyptian dessert... how about Kunafa? - is 14 months old, and adores dogs. She loved pointing to the dog on each page, and woof-woofing earnestly. Why this book in particular caught her interest, I'm not sure, but it made for some very sweet read-aloud moments.

Duck Duck Moose was one of Basbusa's own picks from the library, and I'm so glad she found it! It was our first book by Dave Horowitz, and we all loved it. It's about a New Hampshire moose who decides to migrate south to Florida for the winter with two ducky friends.It's hard to describe why the book was so successful, because not too much happens in terms of plot besides going to Florida and coming back again. But somehow, despite the minimal text (great for beginning readers), each of the three characters has a personality that shines through. There's humor that was targeted at just the right level for Basbusa, and Kunafa was intrigued by the "moooooooooooooooose," as she kept pointing out to us, waggling her hands by her head for antlers. T'his would be a great book to do FIAR-ish activities with, if you're into that. We pulled out our maps right away to trace their route ("'Hey,' said Duck, 'I see New York City!' 'Hey,' said Other Duck, 'I see Washington, D.C.!' 'Hey,' said Moose, 'I've gotta pee!'" Cue much giggling from Basbusa.) Lots to contrast between NH and Florida, discussion of seasons and hibernation and migration, etc. We checked out some other books by the same author, but none of them were quite such a hit, though we did enjoy Humpty Dumpty Climbs Again.

Last up, Toot and Puddle, which was similar to Duck Duck Moose in being a travel-centered story without vast amounts of plot, but totally different in style and illustration. It's just the story of two pigs, one who goes on a trip around the world, and the other who stays at home in Woodcock Pocket. Each month, Toot sends a postcard home to Puddle, showing a glimpse of his exotic adventures, while Puddle enjoys the closer-to-home joys of each season. The illustrations are charming, and I loved how the two pigs had such a close friendship despite their different tastes. Basbusa really enjoyed it, and we did some more map-hunting to follow Toot's adventures. We checked out some of the sequels, and they were ok, but not as delightful as the original, in either of our opinions.

Linking up with What My Child is Reading and Read-Aloud Thursday.

What's Basbusa reading?

2011-12-16T09:56:00.000-05:00

Woo-hoo, I'll finally be done with the backlog of un-blogged books, after this post! Which is just as well, too, because I have another giant list building up already. Al7amdulillah for good books :)

Of these five books, Basbusa's favorite was Angelina's Birthday, but I won't spend too much time describing it, because I'm sure everyone already knows about Angelina Ballerina! We read most of the rest of the series afterwards, and Basbusa liked them all. In this particular story, Angelina doesn't look where she's going while riding her bike, and takes a big spill, a tale that provides a useful reminder when Basbusa's attention is wandering while out on her own bicycle. I just call out, "Watch out, Angelina!", and she giggles and keeps her eyes on the sidewalk again :)

I'm often a bit conflicted about Rosemary Wells' books - I frequently like almost all of a story, but find one little part of the message a bit jarring. Noisy Nora, for example - it was such a cute story of a middle child who felt like nobody had time for her, with a happy ending that really rang true. But the refrain was - well, not the kind of model I'm aiming for. Every time Nora makes an attention-seeking ruckus, her family responds, "'Quiet!' said her father. 'Hush!' said her Mum. 'Nora," said her sister, 'why are you so dumb?'" If it wasn't for that last line (which keeps repeating throughout the book), I would have loved this book. Max's Chocolate Chicken, however, was one we both enjoyed unreservedly. (Well, except that it's really an Easter book... But it didn't say "Easter" anywhere in the text, and Basbusa has never heard of Easter or of Easter eggs, so she just thought it was about an ordinary treasure-hunt.) Max is just plain mischievous in this story, and he gets away with it, an idea which Basbusa finds enthralling. And she sympathizes whole-heartedly with Max's love for chocolate, which provided an extra draw :)

Piggie Pie Po is one of our favorites of Audrey Wood's books, and we bought our own copy soon after checking it out of the library. Basbusa still enjoys it, but she may be outgrowing it just slightly, so maybe this one would be ideal for two-to-three-year-olds? It has three (very very) short stories about a pig called Piggie Pie Po, all in rhyme. The first one starts out, "Piggie Pie Po likes to dance / When he wears his Party Pants! / When he wears his rubber fins, / Piggie Pie Po swims and swims." And finally, in the tub, "... Piggie Pie Po wears no clothes - Only bubbles, head to toes!" It's cute, with very simple-to-predict text, so Basbusa was soon "reading" it herself. And she particularly liked the line, "he tromped upon the yummy cake," which we re-enacted endlessly :)

Now One Foot, Now the Other was one of Basbusa's own selections at the library, and again, it's one I would never have chosen for her. It's about a boy and his grandfather, who have been very close ever since he was a baby. Then the grandfather has a severe stroke. The rest of the book deals with the boy's sense of loss, then his fear when his grandfather comes home again but cannot walk or talk, and then finally, how the boy's love for his grandfather helps the grandfather to recover his health. (The title of the book refers to how the grandfather taught the boy to walk when he was a toddler, and how the boy teaches his grandfather to walk again after his stroke.) It's the kind of book I would never have gotten unless a child needed to understand about strokes due to their own circumstances, but actually Basbusa really enjoyed it (?!?). She didn't seem to find the plot alarming, and we actually had several meaningful chats about aging and illness and the ways in which love can and can't cure things.

Linking up with What My Child is Reading and Read-Aloud Thursday.

What's Basbusa reading?

2011-12-06T10:19:00.001-05:00

Almost done with my giant backlog of un-blogged books! Two more posts should do it, I think.

First up, Emily Gravett in general, and Spells in particular. The basic plot is that a lonely frog decides to transform himself into a prince so that he can marry a princess and not be lonely any more. But since he has been tearing sheets out of the spell book to make palaces and pirate-ships, he has to try to piece all the paper back together again to get the right spell. From then onwards, the book is literally split in two, horizontally. You take your pick of any page from the top half and any page from the bottom half, and you end up with an animal that is half one thing and half another, with the spell to go along with it. For example: "String thing / forked tongue / Alakazird / SNIRD!", along with a picture of an animal that is half snake and half bird. Basbusa thought these were absolutely hilarious. We read them over and over and over and over, and she never got tired of it. We tried many other Emily Gravett books as a result, and she liked many of them (Blue Chameleon and The Odd Egg, for example), but I think she was still a little young for most of the others.

Mama's Perfect Present is the sequel to Where's Our Mama. Both books are set in Paris and show a brother and sister's explorations of the city in lovingly-illustrated detail, but Basbusa and I liked this sequel much better than the original. In Mama's Perfect Present, the boy and girl are out trying to decide what to get their mother for her birthday, and inadvertently causing mayhem along the way due to their little dog's unerring instinct for getting into trouble. The children, however, continue on their way, quite oblivious to the dismayed adults in their wake, until they hit on just the right gift. Basbusa liked the plot and the humor in this story, and also liked the Paris aspect of things, since Grandma is a huge Paris-ophile :)

Too Many Frogs is another funny story dealing with unintentionally-caused chaos, but here the "chaos" is the disruption of an unsociable, book-loving Bunny's bedtime-story routine. A cheerful and very outgoing frog discovers this regularly-scheduled story time, and - much to the disgruntlement of the bunny - makes a habit of arriving just in time for each night's installment. When the frog arrives with his entire family reunion in tow, the bunny finally speaks up and declares that he likes his story-time alone... only to discover, when he gets his wish, that he has actually come to enjoy having such an enthusiastic listener for his stories. A very enjoyable read, even if it's not imparting any particularly profound truths!

A Grand Old Tree is more non-fiction than fiction, although it's told in picture-book fashion with a tree as the main 'character.' It simply describes the life of a tree, through the various seasons and through all kinds of weather. Eventually, the tree dies and falls down, but even on the ground it continues to 'participate' in the world of living things around it, and its descendants have spread far and wide. This book is absolutely not giving any kind of formal 'instruction' about life cycles or ecosystems, but I really liked how it introduced those ideas through the simplicity and the beauty of the rhythms it was describing. (The tree in the spring gave shelter to birds and animals, and the dead tree on the ground still gave shelter to animals and insects, for example.) This was one of Basbusa's own choices, and I was surprised both that she chose it and that she kept re-reading it. Pretty though it is, I would have glanced through it, seen the near-complete absence of a plot, and assumed that Basbusa would find it boring.

And lastly, just a quick mention of three books that Basbusa really enjoyed: Chris van Dusen's If I Built a Car, and Mo Willems' We Are In A Book! and Should I Share My Ice Cream? I won't go into details, because she enjoyed them for all the same reasons that she enjoyed other books by the same authors, which I have blogged about here. Definitely recommended, though! Especially We Are In A Book. She giggled her way through it a zillion times.

Linking up with What My Child is Reading and Read-Aloud Thursday.

More homeschool thoughts-in-progress

2011-11-30T22:33:00.001-05:00

I got the form today for reserving Basbusa's place at preschool next year, and much as we both like the school, I think I'll be returning them a "no, thank you"... Insha'Allah we're going to give 'homeschooling' a try next year, and see how it goes. She will only be four, so it's hardly accurate even to call it homeschooling! But I want to try a little tiny bit of formal learning and some semblance of a routine, just to reassure myself that we'll really be able to implement a homeschool lifestyle once Basbusa is old enough for 'real' school. And I also want to reassure other family members that she will, indeed, be learning and not falling behind!

So, my plan for next year is just this, insha'Allah: Five days a week, in the morning, we'll do a little bit of Quran memorization (just one line a day would be great, not even one full aya), and work a little bit on Right Start math. That's it. The rest of our 'homeschooling' will just be what we do already: lots of reading and stories, lots of drawing and pretend-writing, lots of time outdoors, trips to fun places, and playdates with other kids.

I think this plan sounds ok, in theory... But I still have a bunch of worries, both about the plan itself and about how I'll put it into practice. Here they are, just for the record:

First, regarding the plan itself: is it 'enough'? I think it is, but I keep coming across all these amazing, elaborate pre-K curricula online, and suddenly doubting that I'll be doing enough for Basbusa. I've read blogs of people who follow FIAR and BFIAR, for example, and their kids seem to be enjoying it so much. Whenever I sit down and think hard about whether that would work well for us, I end up deciding that what we're already doing would be better... but what do I know?!?

Second, regarding putting the plan into action, I have two more concerns. I'm not sure how to go about setting up the "playdates" part, and that's really the part I care most about. I know there are a billion ways to set up opportunities for Basbusa to interact with other kids, but what I'm really aiming for is opportunities for extended free play with the same group of children on a very regular basis. If I could manage to arrange that two days a week, I'd be totally comfortable with our plan, but I haven't found a way to set it up yet. Almost all of Basbusa's current friends, unfortunately, are leaving the country in a few weeks, and her new friends from preschool will be, unsurprisingly, in preschool. I guess what I'm looking for is a preschool-age homeschool coop, not to far away from here, that involves only a little (or no) structured activities. Hmmm. So I have to work on that, between now and September, insha'Allah.

My other worry about implementing this plan is that I'm not sure what I should do if Basbusa isn't thrilled about studying Quran and/or Math. Maybe she won't be interested in the whole idea; maybe she won't like one half of it; maybe she'll be willing to do it one or two days a week but not five. Then what? On the one hand, she'll only be four, so there's no 'need' to do anything formal yet, and I believe very strongly that children's learning should be led by their interests as much as possible. But on the other hand, she is old enough to be doing some Quran, and doing a tiny bit of Quran once or twice a week isn't really enough for anything to "stick." And also, if we don't follow through on this plan, family opposition to homeschooling for Kindergarten will increase dramatically.

Hopefully she'll love it, and I know that I won't force the issue if she clearly hates it. But I haven't yet worked out what I think I should do if she falls somewhere in the middle.

What's Basbusa reading?

2011-11-26T09:30:00.001-05:00

I'd like to start this post with a request: can anyone recommend a favorite anthology of children's poetry? I'd really appreciate it! I'm looking for poems aimed at the younger end of the spectrum, but not the typical "Mother Goose" collections. (We have those already, and besides, I always feel that many of the traditional nursery rhymes are more than a bit odd when you actually focus on the words...) To give an example of the kind of poem that would be ideal, "There Once Was A Puffin" is Basbusa's current favorite.

I've been looking for just the right anthology of children's poetry for quite a while, and the Random House Book of Poetry (edited by Jack Prelutsky) is the best I've found so far. It has a "a collection of 572 poems for today's child," including old classics as well as very modern poems, very long ones and very short ones. We really liked how the poems are grouped by topic, so all the seasons-related ones are together, and all the monster-related ones are together, and so forth. We found some poems that we really loved (Prelutsky's own "The Troll" was one of our favorites), but about half of them were completely over Basbusa's head, and more than another quarter were only vaguely within her grasp. That's not surprising, I suppose, since Basbusa is only three, and this is a collection that would last us throughout childhood for all kinds of children, so I might buy us a copy anyway. My only slight criticism is that the illustrations aren't fantastic, but I suppose you couldn't really include fancy illustrations for so many poems. And besides, as Basbusa gets older, she won't need the pictures anyway.

The next book in this week's list is one which we've loved for a long time from the library, but which I was lucky enough to win a copy of from CityKidsHomeschooling! (Thanks, Kerry!) The Seven Silly Eaters has a silly, funny plot - each of the children in this family has his or her own finicky taste regarding food, and as her family grows to seven children, the poor mother grows ever more frazzled trying to cater to them all - but that's only the beginning of why we liked it. The story is in rhyme, which is always a hit with Basbusa, and the illustrations are wonderful. Basbusa likes watching as the children get older from page to page, and identifying which is which. Plus, their house gradually fills up with all the kind of kid-stuff you would expect with so many children, so there are always interesting conversations to have about which of them probably plays with which toy, and how what the kittens are doing under the table, and so forth. The children eventually stumble over a solution which means their mother no longer has to spend her days cooking seven different kinds of food, so there's a happy ending for all concerned. A truly charming book.

Perfect Soup was an accidental find as we were browsing in a train-station bookstore one day, but it's been a favorite on our shelves for almost a year now. Murray the Mouse discovers, mid-recipe, that he has no carrot to put in his Perfect Soup. On one level, the rest of the book tells the story of how Murray gets a carrot (by doing an increasingly complex set of trades with a farmer, a horse, a shopkeeper, a boy, and an old lady who likes to knit). This plot-line caught Basbusa's attention from the start, and would have made the book an enjoyable read even without anything else. But on another level, a second story is taking place; about how Murray, in his quest for perfection, was at first too busy to make time for friendship, and how, in the end, he realizes that friendship, not a carrot, is the ingredient that truly makes his soup perfect. Add all this to beautiful illustrations showing idyllic winter scenes, and you can see why this is one of our favorites.

I found Dahlia at Hope Is The Word's list of best picture books. We had to check it out, since we happen to know a very dear little girl with the same name, and I'm so glad we did. Charlotte, the heroine, is a very un-frilly little girl who strongly favors mud-pies over tea-parties. Initially, she reacts to Dahlia, a very frilly new doll, with much ambivalence. But Charlotte eventually comes to love her, and Dahlia comes to love tree-climbing. I thought Charlotte was a wonderful heroine, and I also liked how the lesson of the book went both ways: it is perfectly valid for a little girl to like outdoor exploration more than tea-parties, but it is also perfectly valid to enjoy all those outdoor activities without abandoning frills and ruffles. Plus, Charlotte's day depicted what I would think of as an ideal childhood summer, and the illustrations are lovely.

What Happens on Wednesdays is one of Basbusa's own picks from the library, and she loved it. It's just the story of one preschooler's Wednesday, from the time she wakes up until the time she goes to bed, but I think that's why Basbusa liked it so much. The narration clearly shows a preschooler's love of familiar routines of enjoyable activities, and since Basbusa is right at that stage herself, she loved following along. Plus, this little girl's day is not too different from our own, with trips to the library, the pool, the park, and to preschool, so Basbusa could easily identify with her.

Linking up with What My Child is Reading and Read-Aloud Thursday.

What's Basbusa reading?

2011-11-10T07:42:00.000-05:00

Still working through my giant backlog of books that we loved but I never blogged about. Six of them today. We seem to add new ones faster than I can cross the old ones off! And we have ten more arriving at the library for us today... al7amdulillah for good books :)

First up, two alphabet books. The first one, Animalia, is actually one that Basbusa wasn't all that crazy about. But it's definitely unusual in the alphabet-book category, so I'm blogging it in case someone else has kids who are more interested in seek-and-find books than Basbusa is. The idea is that there's a one- or two-page spread for each letter, each featuring an animal starting with that letter as the main subject of the illustration. There's one sentence about the animal, in which every word also starts with the letter being featured (for example, "An Armored Armadillo Avoiding an Angry Alligator"). I found the sentences themselves a bit obscure, and they quite often used vocabulary that was so far over Basbusa's head that I couldn't easily explain it. But the most interesting part of the book, I thought, was that the illustrations have a huge amount of detail, and the more you look, the more things you find that all start with the letter-of-the-page. In the background of the "P" page about Peacocks, for example, we also found poppies, a parcel, a penguin beside a pond, a parade, the leaning tower of Pisa, just to name a few (there were many more, but they're too small to make out now in the picture I took with my mobile phone!). I thought this was a pretty interesting way of doing things, and the illustrations themselves are attractive enough to spark plenty of interesting discussions... but Basbusa has never been very excited about seek-and-find books, and tended to move on pretty quickly from this one. Oh well.

Next up, An Annoying ABC, which is the story of chaos erupting in a preschool classroom. You see, Adelaide annoyed Bailey. Then Bailey blamed Clyde, and Clyde cried... and so on, until Zelda zaps the whole class with the hose she was using to water the flowers. Everyone apologizes, dries off, and then has a quiet afternoon. Basbusa was fascinated by this book because of the social aspects of the plot - I don't think she ever figured out the link to the ABC part of things (oh well, again, but she already knows her letters anyway :). Basbusa recently started preschool herself, and I think the exploration of preschool social dynamics intrigues her. How badly wrong can things really go? And how do people react? And how does it get resolved in the end? The illustrations show very typical preschoolers doing very typical things, and there's a background plot to follow (of Adelaide trying to recapture the classroom's pet mouse) that also appealed to Basbusa's imagination.

And now for two books which Basbusa loved, but which I wasn't so wild about. The Duck in the Hole probably isn't a book that I'd ever have picked out for her, but she got a lot out of it. A little girl finds a duck stuck in a hole in her yard, and tries to figure out how to rescue it. A neighborhood dog and cat also begin showing unwelcome interest in the duck, but Keisha eventually figures out a solution that solves the problem. In my opinion - not Basbusa's - the story wasn't very interesting or very believable, and the illustrations were nothing special, but I did like how the girl spontaneously thought through a whole bunch of potential solutions in her imagination, weighing the pros and cons of each one, before deciding what to do. I saw Basbusa mimicking the process a few times, which is a good thing to have picked up! This book also marked a new mini-milestone for us. Each of Keisha's possible choices (and their consequences) were illustrated clearly, and until quite recently, Basbusa wouldn't have been able to grasp that those things didn't actually happen in the plot - they were just showing Keisha's thought-process. I had tried to explain similar issues many times with other books, and Basbusa only half understood me, but this time, she got it all by herself.

