Isabelle Art

More, I'll let these speak for themselves:

House, with one fixing the sky

pencil and crayon

Too Many Kids

pencil and crayon

Zone of Proximal Development

The other day Isabelle and I were drawing together, and I decided, on the spur of the moment, to not draw with my cartoon style (as from my MLK book) but to adopt her style, and add just a little sophistication. The Russian developmental psychologist, Vygotsky, called this the Zone of Proximal Development, which is to say, teaching not what the child knows, nor what you want the child to know, but just a little more than they can comfortably do. The next day, Isabelle drew this:

Me and Jenna

pencil

Jenna has a big mouth, because she eats a lot. And she's got a strawberry, Isabelle told me. But I noticed two things: 1) the eyes are not simple circles, but suggestive of eye shape, with the pupils properly lower than center, 2) the addition of hair. Here's another:

The Monster in Us

pencil

On the right is the monster, on the left is a ghost, probably Ghostey, her ectoplasmic imaginary friend. I like the difference in the ghostly features of Ghostey, and the more corporal features of the monster.

Still doesn't worry about the number of digits, though.

Isabelle, Tolkien, and reincarnation

For those who don't see Isabelle in person, you should know that she has beautiful blue-gray eyes. She is also a social-leader type, attracting around herself a small court of admirers.

So the other day, Isabelle put a hand towel over her head like a kerchief. She wrapped a body towel around her waist like a robe. Then this little gray-eyed pilgrim looked at me and told me she was going on a journey.

"Where are you going?"

"To Numenora."

I swear that I have no memory of ever telling Isabelle Tolkien's tale of the Kings of Numenor, or showing her my "Numenor" website, or even speaking the word in her presence. Numenor is just not one of my oft-told tales. Carrie likewise. While one might expect a reincarnation of a Numenorean to be taller, still she has the noble bearing, magnetic personality, and those gray eyes.

Isabelle's favorite books

Isabelle has long loved to pull books off Daddy's bookshelf. At some times she'll do this daily. Generally the same ones. In relative order of preference, Isabelle likes

1. The Mother Dance by Harriet Lerner, Ph.D.
2. Dinosaur in a Haystack by Stephen Jay Gould (Biology, not fiction)
3. Relativity, the Special and General Theory by Albert Einstein
4. Asymmetries in Time: Problems in the Philosophy of Science by Paul Horwich
5. Western European Costume by Iris Brooke
6. The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould
7. The Double Helix by James D. Watson
8. The Essential Enneagram

Does she want to be a scientist?

While most of these books are together on my shelf, many are not (such as Mother Dance and European Costume). There are also a number of non-science books near the others that she never selects. These are definitely her favorites.

Genevieve

Isabelle has a naughty alter ego. For a long time I thought she was calling her "Jenna-thief," and if I ask her about "Jenna-thief" she will answer as if I have correctly named her. Carrie heard the name as "Genevieve," which is probably what Isabelle intended. But I keep hearing her say "Jenna-thief," probably because the name is evocative for me. When I listen carefully, I can tell that her 4-year-old effort at the sound /v/ is unformed, and often sounds more like /f/. Since /f/ and /v/ are allophones most of the time in English (that is, one can substitute one for the other without changing the meaning -- "vor" is heard as a variant on "for," whereas "gat" is not a variant of "hat"), my ear hardly notices her unformed consonant, I simply translate it into something that makes a word. "Jenna-thief."


What does Genevieve do? Everything naughty. She first emerged in an ecstasy of storytelling, with Isabelle running about her Grandparents' home in Massachussets describing the havoc Genevieve wrought.


"She took those books and threw them on the floor. She took that pot and she broke it. She ripped up those papers."


Eventually she ran around the room pointing at various objects, "she broke that, and she broke that, and she broke that."


Later, Genevieve became more sophisticated, although her goal of thorough naughtiness remained her raison d'etre:

She rides in the car without her seatbelt
She parks on the sidewalk
She goes shopping in her pajamas
She makes people climb on the roof and then pushes them off
She feeds the cats milk and chocolate
She throws Mommy's shelves without taking the horses off.

