Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Learning How To Read

Of all the various parts of homeschooling, the most challenging for me with both boys has been teaching them how to read. It's pretty fundamental, you don't want to screw it up. Both of my boys are now beautiful readers, but at the time they were starting out it was frustrating for me. You see, I can remember learning math, I can remember the tricks I learned that helped me do things in math, but I don't remember learning how to read. As far back as my brain can reach, I always just knew to do it. So I felt pretty useless most of the time with nothing more helpful to offer than "sound it out". Both of them used the same technique that wasn't giving them particularly good results: look at the beginning of the word and the end of the word and guess the rest. Particularly with big words they would do this guessing method.
.
(For those that get all geeky on curricula like I do and what to know what books I used, for Aidan it was Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, although we washed out at about lesson 50. We switched to Phonics Pathways and just read a lot of easy readers from the library, which wildly vary in usability (I particularly hate the ones that actually encourage a kid who's learning how to read to guess at words by looking at the pictures. Ugh.). For Oliver I used The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading, which I liked quite a bit. If it has a fault it's been too thorough. It covers enough material to make an 8-year-old's head explode. We still used Phonics Pathways because it's such a nice lead-in the spelling. OK, schoolie geek moment over).
.
It's hard to recreate the learning how to read experience. I have over my lifetime learned a few other alphabets, but they always can in context of learning a whole other language. The challenge of that really outweighs the challenge of sounding out the words. That, and most languages are a lot more phonetic than English, so you really can just sound them out and get it right on the first try.
About 18 months ago, I started learning Hindi and with it the Devanagari writing system. Which is really elegant and easy to learn. As I said, once you know what the letters are you can just sound it out:
.
मुझे आइस क्रीम पसन्द है
.
But I was learning the language at the same time as the letters so I could sound it out, but I still had to look everything up. It was hard to gauge there how my brain was processing just the reading. Fast forward to just after Christmas time. I have a shiny new Teach Yourself Urdu book. Urdu is the language of Pakistan and is nearly identical to Hindi. There are more Persians words and fewer Sanskrit ones, but the main difference is that Urdu isn't written in Devanagari, it's written in a modified Arabic script. And it's so beautiful you can see why they use it for decoration:
.
مجھےآس کريم پسند ہے
.
(It's looks prettier written than typed. And not in my writing; my penmanship in any language is severely challenged).
.
This was a new experience for me, learning how to read a language in which I already had a working vocabulary of about 2500 words (everything in a beginner's book like this one plus some extra). I had the chance now to observe my own skills at learning how to read. And do you know what I caught myself doing?
.
Looking at the beginnings of words and looking at the ends of words and guessing what comes between. *Sigh* My guessing was better than theirs, surely, but only because I'm dealing with a much smaller pool of potential guesses. Although it would help their technique if they would only guess words that actually made sense with the sentence they're reading.
.
(Both the sentences above say "I like ice cream." Which, aside from being true, I picked because it was sentences like this that always tickled me when I was in the early, carefully sound out each character phase. It says "mujhe ais kreem pasand hai". Imagine sounding it out: "ai-s kr-ee-m, oh hey, that says ice cream!" Don't you just love loan words?)

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Movies in March

Being cash-strapped I've taken to checking out DVDs from the library, which always involves a wait and they don't have a particularly good way of browsing. You pretty much have to know what you want and see if they've got it. Still, free.

I got The Footlight Parade just to see the synchronized swimming number. I was surprised to see James Cagney in it; I associate him so much with gangster roles that I wasn't expecting to find him in a musical. He and the actress who played his secretary had a nice rapport, and I enjoyed this movie (although the synochronized swimming segment did inspire a bit of cattiness, pointing out who wasn't where she was supposed to be).

His Girl Friday was fun as well. This movie I've heard praised all over for its sharp dialogue, and it has that in spades.

Gandhi we watched together as family, sort of. Oliver conked out 20 minutes in and slept for the last 2 hours of movie (I blame the layer cake. We don't eat much sugar around these parts, and when we do it knocks us all out). I'd never seen this movie before (although I've seen a couple of movies about Bhaghat Singh). I was surprised by how much Aidan enjoyed it, but it really made an impression on him. It's been a bit more than a month since we watched it and he's still talking about things Gandhi said and did.

Freaky Friday we caught on TV, the remake with Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsey Lohan. I'd never seen the original although I read a book version once in middle school. This was another one that Aidan really liked. I thought the two actresses did a terrific job of being each other. It's kind of a shame that these days Lindsey Lohan is mostly famous for being famous; she had the chops to go another way, I think.