A Cake All for Me... oh my goodness, A Cake All for Me. One of those books that I was wishing had never been written by the time we could eventually give it back to the library, and which I keep trying to hide behind other books on the shelf when we pass by it in the library again! It's basically a counting book about a pig making a cake. ("One, two, Get out the moo. Three, four, open and pour. Five, six, sift and mix..." etc. We gave this back to the library maybe three months ago now, and I still have it memorized!) The only other plot is overtly preachy, in my opinion: the pig starts out by wanting to hog the whole cake, even when his hungry friends ask to share it, but then he relents and they all eat it together. Plus I think the animals all have scary-looking teeth. But Basbusa loved this book: we read it approximately forty-two million times, and we still never get the milk out of the fridge without her reciting, "one, two, get out the moo," so here's the recommendation, for what it's worth!

Ok, and now for two books that both of us liked. Interrupting Chicken is one of our all-time favorites, so much so that we bought our own copy and still read it regularly. There's so much to like about this one! The basic story itself is both cute and unusual: the daddy chicken is reading bedtime stories to the little chicken, who keeps interrupting him to change the endings (advising Little Red Riding Hood not to talk to the wolf, and telling Chicken Little not to panic because the sky isn't really falling, and so on). In the end, they run out of stories, so Papa suggests that his daughter tell him a story for a change. He falls asleep half way through, and she snuggles up beside him. Awww. I love the loving relationship between the daddy and his daughter (not a theme that often tends to crop up as the central relationship in children's books). I love the little chicken's enthusiasm and involvement in the stories, which is so like Basbusa. I love the little chicken's willingness to take the story-telling into her own hands, something that Basbusa also loves to do, and I love the illustrations. Basbusa thinks it's very funny how the little chicken keeps interrupting, and likes the stories-within-the story along the way. I think she feels it's four bedtime stories for the price of one :)

The Squeaky Door is about a boy sleeping over at his grandma's house. She puts him to bed, tucks him in, gives him a good-night kiss, and tiptoes out... but the squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeak of the bedroom door scares the boy awake. So, she tucks the cat in beside him.... then the dog... then the pig... Eventually, when the horse is all tucked up beside them for the night, there is not only a "squeeeeak" but a "BOOM!", because the bed has broken into smithereens. The boy sleeps with grandma and grandpa that night, and the next day, Grandma gets out her trusty oil-can and takes care of the squeaky hinge. It's a cute story, silly and funny, and for us it was the first book where Basbusa started sounding out words by herself (those lovely "squeak"s and "boom" :)

Linking up with What My Child is Reading and Read-Aloud Thursday.

What's Basbusa reading?

2011-11-03T10:07:00.000-04:00

There's no real theme to this week's selections - just a bunch of picture books Basbusa has enjoyed recently.

Pouch! is the story of a baby kangaroo's first few trips outside his mother's pouch. The plot is short and simple, but funny: on his first few tries, the joey is astonished and highly alarmed by his first encounters with ordinary things like a bee or a rabbit, and with a yelp of "Pouch!!" he flees back to safety. But on his fifth trip out, he meets another baby kangaroo. They both yell "Pouch!!" and start to run away, but then realize how similar they are and start giggling. When their mothers come up and ask, "Pouch?", they happily reply, "No, thanks!" The illustrations are charming, and Basbusa can identify with the joey's hesitant reaction to new experiences! But she likes to point out to him that bees and rabbits aren't scary really, and I think she is interested by his new self-confidence by the end of the book.

There are several books in this series by Yoriko Tsutsui, all of them translated from the Japanese. Basbusa's favorite was Anna's Secret Friend, but I couldn't find a picture of it anywhere online, and we also really liked Anna in Charge, pictured here. In Anna's Secret Friend, Anna has just moved to a new town and is a bit lonely, since she doesn't know any other children and her parents are busy unpacking. But then a shy little girl from across the street starts leaving her little gifts in the mailbox - a little bunch of flowers, a folded paper doll - and a note saying she hoped they'd be friends. When they finally meet each other and find the courage to say hello, they really do make friends, and the last scene is of the two of them riding off together on their bikes to flower-filled fields. It's a sweet story, and the mystery of who was leaving the gifts caught Basbusa's interest right from the start. Also, since Basbusa herself tends to need a few moments to gather her courage before joining in a game with new kids, I think she enjoyed seeing other children who felt the same way. And I was glad that she would see an example showing that her approach works out just fine too, in the end!

The Bog Baby is the story of how two little girls find a magical creature - a Bog Baby - in a pond in the woods. They take it home and keep it in a bucket in the garage, but despite all their love and attention, it pines away for home. In the end they ask their mother for advice, and she explains that if they truly love their soft blue pet, they have to let him go. Basbusa likes stories involving adventures in the woods, and stories about little baby animals, and anything with a hint of magic about it, so this book was a big hit (and the cover art doesn't do it justice; the illustrations inside are much prettier). It's aimed at a slightly older audience, so there were one or two details she didn't quite get, but we still renewed this one from the library for about two months straight.

Next up, two Berenstain Bears books. The Spooky Old Tree and Bears in the Night are quite similar in plot, and Basbusa loved them both. In The Spooky Old Tree, the bears are off on a night-time expedition to explore the scary world inside the gnarled old tree on the cover of the book. First one, then another, and then all three lose their nerve, and end up running home to their mother as fast as they can. Bears in the Night is even simpler in terms of plot: the bears hear an owl-hoot and sneak out of bed to find what's making the noise. When they find the owl and it hoots again, it gives them such a fright that they run straight back home to bed. This book is really an exercise in prepositions: the text simply reads, "In bed... Out of bed... to the window.../ To the window... at the window... out the window...," and so forth, around the lake, under the bridge, and up Spook Hill. But the repetition actually worked quite well to increase the suspense, and this is just the right level of scary for Basbusa. We spent weeks re-enacting the adventure, and one particular bed in our house is now permanently known as Spook Hill :)

A Splendid Friend Indeed is a book which, in my opinion, needs very active story-telling to bring it to life. The basic story is that the bear, who is quite happily reading his book or writing in his diary, keeps being interrupted by his over-enthusiastic friend, the duck, whose incessant chatter drives the bear batty. He puts up with it with great patience, however - the duck is oblivious to the increasingly grumpy look on the bear's face - and in the end is rewarded when the duck's final interruption is to read him a letter he has written, telling him what a wonderful friend he is. Awwww. The story ends with hugs and a picnic. I found that I had to make a big deal of acting this one out, though, before Basbusa started to enjoy it. The text is very limited: it only includes the duck's chatter, and the rest of the story is told by the illustrations. But the illustrations are relatively subtle (if you're a three-year-old), and Basbusa didn't pick up on the bear's grumpiness until I started mimicking his posture and body-language. Then she got the point and thought it was funny. She has also started using the words "splendid" and "indeed" in her everyday conversation :)

Linking up with What My Child is Reading and Read-Aloud Thursday.

What's Basbusa reading?

2011-10-27T22:36:00.000-04:00

This week's picks are all non-fiction. We didn't get them all out at the same time - we usually have one or two non-fictions on hand, along with maybe twelve or thirteen fiction books. These are our favorites from the past six months or so.

Basbusa has been fascinated by the working of the human body for well over a year now, so I've been trying to make plenty of resources of all kinds available to her. As far as books go, it's been hard to find ones that are anywhere near a three-year-old level, but here are our two favorites so far.

The Human Body: Lift the Flap and Learn has interactive flaps and tabs that go way beyond the usual open-and-close type. For example, Basbusa's favorite page shows how food gets processed from mouth to - well, you know where food ends up :) The page has bits of broccoli in various states of digestion that you slide down through the esophagus, then the stomach, and then through the intestines. Finally, there's a pull-tab at the bottom, which you pull downward to reveal the "final product" of all this digestion... I know, ewwwwwwwwww, but Basbusa thinks it's hilarious and she has learned a ton from that page and from all the related questions it generated! The book is aimed at preschoolers and there's a lot that it doesn't cover, but it was just the right level of detail for Basbusa's age and interest level. My only caveat is that although the book is really very sturdy considering all the moving parts it has, it's not the kind of thing you can leave near the all-too-inquisitive fingers of a one-year-old... (For another review of the same book, please see the Infant Bibliophile, which is where I first heard about it.)

A Drop of Blood is part of the Let's-Read-And-Find-Out Science series. They have a bunch of body- and health-related titles, and we've checked out quite a few of them. They've all gotten a read or two, but this is the only one Basbusa keeps going back to. It's about the circulatory system. There's a little bit too much text for Basbusa, but by skipping a sentence or two on each page, it brings it down to the amount of information that she can handle. She was very interested in the experiment with the flashlight-in-your-mouth, and we went and got a quart container of cream from the fridge to see how much blood she, her little sister, and her dad really have in their bodies (a comparison which the vampire helpfully provides). She was fascinated by the description of how the white blood cells "eat" germs, so we got another book from the library to follow up on that.

Germs Make Me Sick is in the same science series as A Drop of Blood, and it's been just as big a success with Basbusa. It's pretty long, and her attention sometimes fades towards the end, but she chooses this one over and over again. I heard her explaining to Grandma how germs get passed around and what your body does to fight them, so something must be sinking in! I think this book is a bit beyond her level, really if I were expecting her to process all the information that's in it, but she enjoys the first two-thirds of the book enough that I thought it had earned a recommendation :)

Next up, some nature books. Basbusa really loved Gran's Bees, which isn't really pure non-fiction. It's pretty close, though - it describes a girl's visit to her grandmother, to help her harvest the honey from her beehives. There's no real plot other than to follow them through the various steps of the process, but Basbusa was intrigued. I was looking for a follow-up book on bees for months afterwards, but it's only now that the summer is over that I finally found The Beautiful Bee Book. This one is straight non-fiction, and just at Basbusa's level, explaining the life-cycle of bees, how they collect pollen and nectar, and how they communicate. The book's lift-the-flap and pull-the-tab features really do make the content more accessible, rather than just serving as added frills, and there is also a two-page spread showing the most common species of bees you might see around your garden. I think I'm going to hide this one away until next summer, and then re-read it in conjunction with Gran's Bees when there are actually some real bees outside to look at.

Gosh, this post has gotten way too long, but just two more quick ones!

Why Do Leaves Change Color? was a very interesting read for me, and I had thought it would be great for Basbusa. (For example, did you know that the yellow and orange are already present in leaves, but are usually drowned out by all the green? Once the leaves stop producing chlorophyll, you can finally see the other colors that were already there. It's only the red color that is the result of sugar crystallization.) The illustrations were clear and attractive, and most of the information was at Basbusa's level (I skipped over the parts that talked about cell structure in detail). However, on her first read through this one, Basbusa made up her own plot, which was fascinating and very exciting but had nothing whatsoever to do with the science of fall colors. She "re-read" this one a zillion times, elaborating more on her own personal interpretation each time through it, and was 100% against hearing anything about what else the text might have been saying :) So it was certainly a big hit with both of us... even if not for quite the same reasons!

And last up, Where Does the Garbage Go? This one was a little bit dated - it talked as if recycling were quite a recent innovation - but for Basbusa's purposes, it provided very interesting background info surrounding one of her favorite events: the much-anticipated weekly arrival of the garbage trucks :) She was interested to see where they go after they pick up our trash, and she liked examining the illustrations of the big, complicated machines and conveyor belts that recycle the glass, paper and plastic. (I think these machines were largely imaginary rather than being realistic representations of what a recycling plant really looks like, but Basbusa got the idea that old plastic went in and new plastic came out, which is good enough for now.) We've been looking for the triangular-arrows recycling symbol on packages ever since, so it's helped her know where to throw things away too.

Linking up with What My Child is Reading and Read-Aloud Thursday.

education research: positive coaching

2011-10-27T10:27:00.000-04:00

The following is an excerpt from "The Power of Positive Coaching," part of the New York Time's Fixes series. The Positive Coaching Alliance (PCA) feels that competitiveness and a winning-is-everything approach have become dominant in youth sports, and aims to change that. But the reason I'm quoting this article here is because I think the PCA's way of teaching kids to respond to challenges or disappointments would be a way I think would work well in any setting, sports or otherwise.

"Sports psychologists know that athletes who focus on things they can control, as opposed to external factors, are less anxious, more confident, and consequentially, happier and better performers. ... [Jim Thompson, founder of the PCA] came up with the 'ELM Tree of Mastery' to help coaches remember that the feedback that most helps young athletes develop their potential is not praise for good performance or criticism for bad performance. What works best is helping children understand that they control three key variables: their level of Effort, whether they Learn from experiences, and how they respond to Mistakes.

... 'If a child misses a big play, it's a perfect opportunity to talk about resiliency,' explains Thompson. 'I know you're disappointed and I feel bad for you, but the question is what are you going to do now? Are you going to hang your head? Or are you going to bounce back with renewed determination? The single most important thing we do is help coaches teach kids not to be afraid to make mistakes,' he adds."

What's Basbusa reading?

2011-10-20T17:39:00.002-04:00

The Circus Ship is one of our all-time favorite books, and has been ever since the first reading. We've loved everything by Chris Van Dusen, as I've mentioned before, but this one is one of the best picture books I've ever read. The basic story is that after a circus ship sinks, the fifteen circus animals end up swimming ashore to an island off the coast of Maine. The astonishment they cause there, and then their plan to avoid being re-captured by the circus boss, are very funny. ("Soon animals were everywhere, and into everything. / 'There's an ostrich in the outhouse!' / 'There's a hippo in the spring!' / 'There's a tiger in the tulips!' / 'There's a lion on the lawn!' / 'There's a python in the pantry!' / It went on and on and on...") But the best bit has to be the circus boss himself, Mr. Paine. He's an arrogant, dictatorial bad-guy who is sooooo much fun to read aloud. "But Mr. Paine, the circus boss, was terribly demanding. / He stomped up to the helm where Captain Carrington was standing, / and screamed, "Don't stop! Keep going! I've got a show to do! / Just get me down to Boston town tomorrow, sir, by two!" He's overblown but only enough to make it fun, not ridiculous (and I love hearing Basbusa's "big mean bad-guy" voice when she says his lines!). The illustrations are great, with lots of little details to discover during re-readings, and Basbusa loves finding the animals hidden in plain sight, to the complete bafflement of Mr. Paine.

I know that the entire world adores Mo Willems, and indeed Knuffle Bunny was one of the first library books that we renewed so often we ended up buying our own copy. But neither of the sequels quite caught Basbusa's imagination (Knuffle Bunny Free, in particular, went straight over her head). The pigeon books are hit-or-miss (for us - I know most people seem to love them). Basbusa loved The Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog, and we actually had a whole lot of interesting discussions around that one, about why the duckling was asking so many questions, and why the pigeon was getting so annoyed... And it's thanks to Pigeon that "Oh, for Pete's sake!" (plus forehead-slaps) is still part of Basbusa's repertoire ;) But Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus? Nope, not much interest. Hooray for Amanda and her Alligator? So-so. And that Cat-the-cat series just leaves both of us blank. BUT... to get back to the book at hand, Basbusa does like Elephant and Piggie! I Broke My Trunk is one of our favorites so far. Gerald breaks his trunk - not by carrying two hippos, a rhino and a piano on it, but by tripping on his way to tell Piggie all about it. And Piggie thinks the story is so funny that she rushes off to tell somebody else... and trips... The text is simple enough that Basbusa can "read" it to herself, and the plot is funny enough to keep her re-reading.

Jez Alborough is another author we love, and Where's My Teddy? is the book that first introduced us to him. A boy and a bear get their teddy-bears mixed up, scare the daylights out of each other in the process of exchanging them, and both run away home to the safety of their own cozy beds. It's all in rhyme, and I love how the pace matches the plot. The sentences are longer at first, with one sentence spanning several lines of rhyme, but the climax all happens in a few short lines, when the bear and the boy stumble across each other, each holding the other's stuffed toy: "'My Ted! gasped the bear. / 'A bear!' screamed Eddie. / 'A boy!!' yelled the bear. / 'My Teddy!' cried Eddie." Then, reunited with their teddies, they both run for their lives :)

The Mystery of King Karfu is really a bit advanced for Basbusa - she needed quite a bit of help to understand the plot, and the first few times we read it, I just told the story in Arabic rather than reading aloud the English. The book is the story of a food-loving wombat detective named Seymour Sleuth. He is called to Egypt to help an archaeologist friend recover an ancient stone chicken, which has been stolen from the tomb of King Karfu. Rather than the usual text-with-pictures format, this whole book is composed to look like a casebook, with ticket stubs "pasted" in, "photos" of evidence, and Seymour's notes on his interviews with suspects. This was Basbusa's first detective story, and I think probably also the first time she had come across the idea of detectives in general, and she found the concept very interesting. She liked looking for clues (comparing feet to footprints, for example), and she liked the unstated jokes (Seymour Sleuth's 'light snacks', for example, which usually include enough food for a banquet). There were a lot of jokes that she just wasn't old enough for, but which made it fun for me to re-read! I'm not completely sure that she ever 100% got the concept, but she must have gotten the general idea, because she often chose to read it, either with me or "by herself."

My Birthday Cake is an easy-reader book, and so far I've found most of them to be tedious beyond belief. This one, though, I'd rate as "not bad," which puts it way ahead of most easy-readers we've seen so far. It's a rhyming book about the birthday cake a little girl makes for herself: "My cake will be yummy! My cake will be sweet! My cake will have all the things I like to eat!" And sure enough, it does - candies and donuts and cookies and lollipops and cherries, etc... Basbusa was a big fan of the ingredient list :) In the end, though, she puts on too much blue frosting and ends up preferring the cake her mom has made for her. Not wildly fascinating, but appealing subject-matter for my little sugarcake, and not bad as easy-readers go.

Linking up with What My Child is Reading and Read-Aloud Thursday.

What's Basbusa reading?

2011-10-17T21:43:00.003-04:00

The books in this week's review are ones which Basbusa really liked when she was two or two-and-a-half, and still likes going back to every so often even now (at 3-and-a-quarter). I think she sees them as "light relief" from the picture books she mainly reads these days, with their more complicated plots and vocabulary. I hadn't really noticed how her taste has changed lately, until I came across these titles on my giant still-to-be-blogged-about list, and found myself thinking, "oh, but those are 'little-kid' books..."

Oh, A-Hunting We Will Go takes the old childhood rhyme ("A-hunting we will go, a-hunting we will go, we'll catch a fox and put him in a box, and then we'll let him go!") and adds a bunch of equally silly new verses (for example, we'll catch a snake and put him in a cake; we'll catch a brontosaurus and put him in a chorus...). I can't say I was wild about it myself, but Basbusa found it hilarious :) And she loved being able to use the rhyme to predict what would happen to each animal. We're definitely not talking classic children's literature here, but Basbusa did enjoy it.

No More Blanket for Lambkin was on our library's display shelf for weeks and I never even glanced through it, having assumed that it was some book aimed at helping kids learn to give up their blankies. In the end, Basbusa went and got it, and it turned out to be much better than I had thought. In the course of a playdate for Lambkin and Ducky, Ducky manages to detatch Lambkin from his blanket for long enough to throw it in the sink along with all the doll-clothes they are washing. Lambkin goes along with this plan very reluctantly at first, but then is beguiled by the fun of splashing and bubbles - until it turns out that her beloved blanket now has holes in it!! Oh no!! But Ducky comes up with a cute idea to put things right again. A nice, light read with a straightforward plot.

