Today we worked on continuing to expose and explore the value of being able to express portions of a whole in various different forms, whether it be percentage, fraction (reduced & expanded), and in decimal. Lily doesn’t care and so it’s challenging to keep her focus. For the future of this concept, I’m researching angles that do not include forcing it down her throat, but instead rely on simple exposure and natural drawn connections. I’m considering whether introduction of this concept at this point (in whole and in part) is valuable to her, or simply creating a block and point of negative reference for the future.
I’d like to continue at least the exposure aspect, without expectation of specific comprehension at this point, simply because of its necessity as a foundational building block for so much to come, but that is the precise reason I am sitting on the fence with this as well: its foundational aspect being so integral to future comprehension and calculation, that I don’t want a negative association to imprint for her. I have plenty of these, all associated with either math or science, as a result of the methods and approaches used by educators from my own childhood, and they remain a persistent aspect of my mental processing.
Lily has the ability to maintain focus on something of interest for hours, days even, if she’s inclined. Honestly, a topic of interest (take vampires, for instance) can be explored for months, we’re at 15 straight at this point. As she’s grown, we can determine exactly how old she is given her outfit and what she is doing/has in hand because with each subsequent year, a new theme of interest emerged. I’ve contemplated her struggling with focus and it being an actual clinical concern (as a result of trying to figure out decimals, and maybe one or two other topics in the last year), but then when I really look at what it looks like when she’s into a topic, I realize that she has absolutely no issue focusing on whatever, and for whatever amount of time she wants.
So….
From experience, I know that in order to accommodate and flow with her, I have to move beyond my own boulder. Here’s to mind widening and perspective broadening, and away we go.