Flyboys was a movie the rest of the family had already watched before but for some reason thought that I would want to see it (actually, I think that reason might be named James Franco). I'm not saying this movie is predictable, but I did amuse my boys by accurately guessing every plot twist and often paraphrasing the actual dialogue before it was spoken. I think it was the point where Franco's character and another guy crashlanded and I foresaw waking up in a whorehouse, meeting a girl he liked, and having that girl turn out not to be a whore because heroes don't fall for whores that really put it over the top. Apparently the planes aren't particularly accurate either, although that's more my husband's realm of expertise rather than mine. There is clearly a good movie to be made about these pillots, a Band of Brothers type movie about what it was really like. This isn't it. (Although it's hard to truly hate a movie where someone kamikazes a German Zeppelin).

I had a few things on preorder from Amazon.com that came this month as well. Baz Luhrmann's Australia I thoroughly enjoyed. After reading the description on the back of the box I was worried, it sounded like it would be kinda hokey, but it was just so perfect. And the kid playing the lead role of the half-aborigine orphan had such a wonderfully expressive face. Plus, Hugh Jackman. Can't go wrong with Hugh Jackman.

Quantum of Solace was just as awesome as I had been told.

BSG Season 4.0, being the first half of the fourth season. I'm starting to get a bad feeling for where all this is going. And as much as I dutifully avoid spoilers for this show and Lost, I've caught the phrase "deus ex machina" a few too many times in blogs about how the season wrapped up. I can see where a religion focused on total forgiveness (and in particular the you, like Kevin Bacon in Murder in the First, were just a tool/weapon defense) would appeal to Gaius Baltar. And I always love how he starts out conning others and inevitably ends up believing his own con (his character is the core of the show for me). But I don't see how this religion is going to appeal to the thousands of other survivors. I don't see how it's going to provide the sort of meaning they would be looking for, to put what happened to them in context. I wished it had been thought through just a little bit more.

Lastly I'll mention Sita Sings the Blues, a truly wonderful piece of filmmaking. It's a shame that legal snafus kept this out of theaters (and out of award consideration), but on the plus side, we can all see it for free on the internet. (It's here). I love the story. It's just my sort of thing, someone in the present finding deep personal meaning in a very old story, in this case the Ramayan. And I love the different animations she uses for the different aspects of the story, the squigglevision for the present day, the Mughal-style paintings from the Ramayan reenactments, the Betty Boop style for the depression-era songs. But my favorite are the shadow puppets who represent her three friends trying to remember the details of the story with much debating and correcting. The boys liked this one too, well enough to ask to see it again.

So this month's video segment is from Sita Sings the Blues. I loved the "Agni Pariksha (Sita's Fire)" segment the best but can't find a clip of just that bit on YouTube. (It is here, but you have to skip up to 7:20 to see it). In the meantime, here is the opening. I love how all the Hindu imagery is used without any explanation. It's fascinating even if you don't know quite what it all means:



Friday, April 10, 2009

My most popular post EVAH

Is this one: http://macleod424.blogspot.com/2006/12/for-fans-of-avatar-last-airbender-only.html. It gets multiple hits every day from Google Images. Which is kind of funny. A few of them even click around and look at some other posts. So welcome, fans of Avatar, or just fans of Uncle Iroh.

Now I'm off to have some tea, and then it's back to the novel revisions. Hoping to be done before May (*fingers crossed*).

Books in March

Mostly Niven this month, namely: Protector, Tales of Known Space, The Shape of Space, The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton, The Patchwork Girl, Flatlander, and Fleet of Worlds. A few of these were story collections that had some overlap (Flatlander, for instance, contains all the stories from Long ARM plus the novella The Patchwork Girl plus one extra, very minor Gil Hamilton story). I like Niven less the more I read. The ideas are cool but the characters completely fail to engage me. Too many women with stripper names (Feather, Taffy, Teela, ugh). Both the Kzin and the Puppeteers are races where only the males are sentient - what's up with that? I'm hoping as I go that there's an explanation for that amazing coincidence, because otherwise it's just plain hateful.

Mostly I'm grumpy because Jo Walton at Tor.com is re-reading all of Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan books and she's giving me an itch to do the same. I think I'll make that my reward for persevering with my goal to read all Niven.

I also read two more books on slums (novel research). Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World is by Robert Neuwirth, who spent months living in the squatter communities of Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, Nairobi and Istanbul. This book was very interesting and an eye-opener. For one, he advocates calling them squatter communities and not slums, and I can see his point. Many of these places don't really deserve the term "slum" for one, but on the other hand thinking of them as squatters puts them in an historical context (and Neuwirth does, with stories of how the US was shaped by squatters). Highly recommend this one.

Planet of Slums by Mike Davis was also completely engrossing but deeply upsetting, both for its descriptions of what life is like in these places but also for how little hope there is for change (he details exactly how every prior effort to fix things has mostly benefited the wrong people and made life worse for those they were meant to help). A good book, but not a particularly empowering one.