So Many Bunnies is "A Bedtime ABC and Counting Book." With so much ground to cover, you'd think it would surely be a dry and ugly set of flashcards in disguise, right? But no, it's actually sweet and quite a fun read! "Old Mother Rabbit lived in a shoe./ She had 26 children and knew what to do: / She gave them some carrots, some broth and some bread, / she kissed them all gently and put them to bed." And from there on, the text goes through all the odd places her children sleep. "1 was named Abel, he slept on the table. 2 was named Blair, she slept on a chair." And so forth, on through the alphabet. Basbusa's favorite is Mandy, number 13, who "slept in the candy" :) And after Mother Rabbit has finally gotten them all tucked up and gone to bed herself... all 26 bunnies arrive to snuggle up beside her in her bed. Very pretty illustrations with lots of detail and plenty to talk about.

Rockabye Farm is the story of a farmer who lovingly rocks each animal to sleep before rocking himself to sleep in his rocking chair at the end of the book. That's pretty much it, in terms of plot, but Basbusa liked the illustrations. It's not so hard to rock a chicken, but by the time he's rocking cows and horses, the cheery farmer has to go get his tractor or his hay-cart. It looks like this version is out of print, though, and the new, boardbook version doesn't get such good reviews on Amazon, though, just so you know.

Linking up with What My Child is Reading.

Education Research: individualizing education

2011-10-16T11:31:00.001-04:00

The following are excerpts from the Fall 2011 edition of Independent School, the magazine of the National Association of Independent Schools. The article, "Acknowledging the 'I' in Education: School Redesign from the Ground Up," is by Ryan Wooley, a director of technology, library and media services at a school in Ohio. I like what he's saying, and I really like the sample student schedule he has given at the end. (How feasible it would be to implement for 400 students in a private school, or 1,800 students in a public school, is another question, which luckily I don't have to answer!) A school setting that offered this kind of schedule for a high-school student is one I'd be happy with for my girls, I think, whether it was a "school", a co-op, or a homeschool that was providing it.

"... shouldn't we ask, 'What do we want from schools in 2011 that is not facilitated by their fundamental design? ... Schools are not designed to attend to individual need. Even the most progressive schools are organized around arbitrary units of time. Do I spend a year taking chemistry because that is how long it takes me to learn it? ... What would the structure look like if designed from the perspective of student need? Here is a possibility: students would progress through a topic as they were ready... Students would be the architects of their own learning paths."

...

"I'm suggesting that we don't need teachers to teach content [because content can be learned from online lectures etc]. Lesson plans should be burned in a giant, glorious bonfire. ... We need to give teachers a new job description. We need them to help students articulate learning paths. We need them to advise and mentor, connect, and encourage. ... Teachers should look more like travel agents - the really good ones who get more excited about your Alaskan cruise than you do."

...

"[A student's] day might look like the following:
8:00-8:30am - School Meeting in the Auditorium
8:35-9:35am - Meet with science teacher for bi-weekly progress review [of the science curriculum she has designed for herself - the teacher discusses any questions with her, points her towards an upcoming conference on the topic that she might like to attend, and suggests that she schedule a particular lab exercise with the science lab specialist]
9:45-11:45am - writing workshop with writing group
11:45-12:20pm - lunch
12:30-1:00pm - Skype conversation with Chinese-language exchange partner
1:05-1:55pm - Open learning time for group projects / individual exploration
2:00-3:15pm - Live human model drawing"

Education research: project-based schools...

2011-10-15T10:08:00.003-04:00

The following are excerpts from the Basset Blog, which is the blog of the president of the National Association of Independent Schools.

'"The only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school." - Attributed to George Bernard Shaw.
"It's a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Attributed to Albert Einstein.

The quotations above ... capture what many kids experience in too many American classrooms - some inertia point among mental exhaustion, confusion, boredom, and drudgery. ... except for the time between classes, before school, and after school, when you got to do what you wanted to do, with your friends. Wait a minute! That's a novel thought: getting to do what you want to do with your friends in class, not just between and after class." ...

And the solution? He says, "this happens increasingly via real-world, team-based problem-solving, and with engagement in the creative arts fully and vigorously. My grandson Carter is now 12, a seventh-grader attending the Watershed School (Colorado), an experiential and project-based independet school in Boulder."

I've heard about these kinds of "project-based" schools before. I must go find out more about them, see if we have any in our area, and see how much they cost...

My ideal homeschool set-up

2011-10-10T09:00:00.002-04:00

I've been thinking a lot about what kind of homeschooling arrangements would work best for us, in an ideal world where all of this was miraculously feasible. While Basbusa is still so young - say, age 3 through 5 - I think what I'd like is this:

Two days a week having "school" in the morning with one or two other families living nearby with kids near her age. We could trade off whose house it would be held in, so that each of the moms would get at least one or two "mornings off" per week. As for what the kids would do, well, "something educational." We could have a project or two lined up to suggest to them each time, but if they were more interested in just having a playdate on any given day, that would be fine with me, while they're so small.
Three days a week at home with me in the mornings - for the preK/K age I'm tentatively thinking of doing maybe 15 minutes a day of Right Start math, and otherwise just making sure that we're reading plenty of books, doing lots of drawing and painting and building things, and having interesting discussions. Plus Quran every day, of course.
In the afternoons, we would do errands, playground meet-ups, young-homeschooler hikes, housework, go swimming, etc.
On Saturdays, I'm thinking I might send Basbusa to the "Saturday School" at our local masjid. It's a long day for little kids - 9am to 3pm - but I've heard they do play as well as learn, and it would be a way for her to make other Arabic-speaking friends (she only has three of those at the moment, and they will all be leaving the US in a few more months). If Basbusa didn't have any other formal schooling during the week, then I wouldn't feel so bad about one day of sit-in-a-chair-and-pay-attention on Saturdays.

And how realistic is all this? Well, I don't know of any local homeschooling families who might want to team up with us for those two mornings a week (the one family which might have is also leaving the country soon), but we have a whole year to keep looking, and I have only just begun to get to know the homeschooling community.

And the three days a week of homeschooling by ourselves? Well, we're slowwwwwwly getting better about making sure that Quran-memorizing does happen every day, and that was the thing that had really been worrying me about my own ability to homeschool (if I can't even make sure we do Quran, then what on earth would happen to math?!?). It's still nowhere like routine, though. But we have a year to keep trying to get better.

And the Saturday school would be easy to enroll her in; I just have to go check it out in person to make sure their educational methods aren't too scary :)

So, we'll see. This arrangement might be feasible, but we'll still have to spend this year ironing out the wrinkles.

What's Basbusa Reading?

2011-10-08T09:54:00.000-04:00

Snip Snap! What's That? was a huge favorite, and Basbusa is already requesting that we get it out of the library again. The basic plot is that an alligator, who has emerged from the sewer, comes closer and closer to three children who are home alone in their apartment. The alligator is only suggested at first, with footprints... and then with the end of his tail... and then with a tail plus some feet... while the text mirrors the progression: at each stage, it repeats the question and answer, "Were the children scared? You bet they were!" in ever-larger font. I'll never forget the first time we read this one, because by the time we got to the climax - a two-page spread with nothing but a huge, open alligator mouth on them - Basbusa was holding her breath! But then "the children decided they'd had enough/ of all this scary alligator stuff" and shout at it to go away, which the alligator, tremendously taken-aback by this turn of events, does. Whew! :) This summary makes it sound scarier than it really was - trust me, Basbusa is not the bravest of tots, and this would never have made it past the first reading if it were truly frightening. I also liked that the text wasn't completely in rhyme, but had enough rhyme and rhythm to build up the suspense. Plus, the recurring question and answer made it easy for Basbusa to "read" this one to herself.

Penguin is about a boy who gets a toy penguin for his birthday, and tries everything he can think of to make the penguin talk to him. The penguin, unsurprisingly, doesn't. So the boy, completely frustrated, tries to feed the penguin to a passing lion. After the surprising climax of the story, the penguin, in a language all of his own, suddenly starts talking. We liked this one because the story is simple but has an unexpected twist, and a happy ending. Also, Basbusa could relate to the tantrum that the little boy throws when he's completely frustrated! I also liked that the text had only one, quite simple, sentence per page, making it easy for Basbusa to "read" it to herself.

The Perfect Nest was such a fun read. It's about a cat called Jack who builds a nest to attract a chicken, in the hopes of making himself some omelets. But it's such a good nest that it attracts not only a chicken (with a Spanish accent), but also a duck (with a French accent) AND a goose (with a silly American accent). The three birds squabble over the nest and all three refuse to leave it, despite Jack's best efforts to coax them away. In the end, well, Jack doesn't get his omelets, but he gets something else instead. Three somethings else :) The story itself is funny, and it's a great read-aloud because you can do lots of silly accents. Plus, the illustrations have lots of extra details to look at, elaborating on what's in the text.

One Night in the Zoo is technically a counting book, but the progression of numbers fades into the background of a story about what the animals in the zoo get up to during the night, while nobody is there to see. I liked that the numbers part was so understated, because Basbusa is never very interested in books which are really just thinly-disguised math lessons (or any kind of lessons, really). This rhyming story has a recurring line, "...but nobody knew," which generated a sweet moment the first time we read it. The very last page, after the animals have all made it back to their cages just in time, shows a chimp repeating the same refrain, but pointing at the reader, and adding, "except YOU!" Basbusa was surprised and very flattered. "Except me? Does he really mean me...?" :)

The Black Book of Colors is another book which Basbusa picked out for herself at the library, but which I would never have thought of looking for in a million years. But we got a lot out of it! The whole book is black, and the text - in both English and Braille - gives one-sentence descriptions of what each color "looks" like (for example, "yellow tastes like mustard, but is as soft as a baby chick's feathers"). Each facing page has embossed pictures (still black-on-black) illustrating the things described in the text. Basbusa enjoyed the book for its own sake, and liked trying to feel the pictures. She had never learned about blindness before, so we also watched some videos on youtube showing kids reading and writing Braille, which she found very interesting.
Linking up with Read-Aloud Thursday and What My Child is Reading.

Homeschool or Not?.... An example of what worries me

2011-10-07T23:16:00.000-04:00

This week was an example of just the kind of thing I worry about in terms of the practical obstacles between homeschooling in theory and homeschooling in practice.

The week was supposed to be filled with wonderful homeschool-ish opportunities: Monday was to be a trip to the zoo with a Massachusetts Muslim Homeschoolers group; Wednesday was supposed to be the first meeting of our homeschool preschool Chinese class, and then a weekly get-together at a park with another homeschool group that includes - yay!!! - another Egyptian three-year-old girl; and Friday was to be a hike with a young homeschoolers group. Sounds great, right?

In reality, though, the only two days which went as planned were Tuesday and Thursday: the days when Basbusa has preschool. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. (I signed her up for this preschool back when I was panicking that she had no friends to play with at all, before I had learned much about homeschooling. The money is already paid, and she enjoys it. And it's all play, no academics.)

On Monday, it turned out that through miscommunication, some of the Muslim homeschoolers were headed for our nearest zoo, while the others were headed for one that is further away. I couldn't get confirmation that anyone else was definitely going to the nearby one, and it turned out that all but one family canceled on the farther one, due to forecast rain. Actually, the cancelled trip gave us an opportunity to go to the weekly park-day of another young homeschoolers group, which was great, but involved a lot more time in the car.

On Wednesday, the Chinese class turned out to be just what I had been hoping and we met two new great homeschooling families, but there were a few complications. It started an hour late because of transportation difficulties - which was no problem for us now, but suppose Basbusa was old enough for "real" homeschooling, and had other classes or activities lined up? One of her best friends was supposed to have been coming too, but had to cancel because her little brother was sick. And we couldn't go to the meet-up at the park because my dearest Other Half thinks I've been spending too much money on gas lately :( So we went to a local park by ourselves instead.

On Friday, it turned out that this week's young-homeschooler-hike is too far away (considering that Basbusa isn't likely to make it through more than about 20 minutes of the hike in any case :) But we had a playdate with a friend instead, and the girls had a great time playing together.

Hmmmm... Looking back on it, though, we still did get a lot out of our homeschooling activities on Monday and Wednesday, despite the changes in plan. So I guess I should get used to the idea that even a good homeschooling week would involve more flexibility and less predictability than a traditional school week. And that I'll need to find a way of reaching a family consensus that homeschooling is going to have certain costs in terms of gas mileage!

What's Basbusa reading?

2011-10-01T11:57:00.000-04:00

Without at all planning to, we've somehow stumbled over a whole trove of wonderful wordless picture books recently. "Wordless" doesn't mean "baby", though - I think Basbusa wouldn't have been able to follow almost any of these until quite recently, because the plots are quite complex. It's fantastic for both of us to have such good books for non-readers, because she can "read" without having to depend on me for help, and I can enjoy a few minutes of extra time here and there while she's absorbed in a book!

In the town, all year 'round has been one of our favorites for over a year. It just shows what's happening in a town during the course of a year, with a section for each season, but the same cast of characters shows up throughout the book, and there are a million mini-plots to discover as you read (and re-read and re-read and re-read). We have read this book more times than I can even imagine, and still, just the other day, we were reading it upside-down (don't ask), and I noticed yet another sub-plot that had not caught my eye before.

The Adventures of Polo is like a comic book without words, about an adventurous little dog who explores his way through all kinds of places (e.g. the north pole, a desert island with volcanoes, under the sea, outer space) before ending up back home again. The plot, to my taste, gets just a little bit old somewhere around the fifty-second or fifty-third re-reading - you could basically sum it up as "Oh no!! ... Whew!! ... Oh no!!! ... Whew!!! etc - but Basbusa doesn't seem to have any problem with it, and she re-reads it to herself all the time. There are several other Polo books in the series, if your child really likes it.

Clown by Quentin Blake is a charming story of a toy clown, thrown out with a bunch of other old toys, who has managed to jump out of the trash can himself, and is desperately trying to find a child who will come and help him rescue his friends. Eventually, he finds a girl who has all kinds of troubles too, and they help each other to a happy ending. The story itself is both sweet and interesting, but Basbusa really had to use her brain to figure out the plot from the pictures (an older child would have had no trouble). For me, another reason to like this book was Quentin Blake's illustrations - he illustrated all of Roald Dahl's books, so his pictures evoked all kinds of fond childhood memories :)

Fox and Hen Together - well, this one was a huge favorite with Basbusa, but I think a few words of warning might be in order regarding the back-story! In this book, which is part two of a three-part series, Fox and Hen (now happily married and expecting a... well... expecting something in an egg) find there's no food left in the fridge. So Hen gives the egg to Fox to look after, and goes fishing. Adventures ensue; she ends up catching a sea-monster, and they barbeque it on the beach, snuggling their newly-hatched fox-chick. No problems so far, right? (A slightly odd moment when Hen walks in after fishing, sees an empty eggshell and a frying pan on the table, and thinks for a moment that Fox has eaten the baby, but Basbusa seemed to take it in stride.) But just so you know, the first book in this series (The Chicken Thief), the story of how Fox and Hen ended up together isn't quite so PG-rated! Basbusa was oblivious, thank goodness, despite all her millions of re-readings, but I was somewhat alarmed when I realized what was actually happening in the story.... Hmmm...

I've said before how much we love Shirley Hughes, and this book was no exception! It's about a little girl who learns how to fly. Basbusa enjoyed following her adventures as she surprised her parents and classmates, and eluded an annoyed neighbor who was chasing her in his hot-air balloon. I think Basbusa was envisioning herself as the little girl who suddenly found herself able to soar skywards, because that theme suddenly cropped up in a whole bunch of her pretend games over the next few days :)

Deep in the Forest is Goldilocks and the Three Bears, but backwards (a baby bear comes into Goldilocks' house and causes havoc). Its's sweet and Basbusa enjoyed it. I guess this one's a classic, but somehow I'd never heard of it?

And lastly, The Grey Lady and the Strawberry Snatcher. I myself thought this one was a little strange, both in terms of plot (an old lady trying to make it home with her bag of strawberries, pursued every step of the way by a very odd-looking thief) and of illustrations (I would describe them as "interesting" rather than attractive). I wouldn't have included this one here except that Basbusa really liked it, and that it's a Caldecott Honor Book, so I guess Basbusa can't be the only one! The old lady does make it home safely, and the thief ends up finding a blackberry bush instead.

Linking up with What My Child is Reading and Read-Aloud Thursday.

Homeschool or Not? ... Disadvantages of School

2011-09-29T10:58:00.002-04:00

I posted here about the things that still worry me about homeschooling. Today's list, on the other hand, is the things that worry me about traditional schooling (at the early elementary level - I have others for when the kids get older, but I can worry about that later :). I'm not sure how much weight to give them, because after all, I and everybody else I've ever met has been through a traditional school system, and nobody's soul, personality or intellect seems to have been permanently warped by the experience! And I enjoyed elementary school a lot, myself. But for what it's worth, here is the list of "risks" I worry about if the girls go to a traditional school:

"Right" and "Wrong" answers. They would learn, firstly, that there are "right" and "wrong" answers, and that "right" is "good" and "wrong" is "bad." I would much prefer them to be seeking information for its own sake, because they want to know it, rather than because it's a "right answer" and will earn them brownie points / pats on the head / praise / self-esteem. I think kids (particularly ones who want to please their teachers) can develop a fear of "wrong" answers that very seriously discourages their willingness to take intellectual risks, explore multiple options, and damages their self-confidence. There's no need to have kids internalize that kind of thinking while they're still so young, and while their whole approach to learning is still being formed. Besides, when an answer is marked "right" or "wrong," that tends to be the end of the thought-process, whereas really there's usually a lot more to be said and thought about, in either case. And lastly, they would get used to the idea that someone else would be evaluating their work and pronouncing the verdict on it, whereas I would much prefer that they see themselves as very well qualified to judge their own work. Did it turn out as I hoped/planned/expected? Well, good. Or no, it didn't? Well then, what could I do about that?
They would start to expect that someone else should be guiding their course of study and telling them what they should learn next, rather than learning to be guided by their own interests, and to explore and pursue the topics that they themselves find fascinating. I think that the best learning comes out of what you truly care about, and that self-directed study is far more likely to be inter-disciplinary than a course of study which comes pre-packaged into "math" and "science" and "language." All the research I've read emphasizes that the most exciting careers of the future are all going to be at the intersection of two or more traditional fields, rather than within one single discipline. When they're older, there might be plenty of things that they "need" to learn, even if they're not currently very interested in them, but for little kids, I don't think they "need" to know any particular set of facts. They need to know the joy of learning.
Not enough time outdoors if they're in school eight hours a day.
Not enough physical activity if they're in school eight hours a day.
Lack of opportunity to work/learn/study in mixed-age groups. I think learning in a group which has kids both slightly older and slightly younger than themselves gives kids the ability to use the older kids as inspirations and to see themselves as teachers and leaders of the younger kids, all of which is very valuable. Plus, it's more similar to real life than an environment composed entirely of same-aged peers. That never happens once you're out of high school.

So, for now, that's my list of worries. But how worried should I be...? I'm not sure yet :)

Homeschool or Not? ... Current concerns

2011-09-23T23:18:00.000-04:00

I think there are only two issues that are still worrying me about homeschooling. "Only two" is a big improvement compared to earlier this year, but still, they're bothering me quite a bit.

The first is - sorry - socialization. Or not "socialization," exactly, because I'm not worried if the kids don't go through the process of learning to deal with the routine social mechanics of the school environment. But I do worry about their having the opportunity to form lasting, evolving, deep friendships. (Ordinary friendships are important too, of course, but I'm convinced that those would be easy to come by via homeschooling too.) I know this issue has already been discussed to death in a million books and blogs, but I can't figure out exactly how it would look, practically, in our own life. For example, a few weeks ago, I was planning to go to four different not-back-to-school events, in an effort to get to know the local homeschooling community. Three of the four were rained out, and the fourth, although enjoyable, was quite a small group focused more on older kids. Meanwhile, kids in school had seen their friends five days in a row that week, and every week after it, no matter what the weather was like. Would Basbusa's ability to make intimate friends be always hostage to weather, to lots of emailing and schedule-checking by lots of moms, and to many many long car-trips...?

