Learning to Read: Toddler vs Dog – An Update

Tags

development, dogs, first words, intelligence, reading, symbol recognition, toddlers, training

Back in March, I proposed a battle of wits between my baby and my dog.

It didn’t seem so far fetched, back then. Owl was still speaking in mostly single-word sentences, although with signs he often made two or three word combinations. The average dog has been judged to have the intelligence of an 18-22 month old.

My fellow dog trainer has seen dogs who have learned to differentiate between written words.

So!

To be honest, I was sort of rooting for Beloved Dog, because COME ON, that would have been an AWESOME result.

The problem was, it wasn’t really a fair contest. I could work on Owl’s word recognition at various points throughout the day, like after breakfast, and in the bath, plus he got alphabet work at Daycare.

Beloved Dog got maybe a couple of minutes before his dinner every night.

Within a month, Owl had learned to recognize five words: Ball, Apple, Dog, Car, and Foot. Eye gave him some trouble, as did Bear.

I figured out pretty fast that Owl was not recognizing the word as a whole: he was recognizing the word based on the first letter only.

I was disappointed with this result, but he was still doing way better than Beloved Dog.

I managed to teach Beloved Dog to sit when I held up the “sit” card within a single session, and things were looking good. Unfortunately, when I introduced a second word, things went downhill.

Beloved Dog is paying zero attention to the actual words on the cards. He knows that he should sit sometimes, and down other times, but he’s never sure which he should be doing.

I got disheartened and put the cards away, which wasn’t quite fair to him. I should bring them out and work them more, give him another chance, because Owl has left Beloved Dog IN HIS DUST.

I was able to introduce some more written words to Owl’s vocabulary, but Owl continued to recognize them based on first letter. Watch this video, how he’s guessing the word before I’ve even finished writing it, based on the first letter.

In fact, I began to feel that he was getting entirely the wrong idea from his alphabet work at daycare, and now believed that A MEANT Apple, and B MEANT Ball, and so on. So he just dismissed the trailing letters as meaningless.

And then (and I’m still debating the wisdom of this choice) I downloaded a trial version of a toddler iphone app.

Yes, let the judging begin.

Aside: I have very mixed feelings about letting kids use technology like iphones. First, there’s health. Cell phones are known to give out radiation. Now, I don’t have an iphone, I have an ipod, but I’m not sure that’s really the point.

Second, I think that interacting with the real world is an important part of growing up, and that too many video games robs children of active play.

Nor do I agree with people who say that children should be exposed to technology, since they’ll need it to function in today’s world. I didn’t have an ipod until last Christmas, and I learned to use it within days. I didn’t need to start from toddlerhood. It’s not that hard.

On the other hand, videogames aren’t the demons some make them out to be. People who play a lot of video games have been found to have faster reaction times, better decision making skills, and better fine motor control. Put it this way – if you’re ever looking for a heart or brain surgeon, choose one who owns a video game console and plays it regularly.

Anyway, I couldn’t be a hypocrite – I was always playing on that ipod and Owl wanted to play too, so I found something educational and let him at it. The game was First Words Sampler, a free version of several different paid game options. The idea is for the child to take letters scattered over the screen and slot them into  the correct order to spell the word.

So it’s basically a matching game – put the C in the slot that says “C”, and so on. But a voice announced each letter, and when the word is complete, the word is spelled aloud and then a moving picture and an accompanying sound bite of the object in question – a cat meowing or whatever, is played.

Owl loves it. He could play it forever, which is a problem so we don’t let him have it very often.

Then I discovered something. One day while were playing with words on his magnadoodle with the usual mixed success, I wrote out and spelled aloud one of the words from his game. He recognized it immediately.

I found that he could identify all of the words from that game. He sits there and actually puzzles it out, letter by letter, and then announces the word.

Meanwhile, Beloved Dog has learned to spin in a circle on command. So that’s something.

Let’s give them both an A for effort, shall we? That ought to confuse both of them.

The No-Cry Potty Training Solution: A Review And A Plan

Tags

books, Elizabeth Pantley, No-Cry Potty Training Solution, parenting, potty training, reading, reviews

It’s about time I got around to reviewing another one of those books Elizabeth Pantley sent me. I’ve been meaning to do it for a long time, but life kind of keeps getting in the way. But putting it off makes me feel like a thief.

