Regardless of why you’re here, thanks for taking three minutes of your day to read about the trials, tribulations and hopefully as much in the way of cute and funny things that happen with my family and above all, my children.
Now, on to today’s post. We get lots of work home from my daughter’s school. To say that public school is different than Montessori school would be an understatement. Are both children learning? Absolutely, but the route they’re taking to get there is very different. Different still is the way my daughter has to “consume” the school work. First grade has far more work than kindergarten, but fortunately for us we have been given some very dedicated professionals in the field of vision impairment that are working to help my daughter be not only successful, but to excel.
My daughter doesn’t have a learning disability, she has a sensory impairment. He ability to learn is just fine, provided the materials can be given to her in a fashion she can understand them. The work to convert the materials is fairly daunting and impressive. To say we are grateful to our great team of VI teachers would be an understatement.
Take last week’s math work the sighted students did:
Twelve problems, front and back of one page. The child looks at the problem and enters the three numbers in the provided fields below. But if you can’t see, what does your personal, handmade work from your braillest look like?
The top of the page says, “Fun Frames” and then the next two lines have the same text as the printed version, explaining what to do. The picture shows problems one and two. There were six pages just like this one with two problems on each. The full braille cells (six dots) represent the twenty spaces. The stickers represent the number my daughter needed to count.
For her to write her answer, there was a second, answer sheet. She rolled that into her brailler, found the “1. tens ones = “ line. She spaced over to the blank areas and typed the answers in the blank areas between the words and symbols. And she got them all correct.
It’s a lot of work to prepare her materials, but it helps her grasp the math concepts tactilely. To compare, everything in the math world in a Montessori school also has a physical medium component. I’ve written a few posts on work my son has done that has a physical representation to the concept itself. It’s all very interesting to me.
My daughter will soon move into traditional math problems using an abacus more. She already uses one now and knows the numeric operators in braille for plus, minus, multiplication and equals. It’s fun to watch both children learn. And it’s nice they both enjoy learning.
The Big Boy Update: My son has been doing a lot of math work on the iPad to gain screen time (well worth the bribery price in my opinion, it’s making a difference). Today when he came home from school he asked me if he earned screen time from the math work he did at school—because he did forty-five minutes worth. “Unfortunately, no”, I told him.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter got home from school and went outside with her brother. Thirty minutes later the music therapist arrived just as my daughter, son and friend, Keira, came up the basement stairs. When I said it was time for music my daughter sighed and said, “oh. How embarrassing.” She then said she had wanted to play with Keira, so Keira and her brother got invited to music class, which was fine by me.
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