Also, although I do buy the oft-repeated argument that a lot of time is wasted in traditional schools (changing for gym, waiting in line at the cafeteria, listening to administrative announcements, etc), those are all times when kids just chat and interact. That time, plus the before-school, recess, lunch, and after-school moments may not be super-high-quality socialization time, but at least they're pretty sure to happen, and they do add up to quite a lot of hours. I wouldn't be worried about somewhat less quantity in exchange for better quality - if the girls had fewer hours with their friends, but they spent those hours engaged in free play or fascinating projects etc - but how reliable would those "quality" hours really be? I know that every experienced homeschooler with a blog seems to say that this never turns out to be a problem, but I haven't yet figured out how it would work for us.

The second issue that worries me is my own ability to set up some kind of routine. I've been trying to do that ever since Basbusa was born, and three years later, I haven't managed it do it! No two days look the same, and about three days out of four, I get to the end of the day with most of the highest-priority things on my to-do list still undone. For now, it doesn't matter much, because it only results in disorganization and occasional laundry crises. But if a miracle doesn't happen between now and whenever we start "real" academics, I can just imagine things like "math" and "history" still looming on the to-do-list at 8pm at night! This is something I really want to change in any case, regardless of whether we homeschool or not. But I've been so awful at it so far, that I wonder how I could gamble my kids' education on my own abilities to get organized...?

What's Basbusa reading?

2011-09-23T22:48:00.000-04:00

Mail Harry to the Moon has been a huge success in our house. While I was pregnant with the baby, and while she was a newborn, Basbusa and I must have read every picture book ever written about a first kid getting used to having a sibling. Basbusa wasn't terribly interested in any of them while I was pregnant, and even after the theoretical baby-sister became reality, she didn't seem to get much out of them. But Mail Harry to the Moon is just what we've been looking for. The book captures perfectly the kinds of things which Basbusa finds hardest to deal with in having a little sister - especially that someone ELSE now also gets to sit in Grandma's lap! - and the older toddler's reactions are so similar to Basbusa's own feelings that she was stunned into silence the first time we read it :) But the book is funny, and deals with the issues with a light touch. Basbusa also loves the way the older boy pretends the laundry basket is a rocket and zooms off to rescue his baby brother from the moon after all.

Who could possibly not love Chris van Dusen? His most recent book is King Hugo's Huge Ego, and Basbusa loves it. I hadn't planned on getting it for her, because, in the preview, it had seemed a bit too complex for a three-year-old. But I found it for half price at Borders' clearance sale, and it turns out that she enjoys it almost as much as Circus Ship and the Mr. Magee books. Chris van Dusen's books are by far the most fun read-alouds I've ever read, and this one is fantastic too. "Behold, my humble subjects, and do not doubt thine eyes,/ for yea, my noble noggin has increased tenfold in size. I know not how this happened, but now there's even more/ of your absolutely fabulous King Hugo to adore!" Too funny :) Plus, the illustrations are wonderful, with all kinds of details to talk about, and his books are just packed with complicated words that Basbusa loves to pick up. (The other day, she pointed to a tree with white bark, and said, "Look, Mama! The succulent sticks of the Great Northern Birch!" - a quote from another Van Dusen book :)

Basbusa picked out The Man Whose Name Was Not Thomas from the library mostly because the book itself is smallish, and she loves all things miniature. It turned out to be a very interesting read, because the text tells you what the man wasn't, and you have to look at the illustrations to figure out what he was. Basbusa enjoyed (first) guessing and (later) predicting what this man was going to do next, and it's a sweet, happy-ending story.

We got Trouble Gum because it was so highly recommended on Read-Aloud Thursday last week, but I was actually a bit skeptical when I glanced through it in the library. But after we got home, I heard Basbusa giggling to herself - she had gotten the stack of library books, was "reading" this one, and thought it was hilarious! (She was reading "Snap!" and "Pop!" all by herself, too, without our ever having gone through the book together, which was a nice surprise for me :) It's about two little piglets who just cannot resist playing with their gum, despite innumerable maternal warnings, and, unsurprisingly, gum gets everywhere. As Basbusa drifted off to sleep tonight, I heard her saying, "JULIUS!!!!" and giggling again, so I guess she was dreaming of flying, bubble-borne pigs.

Linking up with Read-Aloud Thursday and What My Child Is Reading:

Homeschool or Not...? Goals for "Schooling"

2011-09-20T00:36:00.003-04:00

This is just a few current thoughts on whether or not we should homeschool once Basbusa gets old enough for school, insha'Allah. I hope I'll be able to look back on all these posts and keep track of how my own thinking is evolving.

For now, the list below is what I've come up with for what I want my kids to get out of their education, regardless of what kind of school they get it in (once I'm happy with the list, I'll then try to figure out what kind of school or "unschool" could best manage to teach it). These are the bare minimums I want to make sure to cover - I mean, any system that couldn't manage all this, at least, would be one I'd be pretty dubious about. Of course, I hope that the girls will learn lots of other things too; I'm just trying to sort out what my list of basic essentials should look like.

Main overall goals:

- love of discovery

- confidence in own judgement and abilities

- grow up to be good people, with thorough knowledge of Islam

Goals for social skills:

- ease, comfort and pleasure in interacting with peers, older people, and younger people

- lots of multicultural experience

- teamwork/collaboration experience

- leadership experience

Knowledge goals:

- Quran memorization

- Math facts

- Chinese

Goals for academic skills:

- Good writing skills

- Scientific inquiry

- Mathematical concepts

- Critical thinking

- Computer programming

Other goals:

- lots of physical activity

- lots of outdoor time, in all seasons and all times of day

What's Basbusa reading?

2011-09-20T00:09:00.001-04:00

I have a list of about fifty favorite books which I've been saving during my year-long blog hiatus, so most of these books are ones we've returned to the library long ago. So most of these books (and those in many future posts) are ones Basbusa first loved as a two-and-a-half year old, but she's still enjoying them just as much now (at three-and-a-quarter).

Seen Art?, by Jon Scieszka... Oh, how Basbusa loved this book, and oh, how I grew to loathe it! The premise is pretty corny, in my opinion - a kid, looking for a friend named Art, ends up being directed to look for him inside MOMA in New York. He gradually realizes that all these funny-looking paintings and exhibits are Art after all (even though they're not the Art he's looking for). I thought it was a pretty transparent way of duping kids into an art-appreciation exercise, but Basbusa (who picked it out herself) just couldn't get enough of it, on any of the three times we checked it out from the library. I think she mainly enjoyed the repeated misunderstandings rather than the art itself, but I guess she absorbed some culture in the process :)

Lucy & Tom's ABC is the only alphabet book Basbusa has liked so far (and we've tried zillions)! It's not you're typical "A is for Alligator" style of book; each letter stands for something important in the lives of Lucy and Tom, a sister and brother with all the appeal and charm of ordinary preschoolers. For example: "D is for dogs. There are four dogs on Lucy and Tom's street: a little fluffy one, two medium-sized ones, and a big one called Duchess. Tom doesn't like Duchess very much because she always knocks him down." We love Shirley Hughes' books, both for the stories and for the illustrations (my mum saved Moving Molly, Helpers and Dogger from when my sister and I were little, and all three are on Basbusa's all-time-favorites list).

Seashells by the Seashore is one I saw praised over at The Adventures of Bear, and both Basbusa and I enjoyed it a lot. The plot is simply a day which three children spend collecting different kinds of shells as a present for their grandmother, but the book is also a counting book, a very useful manual of common shells, and is written in rhyme. The illustrations are pretty too. We managed to identify a slipper shell, an ark shell and a periwinkle on our last trip to the beach!

Linking up with

Education Research: character education

2011-09-19T22:54:00.000-04:00

Quotation from an article on the links between character education and long-term student success, in a very interesting collaborative research project between a fancy New York private school and a KIPP charter school: "Peterson [a psychology professor at U. Michigan] ... identified a set of strenghts that were, according to his research, especially likely to predict life satisfaction and high achievement. ... They settled on a final list: zest, grit, self-control, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism and curiosity."

- "What if the secret to success is failure?", New York Times magazine, 9/18/2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/magazine/what-if-the-secret-to-success-is-failure.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&src=ISMR_HP_LO_MST_FB

starting up again, insha'Allah...?

2011-09-19T22:36:00.000-04:00

So, Basbusa is now three, and her little sister is almost one (sub7an Allah, it's insane how much faster the time rushes by with two babies). I'm staying home with them rather than working, which, ironically, has meant *less* time for blogging since I'm no longer able to fit it in to quiet moments during the work-day! Also, I pretty much gave up on the tot-schooling thing. The activities that Basbusa got most out of were always the ones that were closest to real life rather than "structured activities," and she never was interested in completing (or even starting) an activity that she couldn't see a use for it in her own real life, no matter how "educational" it was, or how pretty the pieces were, or how novel it was (or how long I'd spent preparing it!). I have a feeling that the baby might be more excited about Tot-School activities, though... I'll keep it in mind a few months from now.

Right now, I'm thinking very very hard about homeschooling rather than sending Basbusa to school when she's five. (She just started a fantastic preschool that she loves so far, but it's only twice a week for three hours, and they don't do any academics at all. And it's way too expensive for us to do more than that, even if we did want her in "school" for longer hours.) So one reason I'm blogging again is to keep track of my thoughts on the whole homeschooling option.

The other is to keep a record of the fantastic books we've been reading! Basbusa is just as book-crazy as she was as a tot, and I want to make sure we still remember all the great books we've found once the baby is old enough to read them. Plus, I've gotten so much out of book-suggestions from other bloggers, so I'd like to share the joy!

Toddler Ramadan craft: fawanees!

2010-08-16T06:00:00.000-04:00

I haven't found too many Ramadan craft ideas that toddlers can really get the hang of, so I thought I'd share this one just in case it's useful for anyone! Basbusa and I made a bunch of lanterns out of construction paper, and then strung them on a piece of yarn to make a garland. Here's our finished product:

Each lantern takes about 45 seconds to make (well, 45 seconds in grown-up time; longer depending on how old your kid is and how insistent he or she is about doing it "by myself!"). All you need is construction paper, a scissors, and some tape.

We have a pad of 8.5"x11" construction paper, so the first thing we did was cut a sheet in half (to get two short, fat pieces rather than two long, skinny ones):

You'll only need half a sheet for one lantern. The next step is to cut a strip off one of the long edges of the paper (this strip will eventually be the handle of your lantern):

Next up, make a narrow fold along both of the long edges of the paper:

Then flip over your paper and fold it in half, so that the two narrow folds are back-to-back, facing outwards:

Next, open out the two narrow folds so that your paper looks kind of like an odd paper airplane...

... and cut all along the "body" of the plane, with each cut starting from the folded edge and stopping when you reach the "wings."

Open out your paper, wrap it around in a circle, and tape:

Last step, tape on your handle:

Ta-da! All finished. I learned this in elementary school in Ireland (I forget what holiday we were celebrating), and I think I remember that we also taped some red or yellow construction paper inside the lanterns, to make it look as if they were lit. But I thought that was too many steps for Basbusa, and they look fine without it.

How much of this did Basbusa really do? Well, we did the first one together, with her doing practically all of it, and me giving very-very-very detailed guidance on exactly what to cut and what to tape. She was able to do it, but she absolutely adores cutting and taping, and I felt bad spoiling her fun with so many instructions. So from then on, we worked happily side by side, with me making lanterns and Basbusa making this:

The lanterns also look great if your toddler decorates the paper with random scribbles and drawings before you start (as long as they won't mind their picture being cut up afterwards). Normally, Basbusa would have been totally into this stage of the process, but today, the attractions of tape and scissors outshone those of her pens and crayons :)

Tot-School plans for Ramadan

2010-08-09T06:19:00.000-04:00

Ramadan coming up so soon, insha'Allah! I thought I'd post my Ramadan tot-school plans, just in case anyone else is looking for ideas and hadn't yet found these links. We've been reading Ramadan books in the past few weeks just as a kind of a preview of what's coming up, since this will be the first time Basbusa is old enough to have any clue what's going on. I'm hoping to convey a few of the most important parts of the meaning of Ramadan, and also try to recreate the joyful atmosphere and excitement that would be everywhere if we were in a predominantly-Muslim country. So, here's my plan, iA:

Religious:

I'd be happy if she came away understanding what fasting is, what charity is, and that Ramadan is the month when the Quran was revealed.

It would be nice if she could learn Aisha's Ramadan dua'a, which has always been one of my favorites (اللهم انك عفو تحب العفو فاعف عنا). I'm not sure whether all the repetition of similar words will make it easier or harder for her, but I'll give it a try and see if she picks it up.

Quran memorization and prayer as usual, but on a stricter schedule (right now, they tend to get fitted in around the rest of our activities, rather than the other way around).

I hope we can go to a masjid at least twice a week, so that Basbusa gets some of the sense of community, and hears at least a bit of Tarawih.

Cultural:

Basbusa's dad has a whole bunch of Ramadan songs that he's known by heart ever since childhood, and which always make him go all sappy and nostalgic when he hears them today :) I remember Christmas carols being the same way for me, so I want Basbusa to have a few of those in her childhood too, iA. We're going to be playing these two Ramadan songs and this Eid song quite a bit as general background noise. (I'll post the lyrics when I get a chance to figure them out iA, just in case there are any other non-native Arabic speakers out there who want to sing along with their kids.)

We'll be making a whole bunch of lanterns, insha'Allah! They don't look much like the traditional (or modern plastic glitzy) ones, but hey, pretty lights are pretty lights :) I'm hoping to try this one, this one and this one (just using a bunch of multicolored tissue rather than the Halloween theme!), plus one I remember making myself in elementary school (although it was nothing to do with Ramadan). I got a pack of 8 battery-powered tealight-lookalikes in Walmart for $4, so that we don't burn the house down iA :)

I love the Date Chain idea from here! I won't be fasting this year, so I think I'll do a pair of dates each day for Basbusa to open. One for herself, and one to give to Baba to break his fast with.

Other educational activities:

I think we'll go moon-watching every night, and take a picture with the digital camera. Hopefully when she can see the pictures all in sequence, Basbusa will pick up a little bit about the lunar cycle?

I'm not quite sure yet how to set this up, but it would be nice to have a size-sequencing activity in there. Maybe tinfoil-covered cardboard crescent moons, ranging from big to small? If we could hang them on some kind of a mobile, that would make a pretty decoration too.

If I can find some crescent-shaped cookie-cutters, we'll use them for baking cookies, which Basbusa always loves helping with.

And lastly, in a tot-school-related Ramadan assignment for myself, I want to make two lists as I read through the Quran this time insha'Allah. One list will be of verses to do with nature, and the other will be of verses having to do with good behavior (charity, forgiveness, kindness, etc). I'm hoping to intertwine these with tot-school "units" as we go forward - if we're talking about plants, I'll add in a verse about things growing from seeds; if we're talking about bugs, I'll add in a verse about ants, etc. And I was thinking we might pick a 'virtue of the month' to focus on, by talking about a verse that highlights that particular behavior and then looking for opportunities to put it into practice.

What's Basbusa Reading? (Ramadan edition)

2010-07-26T05:33:00.000-04:00

For readers who arrived via the What My Child Is Reading blog hop, just a quick explanation - with Ramadan coming up soon, I'm focusing this post on Ramadan-related picture books. They can be hard to find, so I thought other Muslim moms might find these reviews helpful. But sorry if this list is a bit too narrowly-focused to be much use to moms of small book-lovers in general!

By far our favorite of the Ramadan books I've found so far is Ramadan Moon, by Na'ima B Robert and Shirin Adl.

The illustrations are simply beautiful, and there are lots and lots of details to look for and talk about, which is always a hit with Basbusa. The front cover isn't as enchanting as the illustrations inside.
It talks about the importance of Quran and tarawih without making a big "religious" deal of it. An excerpt:
"And in mosque after mosque,
Of every shape and size,
Men, women and children
Will all stand up to pray.
The imam will recite the verses
Of the book that was revealed
Hundreds
Upon hundreds
Upon hundreds of years ago."
For a toddler, I think this kind of description is much more meaningful than a selection of ahadith talking about the rewards and benefits in very complicated language.
I really like how it deals with fasting. It's the second aspect of Ramadan that is discussed, rather than the primary one (prayer and the Quran come first), and the book doesn't make a huge deal of how fasting is sooooooooooo hard, but then afterwards we get to eat sooooooooo much. Beside a picture of a family Iftar, this text just says,
"In daylight, we feel hungry.
But at sunset, when we eat,
It makes us a little thoughtful,
A little humble,
And very grateful."
It truly captures the joy of Ramadan as it's really experienced. It conveys the sense of being part of a worldwide community and of a family; it makes the connection to the waxing and waning of the moon; there's a page showing a street alive with people in the evening, just like you'd see in Cairo during Ramadan, for example. There are people going to Tarawih, but there are also kids playing in a playground, people eating in restaurants, etc.

Basbusa loves the Eid page because she likes all the pics of tasty food and pretending to eat it, but she likes the whole book, really. We read it four times in a row the first time around, and many many times since.

I also really liked Reza Jalali's Moon Watchers: Shirin's Ramadan Miracle, but I think it will be more meaningful for Basbusa a few years from now.

I loved the close family relationship it depicted, of happy Muslims in the living in the West.
I loved how the little girl can't wait to try fasting and sees it as something beautiful, and how she tries part-time fasting since she's too young to fast completely.
This bit isn't Ramadan-related, but I also liked (with reservations) how the book addresses the way that the girl's mom doesn't regularly wear hijab, but that her grandmother does. Here's an excerpt:
"As Mom stands and sits, the soft cloth catches the breeze. She looks beautiful. Later, I ask, "How come you don't always wear a scarf like Maman-Borzog [her grandmother]?" Mom laughs and says, "You know, not every Muslim woman covers her hair." "But in the pictures Auntie sends us she always wears a scarf." "In her country it is the custom. There are different traditions about such things. But all Muslims use the same prayers and we all observe Ramadan."

I do think that all Muslimas should wear hijab, but I really don't like how the whole scarf-or-no-scarf issue is made into such a huge deal, both in the US and elsewhere. "What's she wearing? Oh, she must be _____. All covered up? Oh, she must be_____ . A niqab? Oh, she must be _____. And most of all, "She doesn't cover? Oh, well then, it's obvious, she must be _____." I can't stand this kind of thing, whether the assumptions being made are positive or negative. Wearing hijab is important, but it is not one of the five pillars of Islam. I know some amazing Muslimas who don't wear a scarf and it drives me batty to hear people just dismiss them as "not good Muslims" just because their hair is showing. Plus, in the US, the question of Muslimas who don't cover is definitely going to come up in Basbusa's mind eventually, and I'm going to have to answer it somehow. My explanation won't be exactly the same one as in this book, but the tone of inclusiveness and tolerance, in conjunction with the message that covering or not covering does not equate to "good" or "bad" Muslim, is just what I'll be aiming for.

I was not so keen on Ramadan, by Sheila Anderson (it seems to be part of a series for kids on "Cultural Holidays.") It's non-fiction rather than a Ramadan-related story book. Basbusa enjoys some of the pictures, but the text (in my opinion) is dry and boring. Plus, it's slightly incorrect in some places (for example: "In the evening, people wait for the moon to be seen. Then, they can eat and drink again.") To judge by the names of those involved in writing it, none of them are actually Muslim, and I think it shows: although almost all the facts are perfectly correct, the joy of Ramadan doesn't come through at all.

