Thane has some resistance towards doing school work, but then sometimes we also spontaneously do something that’s pretty much school work as far as I’m concerned, and ze seems to having such a great time!
Like, 2 days ago, I showed zir my keyboard, and as ze was pressing on random keys, I was making the sounds of the letters. Ze was finding it so so funny that I was trying to pronounce unpronounceable words or trying to keep up with zir holding a key which was typing like 10 characters per second 😅 — one of the most euphoric moments I’ve seen zir in. We were also transitioning back and forth between this more silly game and paying attention to finding specific letters, notably so ze could write zir name. Ze also accidentally wrote something like “llllookkkkkiiiii” (”Loki” is a nickname Carissa uses for zir). Ze went to bring Carissa so ze could also witness how funny this was 😅
And yesterday, ze seemed interested in putting zir food in the microwave zirself. I think those types of moments are the best to teach: 1) there’s an immediate real world application, 2) there’s an immediate reward to succeeding, and 3) it helps zir gain autonomy. A small part of me would rather put it in the microwave myself so we accomplish the task faster — but faster for what? So we can then go teach numbers in a more boring way? That doesn’t make sense.
This morning we were talking about various places we lived and were considering living. Carissa wanted to show Thane on the world map, but Thane insisted we used zir tablet. I think neither Carissa nor I knew/remembered ze had a map on zir tablet. After talking about those places, Thane explored the Earth arbitrarily, and I explained (/tried to) some of the things ze was seeing, like the poles (and so Earth’s rotation and days/nights at the poles) and the distortions caused by making a 2D projection of a sphere.
And then I was eating some chocolate with a high amount of cacao (like 90%), and ze was confused as to why this type of chocolate existed given how not tasty it is, and whether it was found in nature or humans actually went out of their ways to make it 😂 Ze asked how chocolate was made, and Carissa found a video that explained that, and Thane watched the whole 20m video about the plant and manufacturing with rapt attention! I didn’t expect zir to make it through more than a few minutes, but ze is really fascinated by plants, so it does actually fit with my model of Thane ☺
Having this teaching intertwined in our days is one my favorite things to do with Thane ☺
(shared with Thane’s consent)
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