15 September 2005 - Trucking Along

School and school friends are the big things these days. Not only are the boys making friends, but I've become chummy with some of the parents. We've been to swim parties, birthday parties, and backyard barbeques, plus there always seem to be more kids than mine underfoot around the house. The boys are turning into social butterflies and dragging me along with them. I've even joined the school Dad's Club and volunteered to help out with the literacy program.

Schoolwork is presenting a bit of a challenge. Zack has asked a couple of times if he can go back to his pre-K school, because (he says) he never had to work there the way he does in Kindergarten. And Nicky is discovering that first grade involves spelling, reading, math, and homework, which (he says) is too hard and too much work.

Of course, both boys are up to the challenge, and are making tremendous progress that's easily visible to everyone but them. Zack is very close to being perfect at reciting the ABC's, and is up to fifty percent on random letter recognition. He's mastered enumeration, and is now working on sequencing. From an adult's perspective, enumeration and sequencing are the same skill, but for a child, they're quite different activities.

Nickers has discovered how frustratingly illogical English spelling can be, but hasn't quite reached the point of surrender to it. He still wants words to follow rules wherein each spelling has exactly one sound and each sound has exactly one spelling. I'm with him all the way, but, to misquote Pascal, English has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.

We've been reading books other than Dr. Seuss lately, and I've become aware that both boys still suffer from an appallingly inadequate vocabulary. During the first seven pages of the first Narnia book, we encountered these unfamiliar terms and concepts: air-raid, war, professor, country, railway, housekeeper, servant, shaggy, splendid, chap, bad-tempered, passage, creepy, stag, badger, grumbling, meantime, wireless, adventure, unexpected, spare, looking glass, window sill, troop, moth balls, fur coat, sensible, powdery, woods, inquisitive, lamp post, pitter-patter, wool, muffler, parcel, faun, gracious, (and of course) wardrobe. Poor kids! No wonder they prefer Dr. Seuss. In everyday conversation at school, they have no idea what people are talking about most of the time. Because the boys are good at smiling, nodding, and guessing, few people realize just how impoverished Nicky and Zack's vocabularies really are.

It makes sense, of course—they've been speaking English for a very short time, and their vocabularies in Ukrainian were impoverished, too. Rather than retreat from the harder books, however, I've retrenched instead. We stop at every unfamiliar word and talk about it before going on with the story. Normally, one learns new words from context, but context is the very thing they're lacking. Not the context of the book, but the overall context that comes from experiencing the world. In many ways, Nicky and Zack are exactly the same age: one year old instead of five or seven. I'm not sure which is more amazing: how much my boys don't know, or how much other kids do. Even something as simple as the word "wool" can lead to an hour-long discussion about clothing, animals, growth, weather, tools, stores, money, and anything related to any of those topics.

Like all kids, but more than most, my boys are hungry for knowledge, eager to learn how things work and why people act the way they do. On the other hand, Nicky's favorite word right now is "poop," and Zack still bangs everything he touches against anything that doesn't run away (and even some of those), so they're pretty normal kids. And you know, that's pretty amazing, too. They approach each day with good cheer, a willingness to learn, and the expectation that things will work out. They're learning the balance between trusting me to take care of them, and taking responsibility for themselves. They're learning that it's okay to take risks, okay to make mistakes, and even stranger for them, also okay to do well. Imagine having to learn that positive attention is a good thing!

On the calendar coming up, we have more barbeques, parent-teacher conferences, fall break, a visit from Uncle Ken and Aunt Liz, a trip to Dinosaur National Park, the ongoing speech/language therapy for Zack, and Halloween. The boys want to be Batman and Robin this year, and I'm inclined to go along with it. After all, they are already super, and, in my books, heros.