And finally, we read Night of the Moon by Hena Khan. It has lovely illustrations, but they're not the kind that easily allow Basbusa to piece together a picture of what's happening in the story (which is probably too complex for her to grasp anyway, even in a general way). But this book is also an example of the kind of approach to Ramadan that I'm not so keen on, focusing on the more secular aspects. ("Yasmeen had been looking forward to Ramadan. It was a time filled with delicious foods, new clothes, lots of parties, and her favorite thing ever - presents!") I'm all for sharing the joy of Ramadan, but I think kids will appreciate those parts of it without help :) And they're not what's really important about the month anyway.

Does anyone else have suggestions for good toddler-level Ramadan books? I'd love to hear them!

For more suggestions and reviews (for kids books in general, not specifically for Ramadan), check out the weekly blog-hop at Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns.

Two years old: Islamic Tot-School progress

2010-07-25T12:00:00.004-04:00

It's Basbusa's Islamic education that I'm most worried about, because, not having had a Muslim childhood myself, I'm never quite sure that I'm doing things "right" (all dua'a much appreciated on that one!). But at just-turned-two, here's where we stand:

She's such a good girl with prayer, masha'Allah!! Whenever I pray, I ask her if she'd like to join in or just do a takbeer, and she willingly goes along with it (most often choosing just a takbeer if she's busy playing or reading, but she does seem to have gotten the message that prayer time means we interrupt our other activities for at least a split second, which is all I'm aiming for at this point). I always lay out her little prayer-mat beside mine, though, and quite often she comes along to join in, or to have her doll join in, at some point after I've started. But she prays all the time by herself, which is the cutest thing EVER, masha'Allah. She tends to "pray" when she notices that a piece of material (might be a kitchen towel, might be a doll blanket, might be a tissue) is rectangular. "A prayer mat! I'm going to pray on it," she says busily. She smooths it out carefully, stands at one end, and starts off with her "prayer": "Allahu Akbar! SamiAllahu hamiya! Allahu Akbar! SamiAllahu hamiya!" In the eyes of this doting mama at least, there is nothing in the universe so cute as my darling cupcake "praying" on a cloth-diaper insert, not wearing a stitch of clothing, with her little bum in the air. Masha'Allah, I just can't handle the cuteness :)
She falls asleep every night to Ayat al Kursi and the pre-sleep thikr, which serves the double purpose of teaching her what they are, and conveying the message that now it's time for lie-down-and-close-your-eyes :)
She knows we say "bismillah" before eating or drinking, and "al7amdulillah" afterwards. She needs to be reminded about 80% of the time, but she totally knows the routine, and the reason for it. (In her words, "we say 'bismillah' because of Allah. Allah gave us the cookie.")
She has a vague grasp that Allah made everything. I don't think she has really generalized to "everything" yet, but she knows that Allah made her nose, and the freckle on her leg, and our food and drink, and the sun and the moon, for example.
She knows about saying "Al7amdulillah" and "yr7mkum Allah" when someone sneezes.
She can kind-of, sort-of say Surat al Fati7a. Very little of the pronunciation is particularly close to what it's supposed to be, and she gets it out of order unless she's saying it along with someone else, but she knows maybe half of the ayat pretty well by herself. And just yesterday, she found a framed ornamental passage from the Quran, realized what it was, and started "reading" it, getting almost the entire way through Al Fati7a without any prompting, masha'Allah. I was one overjoyed Mama :)

So, I'm not sure whether we're "on schedule" or not in terms of her Islamic upbringing, but I think we're more or less in the right ballpark insha'Allah? I've seen Youtube videos of two-year-olds who know far more Quran, and who pronounce it much better... but I'm not sure whether Basbusa is really "late" or whether she's still ok for having just turned two. The things I'm most happy about, though, are that she loves praying, "prays" willingly when it's prayer time, and loves snuggling on my lap to "memorize" Quran with me. I'm pretty sure that's a good start, insha'Allah...

Two years old: Tot-School Progress

2010-07-24T12:00:00.001-04:00

Just a quick summary of where we stand in terms of Basbusa's "education" as she turns two:

She knows half the letters of the Arabic alphabet. I'm not rushing on those so much any more - I've seen that she can pick them up quite easily and enjoys it as a game, but I don't want to make a big deal of the alphabet as something she feels she "should" know or is "expected" to remember.
She knows all her colors.
She knows all her shapes (even more obscure ones like crescent, diamond and oval).
She can 'read' (well, recognize the words, not really read) Allah, her first name, her nickname, her last name, Mama and Baba. Oh, and in English, she regularly scares the daylights out of me in the car by yelling out "Stop!" when she sees a stop sign :)
She knows that words on the page "say things" and follows them along with her finger as she makes up text.
She recognizes the numbers from 0 to 9, more or less. Kind of. Not super-reliably, though, and she doesn't have much clue what they actually mean. She knows what numbers to press on the elevator for friends who live on particular floors of the building, and she knows what one, two and "half" mean, but as for counting larger quantities, she's not quite there yet.
She can count to six quite well, and sometimes makes it to ten.

Other semi-educational skills:

She's crazy about books;
She adores "writing" and drawing;
She cuts very well with scissors, not needing any help;
She's getting quite good at using a glue-stick and making collages (we haven't tried messier glues yet!).

And a few other tot-school "skills" which I had previously been trying to introduce formally, but which I've now decided not to bother with for the moment in a tot-school setting:

Sorting: none of the tot-school activities I used for this really attracted her, and she didn't really get the concept. But she's now sorting spontaneously by color or by size in real life, so that will do fine for now. I'll get back to it a bit later when she might be ready for more complicated kinds of sorts, but for now I'll use that tot-school-preparation-time for making other kinds of materials.
Fine-motor skills: these were some of her favorite tot-school activities, but in reality, she does almost nothing else all day long, in everyday life. She loves screwing and unscrewing things (jars, toothpaste, bottles, nuts and bolts), peeling things (garlic, bananas, any kind of sticker), pouring things, and stirring things. That's another area where I'll save the time on making tot-school materials and spend it on other areas instead.

Two years old!!

2010-07-23T12:00:00.000-04:00

My darling Basbusa turned two a few weeks ago. I can't believe how time has flown, and how much she has grown and changed over the past two years, masha'Allah! She's the light and joy of my universe, and every day she lives, her company becomes even more fun and more interesting. She's such a blessing, al7amdulillah!

At two, Basbusa can say pretty much anything she wants to say in Arabic. She can explain all kinds of complicated ideas about the past, the future, and about how things work, and picks up new words at the speed of light, masha'Allah. (I know all toddlers do, but it still never fails to amaze me that I can tell her words like "walrus" or "dome" just once, and hear her remember them perfectly weeks later.) She chatters all day long, and there's nothing in the world that I enjoy so much as listening to her plans, opinions and explanations!

In English, she's much more limited, but it's insane how fast she's picking it up since we've moved back in with my parents (who don't speak Arabic). I was even getting seriously worried in the first week or two that she had already started on the slippery slope of letting Arabic become her second language rather than her first, but now it seems like she has sorted out that Arabic is her main language, and what she uses with Mama and Baba and our friends, and that English is what she uses with Grandma and Grandad and people in shops. (The other day, for example, she told Baba in Arabic that she wanted to go play in the water (in her paddling pool). "يا بابا! يا بابا! عايزة العب في الماية!") But Baba was too busy to keep an eye on her, so he said no. Undeterred, Basbusa went to find Grandma. "يا Grandma! يا Grandma! عايزة play in the water!")

She is absolutely crazy about books, and reads them all day long. She even likes to sleep with her favorites sometimes. It's interesting; all of a sudden a few weeks ago, she has started to show a very clear preference for longer picture-books with more complicated plots, rather than the board-books she has loved for so long. She still looks through them occasionally and enjoys them, but rarely goes in search of them any more. Overnight, she seemed to reach a point where she loves books with characters having experiences she can relate to, and follow through the courses of their adventures. In most picture books, some of the details of the plots are still over her head, but she gets the general gist, and loves reading them over and over again until she can "read" them back to you. She's also making all kinds of connections between things that happen in books and things that happen in her own life, and between similar or different occurrences in two different stories.

Also quite suddenly in the past week or two, she has jumped into imaginary play. In a picture book showing bears in an icecream shop, and she spends ages pretending that we're in the shop too, picking out which flavor she wants to eat, asking the sales-bear to give it to her, pretending to eat it, asking me which one I'd like and "buying" it for me, etc. In the car the other day, she was playing with a flash drive, and within the course of fifteen minutes it became a camera that she took pictures with (admiring herself in each "picture" after taking it), a phone to talk on, a Quran she was reading, and a bottle of juice she was drinking. She also has all kinds of adorable one-sided "conversations" with her friends and family while she's pretending to talk on my mobile phone. It was an amazing transition to watch: One day, each thing had its own name and purpose; the next day, her imagination had opened up a thousand possibilities.

She loves playgrounds, beaches, the garden and her paddling pool, but she's still a little more on the cautious side when it comes to gross motor activities, especially if they're new to her.

She loves bugs. Almost nothing is as fascinating as watching ants and spiders, and she's intrigued to watch them running around on her hand when she can persuade them to climb up on her (which she does with great enthusiasm: "يا نملة! يا نملة! تعالي! اطلعي! اطلعي على عيدي!").

She very much enjoys spending time with her three "best friends" (two little girls and a little boy, all almost exactly the same age as her). She still has a long way to go in terms of the whole "sharing" and "taking turns" concepts, but I can see her getting the hang of it more and more each week. After these visits, she talks endlessly about who she played with, what they said, what they did, and what their mothers said in reaction :) She doesn't run to make friends with new kids in the playground, but she watches them in fascination, and is starting to interact with other toddlers without being encouraged to.

And just a few other sweet randomnesses: her hair is just long enough now that she no longer has a "palm tree" sticking straight up out of the top of her head, and she's getting the most beautiful curls and ringlets masha'Allah - just like I always loved when I was a child. She's inherited her food preferences from both Mama and Baba: her favorite foods are ice-cream and chocolate (that's my girl!), and anything salty (bint Baba). The other day, to entertain her while I was doing the dishes, I gave her a grocery flier and a pen and asked her to circle anything that we needed to buy when we go shopping. I thought she'd just circle and scribble randomly, but she want through it page by page and circled two kinds of ice-cream, strawberries, chips, cinnamon bread, and a cleaning product that she thought was chocolate :)

Long silence, back at last!

2010-07-22T15:11:00.004-04:00

No posts since April! The last few months of being a working mom just got too hectic, but now, al7amdulillah, I have the glorious luxury of being a SAHM to Basbusa (and, in a few more months, her little sister insha'Allah), so more posts will be coming right up. The first few might be interesting more to me than to anyone else, because my sweet Basbusa just turned two, and I want to write a few posts on what an accomplished and entertaining little person she has become, masha'Allah. But I also have a post on the way reviewing the Ramadan story books we've checked out so far, plus one on all the tot-school Ramadan ideas I have planned. So, please check back over the next few days; new content is on the way insha'Allah!

What is Basbusa reading?

2010-04-24T08:00:00.000-04:00

I saw Kit Allen's Slide, Already! recommended on Elbows, Knees, Dreams. It's about a boy who eventually tries going down the big playground slide, despite all his nervousness, and ends up loving it. It isn't actually a favorite of mine in terms of the illustrations, or the story, really - I'm never quite sure whether it's an example of a kid being encouraged by his friends to venture out of his comfort zone, or an example of a kid who feels like he can't say no to the pressure his friends are putting on him to try something he's not comfortable with - but Basbusa loves it. The plot is simple enough that she can narrate it to herself, and she seems to totally understand the feelings of the little boy as he edges his way higher and higher up the ladder, each time increasing the numbers of "oh no"s in his "Oh no oh no oh no!" She also likes looking at all the different children and pointing out the tallest, the girl with pigtails, and the little boy who always goes down the slide upsidedown. Plus, it's about board-book-sized, which Basbusa always prefers, since it's so much easier for her to handle than a full-sized picture book.

What shall we do with the Boo-Hoo Baby? was another favorite this week. I chose it partly because Basbusa likes babies, and partly because we're likely to have a boo-hoo baby of our own joining the household later this year insha'Allah, so I figured it would do no harm to introduce a few examples of what life with a baby looks like :) The story is simple - baby is crying, and each of the animals in turn has a suggestion for what to do to console him. Basbusa likes being able to predict what each animal is going to suggest, and being able to predict whether it will work or not. She also likes saying "معلش, يا نونو" ("there there, baby") when the tears continue, and she likes looking at all the odd foods the animals bring when they think the baby might be hungry. Another fun read.

We got Dig Dig Digging out of the library partly because a new pharmacy is being built down the street and there are lots of fascinating big machines for us to watch, but also because it is one of the very few board-books left in our local library that we haven't already read! Actually, though, I'm sorry we didn't choose it sooner, because Basbusa really enjoys it. The illustrations are colorful and detailed, with lots to talk about in addition to the machine featured on each page. We look for people wearing helmets, or look for the animals (birds, a rabbit, a ladybug and a worm) in the field with the tractor, or the different kinds of trash-cans in the page with the garbage truck. Plus it was a good vocabulary-builder for both of us, because I didn't know most of the words for these things in Arabic before we started reading this book! (I'm still not sure of one or two of them, actually - does anybody know if ببور الزلط is really the right word (in Egyptian dialect) for a road-roller?) I thought the text was pretty disappointing, but we just ignored it and talked about the illustrations in Arabic instead. That's what we do with all books in any case, unless they rhyme in English or unless the language is particularly fun.
Hide-and-Seek Duck was a used-bookstore find. The story is not too exciting - Duck and Rabbit are playing hide-and-seek, and Duck is looking for Rabbit - but the nature illustrations are lovely. There are all kinds of little details to look for and admire, including lots of insects and plants that we can look for in real life when we go out for walks. Definitely worth the $0.59 we paid for it!

If you'd like to see what books other people have enjoyed with their children this week, please see the link-up at Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns.

tot school: Arabic alphabet puzzle

2010-04-22T13:42:00.001-04:00

Parents of kids learning the alphabet in English might not appreciate how overjoyed I was to find this toy/puzzle for sale for only $15 at an Islamic bookfair near our house last week!

You can pick up similar things in English at any dollar store, but Arabic is a whole other story. I'd seen these online in several places, but the only size that seemed to be in stock anywhere was the large size, with 12"x12" squares, for the insanely ridiculous price of $40. So, I had pretty much given up and stopped looking. But the ones on sale at the bookfair were 6"x6" - a much more manageable size for a toddler in any case - and although $15 is still ridiculous since they probably cost about $0.10 to manufacture, I still snapped one up.

And Basbusa loves it! Her new puzzle-doing skills transferred right over to these mats, and she also loves that you can use the squares to build cubes, towers and "houses" as well as just lying them flat on the floor. I pulled out only the eleven letters she already knows, and I'll add to them as she learns new ones (so that she knows which way up they're "supposed" to go and doesn't accidentally confuse herself by getting used to seeing them upside-down or sideways).

And another bonus: dip them in water, and they stick to the wall!
Basbusa was thrilled, and spent way longer than I expected trying to get all the dots in just the right places beside their letters. Lots of fun!

It looks like these things are now back in stock online, too! NoorArt has them here, and they also have a cheaper, smaller version (4"x4" squares) for $9.

Muslim tot-school: masjid artwork, and a question for other Muslim moms

2010-04-21T05:45:00.000-04:00

Umm An-Nu'man over at A Muslim Child is Born has a lovely set of three downloadable templates for masjid-based art.

I picked one, shrank it down quite a bit, printed it out and laminated it, and since then we've been trying to use it. Umm An-Nu'man and her kids used paints to fill it in, but Basbusa hasn't had much practice with paint yet, and is still far too fascinated by "exploring" it to be able to use it in a real "art project." (Much more interesting to find out what happens when she sticks her fingers in it, paints her feet, mixes colors together, etc etc :)

So, we tried scribbling in it with markers, outlining it with crayons, and even putting it underneath the paper and doing "rubbings" of it. They all worked in the sense that Basbusa got the general idea, but I think she's still a bit too young for a structured project with a pre-set goal, and I don't want to do anything that might teach her to think that there's a "right" and a "wrong" way to do artwork. So, I put the template aside until she's a bit older.

But I guess something sunk in, all the same! This morning Babusa was scribbling on her magnadoodle while I finished off some work on the computer, and she suddenly said, "Mama! Masjid!"

Well, I'm sure a mother's rosy-eyed view is influencing my interpretation, but you can kind of see what she means, right? :)

And a question for other Muslim parents: have you tried - or even seen in real life - any formal Islamic Studies "curriculum"? Do your children use one in Islamic School, and if so, what do you think of it? The ones I've heard of are IQRA, ICO Islamic Studies and Goodword, but I have no idea how good they are, and there seem to be millions of other options too. Basbusa is still too young for these, but I want to start investigating the possibilities so that I have some sense of direction when she's older. I'd like something that concentrates mostly on Islamic values, using examples from the Quran, seerah and ahadith, rather than just presenting simplified versions of stories from the Quran or getting tied up in the technical details of exactly how to wash your ears in wudhuu'. I'd really appreciate any input, even if it's just, "My kids did fine without any formal curriculum," or "I have no clue either, but I heard from my friend's aunt's sister that X is no good..." Jazaakum Allahu khayr!! :)

tot school: A puzzle! Finally!! and nature exploration

2010-04-20T13:39:00.003-04:00

As I've mentioned in a few previous posts, Basbusa has so far shown no interest in puzzles of any kind. Jigsaws, simple wooden ones with big knobs, greeting cards cut into two - all complete flops.

Until... hooray for the Dollar Tree ... the arrival of this puzzle in her toy collection!

She's not obsessed with it, but she does (a) get the concept (finally!!); (b) enjoy it; and (c) is able to do it! Woo-hoo! Plus, it's been very helpful for increasing the number of numerals she can recognize. And the six-versus-nine issue, which has long been a point of confusion, has been greatly helped by being able to compare the two numbers, one in each hand, while we discuss how six has the circle at the bottom and nine has the circle at the top.

With the weather finally becoming more Spring-like, I've been trying to make sure we get outside every day we possibly can. Running and exploring is fun, of course, and also helps a lot with earlier bedtimes! But I also want to try to encourage a love of nature and an appreciation of its wonders. Good for science later on, good for the environment, and will also tie in well with all the nature-appreciation in the Quran, insha'Allah. One thing that we've found helpful is the little nature-treasure-baggie, above. We take it with it on most walks, and when Basbusa finds something she really loves - stones, flowers and acorns are her favorites - she puts it into her baggie. She likes the treasure-hunting aspect of it, and it also gives us a chance to talk about the objects again when we get home.

Muslim tot-school: al7amdulillah for mini prayer-rugs!

2010-04-18T14:40:00.001-04:00

A wise and insightful friend, having read my last Muslim Tot-School post, said that she had found that her daughter suddenly started loving to pray alongside Mama after they bought her her very own mini prayer-rug. Well, a solution that simple has to be worth a try! So we bought Basbusa a little prayer-rug of her own ($5 at a local halal butcher-and-random-Islamic-stuff store)... and al7amdulillah! She loves it! At least once a day, and usually more than once, she goes and gets her rug and puts it beside mine while I'm praying (spending forever to get it spread outjust so, but hey, I'm not complaining!). Her "praying" consists of an opening takbeer and then lying face-down on her rug, tapping her index finger, but she hangs out there for at least a ruk3a or two. She also loves the salaams to each side at the end. I'm sooooooooo happy - it makes me feel so incredibly lucky to see my tiny munchkin there beside me while I pray!

