My daughter and I had lunch with Raffaella, her old braillest from preschool, today. My daughter’s memory is interesting and is typical of young children in that people who were key and prevalent in their lives for a significant period aren’t necessarily people they remember. My daughter’s beloved Children’s House teacher, for example, who she was with for three years, she didn’t even remember when I mentioned her some time back. But Raffaella, who only spent two hours with her each week for a year-and-a-half before she went to elementary school, she immediately remembered.
Raffaella met us at Pei Wei and had a present of a sequined, unicorn mini-backpack for my daughter. We hugged and caught up on things both from my daughter talking about school, our fun vacation and adult things. Raffaella works very hard. The public school system has asked more of her than she can possibly accomplish in a week.
She provides visual impairment services to itinerant student in preschool, meaning students that aren’t in a VI specific school. A school had closed and she was saddled with more students—students she has to drive to every day to work with. There were varying schools but even with the drive time, she couldn’t be there when it was circle time, lunch time, recess or nap time. Fitting in six student sessions every day across schools meeting within those times was challenging enough. But that was only the rewarding part of her job.
She loves working with the students. It’s all the paperwork, staff meetings, evaluations, IEP meetings and student assessments, and other preliminary work required to have those meetings that made her job nigh impossible to do without lots of weekend work. Many of those meetings could be four hours long and as a recipient of an IEP, there is a lot of work to just get to the meeting alone. I don’t know how she, or any of them do it.
Couple that with angry parents who, for whatever reason, threaten to sue the school system. I can’t understand that personally, but apparently it’s not uncommon for parents to become that angry, even though the teachers and professionals decided to enter the field because they want to help children learn. As my mother and father told me when I was young (they were both school teachers): “be whatever you want to be when you grow up. We love what we do, but there’s no money in education.” They loved teaching students, helping them learn.
So it baffles me to no end why there is so much strife over IEPs and teachers. To be sure, I think we have the best teachers, but I realistically know there are many talented people in the field of education, all wanting to do the very best to help our small beings become the best they can be. But I’m on a soapbox again and that wasn’t the point of this post at all. I’m realizing this because I haven’t even gotten to the subject the blog post title is about. So let me step off the box, closing with that our lunch was lovely and we plan to get together again in the future.
My daughter and I got home and I asked her if she wanted to work on some origami models. She’s been obsessed with something called the “Sonobe Unit,” a seven-fold model that can be made in bulk and put together to make different shapes. This is called “Modular Origami” in which modules are made and then combined into a larger object like a box, ring or ball.
She’s made so many of these units, working on her accuracy, that I just stopped putting them together until I got direction from her. Three make a tetrahedron, six make a cube, nine make two connecting cubes, twelve make a ball and thirty make a bigger, more impressive ball. Her accuracy isn’t ideal, but it’s getting better. I’ve been trying to come up with ways to help her fold without being able to see the creases, which are sometimes hard to feel.
She and I have also been working on our terminology. It is very easy for me to show you what to fold when you can look at my version of the model and watch me move the paper into position. It is, on the other hand, much more challenging to figure out what I mean when you have to touch the paper to see what I’m doing. I can make the fold on her paper, but that does the job for her and that’s no better.
We’ve been working on paper orientation terms such as does bottom mean the bottom area of the paper or underneath? Ways to define where on the paper such as “raw edge” versus “folded edge”. She knows what a mountain fold and a valley fold are now and understands that all folds are both, it just depends on how you have the fold oriented as it makes a V in one direction (valley) but flipped over, that same fold makes a ^ mountain.
There is a popular origami creator I follow on YouTube. He’s very prolific, coming out with models ranging from simple to complex, funny or action models and a lot related to current pop culture. His videos clearly show how to fold the models, but the number of times he says, “right here” in each video is easily over fifty for the longer ones. I can’t do that with my daughter. I have to reference known landmarks such as the last fold we made or other known area she can find. Then I need to clearly define what to do next in words, so she can do the fold herself.
I do have to show her things, but once she understands what I’m asking for, she can do it herself. Today we alternated with her inventing models, mostly of the airplane or flower variety and me teaching her things like a crab, pencil, several bases and then finally, the flapping bird. This was the most complicated model she’s made and it involved some frustration to the both of us from a communication standpoint. But when she was done and I showed her the wings, head, tail and how you cold hold it and make it flap, she said, “I’m gonna go show daddy my new origami. And I might even put it on Facebook.” (she doesn’t have a Facebook account.)
The Big Boy Update: Dear husband, Nana, Papa, Mimi, Gramps and anyone else who is going to read this that might talk to my son: I am not telling this story. Son, I hope you can forgive me for telling the story when you’re older and read this. Yesterday Shane took my son to the trampoline place. She asked him to do something he didn’t want to do—twice. My son said, “bitch” under his breath as he consented and left the area. She heard him although he denied saying it. She made him sit on the sidelines, doing nothing until she said he was, “bored to tears”. She told him he was never, ever to say that again. She’s great. She handled it so well. Better than I would have, probably, if I’d heard him call her that.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter and I are trying to figure out ways for me to show her things. This goes beyond origami and is a bit of a sticking point with us. Instead of letting you show you, as soon as you start to try, she makes her first guess. She will do this repeatedly, even if I say, “let me know when you’re done guessing and would like me to show you.” When she’s in a receptive mood things work well, but she’s strong headed and likes to figure things out. Not being able to see, she doesn’t know if her guessing is way off. So we’re working on it. I want her to not be frustrated. She gets very excited when she’s figured something out or learned something new and can go and repeat it. Case in point, she’s been folding little squares non-stop for close to a week now.
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