Math Struggles?

If math is a struggle in your household like it is in mine, I would like to share a couple of links that may help. These games will help your child to get down the basics of math really well so they can build upon what they know to go farther , without the frustration.

This is a game that we downloaded for our daughter to use, and while it is not girly in any sense , she is still having some fun using it and it is fun to see her passing the levels and memorizing her math facts along the way. This game is free but if you want the extra bells and whistles of the full version, you can buy that too.
http://www.bigbrainz.com/Downloadi.html

This next helpful looking resource I ran across on a blog and it has some free pages for your child to practice with as well. You can also buy a whole set. This one looks like it might even go beyond the basics a little.
www.makingmathmorefun.com/?hop=clickmom27

And if you are further into math than just the basics you can even hire a tutor from India! Thought this was a pretty cool idea. This guy is a math teacher who is experienced and is credentialed. He helps students who are struggling and those with learning disabilities from 4th Grade/standard all the way up to college math. He charges $40 per month( at least the last I knew) for unlimited tutoring. His contact info is :

Raju
Skype id: raju_tutor
Mobile # is +919880400649

Time-In?

Do adopted children need to be disciplined differently than Bio children? If you are adopting from a Hague country you will no doubt read up on disciplining your child at some point for your training.
Here is one more article on giving your child a Time-in that I thought was interesting to read and could be very helpful as well.
Check it out at:
http://www.rainbowkids.com/ArticleDetails.aspx?id=648

Children Need Time

This morning as I was trying to do some things that I wanted to do when my daughter came up to me and asked for me to take her to the restroom. She has been going on her own without help for quite some time now.

I really wanted to do what I was doing, this is usually when your kids may ask for something, but knew that recently my little girl has had a few accidents so instead of telling her to go on her own I got up to take her even though I was missing out on something important to me. When she was through she wanted me to read her some books, I obliged and we really both enjoyed our time. When you put your children above your wants your love for them actually grows and it makes them feel even more secure.

I have decided to do some spring cleaning, but more than usual. I am clearing out of the house anything that I really don’t need. The clutter is more than I want to look at and the things in storage just plain don’t need to be there anymore. As I was going through some bins I ran across some old school papers of my children. Since I homeschool them I have more papers sitting around here than most parents. It is hard to throw away the daily work they did as it gives me a record that they actually did the work and I love to see their drawings, and the things they wrote. I really don’t need the records anymore as they are much older but it is hard to get rid of the papers that show their personality and such. I found some crafts they had made to help them develop their creative side ,Mother’s Day cards they made and some letters they had written to me. I found it interesting that most of the letters are asking me to do things with them. Even though I was home all day with them and taught them and spent most of my time with them, they still want the attention.

My whole point is to spend time with your kids, whether you are teaching them something or just having fun together, it is one of the most valuable things you can do for them and when you look back on your life you won’t regret it. Time with your children is more important to them than you know and it truly is great fun, definitely a win-win situation.

How Do You Say That?

While I was waiting for our referral of our little girl I wanted to immerse myself in as much Indian stuff as I could. I would read books and articles, watch movies, look at maps, pictures of places and people, look for baby names and dream of our little girl to be. When someone else got a referral I would read the child’s given name and wonder what our child’s name would be. I couldn’t always tell how they were pronounced though and wished I did know.


One of the first things I did when we found out our child’s name was to ask people how to pronounce it. I wanted to know what it sounded like and I knew from my many blunders before from trying that I would very likely get it wrong. I asked the agency worker, the International adoption doctor, people from Kolkata that I knew and anyone else that I thought may know for sure. Well, we had a pretty good idea after talking to all these people just how to say it. And of course I knew the name meanings. All these months of waiting for our little girl we called her by this name and loved how it sounded. Well you can imagine the surprise I got when we were at the orphanage picking up our sweet child when the Ayahs came out holding our daughter and pronouncing her name differently. It took me about 2 seconds though to realize that they were bringing in our beautiful daughter and that the name was just a tiny bit different than we had been saying it. We decided that as we had come to know our daughter as the name that we were saying all these months and that everyone we knew also knew her with this pronunciation that we would just keep it the way we had known it, also the spelling could be confusing to others if we changed it, as there would be sounds in it that you can’t tell from the spelling. I came across this link that I love and that you may enjoy also.
http://howtosaythatname.com/component/option,com_mtree/Itemid,4/

How I wish I would have had access to it earlier on, it would have saved me some embarrassment at times. I thought I would share it with those of you who may be wishing for a way to know these things yourself. This site lets you hear for yourself how to pronounce many of the names of Indian places, food and drinks, and more importantly if you want to know the sound of the name for your child, it gives Indian names, and possibly more items. As an adoptive parent of an Indian child I really want to be able to pronounce the names of Indian cities and such, I know it can change by region a little, as I found that it what happened with our daughter’s name, but I still think this is a great guide.
Another wonderful thing about this site is that anyone who knows the correct way to pronounce Indian words can also add to this site. I would ask those of you who would be willing to do this to go ahead and give those of us, who don’t know the words ,a gift and add to it. It will be a blessing to many Indian children who don’t always get to hear these words and help them become more accustomed to India. Also please feel free to pass this link along as I am sure many other adoptive parents will thank you as well. As you will see when you get there, this is a page where you can have access to words from many other countries as well, making it an even richer link.
Enjoy!