Two other things have also been going well for us lately, al7amdulillah. If Basbusa doesn't feel like joining in at prayer-time, I never push the issue, but I do ask her to do a quick takbeer instead, and she now does so quite happily. What I'm hoping is that she'll get the idea that although drawing/jumping on Baba/pushing her doll in a stroller are very fun things to do, it's normal to expect to put them aside for just a moment when we hear the athan. So far, so good on that one.

The other is something I should have been doing since she was born: saying Ayat al-Kursi last thing at night as she's going to sleep, followed by dhikr. The main reason why I took so long to get around to this is that I hadn't yet memorized it myself. (I should have done so years ago, of course, but somehow, until I realized that Basbusa was also missing out due to my negligence, I never got around to it. Astighfir Allah. But better late than never.) So now our new bedtime routine is teeth, bath, glass of warm milk, goodnight to Baba, long chat in bed with Mama as Basbusa discusses everything we did that day and any other random thoughts that cross her mind... and then, as she starts to get sleepy, Ayat al-Kursi. It has been amazing - after just a few days, she began to associate it with time-to-go-to-sleep, and now she snuggles up close as soon as I start, and is out cold before I get to the end of the dhikr. Sub7an Allah :)

tot school: Arabic words!

2010-04-16T13:28:00.001-04:00

One thing that I've been - well, not *worried* about, but very aware of - for a while now is that Basbusa just doesn't see much Arabic writing in the world around her. We only have four books in Arabic (we have a few more stored away for later, but they're not really toddler-oriented), and a flimsy Egyptian kindergarten alphabet book. Basbusa sees Arabic when we're memorizing Quran together, but that's about it.

All those easy activities you can incorporate into daily life if you're teaching your child the English alphabet are just not available while we're living in the US: there are no Arabic street-signs, store names, advertisements on buses, labels on grocery shelves, etc. And particularly since Arabic script looks so different from the stand-alone Arabic letters which we've been learning, it seems all the more important that Basbusa would just have some general exposure to what writing "looks like."

So, when some friends gave us a whiteboard that their daughters had outgrown, but which is still too tall for Basbusa to use comfortably, I thought I'd use it to add a tiny bit of random Arabic script into our environment:

I change the words on it every so often, although "Allah" is usually up on top. (For non-Arabic-speakers, it currently says "Allah," "Mama" and "Baba," as well as Basbusa's real name, whited-out for the purposes of the blog :) My goal with this is definitely not to try to push her into reading! I'm in no rush at all about that. She's usually watching while I change the words, and I tell her what each one says, but that's it. We don't dwell on them or study them or really pay them any attention at all - they're just part of the environment. I'd just like her to have the opportunity to become aware that there's something called "writing" and that this, more or less, is what it tends to look like. It's an awareness that I'm sure she'd gain without any effort at all if we were working in English, just from seeing words all around her.

So imagine my surprise (and delight! and huge fountains of maternal pride and goofiness! and calls to the grandparents!) when it turned out that Basbusa had actually picked up on every single word I've ever written up there? The other day, she brought me her magnadoodle and said, "write something! write something!" She uses "write" for both writing and drawing, and what she almost always wants is a picture of a cat, but this time, just for the heck of it, I wrote her name. "Basbusa!", she cried, pointing to herself. What?!? Really?!? So I went through all the other words that have been up there, and she called out "Allah! Baba! Mama! Basbusa!" (couldn't resist throwing her name in again!), and even her best friend's nickname, "Raspberry!", which was only up there once, ages ago, for only a few days. She wasn't even stopping to think about them.

Of course she's not really reading; she has just memorized what those particular words look like, but you can just imagine how proud of her I was!

tot school: ice-cube scooping and bead-threading

2010-04-15T13:12:00.004-04:00

Another hit-and-miss tot-school session today, as usual!

First up, ice-cube scooping, inspired by Chasing Cheerios:

This is another one where I'm not quite sure what the point is, as far as "education" is concerned, but Basbusa certainly loved it! I added a bit of red paint to the water before freezing the ice-cubes, just to make them a bit more visible. I thought it would be tricky for her, but actually she had the icecubes transferred into the bowl in about twelve seconds using the big slotted spoon. So we tried again using a teeny-weeny teaspoon. Done in maybe 20 seconds, followed by several repetitions. But she enjoyed it a lot, and I think she was also interested in the coldness of the icecubes (which she has never really played with before) and the way the changed shape and dripped pink water as they melted. So hey, let's call it a science experiment :)

And, yet another fail in the beading department:

(Please note, when I say "fail," I don't mean Basbusa!! I mean failure on *my* part to come up with activities that she finds fun and interesting.) A nice, easily-grippable new shoelace, and some beads that fell off a broken abacus. Fun threading activity, you'd think, right? But no; Basbusa, who finds nothing more interesting than inserting flash drives into USB ports and cell-phone-chargers into cell-phones, apparently thinks that putting a shoelace through a bead is a waste of time. No interest whatsoever. Maybe she'd be more into it if we were "making necklaces"? Get some pink and sparkle involved? She does seem to have inherited (from her Auntie, not from her Mama!) a love of girlie bows and ribbons... Hmmmm....

tot school: number-recognition and pom-pom placing

2010-04-13T12:47:00.006-04:00

Please note: I link to TotSchool once a week, but I actually post our activities one day at a time rather than in a weekly wrap-up. You can see all our Tot School posts by clicking on the "Tot School" link on the right.

Apologies for the long silence! Work always gets crazy at the end of the quarter, so blog-updates fell by the wayside for a while there.

This tot-school session was our usual mix of successful with giant flop. It's odd; Basbusa has been picking up new (Arabic) letters in the blink of an eye, but with numbers, which she sees much more often in the world around her, recognition has been coming much more slowly. Zero, one and six are still the only ones she has completely down, with a few others possible depending on the day. It's lucky we live in an apartment building, or even one and six would probably still be pretty vague! Yay for the joys of elevator-button-pressing :)

So our first activity was to get some use out of the vast number of supermarket fliers that arrive in our mailbox every Thursday:

Lots of pictures of food, which Basbusa always likes to talk about! And numbers of all kinds sprinkled around the page. In the example above, which is the first time we tried it, she was finding the "3"s and I was circling them, and then she found the "9"s and I put a rectangle around them etc, but she wasn't too enthralled, and needed a lot of encouragement and prompting. Since then, however, we've evolved a bit: Now she gets to hold the pen, and we put "stars" (in other words, enthusiastic scribbles) on whichever number we're looking for . We also mix it up a bit by putting stars on the strawberries, or on the noses of the models in clothes-store ads, or on the letter "S"s (the only one she knows so far in English), and she's much more interested. We've had fun with this quite a few times.

Next up: using a teaspoon to put pom-poms into a little tray which used to line a box of chocolates.

Why? Well, I'm not quite sure. The entire tot-school universe and its mother seems to do this kind of thing, whether it's using tweezers to put erasers into egg-cups or using tongs to put marbles onto upside-down bath-sucker-thingies, so I'm sure there must be a good reason behind it. One-to-one correspondence, maybe? Fine motor skills and finger-strength? Their kids also seem to love it, so I thought we'd give it a try, but it didn't really work out. First of all, Basbusa, lover of all things pink, picked out all the pink pom-poms and spent quite a while trying to cram them all into her pocket. She was momentarily intrigued when I started putting one pom-pom into each spot on the tray, but clearly thought it was silly to be using a spoon when fingers were so much easier, and soon lost interest anyway. I held her attention for a few seconds longer by engaging her love of giving orders and letting her dictate which spot I'd put each pom-pom - I figured that if the point is one-to-one correspondence, she'd still be getting some use out of it this way - but we were done pretty quickly. Ah well. Whatever the point was, I don't think we got it!

To see what everyone else and their tots have been up to this week, please check out Tot School headquarters over at 1+1+1=1.

20 months!

2010-03-08T06:58:00.008-05:00

My sweet angel-cupcake is getting bigger by the day - after wearing her 12-month clothes until she was about 17 months, she's suddenly stretching all the way to the very end of her 2T PJs.

She's starting to give us long descriptions of what's happening in the world around her, with pseudo-sentences instead of just single words. She also suddenly plunges into complicated narrations of events that happened days or weeks ago, so it always takes me a few seconds to catch up and figure out what she's talking about! For example, we went to visit a neighbor with a (very timid) cat a few weeks ago, and although Basbusa only saw the cat for about three seconds before it vanished under the bed, she has been talking about it ever since, at all kind of random intervals. It goes something like this (while gazing intently into your eyes to make sure you're following the communication): "Cat! ... Auntie Aisha... cat... Auntie Aisha carry cat... Cat in arms... Cat, meow, meow... Run! Run! Cat run! Cat afraid! Cat all gone! Basbusa saw cat..."

She also takes a few seconds to gather her thoughts as she adds more detail. For example, "Gloves!.... Black gloves... Auntie Nancy's black gloves... wears them... hands... Auntie Nancy wears them [on her] hands... outside... wears them outside..."

She's becoming so smart and helpful about remembering where things are and bringing me things I ask for! Yesterday my mobile rang while I was busy in the kitchen. I asked, "Basbusa, could you get me my phone, please?" and off she trotted to the bedroom, where she hunted around until she found the phone, and brought it to the kitchen for me. She also has a fantastic memory for where she left things. If I'm tidying up the bits of Baba's toolkit after she's been playing with it, and find a screwdriver missing, I can say, "Basbusa, do you remember where you left the screwdriver?" Even if it's fifteen minutes later, she'll stare at me with her head tilted slightly for a few seconds, and then trot off to fish it out from under a cushion on the sofa or between two books on the shelves. May this skill stick with her, insha'Allah! It often seems like one of the make-or-break criteria for being a successful Egyptian housewife is being able to Find Things, and I fail just lamentably at it. Basbusa seems to have inherited this one from two of her Baba's sisters, because she sure as heck didn't get it from me!

Talking of screwdrivers: there are very few things in the universe which are as fun as trying to unscrew things with Baba's screwdriver. And even fewer things cuter than watching her do it, masha'Allah :) My little engineer.

She takes such good care of her doll, reading books with her and holding the doll's hand to point to things in the books.

She adores cats, not that she's ever actually petted one.

She still follows me around all day with books for me to read to her.

She's getting a bit braver with physical activities like slides and jumping (she's not generally the world's most rough and tumble tot, so far). She's going up and down stairs with no help, and even lets go of the banister sometimes.

We're making progress with the potty training. It doesn't feel like tons of progress because she's still mostly dependent on me for reminders, but we don't have more than one or two misses per day.

She knows her colors, and adores pink, which she points out wherever she sees it. She hasn't gotten the hang of purple yet, but that's four syllables in Arabic, so I guess that's reasonable :) She knows ب, س, و, غ, ج, ق, ش and sometimes ك, ف and ت.

And, last milestone, she's finally weaned, about two weeks ago. She was totally ready - she was down to just once a day anyway - and she hasn't missed it at all. Sweet little munchkin. Nursing was all I hoped it would be.

arabic printables: س picture-book page

2010-03-07T06:23:00.007-05:00

Basbusa and I finally started a project which has been in my mind for months and months! You know how there are lots of board-books in English which just have a bunch of nice pictures for words that start with A, and then a bunch of nice pictures for words that start with B, etc? I've searched high and low for something like that in Arabic, because Basbusa loves those kind of books (even at the ripe old age of one and a half), but the closest I've been able to find is My Arabic Alphabet Book. It's nice, but there's only one picture per letter. And also, it uses fuS7a - so, for example, for the letter س, it has a car. Ok, س is for سيارة, but we're Egyptian, so we say عربية for "car." I think that would make it harder for Basbusa to get the link between the sound and the picture.

So, we're making our own. With help from Basbusa in the pasting and sticking, we put together the first page of our own Arabic Alphabet book:

I've uploaded the file here if anyone would like to print it out. There's one page with just the letter س, one page with the pictures, and one page with the words for each picture. You cut out the pictures and words, and add them (collage-style) to the page with the big س on it. I also laminated it when we were done, to make it a bit sturdier, and because Basbusa sees anything stuck to anything else as an invitation to pick, peel, pick, peel until she has it completely disassembled.

The reason I didn't just assemble all the words and images onto one sheet before printing, and avoid the work of the collage-making, was partly that I only have Microsoft Word to work with. I've always found it annoying and time-consuming trying to get Word to display images and text together without doing odd things to the placement. Also, I was hoping that if Basbusa had helped to make the book, she'd be even more interested in reading it. We'll see, insha'Allah :)

The file I've uploaded is slightly different from the one in the photo above. We know a little girl whose name starts with س, so I included her picture on our copy, but I replaced her with something else on the copy I'm sharing with the world in general. Hope this is useful to someone, insha'Allah!

tot school: bears and puzzles

2010-03-06T12:23:00.007-05:00

[Please note: I put the official "tot school" logo on one post per week, but actually, I don't do a weekly compilation of all our tot-school activities - I cover one tot-school day in each post, and upload them as we go. If you'd like to see more of our tot-school days, you can click on the "tot school" link on the right.]

Basbusa was still not 100% over her virus during today's tot school, but all the same, I think the activities I had planned for her didn't really catch her interest. Remember these bears, whom I had been hoping she might sort a few weeks ago? Well, now that she really does know her colors - well, most of them - I thought we'd have another try. And sure enough, while I was setting things up, she did hunt around for a few blue bears and put them in the blue cup without my even suggesting it. But the activity itself wasn't much of a hit. Here's what I had been planning:

I took a big green foam dice (two for a dollar at Dollar Tree), covered the faces with white labels, and colored them yellow, red and blue. Then I got out the red, blue and yellow bears and cups. I had been thinking we could incorporate plenty of running around: we'd put the cups in three different corners of the room with the bears in the middle, toss the dice, pick out a bear that matched the color on the dice, and then run-run-run to the matching cup to put the bear in it. Sounds fun, right? I thought so, but Basbusa wasn't convinced. She got the idea, and understood that she was supposed to pick out a bear that matched the dice, but she didn't seem to think it was a very fun thing to do. And as for going to put it in a cup, well, she saw even less point in that. She did maybe four or five, with much encouragement, and then was all done. She put the yellow dice into the yellow cup and got up and wandered off.

Right. Well, next up were some puzzles. Basbusa has yet to put even so much as one piece into a single puzzle, and I've tried all kinds - those big knobbed ones, ones like the ones below, and even super-simple ones like pictures of animals just cut in two with a straight line, so all you're really doing is matching the heads to the tails. She has no interest in any of them. I keep reading about tots all over the blogosphere who thrive on puzzles, so I thought I'd keep offering them once every so often just in case she changes her mind. So I brought out these (a set of 8 for $4 at the Christmas Tree Stores):

As usual, she had no interest in putting them together, and only mild interest in taking them apart. She did enjoy mixing up the pieces from several different puzzles, like this:

... and then fishing out the three parts of the pig, or the three parts of the cow, but actually assembling those three parts was not on her agenda. Ah well.

Our last activity was just playing, really, with a bit of discussion of colors and clothing thrown in. I made this felt dress-up bear for Basbusa as an activity to keep her busy on the plane for our last trip to Egypt, but she was still a bit young for it then. She enjoyed it for a few minutes this time, but kept wanting to pick up the bear after dressing her, and was discouraged by how the bear just flopped (I've since glued her onto a cardboard backing to make her a bit more robust). So this was yet another not-so-successful activity. Zero for three in tot school today! Oh well. Better luck next time, insha'Allah.

To see what everyone else is up to in tot school this week, please check out the Linky over at Carissa's 1+1+1=1.

Muslim tot school: umm... progressing cluelessly...

2010-03-03T12:22:00.000-05:00

I've been happily Muslim for about seven years now (seven years already? where did they go?), but still, since I never had a "Muslim childhood" and have never even stepped inside the Sunday School sessions at the masjid, I'm always worried that I don't know what I'm doing when it comes to Basbusa's upbringing in Islam. I certainly don't know what the "normal" milestones are, in terms of when kids usually start memorizing Quran etc. (I've seen lots of little three-year-olds on YouTube, who have memorized the whole thing already - does that mean most people start their kids at birth?!?) All comments much appreciated on this one!

So far, my main theory is just to make sure she sees plenty of the things I'd like her to do some day, in the hope that she'll start copying me. She knows a few of the motions of prayer, but she's usually more excited about trying to put on one of my scarves than about the prayer itself. (Totally her own idea, by the way - I would never even suggest that such a tiny baby wear a scarf, for prayer or for anything else. She's just copying Mama.) I'd love to have a way to make the actual prayer seem like a super-fun activity that she can't wait to join in with, but no brainwaves yet. (Suggestions? Anybody?)

(And in a random cute aside, I bet you didn't know that these guys are actually praying, right?

"Boy! Akbar! Bear! Akbar!", said Basbusa, as we read about Kanga and Roo's arrival in the forest :)

On days when I'm not working, I always make a point to sit and read Quran before we get caught up in whatever activities and outings we have planned for the day, and she really enjoys that time. I set up two of those wooden Quran-holders on the floor, one for me and one for her, and she goes and gets "her" little Qurans to put on it. While I read aloud, she sits beside me and flips through them, sometimes running her little finger along the page and making random droning noises (cute!). Usually she ends up sitting on my lap, watching me read.

She knows we say "bismillah" before we eat, and "al7amdulillah" afterwards... She knows we don't leave the Quran on the floor... And that's about it, really.

I guess I could start her with stories about the Prophets etc, but for some reason, I'm hesitant to do that. It somehow feels kind of like indoctrination to me, when she's so little. Astaghfir Allah if that's wrong! I think maybe it's because I think the stories of the Prophets are actually pretty complex, in terms of the challenges they faced and how they dealt with them, and that's the important part, rather than the details of the plots of their lives. If I started telling her their stories now, when she's far too young to grasp anything but the most simplistic plot-lines, I feel like I'd be emphasizing the least important part of the whole thing by focusing on plot. And I'm also worried that in an effort to simplify those plots down to toddler-level, they'd all end up sounding something like, "The nice Muslim prophet tried to help the mean non-Muslims, but they didn't believe him, so they all died." Not, not, not-not-not-not-NOT the message I want to be giving her, on so many levels. So I think I'll keep away from those stories for now (unless someone has a brilliantly insightful reason for why I'm misguided? I'm all ears!)

Am I missing anything? Doing anything wrong so far? I'd be hugely grateful for any and all input on this one. Jazaakum Allahu khayr :)

tot school: introducing the Glue Stick

2010-03-03T09:41:00.003-05:00

Today's tot school was a bit of a failure, really, but that's most likely because Basbusa has been miserably sick with a virus for the past few days. I thought she might like a bit of very-low-key crafting while her fever was down, but she just shook her head miserably when I tried to hand her bits of paper, and said, "Mama do it." She even shook her head at her beloved scissors and just snuggled on my lap instead, whereas usually she likes nothing better than chopping up strips of paper.

So, the following crafts are all me, not Basbusa. I persevered even though she was just watching me, because I had an Ulterior Motive: I'm hoping to start making an Arabic Alphabet picture book with her soon, with lots of pictures for each letter for her to glue onto each sheet, so I wanted to introduce her to glue sticks and how they work. We (well, I) made this:

using her two current favorite colors, pink and black, with a few bits of orange thrown in. She wouldn't hold the glue stick at first, but eventually, after watching me use it, she picked up a second one, wound it up and down a few times, and then started scooping bits of glue out of it with her fingernail, and smearing it on the paper. Well, that works too, I guess! She did enjoy doing a bit of "I Spy" with it afterwards, looking for the hearts and the circle among all the random shapes, but that was about it.