Anyway, this is apropos because we are gearing up to potty train Owl, so it would kind of be good to have a post reviewing the book, and then another post once potty training is complete to say how well it worked.

The No-Cry Potty Training Solution

Overall, I found this book to be a really good overview of the whole potty training debate.

I loved the little tips she put in about things like why a splash guard is a no-no and how to teach them to wipe their own bums.

But, while I normally love the open-ended, menu-of-ideas approach taken by Pantley’s book, I was actually hoping for more decisive instructions this time.

The Psychology of Mortimer

Tags

books, children's fiction, kids, mortimer, munsch, psychology, reading

One of my friends sent us Robert Munsch’s Mortimer as a gift when Owl was born, and it’s one of the only books that he actually listens to, rather than constantly interrupting the narrative by pointing and yelling shrilly, “A TRUCK!!”

PH and I read it differently, though, and it has led to discussions about Mortimer’s motivations.

We can’t really agree on just what Mortimer’s problem is.

For those who don’t know this classic tale, it goes thusly:

Young Mortimer goes upstairs to bed and is warned to be quiet. He responds with “Yes! Yes!” and then proceeds to sing so loudly and joyfully that he drives his family to distraction.

He is visited, in turn, by his irate father, by 17 siblings (Mortimer is actually a Duggar, I guess), and two police men. Each time he is scolded and told to quiet down, he is even more emphatic in his agreement to do so, yet his noise actually gets louder and louder.

Everyone starts arguing with each other about what to do with him and he eventually starts singing softly to himself and then drifts off.

How I See The Story:

As a dog trainer, I see this as a basic story of operant conditioning. Mortimer, as one of 18 children, doesn’t get a lot of attention and he gets so wound-up that he is willing to take even negative attention.

His bedtime antics are rewarded by the constant visits upstairs. Once the attention ceases (everyone gets wrapped up in each other), Mortimer slowly winds down and drifts off. When I read Mortimer to Owl, Mortimer’s “Yes! Yes! Yes!” has a casual tone, like “yeah, yeah, yeah.”

When he winds down at the end, I trail off and fluctuate my pitch, as if he’s a tape recorder that is running out of battery.

Perfect Husband reads it differently.

How PH Sees The Story:

PH sees Mortimer as a child who is sadly afflicted by some kind of mental disorder. He wants to be good but is simply unable to control his deep seated drive to create chaos.

When PH reads Mortimer, his yesses have a frantic note as Mortimer becomes increasingly intimidated by his scolders. Mortimer’s father makes him a little nervous, his siblings’ wrath en masse makes him even more desperate to behave, while the policemen send him into a near-grovel of promises to shut up.

However, no matter how much he tries, he just can’t seem to suppress the devil inside him who simply MUST MAKE NOISE. In the end, when he has wreaked so much havoc that flower pots are flying and the family baby is looking distinctly worried, Mortimer finally finds some kind of satisfaction in his soul.

He sings his song once more, quietly, but this time it has a triumphant note, and then he goes to sleep content.

We are each fascinated by the other’s interpretation. How can such a simple tale be told in such different ways?

So I went online to find out more.

I learned that Mortimer was Munsch’s first book, and that unlike many of Munsch’s characters, he wasn’t drawn from life.

I even listened to Munsch read the work, and his telling ran right down the middle between my telling of it and PH’s.

So we may never know what really makes that little bald kid tick.

But Owl seems to enjoy hearing the story no matter who is reading it, and maybe one day he can read it to us and give us his own interpretation.

I’m looking forward to that. Maybe it’ll give us insight on why our little noise maker won’t go to sleep.

If you read Mortimer to your kids, how do you tell the story?

I Keep Thinking He’s A Dog, But Owl Thinks He’s People

Tags

babies, child development, children, concepts, dog, experiments, generalization, learning, psychology, reading, symbols, toddler, words

Most of my experience with teaching and training beings whose brains are smaller than mine has been with animals. Furthermore, in most scenarios Owl acts and responds very much like a dog and so I treat him very similarly most of the time.

I use redirection, positive reinforcement, a high-pitched, encouraging tone when I deal with him, and it seems to work. He responds well to praise, touch, and food rewards. He likes to fetch.

He’s a puppy!

