• Us
  • It was really easy to use pandas in Python to pivot a table. I’m glad I’m doing this in code instead of in spreadsheets!
  • I drafted thank you cards on my phone at night and then wrote them while A- was at kindergarten readiness class. It was nice to put some thought into it.
  • While A- played with H-, I helped Melissa set up email and think about business.
  • We tested the streaming setup for Emacs Conf.
• Fine motor
  • A- scribbled loops.
• Language
  • “What do you want to bring for show and tell today? Sheep or water bottle?” “Both. Sheep is for show and tell, and water bottle is for snack time. That’s pretty reasonable.”
  • A- made up a rhyming song.
  • A- delighted in pointing out rhyming words.
  • A- looked at the sign on the streetcar. “Why does the streetcar have ‘POP’?” I explained that POP stands for proof of payment. She’s reading signs!
• Self-care and independence
  • W- observed that A- gets a little more talkative when she’s sick. When the babysitter arrived, A- announced, “I’m more chatty than normal.”
• Emotion
  • A- had a tantrum about not wanting to walk and not wanting to feed herself. She said, “I don’t like walking. it wastes my energy.” I held firm, and she eventually calmed down.
• Social
  • We established firmer boundaries about picking A- up to calm her down when she’s upset. She’s getting heavier, so it’s not working so well for me, and I also want to help her get better at calming down on her own. I said I can snuggle her while sitting down if she needs a hug, but carrying her is for when we feel good about each other and I have lots of energy.
  • H- was having a hard time on the playdate. I asked A- if she wanted to wrap up. She said, “I want to wait for H- to calm down and then play after.”
  • A- often talks about bucket filling and bucket dipping. I’m glad we followed Kathy’s recommendation to check out “Have You Filled a Bucket Today?”, since it seems to give her useful words for describing social behaviour.
  • We made thank you cards and gifts for A-‘s teachers. A- insisted on giving them the gift cards herself, and she also dictated her own cards to give in addition to the ones I wrote.
  • “I want my fingernails to be pretty for people. I should paint my fingernails at home soon.”
  • We had a group video chat with A-‘s Lola and Tita Kathy. A- was mostly watching them catch up. Lola asked Tita Kathy, “Do you want me to send dried mangoes over for Christmas?” A- said, “Hmm. Of course.”
  • A- was really set on going on a car trip with W- and the babysitter, so they came along as W- took care of a few errands.
  • “Now that I’ve tried it, it’s my favourite.”
• Cognition
  • The family math program session focused on comparison words (small, smaller, smallest; big, bigger, biggest; …). It was a good reminder to work those words into playdough time. There was a shape-sorting activity and a colour-sorting activity where kids picked one type of thing to collect and then they scrambled to get those things from a pile on the floor. The kids also glued paper-and-pompom fruit trees with sequences of numbers.
  • I asked the teacher about structured learning time. Seems like a good idea to start with something small (maybe 5-10 minutes), fun, and interesting, and then make that kind of planned activity part of the routine. I can also do a lot by infusing more learning into A-‘s free play time at drop-in centres. I wonder if I should have a little structured tracing time every day so that I can help A- learn how to write her name…
  • I thought the RelationShapes app was just a little too advanced for A- because resizing and rotating the shapes is a little hard for her, and she tends to move things around randomly or rely on the magic wand to give her clues. She revisited some earlier levels, though, and she was able to do them with just a bit of verbal prompting. She’s curious about the game, so it might be something handy to keep around. I wonder if there’s a dice-based board game I can have on my phone that requires us to move tokens, or if it makes sense to just have a random number generator and draw the board on my sketchpad.
• World
  • H- and A- played with the screen door, pouring and spraying water on it. They tried many interesting things.

Blog posts

• Learning and teaching early math
• 2019-10-21 Emacs news

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