So we moved on to this (hideously ugly) little guy:

Know what it's supposed to be? Basbusa did, much to my astonishment! As soon as I had the eyes glued on, she said "Owl! Owl!" and was all excited. I chose him just for a bit more glue-stick practice, and also because her favorite book in the universe is still Owl Babies, so anything owl-related is usually a hit.

So, I'm not sure how much of the whole gluing process really sunk in, but hopefully she picked up some kind of idea. We might have one more try before we move on to making her alphabet book.

tot school: jar-closing and rice-excavating

2010-02-19T21:36:00.006-05:00

The first part of today's activities was completely accidental, when Basbusa grabbed some of the materials I was unpacking for the Rice Excavating, and went off on explorations of her own. So here, I present the highly technical Bits-Of-Straw-In-A-Little-Jar lesson:

The jar is from one of those teeny weeny miniature jams you get with room-service in hotels. It turned out to be the perfect size for her little hands, because it was small enough for her to grasp firmly and not too heavy for her to manipulate easily. She spent about ten minutes putting the five bits of cut-up straw into the jar, angling the lid so that it squashed down the tallest bits (which were too tall for the jar, really), and then twisting it closed. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. She was so fascinated that I'm sure she must have been learning something, even if I can't quite put my finger on what it was!

Then we moved on to the "real" part of the session. Remember the hunt-for-coins-in-rice activity I posted about before? This was a repeat of that activity, with a few new twists.

We were still aiming to find the four coins and put them on their spots on the index card. But rather than just poking around with her finger, Basbusa first fished out all the pom-poms and put them into the empty cream-cheese container, and then used the mini-jam-jar to scoop out some rice on top of them. She found it absolutely fascinating to watch how the pom-poms gradually disappeared under each new scoop of rice, and it gave us plenty of chances to talk about colors, saying things like, "oooh, look, the green one disappeared! Now we can only see the blue one and the yellow one!"

Once the rice-level had fallen sufficiently, she could pick out the coins more easily and put them on their card.

It was also fun to put various things into the little jar - one coin, two coins, two coins and some rice, one coin and a pom-pom, etc - and jiggle it next to our ears, to hear what kind of sound it made. It was so funny to watch her try to figure out how to coordinate her movement to get the coins to jingle beside her own ear! At first she could jingle it, but miles away from her ear. Or get it up by her ear, but not be able to coordinate the jingle without spilling everything. But she got the hang of it eventually!

Basbusa loved this whole activity, and it kept her engaged for about twenty minutes.

What is Basbusa reading?

2010-02-17T10:52:00.010-05:00

We absolutely loved Cheep! Cheep! by Julie Stiegemeyer. Short and cute, this is the story of three chicks watching a new sibling emerge from his egg. There is only one word on each page, always rhyming with "cheep," describing the chicks' reactions to the widening crack in the egg. This is one of the first books that Basbusa started "reading" back to me, pointing to the pictures and mimicking that the chicks were asleep, or tiptoe-ing (creep!), or landing on top of each other (heap!). Plus the big hug at the end when the chicks meet their new brother. You can't beat a book that inspires your tot to give you lots of hugs :)

Llama Llama Mad at Mama was a recommendation from Chronicles of an Infant Bibliophile, and it was a huge success! So much so that we bought our own copy. All the text rhymes (for example, "Llama llama out with Mama, shopping at the Shop-O-Rama!"), and after a read or two, Basbusa was chanting along, saying something along the lines of, "Mama llama llama mama rama rama" :) The page where Llama Llama throws a giant tantrum in the store made a big impression, as did the following page where he and Mama Llama kiss and make up. Plus, we've been quoting the book ever since. The other day, when I told her that Baba was going shopping, she said "Shopping! Llama!", and when I asked her to help me push the shopping cart with me - something which Llama Llama also does in the book - she said, "Basbusa. Cart. Llama. Cart."

Since llamas were such a hit, I picked up Is Your Mama a Llama when I spotted it in the library. It's another one we're going to have to buy a copy of! The text rhymes beautifully, and yet uses language that isn't the ultra-simplistic vocabulary of most baby books. (For example: "Is your mama a llama?" I asked my friend Jane. "No, she is not," Jane politely explained. "She grazes on grass and she likes to say 'Moo!' I do not think that's what a llama would do.") There's lots to look at in the pictures in addition to the baby-mommy pair in each couplet, and Basbusa (for reasons best known to herself) absolutely adored the illustration of a mama seal eating a fish. Oh, and all kinds of interesting animals are included, like bats and kangaroos, rather than the usual dog-cat-sheep of many baby books.

And lastly, one we've gotten from the library several times: Mommy Hugs. This book just shows pairs of animals, with each page showing what the mommy does in order to hug her baby, but it's very sweet with lovely illustrations. And it provides you with endless excuses to snuggle your tot as you demonstrate each kind of hug.

To see what books other mamas recommend, go browse through this week's links at Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns.

totschool: brown-bear size sorting and number-jumping

2010-02-17T10:28:00.005-05:00

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? I don't get the appeal, but Basbusa does! So, I printed out the five different-sized Brown Bears from 1plus1plus1equals1, and Basbusa and I did some size-comparing.

The idea is for the tot to line up the bears in order of size, thus learning about big-bigger-biggest and learning to spot and fix things in their work that didn't go quite according to plan. For Basbusa, that task was a bit too complex taken as a whole, but she had no trouble with it when we broke it down a bit. We went through it a few times with me asking her to hand me the biggest of all the bears (or the smallest, etc), and then I'd put him at the head of the line. Then could she give me the biggest of the bears that were still left? And the next one? She enjoyed it, and I think she'll gradually get the hang of how to work through it herself if we take it out again every so often.

Next up, some very fun number review. I made several of these numerals - 0 through 10 - by taking two sheets of craft foam, cutting the number out of one of them, and sticking them together (this was cheap, since you get 16 sheets of craft foam for $1 at Dollar Tree or Walmart). We chose three numbers she knows well and one that she's a bit shaky on, and spread them around the floor. The basic idea was to identify a number, call it out, and run to jump up and down on it:

We played a few different ways - I asked her to find particular number, and we'd both run to it and jump; I asked her to choose a number to run to, then we'd jump on it and say which one we were jumping on; and then at the end when she was getting tired, she asked me to pick her up but still wanted to keep playing. So I let her point to a number, and ran over and jumped on it with her in my arms. Much hilarious giggling ensued. And much wheezing and panting from Mama by the time we'd done it for about three minutes!

The smartest, politest, wonderfulest little cupcake...

2010-02-16T13:46:00.004-05:00

...and just in case anyone should think that those are the highly-biased words of an over-infatuated, doting mother (surely not!), then allow me (yes, please do allow me!) to give you just a few examples of my little sugarcake's latest brilliance:

Yesterday, Basbusa picked up one of her current favorite books (Uh-Oh! Gotta Go!), and brought it over to me enthusiastically. "Uh-Oh!", she said, as she pointed to the right words on the cover with her teeny little index finger. Then she turned to the title page and did it again: "Uh-Oh!" Point point! My smart little munchkin, reading already! (Well, yes... it may also be because we had fun doing lots of dramatic pointing a few days ago, when she was showing me the words in big font in her book. But it certainly looked like reading, and sounded like reading! Such an exciting glimpse of things to come.)

A recent conversation with Basbusa:

Me: Basbusa, would you like milk or juice?

Basbusa: Juice please!

Me: Sure, sweetie! Here you go.

Basbusa: Straw, please?

Me: Of course, my angel darling sweet child! Here, choose a color!

Basbusa: Thank you!

Such heart-meltingly good manners! She still needs reminders more than half the time, but she's getting there, and never has there been anything so beautiful in the universe as her little please-and-thank-yous.

And last but not least, may I report with great pride (and relief) the accomplishment of four straight days with no accidents, where potty-training is concerned? (Well, ok. One accident. Two. But they were very minor and counted as mere blips rather than start-overs.) Today, she's back with the babysitter she doesn't listen to, though, and had three accidents within the first hour, so we still have a long way to go. But it is just glorious to be moving away from endless washings of diapers (and carpets) at last!

tot school update: woo-hoo! flower-letter sorting!

2010-02-16T13:40:00.004-05:00

Remember this post, where I bemoaned Basbusa's tremendous disinterest in my lovingly-made flower-letter sorting game? Well, today she caught sight of it on top of the dresser, and asked to play it. Ten whole minutes of very enthusiastic letter-matching! With all the right sounds! And just the kind of chat that I had been hoping for about sounds and matches!

She loved it. My sweet little angel munchkin.

tot school: alpha-fishing and caterpillar-making

2010-02-16T10:07:00.010-05:00

Today's main tot-school activity was another one of those where the time, effort, and dreamy-eyed imaginings on my part far outweighed the amount of value Basbusa actually got out of it! The basic idea was to make some flashcards with the letters she knows on them, attach paperclips to each card, and then go fishing for them with a magnet on a string. Like so:

I was imagining all kinds of excited conversations along the lines of, "ooooh, look, you caught something! What is it? Yes, you're right, it looks like a sssssssss! It is, it's a red ssssssssssssss!" It kind-of worked, for eight cards, as in these photos:

("ooooooooo! oooooooooooo!" and "g!", said Basbusa), but after eight cards she was all done with the game, with a very definite "been there, done that!" air.

Why, exactly, did I think it was so important to glue on letters that I had cut out of craft foam, in three different colors, rather than just writing the letters with a pen?! There was some logic to it at the time, I swear, but I no longer have the slightest recollection what it might have been. In retrospect, in the light of all the tracing, cutting and gluing I did, and the four-minute activity length, "mild insanity" seems like the best guess.

Next up was an activity which I found here, to go along with one of Basbusa's current favorite books, The Hungry Caterpillar. Here's what we ended up with:

I drew the face, and cut the big green strips. Basbusa did all the tape-pulling, tape-tearing, and tape-trimming with the scissors (when four miles of tape ended up stuck to each link of the caterpillar). She loves both scissors and tape, and she understood the connection between the book and the finished product, so she enjoyed the activity. Plus, since the whole craft took only about five minutes at most, we could easily finish it before her attention-span ran out. Mr. Caterpillar survived as a toy for another day or too, before ending up in a sad crumple on the bathroom floor.

tot school: flower-letter matching and do-a-dot letters

2010-02-12T11:50:00.008-05:00

Look at the pretty activity sheet I made for Basbusa as a review of the five letters she knows so far!

Isn't it colorful? The idea was that she would take the little circles with the letters on them, and match them up to the corresponding flower-middles. The letters and flowers were helpfully color-coded, too, in case she needed any extra hints. It took me ~~a while~~ a billion hours to put together, what with finding a good image of flowers, adding the Arabic letters, printing it, coloring it, laminating it, and cutting out the letter-circles. But I was all excited about how much fun we'd have (and, of course, about how proud of her I'd be when she got the hang of it - sounds like I need to re-read my goal statement yet again), so I didn't mind.

And the outcome? Well. On the bright side, she got the idea right away, and immediately matched up two circles with their flowers (while saying the correct sound). On the less-bright side, two circles is all she did. Then she flicked her hand airily in the manner of a monarch dismissing some poor wretch from his presence, and said, with great finality, "بح" (Egyptian baby-speak for "all done!" or "no more!"). Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. Well, so much for that brilliant idea! I've uploaded the files here in case your tot is any more receptive (the sheet covers س, ب, غ, و and ج).

Next up (this wasn't actually in the same session, but in the following one, to avoid aliph-ba overload), we used round magnets to fill in the dots on giant letters:

(Please excuse shockingly filthy-looking baking sheet. It's not really filthy, just prehistorically ancient.) Being a cheapskate, as usual, I had also opted not to fork out the $15 or so for a set of real magnets like these ones, so instead I bought a $3 pack of magnetic "paper" and cut some circles out of them.

How did it go? Well, not bad. Basbusa got the idea, and we had plenty of opportunities to talk about the "g" and the "gh" (I'm doing sounds rather than letter names), and to discuss green versus red. And I guess it was good for fine motor skills, putting the magnet onto a dot? We got this far...

.... until she came up with a much more interesting use for the dots:

"g" and "gh" might be mildly entertaining, but clearly they can't hold a candle to the joys of sticking things between your toes.

tot school: blot-pictures and hot-vs-cold

2010-02-10T14:24:00.004-05:00

My brilliant plan for this activity was to try to teach Basbusa the difference between "hot" and "warm." At the moment, she usually categorizes anything from lukewarm on upwards as "hot! hot!" (accompanied by much dramatic blowing and pointing), so I thought we could have a cup of ice-water, a cup of warm water, and a cup of hot water, and she could practice identifying which was which.

Well, the general idea worked, but there were a few hitches. It was really quite hard to tell the difference between "hot" and "warm" by touching the outside of the little plastic cups, so I was worried that I'd only increase her hot/warm confusion rather than decreasing it. However, Basbusa helpfully solved this problem for me within about five seconds, when she picked up the cup of warm water and drank it. Well, that solves that problem. So we just played with the "cold" and "hot" cups instead. I would mix them up and circle them around on the tray ("they're spinning! they're turning!" said Basbusa), and then ask her to find the cold one, or the hot one, etc. She would carefully test them with her finger, and point it out for me. I don't think she learned much (since she already knows the difference between hot and cold), but she enjoyed it, and was very cute to see her experimenting like a little scientist to test her materials with her tiny little finger :)

Since we had water conveniently to hand, we next did some scribbling on paper towel (she definitely knows green and pink now! yay!) and then used a dropper to watch what happened when we added water to the scribbles. Basbusa didn't really get the hang of using the dropper, which isn't surprising, but plenty of water got transfered in one way or another. It wasn't a life-altering experience for her, but she was interested enough to keep doing it. Good enough for me!

19 months, and long blog-silence

2010-02-09T14:38:00.006-05:00

It's been forever since I updated, despite the fact that I'm now working part-time. It's partly because, although I do have more time than I used to, it's not actually all that much more time, since most of the reason for cutting back on work was to leave more time for the joys of housework (hmmmmmmmmmm) and childrearing (yay). Plus, actually making these Arabic-language tot-school activities is taking longer than I thought it would. So it's the documentation of all these activities that is falling to the wayside. Oh well, I'll keep trying.

Basbusa, my sweet little munchkin, is getting more and more articulate. She can almost always use words to give you some idea of what's upsetting her when she's having a melt-down, which makes it much easier to help her process the latest trauma of not wanting to come out of the bath, or of wanting to eat Baba's chewing-gum. She's still mostly on one-word communications, but she's starting to put a few pairs together, as in "white headscarf" or "cookie first" (as opposed to the milk I was offering her). Oh, and of course, the ever-present "I want a _____" (which in Arabic is just two words, عايزة _________")

She's becoming more self-aware emotionally, too. When she's getting over an upset, she often observes, "Basbusa crying. Basbusa crying." I've been trying to give her the vocabulary to describe moods, which seems to be sinking in: the other day, as she lay on the carpet howling because I wouldn't let her play with Baba's laptop, she said pitifully between sobs, "angry! angry!"(She doesn't really have full-blown tantrums - they never last long, and she's pretty easy to distract - but she certainly has a mind of her own and objects strenuously and dramatically to having her plans thwarted). Oh, and of course she's known "scared" for quite a while too (she invented her own baby-sign for that one a long time ago, and now knows the word to accompany it). She can communicate her worries quite effectively, as in, for example, "Vaccuum cleaner. Vroooooom. Basbusa scared. Vroooooom. Vaccuum cleaner. Scared," which she reminds me whenever she catches sight of it sitting in the cupboard.

All that playing with rice has paid off hugely - yesterday I was cooking two dinners at once (one for yesterday and one for today), and Basbusa asked to play with the rice after I had taken it out to add to the kosheri. I thought I'd chance it, and would you believe, my angelic little cupcake played with the huge tub of rice for half an hour, without spilling *any* of it? She was scooping and digging and pouring from hand to hand, and didn't make the least bit of mess.

On the "academic" side of things, she now recognizes 7, 8 and 3 fairly reliably, in addition to her favorites 0 and 6. (She has no clue what they actually represent in terms of numbers, of course, but she can find them on elevator buttons and cell phones etc.) She now knows س, و, غ, ج, and ب, and I have a whole bunch of fun activities all laminated and ready to go (and hopefully post about) to reinforce them before we add a few more.

She is loving books more and more every day, to the point that we don't often go more than half an hour without a break for some reading (that's mama's little bookworm!). She's finally gotten into the classic toddler-mode of wanting to have her favorites read to her over and over again, so that The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Owl Babies are now permanently seared into my memory.

Meanwhile, though, she also seems to be picking up Baba's love of computers. She vaguely gets the concept that waving the Wii controllers and pressing the arrow keys causes some kind of motion in computer games, and is getting the hang of the laptop mouse. She's a huge fan of YouTube, which we use to watch animals ("Rooster! Coo-coo-cooooooo! Putin! Putin Baba! Coo-coo-coooooo!"). We hear so much about Putin over here (her pronunciation of "computer") that you'd think we were living in Russia.

She also seems to pick up three or four new English words every time we go over to Mum's, even if we're only there for an hour or two. It's amazing how fast it happens.

Proud mommy-bragging :)

2010-01-20T11:56:00.005-05:00

Basbusa turned 18 months last week, and it's incredible how fast she is picking up new things these days. Her sweet little hands no longer look like soft little starfish, but suddenly have become much older-looking, and every day she gets better at squeezing, twisting, poking, and picking-up.

She's "reading" books independently more and more frequently, and seems to find plenty to look at and point out to herself even without me sitting by to participate and admire.

She has become so accomplished in the matter of pouring and spooning! When we started about two months ago with activities like rice-pouring and lots of water-pouring in the bath, the mess was generally so plentiful and widespread that I never dreamed that she'd have mastered it so soon, especially since we've only concentrated on it specificially a handful of times, and all the rest of her practice has just been real-life experiences. I can hand her a regular cup of milk or juice, and know that she won't spill it unless she gets distracted, and knocks it with a foot while reaching for something else with her hand. She adores helping me make porridge in the mornings, and transfers oatmeal from the giant container into the saucepan with a cup-measure, with only a spoonful or so ending up on the floor. And in the bath, she's a pro, pouring from cup to container to squirty-frog and back again. She's even trying to wash her own hair!

She's such a caring little mama to her dolls and animals. Her Baba let her pick out one of those super-cheap-and-tacky baby-doll sets at Walmart, with a little six-inch plastic dolly and a host of accessories like a potty, a ride-on-duck, some bottles, a bowl with a spoon and fork, etc. Basbusa spends fifteen minutes at a time feeding the baby, sitting it on its duck, putting it to sleep, and wrapping it up in its blanket.

She's doing so well with the potty training! When we go out, I now leave her in undies (rather than a diaper) more often than not, unless I know it will be a very long trip with no access to a bathroom. But we haven't had an accident outside the home yet, and she's doing just fine peeing in restaurant and store bathrooms. At home she almost always uses the potty rather than peeing on the floor. The only two things to watch out for are when she's watching YouTube with Baba - an activity she finds so enthralling that it crowds out everything else - and when she has had massive amounts of juice to drink :)

My sweet little munchkin is getting so good at please and thank-you (well, "so good" in the sense that she said her first un-prompted "please" yesterday, and is happy to repeat "thank-you" when reminded). And as she starts to get the hang of putting sentences together, she's coming up with such heart-melting little statements. Like today at breakfast: "Mama. Kiss. Basbusa kiss mama. Mwah!!"

