Parenting Catch-all

Old Skool Sesame Street, maybe?

gore wrote:

Anyway, does anybody have any recommendations? It seems like she needs some help recognizing letters and forming words (she can recognize some letters and knows the sounds a few make, but that needs to be expanded upon and reinforced). She's also probably ready to look at addition and recognition of numerals (she can count to 29 presently but doesn't readily recognize written numbers).

For numbers and patterns, Team Umizoomi is the best I've found. I can't think of anything offhand that's great for letters, unless you get a bit older and consider WordWorld or SuperWhy. Most of the shows tend to focus on problem solving and social skills though. NickJr and PBS tend to have the best educational TV I have access to, and some of the DisneyJr shows are good as well.

complexmath wrote:
gore wrote:

Anyway, does anybody have any recommendations? It seems like she needs some help recognizing letters and forming words (she can recognize some letters and knows the sounds a few make, but that needs to be expanded upon and reinforced). She's also probably ready to look at addition and recognition of numerals (she can count to 29 presently but doesn't readily recognize written numbers).

For numbers and patterns, Team Umizoomi is the best I've found. I can't think of anything offhand that's great for letters, unless you get a bit older and consider WordWorld or SuperWhy. Most of the shows tend to focus on problem solving and social skills though. NickJr and PBS tend to have the best educational TV I have access to, and some of the DisneyJr shows are good as well.

I like these recommendations. Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood and Blues Clues are also good. I miss Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. While Daniel Tiger is great, nothing to me is as good as the original.

ETA: my son learned his alphabet and counting through various iPad apps.

Leap Frog has a letter factory movie that ours loved. I think it's on Netflix now.

I'll add a vote to Blues Clues, also, Youtube can be your friend. My 2 year old watches a lot of Baby Einstein videos and he's got counting from 1 to 10 and the whole ABC's down pat. Plus it's got a lot of classical music so it isn't as obnoxious as a lot of kids TV.

We let our first son watch the Preschool Prep series (Meet the numbers, Meet the shapes, letters, sight words, etc. ) starting around 2, and I think it made a big impact on him. We limit screen time to about 20 min a day. I think it's a great series for that age.

Montalban wrote:
Jonman wrote:
Maq wrote:

Here's a thought that just occurred: Having your first child involves so much mental, physical, and emotional upheaval and rewiring it's like voluntarily re-entering puberty.

Maybe, but it's like going into puberty as a 30 year old. Hopefully less of a clueless moron than your average 13 year old.

Just less energy and more likelihood your back will give out.

That was a concept I first stumbled across in Stephen King's Christine. The two protagonists are having a conversation about maturity and one says something similar to 'the parents are dragged, kicking and screaming, into maturity by the kids'.

I know it changed me.

It appears that I'm an incredibly lazy parent. No worries, guys. I have 0 guilt about this sort of thing. I know I'm lazy and I take pride in it. But what about that idle parenting thing? Anyone feel like just lying back and letting the kids have it out?

I think yesterday's Penny Arcade comic is apropos to this discussion:

IMAGE(http://art.penny-arcade.com/photos/i-Lk8bgFz/0/1050x10000/i-Lk8bgFz-1050x10000.jpg)

Our daughter isn't 2 yet and while we don't sit her in front of the TV and leave her there we don't have any hard and fast rules about TV/ipad time. In fact, she seems to self regulate pretty well. She'll watch for a little while and then wander off to play with her toys when she get bored of the TV.

We also don't make much of an attempt to change our viewing habits when she's around either. My wife and I don't tend to watch anything with violence or inappropriate language, so we don't have to worry about that. Currently we're rewatching DS-9 and she's in the room most of the time while we're watching, sometimes watching with us, sometimes doing other stuff.

LouZiffer wrote:

Leap Frog has a letter factory movie that ours loved. I think it's on Netflix now.

It is. My son watches all the Leap Frog stuff all the time and loves it. His video preferences have wreaked havoc on what's recommended to me...

I feel like it's a futile effort in my household to try to limit screen time. We do make conscious efforts to play with and read to our children face-to-face, but I know I'd get much less done if my son didn't have an iPad to play with. I have really mixed feelings about it.

The AAP provides pretty good guidance on how much television to let a child watch. The TLDR version is "basically none" prior to two, up to two hours daily in subsequent years.

There's a question of quality versus quantity, as all hours of media consumption are obviously not created equally. AAP actually specifically calls out Sesame Street as providing educational benefit, for example, so there's that.

So I feel like breaking out "Frozen" to pacify my three year old is a complete parenting punt, but man, sometimes you just need a break.

We do have some instructional apps for my Android tablet, but the options for Android devices are unimpressive. Since I don't have any Apple IOS devices I'm apparently stuck in the educational software ghetto.

That comic is like a smugness arms race.

oilypenguin wrote:

That comic is like a smugness arms race.

I find this happens frequently when people talk about parenting.

Present company excluded, of course.

Here are some iOS apps that helped my son learn the alphabet and counting:

Elmo <3 ABC
Toddler Counting 123
Endless Reader
Endless Numbers

Endless Reader is his favorite right now. He is learning how to read individual words from it. He turned 4 at the start of this May.

The Boynton ebooks are fun and very interactive. You can choose to have the words read aloud or not. The Dr. Seuss ABC ebook is also a hit. But none of them are as big a deal with him as the Elmo and Grover ebook, Another Monster at the End of This Book. He's always been less interested in having actual, physical books read to him.

He's a bright little boy and is definitely ahead of his peers academically, so I'm OK with the apps so far.

On the other hand, I still want to stab my eyes out when he chooses to watch Strawberry Shortcake via Netflix.

By this point, I'm pretty tired of Frozen, but I actually rather like how much my son and daughter love the music, which I think is really well done overall. But still some guilt there, definitely.

