Every night for the last five or six days, I’ve been reading A Wrinkle in Time to M1. On Friday night we ended up reading until about 9:40 — we kept getting sidetracked talking about Euclidean & non-Euclidean math/geometry. She’d had a frustrating day at school with math & yet there we were talking happily about these goofily complex mathematical concepts. I pointed that out to her & she said, “Yes, but this is cool math!” Indeed. Math is so developmentally unique to learn. She’s very much where I was at math at her age. I feel for her, having to go through what I went through… I want to just teach her the short cuts to get the work done, but — gah! — that would be counter to the part of education where you’re learning about processes & how to use different parts of your brain to work out problems that may have multiple paths to a correct solution. And we’ve talked about that too. Anyway, this is a bit of a tangent…
We finished the chapter with the man with red eyes tonight. She didn’t want me to stop reading & pitched a major fit. I think she’s getting really into the book & it’s at a little bit of a scary spot right now, so I think the tantruming was all less about me stopping reading, than me stopping reading and not relieving the scary tension by bringing us to a point of, at least less, if not neutral, tension. It’s fascinating watching a piece of literature affect a child — you can almost see the different parts of their brains lighting up as they’re reacting and processing.
This book is definitely beyond M2, but she has other books that affect her developmentally appropriately. She’s at that point where she has more or less memorized certain books & now she’ll say, “Stop Mommy, I want to read this line.” And then she’ll recite the line while moving her fingers across what line of text that corresponds with her recitation. Sometimes I have her say it again while I hold her hand so her finger is on the words she’s saying a little more accurately. Brains are really amazing.