Monday, October 22, 2007

What's the deal with farm animals?

Parents As Teachers is a national organization that sends a Parent Educator to your home about every 2 months to help make sure your child is developmentally on track & to help the parents with educational activites. We love PAT. They've helped us with sleep, food, and fun. They have play groups & lots of fun activities throughout the year. And, we love our parent educator Angela. Jack loves her too.

That being said, Anglea was here about a month ago. She was playing a game with Jack where he would pull different objects out of a can & name them. It was to test his speech more than his vocabulary. (Yes, this story gets better, hang in there...)

Most of the items in the can were animals of some sort. Jack wouldn't name any of them. He mooed at the cow, but that was about it.

When she left I freaked & told John that we needed to work on animals with Jack. But then I thought, what the heck is the deal with all the farm animals??? Big deal, Jack won't identify a pig. Show the kid a saxophone & he'll walk around all day yelling "SAXOPHONE"! He can also name a clarinet, flute, piano, guitar, drum & bassoon.

All you parents out there need to help stop the farm animal madness with me.

5 comments:

Tirzah said...

Totally agree.

John Hendrix said...

Hello.
I will be Jack's parent educator.

First order of business:
We'll test his ability to identify cloud types.

Hmm..
Well, he's not really saying "cumulonimbus" as he needs to for proper development.

cagedwisdom said...

Could you say this with a Seinfeld accent? I think it would really help. yea, why should a kid from U-
city be able to spot a hog. He needs to know types of hummus before that.

Anonymous said...

LOL.

this is really funny. it's a good point that you make. it reminds me of the gripe that people have with IQ tests. they're not relevant cross-culturally. for example, urban youth may score low on IQ tests used in the educational setting and be classified as borderline intellectual functioning or mentally retarded BUT if the questions were more culturally relevant and actually measured their ability to learn based on their experiences and the knowledge they have acquired, they'd score as geniuses. Now if students at Harvard or Yale took the same test as the young urban youth, they would fail and be classified as retarded. (this example may be slightly exaggerated but you get the point. *smile*)

this seems to be the same with farm animals vs. instruments. who needs to know the farm animals to be developmentally on target? why not saxomophones and the like?

Anonymous said...

Well said.