Learning Together

My daughter can light up a room with her laugh. Today, she lit up a dentist office.

After a hard day at school, my daughter got schlepped over to the local dentist for a cleaning. She was a bit apprehensive during the drive over, but once we were inside, she was in good spirits. Her enthusiasm came from her basic curiosity about the office: the tools the hygienist used, the chair she sat in (which she dubbed a “rocket ship” when the hygienist operated it), and the little knick-knacks of floss and tooth paste she received for being a good girl.

But it was her laugh that captured everyone’s attention.

After the hygienist poked around my daughter’s mouth with a mirror, she began brushing my daughter’s teeth with an electric toothbrush. My daughter’s reaction was bubbly laughter. The toothbrush tickled.

Heads started appearing around corners from all over the office. The dentist. Other hygienists. Even some passing customers.

Laughter? In a dentist’s office? With no nitrous oxide? People wanted to know more.

“Precious!” “What a pretty little girl!” “Will you listen to that laugh?”

I was incredibly proud of her and did my best to tell her so. What I’m realizing now as I type this is that my daughter brought joy to the office today. That’s an invaluable gift, one that is truly from God. And to a dentist’s office? Uncanny.

I think she taught me something today.

I have been praying in earnest for my daughter’s salvation. Her decision to follow Christ is not something that I can–or would want–force. Yesterday, during prayer, I felt convicted about what I should be doing.

My commitment: share the gospel with my daughter every day.

Yesterday, I shared the gospel in the context of discipline. Our daughter had refused to do what we asked. I had gotten upset. She was in tears. I asked her come to talk with me. I explained why I was upset and the importance of mercy, grace, and punishment. I used the example of the grace she receives from my wife and I as a model for what God does for us because of Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection. I stressed that as much as I wanted her to obey and love me and my wife, I wanted her to obey and love God that much more. This could only happen if God was living inside her.

Today, I shared the gospel with her in the context of a cartoon. My daughter likes the Animated series that accompanies The Beginner’s Bible. Today, she watched the episode about the Prodigal Son. I had her pause the video and tried to connect for her (A) our sin and the sin of the prodigal as well as (B) God’s love and the father’s love.

This is not just a commitment for me and my daughter. As I go back to school in a few weeks, I will be intent on sharing the gospel every single class. I pray for wisdom and for the power of God’s spirit to do work through my words that I could never accomplish on my own.

“Daddy, daddy,” my daughter said when she got in the car, “I got my Chromebook!”

My daughter has been wanting her computer all week. Today, she got what she wanted.

At home, we navigated through the following Chromebook-enabled features:

• Encyclopedia articles about dogs and cats (read out loud to us, btw)
• Games involving adding and subtracting hosted by an otter with a microphone
• Paint programs
• Narrated books

She dug it right up to the moment that the hated mousepad proved too difficult to maneuver as she played a game.

I will certainly be monitoring screen-time and the boons and bombs of Chromebook learning.

A student in my daughter’s class has been crying all week.

Crying in the morning.

Crying in the afternoon.

The student, my daughter says, misses his mama.

She doesn’t like the student crying. “It’s hard to learn,” she told me.

My wife and I have endured quite a few fits from my daughter this summer. She’s cried in the morning. She’s cried in the afternoon.

I will give her credit for this. Thirty minutes later, it’s like it didn’t happen.

In the middle of the fit though? It’s real.

I asked her if she understood now why we want her to be upset, but not to throw a fit.

“Do you seek what it’s like to be around someone who cries?”

This is a high-level emotional comparison. What I hope is this. As she’s around other kids, she will see others portray the same poor traits she sometimes exhibits. This will let her experience what those traits look like from the outside. Then she can compare them to her own life (with our help).

Do I want to do that or not? With the Holy Spirit’s help, her life can be different.

“I can’t wait for tomorrow!” my daughter said upon getting picked up today.

“Why?” we asked.

“I get to go to school tomorrow!”

Off to a good start.