So I am amused and delighted when Owl displays human-like abilities that are beyond the grasp of the dogs I have worked with.

Like when he was 14 months old and I realized that he understood that he was looking at himself in the mirror.

Hi, me!

I pointed to his reflection and said “who’s that?” and he pointed to himself! To test his understanding, I secretly placed a banana sticker in his hair and showed him his reflection. Sure enough, his hand crept up to his hair while a perplexed look appeared on his face.

Dogs would NOT get that.

Also, I am constantly surprised by not only the extent to which he imitates us, but the extent to which he understands what he is imitating. Like at Hallowe’en, when he had just learned to walk, and he spotted a candy wrapper on the ground. He picked it up and toddled over to the cupboard under the kitchen sink, and proceeded to try and open it to throw away the wrapper.

A dog can learn to put something in the garbage if you teach him, but it would never occur to him to see something like a wrapper, identify it as garbage, and then try to throw it away himself. Hypothetically you could teach a dog to recognize certain things are garbage to be thrown away, but it would be a lot of work.

Your average dog does not watch you do something, intuit the intent behind your action, and then try to do it himself.

Owl does this every day.

I'll just slip these on...

Then there are other things that I almost don’t notice until I think about them.

For example, every morning I ask him to choose his footwear for the day. He can pick his wading boots, or his little doc-martin style boots. No matter which he chooses, he always brings me a matching pair. He has never brought me, say, one wader and one doc martin.

It’s the same thing when he brings me my own footwear (yes, I get my baby to fetch my shoes. I told you he is very like a dog…). He never brings me one sneaker and one boot. He brings me two sneakers, or two boots.

Again, a dog would have difficulty with that. He can fetch your shoes, but you’d have to formally train him to understand “fetch my sneakers” vs “fetch my boots”. It would take WORK.

But Owl does it as a matter of course. Humans are clever.

And the way he generalizes! I made the mistake of teaching my dog to chase my ex-boyfriend’s cat under the command “get the cat”. When I got my own cat, that command didn’t work, because he didn’t understand that “cat” meant any cat other than ex-boyfriend’s cat. We had to teach him our new cat’s name, instead.

But the baby understands categories easily. When he was 12 months old I could say “where’s Beloved Dog?” and he would point to Beloved Dog, meanwhile identifying him as “dog”. Ditto for the cat. He knew that we had A DOG and A CAT but that they each have their own unique identifiers as well.

We taught him what a hippo was, and from then on he could identify all sorts of hippos in all sorts of books, even drawn by different artists. No dog could do that!

"hippo" is one of his favourite signs

Then again, Owl’s capacity for self-control, maturity, patience, obedience, following basic instructions, and potty training are completely eclipsed by our dog, and certainly his capacity for destruction rivals any dog I have ever met.

So I am putting him to the ultimate test.

I am going to try to teach both dog and Owl to read.

Well, not READ.

At least, not as those who use the alphabet would consider to be reading (Owl is trying to teach himself the alphabet, but has difficulty after “D”…).

More… symbol recognition, like in Mandarin. I’m trying to teach Owl to recognize certain letter combinations as holding meaning.

I made Owl flash cards

some of his favourite things

I’m going to do the same with Beloved Dog. I borrowed flash cards from my friend and business partner who swear up and down that she has seen dogs learn to recognize words like “sit” and “down” and differentiate between them.

Just to be clear:

I am NOT pushing, pressuring, or otherwise making this un-fun for Owl. It’s just a game, something I am interested in to test his capacity for generalization and symbolic representation. I don’t believe that it will aid his development or help him school in the future.

I’m just pitting him against the dog.

For science.

(I’m so going to get trolled…)

Which one looks smarter to you?

Is There Such Thing As Reader’s Anonymous?

Tags

addictions, books, literature, problems, reading

Hi, my name is Carol and I have a reading problem.

I can’t remember when I started reading. It seems like I’ve always had this habit, although there must have been pre-literature days in my past.

When it first started, it just seemed like a recreational thing.

The books were short and didn’t take much time – Frog And Toad Are Friends, Millions Of Cats, The Velveteen Rabbit, Mike Mulligan And His Steam Shovel – that kind of thing.

Then I started getting into harder stuff:

• Charlotte’s Web
• The Witches
• The Phantom Tollbooth
• A Wrinkle In Time
• Black  Beauty
• White Fang

By the time I was 12 years old, the habit was worsening.

