I share a small homecoming ritual with my four-year-old son. Each day, when he comes home from preschool, I open the door, sweep him up into my arms and ask him, “How was your day?” Usually, he says, “Good!” and then we cuddle up on the couch and he tells me a bit about his preschool projects as I help him take off his shoes and socks.
Last Friday was different. When I asked him the usual question, Amol’s little face crumpled. “Bad!” he whispered, with tears in his eyes. Sitting him on my knee, I asked him why he had had a bad day. “My teacher told me that I don’t know numbers,” he wailed. “I said that I do know my numbers, but she said that I don’t! Mama, please teach me my numbers!”
Piecing it together, I realized what had happened. Amol was right—he did know how to count from one through ten. The problem lay in the fact that he was unable to correctly identify numerals when he saw them in print. As he begged me to “pleeeease” teach him how to do that, my high-tech mind whirred into action.
Mom Considers Electronic Elementary Tutoring for Son
I mentally ran through a list of my favorite online toddler learning stores. I was going to log on to the Internet immediately and order the best age-appropriate educational software I could find. I was not going to order just any old CD ROM title—I was going to research it thoroughly by accessing parent forums, product reviews and the best education sites on the Web. The steadily rising volume of the wailing in the background brought me back down to terra firma with a thud. The whole process would take too long—Amol needed his education after school right away.
Turn Numbers into Toddler Games
From that point on, I was operating solely on instinct. I grabbed an ordinary ruled notebook and asked Amol to bring me a red crayon. I tore out five pages and ripped each page in half. I then wrote a number on each piece of paper, and laid them out in a row on the floor. For the next two hours, my son and I had the time of our lives.
I asked him to perform simple tasks with the makeshift flashcards, giving him instructions like, “Move number five next to number three,” “Make number eight stand on its head,” and “Put number seven on top of number four.” After a while, we began referring to the numbers as “he” and “she,” and Amol’s imagination ran riot. “No, I can’t put number four next to number seven, because he doesn’t like her. She keeps pinching him!” We made up descriptions for the numbers—number five has a fat belly, number two looks like a swan, number six has a tail that sticks up into the sky.
Learning After School Springs from Instinct
In just under two hours, Amol had mastered his numbers. There had been no need for sophisticated, expert-designed software or educational aids after all. All it had taken was a smidgen of imagination, a small chunk of time and the ability to reach way down into my own, instinctive aptitude for being a parent. Increasingly, I find that’s what being a mom is really all about--instinct.
Suman is a mom and freelance writer. This article first appeared in “It’s a-Parent!, a service of EScore.com.