Tonight my daughter and I read through two Bob books. She was very happy; so was I.

I had tried to teach her how to read at the beginning of the year. We advanced until she was resisting too much. I decided to stop until she had interest again. She recently showed that interest, and we did better than I thought we would do.

I love rhetoric. And I love persuasion. All of these help us to get along without resorting to violence.

So is it surprising that I am recommending the following article by Jay Heinrichs, from Figaro Speech on why we should teach rhetoric to our children?

I learned about Jay while reading a book review on Psychology Today. That was a few months ago. I feel that I am eventually going to buy this book :)

Wonder Time's Argue with Me!

Interesting story about the necessity for failure.

A recent post to a blog entry asked about failure and what to do if you have never failed.

I’ve failed trying to climb the corporate ladder—at at least four decent-sized companies. And I’ve failed as an employee in a variety of smaller ventures. I’ve been laid off once and fired another time. (But these failures have given me the confidence and desire to go out on my own).

Yesterday I had Isabella help me do several housecleaning tasks. She helped me clean the living room, her room, and the carport. The task was basically the same: pick up a certain class of objects and put them away.

She did this very well, and I am very proud of her. Knowing that she must contribute to the household is a very, very important lesson that she must learn when she is very young.

I am running into a problem while I am teaching chess to my daugther. She doesn't seem to have the concept of horizontal, vertical, and diagonal. I have tried to teach her this several times using the board, but it doesn't seem to sink in.

Without these concepts, it is hard to teach her how to move the pieces. Even with this minor roadblock, yesterday she seemed to have a better grasp on how to move the rook.

I guess I will have to find some way of doing it. The board doesn't seem a great place to teach her these concepts :)

Yesterday I started to teach Isabella how to play a simple melody in the piano. Nothing complicated: just five notes :P

She has a good memory and likes music, so I think that she will enjoy learning how to play the piano as much as she enjoys learning how to play chess.

Again, my goal here is for her to enjoy it enough so that she will want to practice all by herself. So, after each time she played the notes right, she got a nice piece of chocolate cake.

In fact, I think that the most important goal for teaching anything to toddlers is to have enough fun so that they will like it. The goal should be mainly appreciation of the subject so that they will want to pursue it themselves.

I went hiking with my children to the C&O National Historical Park. This is the second time that I hiked with my 1-year-old and my 3-year-old. I had hiked with them in Teddy Roosevelt Island, while it was raining, at the beginning of the summer of 2006. At that point he was smaller, and I carried him for the whole hike.

Now he is too heavy to carry, so I tried something that my wife had suggested: use the stroller. So I brought the light cheap stroller that we have, and hiked on two moderate trails, the Woodland Trail and the Anglers Spur.

It was a mixed bag. On the one hand, it worked okay when the trail was more or less removed with rocks. The light weight of the stroller made it possible to lift him over fallen logs or segments with too many rocks.

Last Saturday I hiked the Billy Goat Trail, section A with my 3-year-old. This is a pretty amazing trail; the best that I hiked so far in the Washington Metro Area.

What makes this trail great is the number of rocks that one has to hike through. My daugther had the time of her life.

Especially interesting was a section of the trail that is an easy rock climbing wall, but much harder than what most people who hike generally subject themselves.

Billy Goat Trail in Wikipedia

If you are bilingual, I would recommend to teach how to read in Spanish before than you do it in English.

When a child is learning how to read, he first must get that it is a system for replicating sounds of words. Once he understands that, he must build the individual skill of reading each syllable to be able to read anything.

As a parent or an educator, it is evident when a child gets what reading is about when they seem to understand what the activities are about. Before that, they will seem a bit restless and they will behave in a way that let's you know that they don't see what is the point of the exercises.

At home I am using Juguemos a Leer from Editorial Trillas. This is the book that my sister's used to learn how to read. I learned on a different, but very similar book. The technique is the same though, and the one book that I read on I believe was already out of print back in the 1980s, when my mother home schooled me during the spring to prepare me to go into 2 grade in Mexican schools, after going to school in the U.S. up to this point.

Jugemos a Leer is a truly amazing book. Designed for school instruction, it is excellent for homeschooling. The system is integrated page by page. Even though there is teacher's manual(Apoyo Didactico), one doesn't really need it. All what one has to do is read it from beginning to end. Each reading exercise supports the previous ones and builds from it.

Last week was a total success in Isabella's reading efforts. She learned all of the vowels in Spanish, and we are working on reading syllables already.

She seemed to have some problems identifying the vowels at midweek, but on Friday she demonstrated a good command on them, easily reading the exercise page for the letter U, which has thrown in other vowels.

The first consonant that one learns in the syllabary is /m/. Again I have encountered a cognotive hurdle for her, since it looks like she doesn't get that /m/ and /a/ together make the /ma/ shound.

I believe that this is the major cognotive leap that she has to make so that she will learn how to read and how to use the alphabet. Once she gets that you put these symbols together to make sounds, I believe that it will be much easier to learn how to read.

Yesterday night my daughter claimed that she wanted to do her writing training. I told her that it would come after a little reading training.

She reviewed the Spanish letters "A" "I" and "E". She kept saying that E looked like a three, which is true. She seems to have some problems distinguishing lower case "a" and "e". I told her that "e" has his mouth open, and that "a" has a little tail. She enjoyed the mnemonic, and it seems that it helped her identify them.

I did introduce the "O" to her. We will read together today, when I come back.

I gave her the writing workbook. She seems to have some trouble making zigzags because he is seeing the whole zigzag as a single project instead of making a series of connected inclined lines.

Well, today when I came back from work, I noticed that Isabella had already practiced chess. She set up the pieces, with the "help" of my wife. She knows by now where they go, but she likes being directed. I can relate to that since when I was a child I liked having the same story told to me again and again because I liked how it was told.

I attempted to try to work on chess tonight, but she didn't show any interest when I showed her the chess set. So I got the Spanish syllabary that my aunt gave me. It is the same book that my sisters used to learn how to read back in the 1980s. The graphic work is different. I feel a bit sorry that it is different, but I must admit that it is better now.

For some reason, my daughter had no problem identifying pawns. Rooks = castle and knights = horsies are the most natural solutions since those two pieces look like that.

She did have problem telling the king from the queen, and the bishop from the pawns.

So I told her that the king has a cross on top. Then a realized that she didn't know what a cross was :P

The queen became the ice cream bowl with a cherry, and my daughter’s favorite description is for the bishop: an ice cream cone with a cherry on top.

I was surprised that she quickly started using the correct names, followed by the description.