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Thursday, January 27, 2011

Down to 4 & Toddler Preoccupations

I am trying to go full time with 4 pills of hydrocortisone starting today. It's about as much fun as you would expect.

I like the comment on the previous post from Bad Turns talking about doctor visits as a one off.

I DO feel like my care is a series of bad one-night stands, where there's no history factored in at all to our encounters. No one remembers what came before or even what they said. Worse they contradict themselves, then deny they do so and then dismiss me because to acknowledge what I'm saying would be to admit they aren't paying attention.

It's a perverse dementia where every time they see me, it's the very first time.

I am the only one providing continuity of care.

That is so so wrong.

So the practice of modern medicine sucks. Anything else new?

Why yes. Glad you asked.

The toddler is after to me to teach her how to read. She's 3. She has the foundation to read (knows her letters and phonics and has been reading some words since the age of 2) but I have no idea how to teach her how to read. I just taught myself.

And she can be a bit of a perfectionist and tantrums when she can't do things exactly right. Meaning she's a prickly pear.

I'm a little lost here.

Of course, I'm delighted. I love nothing more than to read and to raise a fellow bibliophile is a dream come true. I just don't know what I'm doing. I've been waiting for this moment, when she would combine her knowledge of phonics with a driving need to read, I just thought she would figure it out on her own.

She also fell down the stairs again. Just a couple steps. No blood. But sheesh. Stop already.

The physical therapist is bumping her up to bi-weekly and we may go weekly for a while. My frustration is, if she's not in therapy (and we had missed some sessions due to the holidays and illness) she regresses. So I feel like we're doomed to forever be in therapy which is super expensive and not yielding permanent results.

The whole thing is so frustrating.

3 comments:

  1. Ok, so I've never taught anyone to read but I took a lot of classes on reading acquisition in grad school. LOL, totally makes me an expert! Anyhow, some of the literature (written by people who did in fact teach children to read) suggests that in addition to alphabet familiarity and general "phonics" (knowing what sounds letters make) another very key element is phonological awareness. This takes the form of awareness that words can be decomposed into elements like sylllables (early awareness); sub-syllable chunks (intermediate) like breaking the "onset" off from the "rhyme" of the syllable (st+op = "stop", p+op = "pop"); and phoneme chunks (advanced). Phonemes are the elements that are supposed to, in languages more suited to literacy than English, map onto letters. Phoneme awareness would be indicated if a person can tell you that the sound "s" in front of the sound "top" sounds like "stop".

    So, because of that finding, there are some reading development curricula which include word games where kids are encouraged to break apart and add together sounds to make words. The idea being that it would help them to learn to read if they can successfully identify the phonological elements (phonemes) that the letters will need to be mapped onto and off of once they encounter a word in print.

    And once they are at the early reading stage, I guess it's best if early words are simple and don't have crazy crap like "ch" and "sh" in them, where one sound maps onto two letters...or "x" where two sounds map onto one letter.

    Boy, I'm probably coming across like a total tool!

    Good luck, it sounds like it could be fun (as well as frustrating at times).

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for all the info. Unfortunately, we're more at the level of she's 3. Three year olds are whiny. At least mine is! Yesterday she literally ran screaming from the room when I set up the magnetic board with letters to work on -at words (mat, cat, sat, hat, fat etc...).

    I'm still not clear on what mortal sin I committed to incite that reaction.

    For now, I'm using the Usborne early phonics readers, incorporating them into our reading and asking her to find words/say words she knows.

    M

    ReplyDelete
  3. LOL - Don't personally know a lot of 3 year olds but from what I've heard from my child rearing friends, it's not just yours.

    ReplyDelete

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