Making Connections

Learning, and life itself, is all about making connections. Yesterday and today were game days again. Uno is great for matching colors and numbers, learning your numbers and strategy for the older kids. D and daddy played chess; they haven’t played in about a year and now C is old enough to start learning. He sat and watched to learn about the pieces and how they moved. Next we got out What’s Gnu?
It’s been sitting on our shelf forever. There are numerous cards with three spaces, two blank and one letter filled in. You spread all the cards out on a table and a small dispenser gives you two letters at a time. Then you try to make a word. One of the letter combos we got was ‘o’ and ‘e’. We had a card with an ‘f’ in the first spot. When neither D nor C could make a word (anyone seen the TV show Word World? The kids kept singing, “We’ve got to build a word. Let’s build it. Let’s build in now.”) I pointed out ‘foe’. You know, like Mad Eye Moody’s foe glass and suddenly D knew what a foe was because he’s listening to the cds of Harry Potter.

When I was in college I took classes in literature through both the English and Humanities departments. I really enjoyed the Humanities classes far more. Rather than reading a novel in a vacuum, they explored the politics, art, culture, science going on at the time and how it influenced the author and may have influenced the contemporary audience. In a similar manner, I never understood the very strict specialization of subjects in school. Your sophomore year in world history you might learn about the Queen Elizabeth 1. Your Junior year might have you reading Shakespeare. It is difficult to get a sense of cause and effect, how history affects art, advances in math lead to leaps in science.

The more ideas, people, places, books you introduce children to, the more connections they can make. ‘Foe’ in What’s Gnu? is the same as ‘foe’ in Harry Potter. If a ‘foe glass’ is a glass to spot enemies than a foe, simply, is an enemy. Basically for us it comes down to talking about everything, not saying ‘now isn’t the time for ancient Egypt’. And one thing leads to another . . . and another . . . and another.