Learning sounds with a love for India

My baby is only 2 1/2 and already is learning her sounds for reading without my prompting.

I used to work with her older sister on letter sounds when our little girl first came home and she remembers this and still says the sounds. One day she started singing them as our learning song goes and when she came to the letter I sound she said i- i- i- i- India, instead of the way our tape plays it, which is i- i- i- i- Inchworm. I was so surprised when I heard her singing this. It made me happy and proud to hear her make that change on her own and now we sing it that way all the time. She has inspired me to change all the letter sounds to words that relate to India, she is making learning so fun. E will become Elephant and A will become Amma instead of Egg and Apple. We are still working on finding replacements for the O and U. I know I will have a great little reader before too long.

Teaching speech and language skills to your child

In one of our earlier post, we talked about how to teach initial words to our child. Continuing with where we left, in this post we will share how to teach our child pick up basic words and encourage them to speak. However, this information is more relevant in case of adopted children as they are deprived of "being talked to" during their stay at the orphanage.

The first and foremost thing that we as parents should do is to talk to our children. Irrespective of what age they are, children learn by observing what happens around them. So the best thing to do is talk to your child with actions, gestures etc. You could start with reading her nursery rhymes or stories loudly. Typically children story books are more of pictures and less of words. You should try to speak the words in the story by showing the picture. e.g. If you see a picture of a dog sleeping, then you should tell your child something like "doggy is sleeping" and at the same time showing her the action of sleeping. In this way, the child would be able to relate to the actual meaning of words. You could expand the horizon of the word "sleeping" by suggesting to her that "we all sleep during the night". By doing this, she would slowly understand the meaning of the actual word sleep. And who knows very soon, she might say to you that she wants to sleep by showing the same actions. The overall idea is to associate meaningful verbs with nouns.

Introduce your child to the world of music. You would be amazed how quickly kids get attached to a particular kind of music and even start singing few words from the song. The idea is to provide them ample opportunities for them to hear stories, music, songs etc. The more they hear, the more they would be encouraged to speak.

If you want to teach your child multiple languages, try to repeat the same words in both the languages. In this way, they would be able to relate the words in multiple languages.

Try to find the learning pattern of your child. Is she attentive enough while you are reading her out stories or does she have a less attention span? In the latter case, you should not force her and try to divert her attention with some new words that might interest her. We as parents often try to judge the developmental milestone of our child based on her ability to speak. In my opinion this is not correct and we should give our child ample opportunity and time. Very recently this fact was emphasized in the Aamir Khan film Taare Zameen Par. I would recommend all parents should watch this film to understand how to interact with their child.

Try to get tips from other parents and use them. Go through this article to find more detailed tips on how to teach your child speech and language. I would be interested in tips from other parents such that i can start using them as well.

Teaching Language skills to adopted child

Generally children at orphanages are less talked to. The reason for this is the low ratio of staff workers to children at all the Indian orphanages. I'm not sure about the approximate figure but even if its 1:5, still I feel a staff worker would not be able to devote enough time to all children as compared to children who are biologically born to a family (the ratio would be reverse i.e. 5:1). This causes delay in development stages for all adopted children till they are brought home to stay with a family. The delay could be in multiple forms like physical growth, emotional growth, cognitive growth etc. In this post, I would like to focus on the cognitive growth aspects of how to teach adopted children language skills.

Infant children (i.e. below 2 years of age) and toddlers (2 to 5 years) are super learners of anything and everything in this world. We as adults although try to underestimate often children at this age group, but its obvious and proven that children learn extremely fast when given proper stimulation. In fact some study suggests that toddlers have the ability to learn around 11 languages during their first five years of growth.

So coming back to the language skills, the best way to start off with teaching children language skills is with the proven and time tested use of flash cards. You can get flash cards starting from alphabets, numbers, animals, opposites, learning time etc at any of the book shops, but you could also make your own flash card especially if you want to teach the child a language other than English. Here are few tips to start with:

• Starting with alphabets, get hold of a flash card that would show a picture of an apple and just below it the word "Apple" with the alphabet 'A' emphasized. Don't focus initially on teaching your child only the alphabet but rather the whole word.
• Repeat the word Apple with your finger pointing to the picture and loudly speak the word.
• Repeat this many times and urge your baby to speak.
• If possible get hold of a real apple and give it to your baby and encourage her to speak.
• If she is able to speak, show her some form of encouragement like clapping or hugging her and urge her to do more.
• Its better to group the flash cards based on category e.g. fruits' flash cards, animals' flash cards. In this way they would be able to associate the members of the group well. One of my colleague's son yelled "Doggy" the first time he saw an elephant at the zoo, because he could relate both dog (which he sad seen earlier) and elephant from the same group i.e. animals.

You will be surprised that by the tenth time you repeat, your baby will start trying uttering the word in some form of "Appy", "Appal". You should try this technique with day to day household objects like food items, table, chair, toys, dogs etc. which the baby can easily relate to.

I myself was surprised when my daughter who at the age of 15 months tried to utter the words like "umbrella" and "hammer" in her own way just by seeing the images of the objects (thanks to my wife). Hence visual aids are the best way to start teaching a child any language skills. This is not only applicable to adopted children but all in general, but is useful more in the case of adopted children as they don't get this kind of stimulation during their orphanage stay.

I would love to hear about the experiences of other people.

P.S. Few samples of good flash cards