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Archive for the 'the little girl (2/06)' Category
April 3rd, 2008
This is a line from Paper Mario, a game for the Nintendo 64.
I have had the merging of technology and education on the brain lately. My friend’s eight-year-old son doesn’t like reading so I invited him over to play Paper Mario on the condition that he had to read all the dialog. He read for almost an hour, until he had to go home. My mother was telling me about another friend whose kids wanted to watch TV all day, but Mom didn’t want to hear the noise. She made them watch the TV on closed caption and they learned to read like aces. Despite all the bad rap TV and video games get, despite how society pushes us to encourage kids to read books instead, I think these could be our biggest allies for teaching reading.
Anyways, I haven’t had much time to dedicate to this project recently, and not much motivation, either, since Little Girl hasn’t been too into it lately. However, in the last couple of days, she has taken to playing a bit again, and now she can play in quiz mode. Big Girl will sometimes play the quizzes, but on anything other than the “common words” category she is guessing, randomly clicking each picture in turn until she hears the answering “Correct!” Little Girl is NOT guessing. She navigates through quizzes of artwork, dinosaurs, trees, fish, and dog breeds like a champ, missing only one or two answers. Also, I am fairly certain that she recognizes some words, since occasionally the pictures for the quiz load before the sounds and by the time the computer reads the word her mouse is already hovering above the correct picture. Moreover, she now repeats the specific names of these items, even occasionally trying to use them in real life. “That’s a birch,” she told me recently, pointing to a pine tree. Well, maybe not…
I’m so proud of her, and starting to feel inspired to bust out some new cardsets. Stay tuned.
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February 28th, 2008
Time has been getting away from me lately and I haven’t had much time to devote to the flashcard project. I have noticed that my DD (who is now a two-year-old!) is starting to be more interested in stories than just pictures, and I found a beautiful site dedicated to public domain illustrated children’s literature. Check it out!
the Rosetta Project - Pre-Reader and Very Early Reader
Many of these books can be adapted to my website with little or no modification! I am starting to feel inspired to do a couple this weekend… but have so many other things I should be doing… we’ll see 
I also found a site by someone who did the Glenn Doman flashcards with her son for a year and who made all of her flashcard sets available online. I don’t think the images are public domain, but it is a good place to get ideas for complete sets without having to do so much research first:
Classical Mommy - The Bits Collection
Unfortunately, she ultimately came to a negative conclusion about the method, but after reading her thoughts I still think that the online flashcards approach minimizes the negatives and maximizes the positives of the program for the following reasons:
- Using online flashcards minimizes the amount of time needed to develop the materials. Okay, obviously I’m putting a lot of time into it, but my visitors can get the benefit of my work with zero effort.
- There is much less effort involved in running the sessions. Instead of drilling the flashcards with my daughter, I can concentrate on cuddling with her and telling her how sweet and smart she is.
- My daughter gets to choose from eight sets which ones she likes the best, making the learning process more child-directed than the Doman method.
I have noticed some interesting trends lately:
- She never picks the cards with words only. Words and pictures together are much more entertaining.
- Ever since I added the numerals set, she never picks the red dots numbers any more.
- She loves looking at the common words over and over.
- When the common words are read in German, she usually says the English word instead of the German.
- When she looks at geography sets, she doesn’t repeat the countries any more. Instead she says “map” for each slide. The same thing with the dogs and dinosaurs, she just says “dog” or “dinosaur” for each slide.
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January 21st, 2008
It has been almost a month since I updated anything on this site, and that is because I have been working on restructuring the database and rewriting the flashcard builder interface. And Christmas. I have some really neat plans for interface upgrades in the future, but it will probably take me about 3 months to implement them.
In the meantime, my friend Sara visited me this weekend, and she is from Germany, so please enjoy learning some German words with my new language sets. THANK YOU SARA! I still have more recordings to process, so more German sets are to come. I also have some number sets up in Spanish and Arabic, thanks to Ray and Komal.
I have been watching the traffic of this site, and I have noticed that I am starting to build a small base of users who return again and again. It is so encouraging to know that a few other people out in cyberspace are using my flashcards! I wanted to launch this blog to try to connect with regular users, to let you know what updates are in the works and to get your feedback and experiences with the flashcards. I may also write some technical posts on how to design web applications with PHP, mySQL, and Javascript. This blog uses WordPress with the Tm Clear n 1 1.0 theme, with very little modification, just my menu bar at the top. Please leave me a comment if you have time.
The other thing that is encouraging is using the flashcards with my younger daughter, Liane. She will turn 2 in February, and she has been playing with the flashcards since about 18 months. Her favorites are the animals and the household words, but maps and presidents and famous paintings all take their turns, too. Whenever she sees me on the computer, she runs up and demands flashcards!
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