it’s so amazing the differences between children.
layla loves to write. she spends most of her time making cards lately. her favorites are happy birthday and happy valentine’s day cards. (not sure why she’s thinking of valentine’s day right now, but whatever.) she doesn’t know how to ‘spell’ per se, but if you tell her the letters, she can write the word. well, i finally got so sick of telling her how to spell these ten thousand times a day, so i wrote it on a piece of paper for her to copy and stuck it to the lid of her box of markers.
well, just this morning, she’s sitting at the table with a pencil and a piece of paper (no box of markers), writing a valentine’s card. she says to me, “i can’t remember the rest of the letters.” so i look at what’s she’s got and see that she’s written HAPPY VALEN… wow! all that from memory. so then i say the next part of it, but not with letters. i give her the sounds and she gets all the letters right (i told her about the silent E) in valentine’s and day. she’s 4!
this totally blows my mind because i never could have done something like that with shane. that sort of thing would still frustrate him and he’s 10!
first of all, he never would have been voluntarily writing anything. he hates that. also, if he HAD to write something down, he would have wanted to know EXACTLY what letters were in it. trying to figure it out from the sounds would have been way more effort than it’s worth (and when you don’t want to do it in the first place, any effort is too much).
it’s just interesting how much interest affects motivation.
I find that girls really get a kick out of just 'writing'.
ReplyDeleteMy experience of having both genders is that they are WAY different in their approach to learning. So far my son has the better brain BUT he is and never has been the one to just randomly write STUFF!
Rachel was writing words from a children's dictionary the other day with no idea of what the words say or mean. She came and asked after so I guess that was a learning session in itself!
I remember spending hours as a child playing schools on my own with my blackboard and writing pages and pages of what was probably just stuff' too ;D
I know Rachel is a sponge right now and it amazes me on a daily basis the information she has retained and educates us all over dinner each night...it is GREAT!
Let's enjoy them when they are this young and we know what they are talking about. It gets a lot more tricky when they are in High School to decipher their work and needs Ha-ha!
My kids are the same way. I think boys just need something more active to do than sit and write or color or draw while girls love that kind of thing.
ReplyDeletehow is that they can be programmed as such? This makes it all sound like it's in the male genetic structure and so it has nothing to do with what we do or they do and it's just the way God made them. Obviously we don't think Shane isn't smart, it's that a lot of the times academically he appears lazy. Layla on the other hand is soaking stuff up while she "plays" and can write all this stuff with limited help. And she wants more of it. Can it really be so easily gender dictated?
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