It's everyone's favorite time again: parenting tips! In the past when I've posted my own parenting tips, I've been accused of killing wildlife and turning my kids into lazy, money-grubbing bastards. Score!
But I'm not going to let that stop me. Think of me as The Little Engine That Keeps Trying To Get Up The Hill Even Though No One Wants His Freight. Just try to derail me, folks!
Zoey has some sort of an education sensor inside her body that transmits a signal to her tear ducts every time we try to teach her something. In other words, if she figures out we're not just playing and she is actually learning something, she has a tendency to get pissed.
Kindergarten should be fun.
So we're constantly looking for new ways to sneak information past her sensor. Lately, we've been working on numbers. She can write and identify numbers up to 30, but after that, things get a bit sketchy. Since she is supposed to be able to identify numbers up to 100 prior to entering kindergarten, Ella and I devised a game to accomplish this task. Plus, it was a whole lot of fun for us.
Zoey loves to dance. She dances like a spastic elephant, but that doesn't stop her from dancing (as long as she doesn't catch us laughing at her). So we concocted a dancing game (think So You Think You Can Dance meets The Gong Show (but luckily for her, we do not own a gong)). We would play some music and she would dance to it. When she was done with her twenty-second routine, Ella and I would "judge" her performance and hold up dry erase boards with her scores. She would then have to tell us the numbers on our boards. And then it was time for her next performance.
Lame, I know. But it was effective. She can now identify all her numbers. Plus, Ella and I got some good laughs over the course of several afternoons (I only wish I had video of her "hip-hop" performance, which mainly consisted of her quickly rolling and spinning around the floor in a seizure-like state).
Song of the day: Never Enough by The Cure
Parenting Tips For The Overly Neurotic: Dance Dance Number Recognition