She's a huge fan of mobile phones, and is starting to recognize numbers as a result. She loves picking out a number on the keypad and seeing it come up on the screen when she presses it. Her favourite by far is the number zero, and she also knows six pretty well (although she sometimes muddles it with nine). Yesterday, I thought I'd introduce a new one, so I started by asking her if she could find a three. I was expecting to have to show it to her, but she went right to it and pressed it!

And also yesterday, she was drawing on a pad of paper, and, as usual, passing me the pen every so often to draw something for her while she watched. So, on one of my turns - having drawn enough cats to last me a lifetime - I drew a letter س , and asked her what it was. She immediately replied, "sssssssssssssssss!". Well, hey! Great! So what about this one? و . "oooooooooooooooooooooo!", she replied. I was almost afraid to push my luck, but tried one more. How about this one, Basbusa? ب "b! b!", she said. Then she took the pen back and started trying to draw ب's of her own :) Awwwwwwwwww, sweet adorable darling little angel-cupcake.

tot school: coin-hunting in rice, and a snowflake thank-you card

2010-01-11T15:47:00.008-05:00

Since playing with rice is still by far Basbusa's favorite tot-school activity, I thought I'd introduce a new twist to it this evening: coin-hunting. I took three pennies and a quarter, and drew around them on an index card, as a visual indication of how many things Basbusa had to look for, and how big they were. Then I hid the coins in the bowl of rice, and Basbusa excavated carefully with a cautious index finger until she found them. She put each one onto a dot on the index card, so that she knew when she had found them all, and then we put the four coins back into the rice again. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

Basbusa loved it, both the finding and the hiding of the coins. She seemed to think it was magical, the way they sank down and disappeared beneath gently-jostled rice :) From my point of view, it was fun for her; it was more sensory exploration with rice; it was a little tiny bit of one-to-one correspondence by putting the coins onto the dots; and it was a chance to talk about big and little as we found either pennies or the quarter. (In other words, my kid played with some rice. I'm not sure whether or not I've gone completely insane with this tot-school stuff.)

Next up, we made a thank-you card for a beautiful set of mini-books which Basbusa received recently. I used this fantastic post from Valerie at the Frugal Family Fun Blog as the inspiration. Amazingly simple and amazingly pretty given that it's created by a toddler! You just use a few bits of tape to make a snowflake on a piece of paper (or a card, in our case), go wild coloring over the whole thing with blues and purples, and then peel away the tape when you're done. (Basbusa scribbled with markers rather than using paints, though, to reduce mess and drying-time.)

Although I love how it turned out, this was totally artwork-for-mom's-sake rather than for Basbusa's. I did the folding of the card, I taped the snowflake, I chose the colors, and I did most of the snowflake-tape-peeling when she was finished. Very cute, but I must remember that making messes, not artwork, is the point, when she's still so young!

tot school philosophy: unschooling?

2010-01-11T10:18:00.004-05:00

Hey, what about "unschooling" for my 18-month-old....? Bing! The little lightbulb above my head just lit up! Took me long enough, considering that "unschooling," in the case of tots, would be also known as "just letting them play around." Only took me about six months of research to stumble over the obvious!

Just to clarify what I'm talking about, though, the article that finally flipped that lightbulb switch for me was this one: the acceptance speech given by a guy called John Gatto when he was accepting the "Teacher of the Year" award for New York City. I found the link on one of my favorite Montessori blogs, What DID we do all day?, but apparently it's a cornerstone of the justification for homeschooling or unschooling for many homeschoolers.

I'm not planning either homeschooling or unschooling, but all the same, I was really interested in his emphasis on the value of allowing the child to pursue her own interests and pick up skills along the way, rather than schooling the child in skills which will be applied to real-life situations at some vague, far-off date. I was pretty convinced by his argument that this kind of learning will probably stick in her mind much better than learning which stems from a pre-set curriculum. Plus, it sounds like I could be more sure that I'm not force-feeding my toddler with random "academic knowledge" if I make sure that the activities I offer her are based around things she is currently interested in.

So what does that mean for us and Tot School? Well, it provides an answer for all my previous worries about what I should be doing when I offer a tot school activity that Basbusa doesn't get the hang of: I should be putting it aside and not even giving it a second thought! So the new plan is to offer lots of variety, but absolutely encourage her to play with the ones she likes best, rather than re-suggesting the ones that she "had difficulty with." And look for ways to base lessons around her current favorite things, whether that be pouring water, cutting bits of paper, or the Hungry Caterpillar. And look for ways to make her favorite activities even more fun and appealing, rather than looking for ways to disguise the ones she doesn't care for in order to trick her into liking them.

Whew! So glad I got that one sorted out in my head! I never felt comfortable doing anything remotely resembling "pushing," but was worried that I was causing her to miss out on all kinds of valuable experiences by not trying to direct her towards activities she's not interested in right now. And even in our tiny smattering of experience so far, I can already see things that ring true from Gatto's article: I was astounded by the number of things she discovered during our rice pouring activity. And although most of my attempts to introduce her to the names of colors have been giant flops so far, she does happily point and say "pink!" when I ask her if she want to wear her pink diaper or her blue one. So, looks like she does get more out of "real life" situations.

We did more rice-pouring last night :)

Tot school: bear-sorting and number puzzle

2009-12-29T11:14:00.005-05:00

So today was yet another day where I was fumbling cluelessly, with no clue how to find the line between playing-and-exploring with a tiny bit of guidance (good), and pushing-and-instructing (bad).

We started out with the Counting Bears ($1 at the dollar store, that wonderful source of cheap tot-school delights). Basbusa loves these guys, because they make a lovely clattering sound when she pours them from cup to cup. When we've used them before, I had plans to try some color sorting, so only put two colors out, but all three times, the joys of bear-pouring completely eclipsed all other possibilities. So this time around, I decided to just go with the flow (of bears), and just let her go nuts with the pouring, while chatting with her about colors a bit as she did it.

Bears were poured back and forth, with much delightful clattering. And then she put a yellow bear in a cup, hunted around a bit, found a second yellow bear, and put it beside the first one. Hmmmm... Spontaneous sorting? Or complete coincidence? I had no clue, but I thought I'd see if we could keep going a bit. So asked if she could find me another yellow one. She did, but wanted to put him in a different cup.

From here on, I'm not sure if I took the right direction or not. I got a bit more involved in giving directions, encouraging her towards the cup we were sorting into when she had found a yellow bear, and, when she picked one of another color, saying something along the lines of "oh look, a red bear! How pretty. But let's not put him in with the yellow ones. Look, see how he's a different color?"

So, here's what we ended up with:

All the yellow bears in the purple cup. Is this a picture of a successful learning experience? Or of childhood exploration being squashed by a narrow-minded, pushy mother? I don't know. I'm sure she's not warped for life - yet - but I wish I had more clue what I'm doing. At least it was good pouring practice, until Mama decided to stick her big nose in.

Next up was her number puzzle.

This is another one where I don't know what I'm doing. So far, she hasn't gotten the hang of puzzles. She can get the pieces close-ish to where they're supposed to be, but she doesn't know how to put them in place, and isn't very interested in trying. With this puzzle in particular, though, we have a game she likes: I sing the chorus of her favorite number-song in Arabic, pointing to each number as I sing it. She steals a number, and then when I get to that point in the song, I make a big deal of being surprised and astonished and confused that I can't go on with my singing. Much giggling ensues, and it gives me plenty of chances to repeat things like, "... six, seven - oh no! where's the 8? where did the 8 go? here's the place for the 8, right here, but the 8 is gone!"

Sometimes I go on to, "Basbusa, do you think you could put that 8 back in it's place? So I could keep singing my nice song?" She makes an attempt, but isn't that interested, so I usually leave it at that. I don't think she gets the point, and it seems silly to go through motions that are meaningless to her.

So, maybe my baby just hasn't gotten to the "puzzles" stage of development yet, or maybe I'm failing to endow her with puzzle-solving skills. Anyone know?

Tot school: (non)sorting and some engineering

2009-12-27T06:32:00.009-05:00

My "official" tot school session wasn't really very successful today. Or maybe I should say, it didn't go as I had been planning. I hadn't even been planning to have it at all today, actually, but Basbusa spotted the materials I had been planning to use for sorting, and wanted to play with them. When I said that we wouldn't play with those now, but we would the next time we did "school," she ran to our tot-school-corner and started tugging on the mat we spread out during "school time." So ok, I guess "school time" just arrived :)

It didn't work out phenominally well, though. I was using a kind of mini-peg-board thing that that my husband picked up at a flea market. Basbusa has played with it several times before, sometimes just with pegs to put in and take out, and sometimes with elastic bands for looping around the pegs, but she hasn't been wild about it either way (read: lost interest after about 30 seconds).

This time, I was hoping we could put all the blue pegs in one board, and all the red ones in another. Basbusa had no interest whatsoever in this plan. So far, she has had the same reaction to any sorting activity, no matter how appealing the materials. I don't really understand it, because she does seem to get the concept in other contexts - she can pick all the peas out of a veggie mix with no problem, so as to avoid eating any corn, for example. (That's "sorting," right?) But when it's a goal for its own sake, she either doesn't get what I'm talking about, or else has some objection to doing it, I'm not sure which. Maybe she just doesn't see the point?

So, complete failure of the sorting activity. On the other hand, she spent a total of about 40 minutes playing with these "toys":

A padlock and a mini-screwdriver set (I think it's supposed to be an eyeglass repair kit). She spent forever practicing putting the key in the lock and taking it out again, and then opening and trying (unsuccessfully) to close the padlock itself. The screwdriver set has five teeny-weeny little heads, which she took out of their holders and replaced about five thousand times, before figuring out that they could each be inserted into the screwdriver-handle, opening up a whole new world of putting-in-and-taking-out.

So, I'm calling this one practice for fine-motor skills, and an introduction to engineering :)

Tot-school: cheerio beading and rice pouring

2009-12-23T09:41:00.010-05:00

Yesterday we started off with a (cheapskate) version of beading: cheerios on a (new) shoelace.

I'd seen many varieties of beading activities on other blogs, which all seemed to go well. Basbusa loves cheerios, and is a huge fan of plugging cell-phone-chargers into cell phones or computer-headphones into computers, so she should love this one, right? Well..... not so much, it turns out. She put a few cheerios onto the lace, and was quite enthusiastic about taking the cheerios off the lace again, when I did a few demo-beadings, but it wasn't long before she was pointing to all her favorite animals on the alphabet chart and feeding them cheerios instead. "Llama! eat! nom-nom-nom-nom... Donkey!! ee-awwww, ee-awww.... eat! Donkey! nom-nom-nom."

Once the animal alphabet chart had had its fill of cheerios, she pointed up to where I had ever-so-sneakily hidden activity number two (note to self: be sneakier in future), and said, "Rice!" Ohhhhkay then. Rice it is.

We've done this one once before. Again, I was envisioning all kinds of pouring and scooping activities the first time I tried it, inspired by blogs everywhere, so I had collected a variety of spoons and scoopy-things and cups. Result? Confusion. Basbusa was keen on investigating the rice, but all the scoopers and stirrers seemed to get in the way of whatever plans she had in her little head. I was sure, at the very least, that she'd enjoy learning how to scoop up a big cupful of rice and pour it back into the bowl again; but no, what she wanted was to use her hands to transfer rice from the big bowl into a smaller one.

So this time, I was smarter: we had a big bowl containing just rice and one little bowl. She loved it! And it was fascinating to watch how many things she learned just with those simple tools. She spent the first ten minutes or so just transfering rice again, finding out what kind of hand and finger-motions worked best for picking it up and carrying it, and which worked best for pouring it out again. (I'd never noticed - the sound of rice falling quickly is actually quite different from the sound of rice falling a few grains at a time.) And what worked best for the little bowl? Holding it in her other hand? Putting it inside the big bowl (my favorite)? Putting it on the floor beside her (her favorite - me, not so much... rice everywhere...)?

Then she noticed that the big bowl actually has pictures of fruit on the bottom, and that by pushing the rice aside she could see them. Much excited excavation followed, with rice flying around her ears. Uh-oh, Basbusa! Just a moment, sit over here for a minute; we'd better do some picking-up. "NO!!! No-no-no! NO! Rice! Rice!!! No!!!!" *

Play resumed after we had had a discussion about having to pick up the rice first, and that we'd be playing with the rice again afterwards. This sequence of events seemed to make a big impression, because she was being much more careful when she got back to her rice-excavation, trying out different motions to see how she could toss the rice around without letting it fall outside of the bowl.

So, a successful session overall, I think? Don't know what went wrong with the cheerios, but I'll give it another try in a few days. And the finding-things-in-rice seems to have been a big hit - maybe I should try one of these I-Spy bottles that are showing up all over the tot-school blogosphere?

* Note - we only speak Arabic with Basbusa, and so far, that's all she speaks (except, mysteriously, for the word "no", which she says in English every single time). So the conversations reported here are translations, not the originals :)

Tot School: Our school-mat schedule

2009-12-23T09:16:00.006-05:00

When I first started reading tot-school blogs, I was always interested in hearing about the mechanics of how the process worked, especially with very little babies (Basbusa isn't quite one and a half yet). So, in case anyone else is wondering the same thing, here is how we're going about tot-school at the moment.

While I'm still working full-time, Basbusa and I usually have tot school in the evenings, right after dinner but before she starts getting sleepy. (We don't do it every day - maybe three times a week, depending on busy-ness and sleepiness?)

Our apartment is a one-bedroom, so we don't have anything remotely like a dedicated schoolroom, or even a school area. What we do have is a big plastic mat, and an Arabic alphabet poster on the wall of the bedroom, at toddler-height. So when it's time for school, we spread the mat on the floor beside the poster, and that's our school area. I'm hoping that having a defined space will both signal to Basbusa that we're about to start activities, and help to confine the mess when we're using something that spills or sticks or stains. Basbusa can get up and wander off whenever she likes, but the materials we're using stay on the mat. I think it's working so far: yesterday, I when I said, "Hey, want to go do some school?", Basbusa said "School! School!" and ran to get the mat out from under the dresser.

I've seen lots of blogs where the week's activities are all laid out on a special shelf, and the tot picks which one to play with. I loved the idea, so I tried something similar at first, but I think maybe Basbusa's too little for so much self-guidance? Having many options resulted in much excitement, but only a few seconds spent with any one thing. So now, I pick two activities ahead of time, and offer them to her one at a time. (Hmmmm..... in other words, self-guidance resulted in choices that weren't what I had in mind, which is probably the whole point of self-guidance.... Hmmmm.... maybe I'll try it again once we get into a school-time routine....)

In terms of length, once she loses interest in the first activity - after thirty seconds or after fifteen minutes - I bring out the second. Once she's done with that one, then we're finished with school for the day. Or, once she hears Baba doing something interesting in the kitchen and scampers off to investigate. Or if I've timed things too close to bedtime, and she starts fussing and yawning in the middle of it. So far, our "tot school" sessions have ranged from about ten minutes to about 40, if I happen to pick two things she loves and the timing is right.

I'm very interested to hear what other moms are doing (or have done) with their under-twos in terms of set-up and timing?

That's my baby!

2009-12-22T15:51:00.002-05:00

So yesterday evening, after a million delays in leaving the house, we didn't start our errands until 6:30pm. As I tucked Basbusa into her carseat after the second-to-last stop, I told her we were going to the library next.

"Library? Library?" Yes, 7bibet mama, the library.

I then proceded to get lost twice, with the result that Basbusa was fast asleep and deep in dreamland by the time we arrived at the library at almost 8pm. Awakened by a freezing blast of wintry air as I opened the door, she was less than thrilled, and began to protest vigorously, until I said we were at the library.

"Library? Library!!!" Yes, ya ru7i, the library :)

We spent 45 minutes browsing among books and playing with the puppet theater in the toddler area, and came away with a stack of new selections. I strapped her back in her carseat, and before I had made my way around to the driver's seat, she already had her nose stuck in a book.

That's my baby :)

Also: Huge thanks to our glorious local public library, which is actually OPEN at 8pm! Bless them.

"Muslim" craft ideas... hmmmm....

2009-12-22T12:36:00.004-05:00

Inspiring as all my bookmarked mama-blogs are, there's one area where their creativity points to a hole rather than a highlight in my own tot-school plans: holiday crafts. I can't even count the number of adorable, fun, holiday-spirit-infused, toddler-friendly Christmas crafts I've seen posted over the past few weeks, everything from Rudolph sugar-cookies to personalized tree decorations. I'm sure when Easter rolls around, there will be eggs and bunnies galore! But so far, at least, my list of possible Eid-related crafts is ... well... isn't, would be the best way to put it.

So, ok, let's say it's an opportunity rather than an obstacle. I can use the next few years to be on the look-out for ideas I can adapt, and by the time Basbusa gets old enough to have a clue what the heck a holiday even is, I'll have a whole list of fun projects lined up (insha'Allah).

We can do "seasonal" crafts, like spring/summer/fall/winter... We can do a whole bunch of lantern-related things for Ramadan, I guess... We could do Ramadan calendars instead of Advent calendars... Eid al Adha is a bit tricker, though. There isn't a set of associated icons that adapt naturally to toddler crafts. ("Happy Eid!" ads on TV in Egypt tend to feature cartoon sheep trotting around, which, clearly, they only do until they meet their destiny on Eid morning. Hmmm. Haven't figured out how to translate that into a craft project yet, without involving an awful lot of red ketchup.)

And what about Halloween and Thanksgiving crafts? Hmmm. I know the orthodox answer on Halloween, in any case, although I haven't completely figured out my own position yet. But Thanksgiving? Should be fine, right? Can anyone see anything haram in a toddler making a bunch of turkey-related handprints...?

A note on languages: We're mostly Arabic-only

2009-12-22T11:33:00.000-05:00

Although I translate Basbusa's comments for the purposes of this blog, she actually speaks Arabic, since that's the only language we use with her at this point.

My own first language is English, and although I enjoyed the various languages I studied at school at various points, I didn't start learning Arabic until my senior year of college. After a bunch of studying, a whole lot of immersion in Arabic-only environments, a master's degree, a husband who spoke no English when I met him, and a job focused on translating Arabic newspapers, I'm now fluent (more or less) in Egyptian Arabic. My husband didn't start learning English until a few years ago.

Since we're living in the US, we're speaking only Arabic with Basbusa (if/when we move back to Egypt, I'll switch over to English-only). She gets exposure to English from my parents and sister, and, as she gets older, from the whole rest of the world around her, I'm sure!

Tot School Goals - Note to Self

2009-12-22T09:27:00.006-05:00

I'm writing this post as a reminder to myself, which I fear will be all too necessary: that the point of Tot School is not to teach Basbusa her letters and numbers faster than anybody else!! That is not the point! NOT what we're aiming at!

Are we quite clear on that? Yes? Good.

Am I going to forget this every single time I read about another toddler who is writing a doctoral thesis already? Probably. And then what am I going to do? Go running to pull out the letter-matching games and counting bears? No! I'm going to re-read this post and remind myself, yet again, that winning the academic-smarts race is not the point.

She's one and a half. She has no need whatsoever, for reading or number skills at this point. She does not have a checkbook to balance; she does not need to read street-signs as she drives around the apartment on her plastic car. What she does need is to learn how much joy there is in books; how many fascinating patterns and connections there are in the world around her; and the confidence that she, too, can enjoy the process of creating things. That's the point.

Note to self: please take note of note to self!