But it was her lesson for the day that I really took note of…

At home, we played school again, and I learned the kindergarten-approved way of dealing with a rambunctious student. After I yelled and screamed, she came and asked me to calm down by doing two things.

1. Take a deep breath (which she modeled for me)
2. Count to four

“Now do you feel better?” she asked.

I asked her if she had been asked to calm down today. She said she hadn’t.

Now came the clincher. Could we use the method to help her calm down? She agreed.

I pray we won’t have to find out anytime soon.

Today was our daughter’s first day of kindergarten.

Over time, I’ve found that direct questions rarely get my daughter to divulge what went on at school on any particular day.

Instead, I have to be willing to “play” the student while my daughter “plays” teacher. She spills all the goods.

I played a rambunctious kindergartener named “Jonathan” (a real stretch) and let my daughter lead me through the day.

The two things that drew the most attention?

1. The elementary school has a value code called “Freedom Stars.” The values include respect, responsibility, and walking feet. (I don’t know how the third one got in there.)
2. The instructions about how to use the bathroom. My daughter recited verse and chapter on the protocols for proper restroom use. Whew boy.

Note to self: what are the chief values of our home? Do they mesh with “respect” and “responsibility”? I would say that our family exists to GLORIFY GOD and ENJOY HIM FOREVER. Those are our chief values.

Prompt: how can I make them concrete for her?

“What do you want to learn about today?” I asked our daughter this morning.

“Sharks!” she said definitively. More specifically, she wanted to know more about Tiger Sharks.

So we headed off to the library. Inside, we found a Shark Encyclopedia and sat down to read through its small article on Tiger Sharks. I had handy my BRAINSCAPE app, and so as we read through, I made flashcards to remember what we read. They included these facts…

Continue reading “Two Kinds of Lessons”

Yesterday, my daughter and I made our weekly trek to the library. I said she could check out three books:

• A picture book
• A book she wanted to read
• A non-fiction book on a topic she wanted to learn about

She got a Vox Book (a book that has contains an mp3 file so you can listen to the book read aloud) for the first one, a graphic book called Super Narwhal for the second, and a book about cats for the third. Specifically, she got a book about cat breeds.

While Cat went through the first two books several times yesterday, the cat-breed book went unexamined. So this morning, I asked her, “What do you want to learn about cats?”

Continue reading ““What do you want to learn?””

Inspired by yesterday’s meet-the-teacher exercise, I set up two scavenger hunts for my daughter this morning.

The hunts consisted of tiny notecards with couplets for clues. Example:

If finding the next card is your goal,
You’ll should look in the basket that gives you “control.”

Doggerel for the win!

She looked here and there for twelve total cards. I managed to make the clues easy enough to be deciphered and the locations hard enough to require additional effort in locating the actual card.

All told, we spent about an hour doing it this morning. It was fun to make, and she had fun figuring stuff out.

The next question: how to put this model to use?

We showed up at our daughter’s Meet The Teacher day and were greeted with a nine-part treasure hunt. It was our daughter’s job to navigate nine classroom activities before she left. They included:

1. Finding her cubby
2. Having her parents volunteer for activities
3. Placing her supplies in the class storeroom
4. Spotting and attempting to name the class’s pet fish
5. Having her parents enter their info in a computer survey
6. Finding her desk
7. Saying hello to the teacher and the teacher’s aide
8. Taking a picture with some available props
9. Playing with the classroom toys

By the end of the sequence, we had spent half an hour in the classroom, and Cat’s jitters were gone. The teacher actually took our daughter to meet another classmate, a girl who set up shop at her desk and hadn’t moved. After the intros, the two went to the toy section and played together for another ten minutes.

This summer, I discovered how well scavenger hunts worked for elementary school kids. They loved figuring out the riddles and going and seeking the hidden objects I spread around the church social hall. The activity asked the kids to use their minds and bodies.

Our daughter’s teacher knew that a lecture wouldn’t work, so she set our daughter (and her classmates) on knowledge journey. I was taking notes.