SixteenBlue wrote:
oilypenguin wrote:

That comic is like a smugness arms race.

I find this happens frequently when people talk about parenting.

Present company excluded, of course. :)

Way too often.

LouZiffer wrote:

Leap Frog has a letter factory movie that ours loved. I think it's on Netflix now.

Yeah, there are a number of Leap Frog movies, all of them decent. Annoying as hell to me, but the kids like them and seem to pick stuff up from them.

My kids both loved Monkey Lunchbox on iOS when younger, but we have them using IXL now, which while predominantly maths based is linked into our local curriculum. I believe they localise content to country, and it covers pre-primary/kindy through to high school, with reduced subscription costs as you pile on the kids.

Bebot is a fun music app, and they have had fun making their own 'toys' with Foldify.

I don't associate with parents who engage in smug arms races. Life's too short and I already have too many awesome things I want to do to waste time that way. That pile won't play itself, ya know!

It's all about choices, and some of them are pretty arbitrary, but as long as you provide consistency and love, they seem to do pretty well. But hell is other parents, as they say.

Except for you guys:)

It's great to hear others not getting caught up in it. I have a pretty tight posse that I hang with before and after school, and we are of that mindset. My wife calls us the 'dirty hippie parents', but we just don't buy into the BS and keep it real... Maybe I do see her point after all

I tend to just roll with the punches a lot of the time. I'll ask the girls what they want to do today, and we play it by ear. I have two weeks school holidays starting next week (although my 4.5 year old started her's at noon today, slack kindy kids).

It's winter, so there isn't much opportunity for outside play, but I have a lot of things 'ready in the wings'.

Newspaper if we decide it is a craft day and we want to make some Papier Mâché animals/masks.

I'm picking up the Lego Movie on BluRay in case we want to do a cinema day (plus popcorn, and paper boxes to eat out of)

Plenty of Art supplies, plus paper, and/or canvases.

Lots of Lego.

If the weather is nice, we have the local Library (to restock reading books for the rainy days) or some of the parks in our area are nice.

We have some colouring in books, activity books, and paper model books, all themed with either super heroes, ninja turtles, or fairies (quite the mix).

iPads fully charged in case they 'want' to do any homework, or maths practice. My 6 year old is enjoying writing stories on the iPad, so I let her type away on that. It's good because she types how she thinks the word is spelt, then we look at the auto correct and talk about how her 'sounds that make sense' are actually written in 'oddball English'. I keep two versions, because her phonetic spelling is just awesome, and that stuff needs to be squirrelled away for posterity.

Skylander portals dusted off, and Little Big Planet ready for exploring, with two player co-op in mind.

Basically, we intend to chill out, just the three of us. We'll make sure any couch forts are tidied up before Mummy gets home, and that dinner is ready for her, but other than that, no plans, but plenty of (fun) options.

Monkey, that sounds awesome. I wish I could hang out with you guys

I also can't wait for the day when I can do actual activities with mine. He's 1 and getting on and off the kitchen chairs for half an hour is entertainment, so I'm desperate to get him outside any time we can for a change of scenery.

Standing invitation Disco, if you're ever in our neck of the woods

I had a lot of structure at my house, but that was because I had a special needs kid who needed it, there were four of them within four years of age, I was a single mom with no support system, and only a certain amount of money and hardware resources. Those were far more limiting factors than any study for me.

Also, I would take that screen guideline with a grain of salt. I've said this before elsewhere, the study itself has a paragraph on the first page that says how to avoid the bad effects of screen time - pay attention to your kids. Watch with them. That's all it takes.

The kids were old enough they participated in the setup of the system, and it's maintenance.

m0nk3yboy wrote:

Standing invitation Disco, if you're ever in our neck of the woods ;)

Australia, yeah? Be right there. After like a 2-day flight.

DiscoDriveby wrote:

Monkey, that sounds awesome.

Everything is awesome when you're living Monkey's dream!

sometimesdee wrote:
DiscoDriveby wrote:

Monkey, that sounds awesome.

Everything is awesome when you're living Monkey's dream!

True dat! Being the SAHP... It just kind of feels like I was always made to do it. It's weird, but there isn't a day, even the really sh*tty ones, where I would swap back with my wife.

Maybe I'm trying to erase my own crappy childhood memories with great ones for these guys. I read somewhere that you only develop so many neural pathways, and that when you're older, you have to forget stuff to learn new.

I'm slowly rewriting my bad memory blocks with these better ones.

This is how I feel today (and many other days):

IMAGE(https://scontent-b-ord.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xfp1/t1.0-9/10420037_10152551414049700_2248982549669032150_n.jpg)

Still. Something I am loving is that my son is singing all kinds of songs. Today I was singing the end theme to Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood ("It's Such a Good Feeling") and my son joined in and finished it word for word.

m0nk3yboy wrote:
sometimesdee wrote:
DiscoDriveby wrote:

Monkey, that sounds awesome.

Everything is awesome when you're living Monkey's dream!

True dat! Being the SAHP... It just kind of feels like I was always made to do it. It's weird, but there isn't a day, even the really sh*tty ones, where I would swap back with my wife.

Maybe I'm trying to erase my own crappy childhood memories with great ones for these guys. I read somewhere that you only develop so many neural pathways, and that when you're older, you have to forget stuff to learn new.

I'm slowly rewriting my bad memory blocks with these better ones.

You do realize I'm quoting a movie, right?

(No spoilers, and no, you don't need to listen to all 10 hours)

sometimesdee wrote:

You do realize I'm quoting a movie, right?

Yep... Totally got that reference... Erm...

Spoiler:

I totally didn't, and I hang my head in small plastic brick shame...