Money Monday

January 12, 2009

This is about Monday, only I’m writing it on Tuesday and I can’t quite remember any of it anymore.

We did lots of alphabet work today – Rocket Boy sat and wrote out letters more times than I thought possible. He’s doing this annoying thing where he purposefully does something exaggeratedly wrong in an attempt to clown around – a “P” with a giant loop, an “H” with a crazy curly leg. It could be fun, except he’s not really doing the letters correctly. I wouldn’t mind some clowning if he could show me his proficiency first. I suspect it’s a coping mechanism. He doesn’t really know how to do it so he clowns. My correcting him only makes him act out more so I countered it by letting him do an alphabet as he saw fit, then I had him correct his own work, marking an x next to the letters that were wrong. Next I had him rewrite those letters. I’m not sure if it really worked, but if I let him turn a critical eye on his own work, I’d be able to judge if he knows correct letter formation or if he’s having some recognition problem. Turns out he knows what’s wrong. Making the judgment call himself might motivate him better.

Next it was math and money time. We emptied out the two quart mason jars full of coins onto the table then sorted them, talking about cents and how many make up a dollar. We talked about the kinds of coins, the presidents, and even got to compare some foreign coins. Somehow euros and Canadian ended up in the jar. I need to dig up the other foreign coins we have, but I can’t imagine where they are now. We had a big talk about bartering and the development of money when it became impractical to walk around with three cows in your wallet (giggles galore). Next was the big field trip to the bank. We opened a passbook savings account for Rocket Boy, depositing all the coins and the birthday/Christmas money he got. We have another account for him for college, but it is an investment account that took a big hit recently. Things will bounce back in time for him to go to college, but in the meantime I felt perfectly fine setting up an account for him that is fully liquid. TD bank is extremely kid friendly – handing out crayons, an activity book, and a piggy bank to their new customer.

Then we met Hypersteve for lunch. We got back home with only about an hour of time left. I pulled out alphabet cards and we played a highly managed version of Go Fish in which we asked “Do you have the letter that comes after/before . . .” we need to strengthen his letter order recognition. He still has to recite the alphabet to himself to know what goes next. I’m looking for more ways to get him used to knowing that N follows M without having to sing the song every time.

I think we called it a day after that, or at least I can’t remember anything else we did.

At least the field trip to the bank made an impression.