Bored Ellie is Bored

Ellie has different kinds of lessons now. It used to be just "Vocab". Then it was "Book" or "Vocab". Now it's Book, Vocab or Story. But she's getting bored again. She can read sentences - just the challenge of reading sentences isn't enough anymore. She wants to learn.

I tried doing some simple stories:
"This is Zed. Zed is a fish. Zed likes outside. Zed likes water. Zed likes green. Zed doesn't like grass."

That was OK - but she didn't want to keep it up. Last night we worked on body parts. She can touch Zed's eyes, his nose, she can give him a kiss, touch his tummy, and his tail.

I also have a stuffed elephant that she likes. We reviewed names (my name is Mom, your name is Ellie, her name is Isabelle, fish's name is Zed) and then I asked her if she wanted to name her elephant? ("Yes.") I figured we'd do one traditional option (Barney) and one that would help her practice the little-used X - Xerxes. She picked Barney to be his name... and now she knows Barney's big ears, that he has four feet, a long nose, and eyes.

I also taught her homonyms - know and no. Ellie knows red. Ellie knows green. Ellie knows blue. She was so cute. I said: "Do you know red?"

She kept picking "NO", so confused! Then she figured it out :) "Yes!"

Anyway, all that to say.... I'm running out of things to teach her again? She's bored - she can read sentences. She knows Zed lives in water (and Ellie lives in a house). I started to make up stories, but then thought... that would be so confusing. "Zed lives in the outside water. Outside water is called creek."

But Zed is here, next to her, and not in water. He's not outside in the creek. Barney doesn't live outside either, he's next to her too...

Maybe I'll try to say, "This is a pretend story.. Let's pretend...."

I think she challenges me at least as much as I challenge her.

Ellie's Terrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Ellie's such an interesting creature - she's cerebral, not affectionate or cuddly. She wants to be mentally stimulated more than anything. She's all brains--albeit mostly mute. But she is sooooo sensitive, and can become a sad little bugger when she doesn't get her way.

I have been gone 12 days out of the last 16 days, and Ellie was really upset. I asked her questions Monday night to see if I could cheer her up:
--Do you want to play vocab? ("No")
--Do you want to read a book? ("No")
--Do you want a pancake? (Her favorite food!) ("No")
--Do you want eggs? ("No")
--Do you want tea? (Her favorite drink!) ("No")
--Do you want water? (She tolerates but doesn't love water) ("Yes")
--Do you want it hot or cold? (She doesn't like cold beverages) ("Cold")

So basically she was totally miserable and dejected and wanted only cold water and to be left to sulk about her life! She was pretty nippy, so I told her, "You can have a bad day. It's OK to be upset. But you can't bite or hurt others when you are upset."

I gave her some space to feel the fullness of her feelings - and tried to bribe her with treats. It took a few days, but my moody little critter came around!

We played this morning, and then I was away working for a good ten hours. When I started her lessons tonight I asked her:
--Do you like treats? ("Yes!")
--Do you like vocab? ("Yes!")
--Do you like pancakes? ("Yes!")
--Do you like Mom? ("No.")

By the time we finished our lessons I asked her again, "Do you like Mom?" ("Yes.")

There's something innocent about asking her questions. She shares her heart without shame or hesitation--she doesn't know those things. She just expresses her opinions, and sometimes she's not happy. And that's OK :)

My tough cockatoo, let me show you her.

Ellie's Fidget Stick

Ellie has begun bringing a little stick to chew on to all of her lessons. She actually holds it in her foot while she munches on treats - and then puts it back in her mouth for her learning! She's so odd... and, like many school children, so not odd. She literally fidgets while she learns.

Here she is - we were working on silent reading vocabulary... with a little stick in her mouth.

Ellie's Test

Some brainy stuff first.

Reading is considered a complex cognitive process utilizing many features of the brain - including the ability to visually process symbols into meaningful communication (orthography), the ability to hear sounds and combine them with the symbols (phonological awareness), the ability to put those sounds and symbols together for vocabulary development (semantic processing), etc.