• Watership Down
• My Family And Other Animals
• If Only They Could Talk
• The Sword In The Stone
• Jurassic Park
• Beautiful Joe
• To Kill A Mockingbird
• Animal Farm

I knew that I read more than a lot of people I knew, but I didn’t think I was that unusual. I just happened to know a lot of non-readers.

It wasn’t until University that people began to broach the subject with me.

Guest Post At The Squeee!

Tags

books, Fassbender, feminism, interpretations, Jane Eyre, Jane Eyre 2011, literature, movies, reading, reviews, Rochester

Hey guys, The Squeee has kindly posted one of my Jane Eyre rants. I’d love it if you would check it out:

http://www.thesqueee.co.uk/2011/09/problem-with-jane-eyre-adaptations.html

For those who have come over from The Squeee, my original review of the 2011 movie is here.

You might also be interested in:

Jane Eyre vs Bella Swan

The Twibashing Series (Round 3 is coming soon!)

Magic in the Potterverse

Other book-related posts

Reading: Eclipse

Tags

authors, books, Eclipse, grammar, reading, Twilight

Dear Ms. Meyer,

I’ve been reading the first few chapters of Eclipse, and there are some things I feel that I need to say.

1. When you introduce someone as “my best friend (and werewolf)”, you imply that this person is also your best werewolf. If you want to say that he is your best friend and also happens to be a werewolf, you could say “my best friend (a werewolf)” or “my best friend (who is also a werewolf)”. Or you could stop treating your sentences like clown cars and write the information in totally separate phrases.

2. By the end of the first chapter, I noticed that Bella had another incident of forgetting to breathe. She really is the dimmest protagonist I have ever had the misfortune to encounter.

3. I’m confused.

Bella is up in her room when she smells “the unmistakeable scent of a smoking burner rising from the kitchen”. Now, leaving aside any discussion of the smell of levitating oven elements, it is revealed in the next paragraph that the smell comes from noodles in a pan (a pan?) that were not stirred and have now congealed into a “mushy hunk that was scalded to the bottom.”

It seems like the problem must have been more an issue of boiling dry than stirring, but both are bad, so ok.

While I try to suspend my disbelief to the point where I could accept that a grown man who batched it for 16 years doesn’t know how to boil pasta, I continue reading and see this: “the pasta lump bobbed in the boiling water as I poked it.”

So, wait, it is in water?

It’s in water, but it burned enough to make smoke? Has this ever happened to you?

Please explain. I may need this information for personal reasons.

4. Your readers think independently of your protagonist, so you can’t create a mystery just by making Bella confused. When Bella fails to put two and two together, your readers are not equally mystified. Instead of thinking “OMG double twos, what does it mean??”, your readers are thinking: “four. Four. Four. FOUR, YOU EVERLASTING MORON.”

So when Jacob calls Bella and tells her he desperately needs to talk to her about something, and then asks her if she’s going to be at school tomorrow, there really is no mystery created. Bella may spend the next two pages thinking deeply, desperately trying to figure out how Jacob’s need to speak with her could possibly be related to her attendance at school… but your readers have already figured it out. You aren’t creating mystery or suspense. You’re just showcasing Bella’s idiocy, especially since she never does figure it out.

Now, I haven’t read the next chapter, but let me guess: Jacob’s going to show up at school and try to talk to her alone, right? And Bella will be super surprised?

Thanks for your time,

Carol

Perfect Husband reads: Twilight

Tags

books, errors, mistakes, reading, Twilight

“Carol.”

“What?”

“Carol, it hurts.”

“What does?”

“Carol, it says, “No, I prefer to referee – I like keeping them honest.””

“Okay…”

“Carol?”

“What?”

“BASEBALL HAS UMPIRES.”

More Twilight Posts:

Twibash.

Why Jane Eyre is awesome and could kick Bella Swan’s self-centred ass right to the curb.

Oh. My. God.

New Moon, New Psychoses.

A Bookworm in the Making.

Tags

babies, board books, books, reading, reading to baby, Sandra Boynton

Babby is really starting to enjoy books.

Around two months of age, he started becoming increasingly distracted by my own books, since one is invariably hovering over his head when he is breast feeding.