But have no fear. If Genevieve comes near, Isabelle says she'll get Mr. Incredible to throw the house at her.

"But honey, if he throws the house at her, where will we live?"

"That's okay. We can live in the hole where the house was."

Isabelle's Room

Isabelle's Room

pen and crayon

This is a thorough diagram of Isabelle's room. On the left side, you can see Isabelle coming in. The rectangle around her is the door. At the top you can see her bed, surrounded by ruffles, with a pillow, and rumpled blankets. Moving clockwise to the right, there is a square which is her window, and then her dresser, with all the drawers for her clothes. In the lower right corner, the circle with lines is her hamper. Along the bottom is the hallway, narrow next to the hamper and widening into a rectangle. The green is our ugly hallway rug.

A Song of the Heart

So I just looked down at a pile of Isabelle's papers, and this is what I saw:

I asked her what it was, though it was obvious, and she told me it was a song. "A Song of the Heart."

Others may not think this is such a big deal, but I was utterly floored. Consider that she's spent the past year and a half practicing drawing letters and numbers, and hasn't yet done so independently and with confidence, but here she spontaneously wrote out musical notes. Mostly eighth notes, but some are conjoined and some are independent (with their flags projecting forward). There's even a pair of sixteenth notes. The thing in the upper left may not look like much, but it seems to be holding the place of the G-clef. I don't know if Montessori has had them look at written music, or taught them about it, but her exposure here has been mostly limited to one embarrassing effort of Daddy's to play the "Bad Babies" song on his guitar.

tales of teaching

Okay, so this isn't about Isabelle, but it's a quote too good to pass up:

STUDENT: Can I have a rubber band?

ME: [suspecting catapult construction] What do you need a rubber band for?

STUDENT: I need it to hold a rolled up piece of paper.

ME: [seeing no such thing] And this rolled up piece of paper is where?

STUDENT: I just made it up so I could get a rubber band.

Isabelle Art

A Valentine Picture

A Flower





A Falling Star

"Like the one Howl caught. This is what it looks like when a demon steals your heart."

Manners

So Isabelle went to a party at her friend Zella's house today. There was a little girl there who did a lot of toy-grabbing, resulting in a few tears, particularly on Zella's part, but Isabelle minded her manners. As we tucked a very tired little girl into bed, we complimented her on being so polite, when all the other children had forgotten their manners.

Isabelle said, "There was another kid there. He was older, he was a boy. He didn't grab. He was like my cousin Benjamin."

Tradition

Since I get up at 5:30 am to get to school on time, Isabelle is instructed not to get up when she hears me, but to wait for her good morning kiss about 6:20.

Each morning, after I wash up in the bathroom, I head back to my bedroom to dress, and glance, as I walk by, into her room to see if she is sleeping. She usually is.

This morning, as I started down the hall, my nose tickled, so I turned back to the bathroom to grab a tissue.

A cry rent the night. "Daddy! You forgot to look in my room!"

Creeping middle age

The other day I remarked upon the great quantity of hair that had caught in the hair trap of my shower drain, as it has every time I've taken a shower for over twenty years, and it occurred to me that it could be--it just could be--that my hair might be thinning in my advancing age. My hairstyle typically involves a center part and ponytail hiding my hairline, so I peaked under my hair, intent on a close inspection to see if there was any thinning.

I didn't find my hairline where it should be.

To my shock and surprise, it had moved back almost an inch. It looks rather like I thought about giving myself a mohawk, then changed my mind after shaving a bit on both sides. If I had parted my hair on either side, or combed it back, or cut it off, I would have noticed the creep long ago, but the center part hid it.

Ten years ago I noted my silver hairs with pride. Two years ago I started wearing granny glasses on the tip of my nose, with pride. Some decades hence, if I live so long and need a cane, I will swing it with pride. But oh, I did want to keep my hair.

I am determined to grow old with pride, to reject the deification of youth and beauty. Since my hairstyle naturally hides my hair loss, I could easily fall into the sin of wanting it hidden. To avert this misdemeanor, I thought I should announce it to the world.