The hallmark of literacy is the triggering of the self-learning mechanism - the ability to read something and add it to one's internal vocabulary - and thereby learn more things. (This is called lexical orthography.)

Pigeons and baboons have (shocking scientists) mastered orthography - the ability to decipher strings of words into 'possible meaning' - they weren't meaningful vocabulary, but they could do it. Over and over again, however, scientists say, "Reading is a uniquely-human skill."

Anyway, lots of mumbo jumbo to say, I've finished the article as far as it can go (12 pages) and have designed the tests. The first one is super easy (it may be too easy for Ellie - she gets bored and her scores go down on easy stuff), but it'll be simple words. Birds'll read them under blind conditions, easy peasy. Isabelle already does this, and she's only started learning to read two months ago.

The really cool test - the hallmark of reading - is whether the birds can decode words by sight, and then later recall them when verbally prompted. I tested her ability to silently read words and later recall the when verbally prompted...

AND OMG SHE DID IT!!! Afterward I cried with happiness and called Joe and my Mom! :)

Letter to Parrots

Dear Ellie and Isabelle,

I am in Oregon, in a little cabin in the mountains, sitting by a fire and enjoying the view of the river just under the deck, the peaks of the mountains not too far off. The fog dwindles down the mountain. It is unspeakably beautiful here. Writing in a cabin in the mountains by a river... a small dream come true.

I'm writing an article--your article--about how you learned to read. I'm seeped seven pages into this sucker, with an entire page of references already. I've written the introduction, reviewed prior research and have already written all about the materials and stimuli used to teach you. The other researcher and I have discussed you today, and the organization of this article, and at her prompting, I've written to three journals about their interest in publishing this material.

And with all of that background, I get to you, my sweet girls. Procedure is this section, and I must relive the moments of joy as I watched you learn to touch colors, then discriminate between colors... (Isabelle, I thought you'd really never learn! You always tossed the colors across the room--FOR MONTHS--and I honestly decided you were my artistic, expressive, but-not-very-bright bird child. And now you rival Ellie in your word-recognition skills!) Then as you touched the letter A for the very first time.. and then B, and C and all the letters that came after. As you distinguished BALL from BELL and cascaded into reading words and danced into emerging reader books.

I sit here, writing and reliving these memories and bawling with pride because you are the most amazing little bird girls on earth, and I am so honored to be your "bird mama". I have a notebook full of research articles on "orthographic processing in animals" - and researchers say over and over again: reading is a complex cognitive process rooted in language development, and it is a uniquely human process.

And you two have shown that it's not. You are incredible and smart and colorful and amazing. I love that you LOVE to learn, that you beg me every single day to teach you more, that you don't shy away from hard tasks.

It is a privilege to share my life with you.

With more love than could ever be described,

J

Isabelle Learns to Read!

Some very exciting news is Isabelle! She had the most adorable "aha!" moment last week while we were working on her flash cards. Isabelle learned phonetic letters and then I began teaching her words. She wasn't really getting the word thing, so I started teaching her to sound them out. "Which one starts with S? Which one starts with T?" After we'd go through her cards, sounding out the first letters, I'd go through the cards again asking, "Which one says, SIT? Which one says TALL?" This way she'd already looked at the first letters - and now could expand it to the word.

So last week, all of a sudden, her eyes lit up and she had the cutest, most excited cockatoo smile ever, and was like OMG I GET IT I GET IT I GET IT!!!!!! She started picking out the words like a boss! I had to run and find all of Ellie's old site words, and then she knocked them out like crazy!

Yesterday I gave her 16 new words she'd never seen before. We didn't pre-read them, sounding them out, we just read them, straight. SHE GOT 88% CORRECT!!! She missed TWO out of SIXTEEN!!! OMG I was sooo proud of her! My little reader <3 <3 <3 (And to think, I didn't really believe she could learn it, haha!)

Here's our video :)