(Before you judge me, you have to understand. For me, reading is like breathing. I don’t “find time” to read for the same reason I don’t “find time” to inhale. Even when I was working full time, I managed to sneak in an hour or so of reading during the work day. Lunch was Readin’ Times. So nowadays breastfeeding has presented itself as the time to read (along with while I eat and before I sleep at night, and when I bathe and…). I mean, Babby’s on the breast constantly and there’s only so much staring deeply into his eyes that I can do. Plus he mostly stares at my armpit anyway.)

The black and white contrast of text on paper began drawing Babby’s gaze. By three months, he was clearly beginning to wonder “what is Booba-Lady staring at?” and so he would flip around to look. He began to reach out to the book, and gently run his hands along the page while I read it out loud to him.

When the Flight Attendant on our way home to BC after Christmas took Babby for a walk up the aisle, she returned him with “wow, he likes books, doesn’t he?” Apparently he had been goggling at another passenger’s open book.

“I think he likes the contrast,” I told her. I mean, I’m not so delusional as to think that my child is starting to be interested in reading. He just knows that there’s something fascinating to me about books, and he’s trying to figure out what that is.

Then he started trying to turn the pages the way I do, except his method was to grab a page and crumple it in his fist and then yank.

So I decided that it was time to hand him his own books. We now have story time before bed every night, where he cuddles in my lap and his Daddy reads Sandra Boynton to him while he reaches out to grab and attempt to turn the pages. He has varying success at this task.

I handed him a book one day to see if he would try to turn the pages on his own.

He did… for a minute.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

No more fun, thanks

Tags

conference, introversion, introvert, lazy day, montessori, parties, reading, Sunday

I’m having the laziest day evar. I just put on my clothes, and it’s THREE PM.

This is why I wanted a yard. The dogs peed before I even had to get dressed.

It seems ridiculously extravagant to still be lying on the bed reading in my bathrobe well into the afternoon, but I needed the rest. Yesterday wasn’t really a day off. I had to go to a conference to keep up my continuing education credits with the AHTA, so it was like another work day. Spending a day surrounded by total strangers does not make for a restful time. Although it was actually a lot better than I thought I would be. It reminded me that I am, and always will be, a product of Montessori:

I find structured labs where I have to follow structured activities (many of which I do not find educational) rather stressful. It usually involves a certain amount of interaction with the people in your class, which in this situation would be total strangers. It also requires that you shoulder a certain amount of responsibility. Here I am, doing something for the very first time, and I’m just supposed to fetch supplies and follow instructions on my own, instead of being personally taught and guided.

That is what I was expecting of the wet labs at the conference, but they weren’t like that at all. They basically treated us with a “you paid to be here so come on down and get your money’s worth” attitude which I highly appreciated. We were allowed to wonder around, watch demonstrations and do as much or as little hands-on practice as we felt comfortable with.

…Which meant that I played with the goniometer, but just watched people use the Gulich. I waved my hand over the Pulsing Magnetic therapy bed, and let them attach electrodes to my arm to feel what muscular electric stimulation feels like (WEIRD). They gave me full control over how high I turned it up, which meant I felt quite comfortable cranking it up quite high, trying to get my hand to twitch. Then I helped myself to the peppermint and tea trea muscle relaxing oils.

If they had created a structured lab, I would have hated every minute of it, even while learning. But this was actually quite pleasant. This is what Montessori school was like. They didn’t FORCE us to learn. They set certain goals, like you had to do a minimum of one math activity, one English activity and so on, but from there on the choice was yours. They assumed that you wanted to play and learn, and so it never occurred to any of us to fight it.

So really the conference was great, just what I would have wanted. But it was still an exhausting day for an introvert – strange place, strange people, strange gadgets…

Then Perfect Husband and I had a party to go to that evening. The hosts are good friends, but a lot of the people there are strangers. Which meant more socializing with strangers.

See, it’s not that it was a bad day. I learned a lot, and then had a nice, fun evening out talking to some really cool people and breaking my heart over an incredibly adorable blond boy, who seemed fascinated by my husband and kept dragging him around by the finger saying “night night?”

But for an introvert? That was NOT a day off.

After an eight hour sleep and then another five hours of reading lazily, I finally think I have the energy to face the day.

And it’s raining.