Miru
Fragments written for my daughter Miru, born January 2013. Observations about her life, her learning, her loveliness. I share stories about how she grows up as a bilingual child dividing her time between different continents. There are also reflections about parenthood, as well as letters that I write to her.
Miru also has her own website at miru.creativechoice.org
What is context?
I asked Miru what 배 'bae' and 눈 'nun' means. She says 'pear' and 'snow'. But in Korean, bae also means boat and nun also means eye. I tell her that it depends on the context. Context is the concept I want to explain to her today. "Papa what is that, context?" -"Context is a ...
Math
Dear Miru, Your calculating is improving and you actually like it. We play with numbers together. Two times ten is twenty. Six plus five is eleven. Ten minus 2 equals eight. It is all very playful. You learn how to figure out calculations by making drawings of dots, lines, squares on the whiteboard. You don't ...
Be Farecul When You Ross The Croad
You learn very fast now. Lately, we have been playing "lettertjes omdraaien", exchange letters in words. Even though you don't really get the concept of spelling yet and how several letters make up a word (it is interesting that this mental apparatus is apparently rather complicated; letters are an abstraction, the unit of our language ...
Learning: Definition game
Dear Miru, I taught you definitions and how to describe something without using the word for it. It is a game now, but later you'll understand why that is useful. You are good at it. I asked you to describe an ice-cream and you said a thing that children eat by licking and that is ...
Learning fun: Odd one out
Dear Miru, Everyday you are a little bit smarter. I try to catch up with you and come up with a suitable game. Today, I play 'The odd one out' with you. I mention four items and you tell me which one doesn't belong in the list and why. You are good at it! We ...
Bilingual child’s creative translation
Today, like most days, my four years old daughter Miru sang a song in kindergarten. When I asked her to sing it to me after I picked her up and she was enjoying an ice slushy that colored her tongue orange, she rendered a perfect translation in Dutch. Good, the song consisted of three distinct ...
Fearless
Dear Miru, There lives an intuition in me that wants you to be fearless. I know that fear has a vital function, but it only works when you experience it against the background of fearlessness. When your mind is troubled by unprocessed phobias, the fear that might have saved you will become useless and irrational. ...
On Education
Dear Miru, Today, I want to tell you about Education. Even if we would want them to, our children don't accept the concept of schooling as the transfer of a canon of established facts. They are so much used to Wikipedia and Google that it would be practically impossible to convince them that carrying knowledge ...
The writing is on the wall
An almost three-year old girl draws on everything. Miru takes her color pencils and makes her mark on the vocabulary cards that her mother has prepared for her early childhood education. Her third birthday is less than a month away and we think it's great when she learns a lot now, while her need to ...
At the Zoo
About a month ago, I took Miru to the Tierpark Berlin. When we entered the large park, she had no expectation and did what she does best: smiling at the guys who checked our tickets and nagging for a candy she sees in the hand of an other child. I, on the other hand, had ...
Bird watching with Miru
Miru and I found ourselves on the church square in the village of Vimeiro in the Alentejo region of Portugal. A father and his daughter. In the portico in front of a church, where we sat down because of the shade we looked up and there were swallow nests between the naves of the dome. Miru ...
How the brain of the one percent works
Miru is sharing only an infinitesimally small piece of her chocolate cookie. I ask her if she would share with papa and she nods. Then she touches her cookie with her little thumb and index finger, and puts the crumble that sticks on her fingers to my lips. Her dexterity is excellent and her composure ...
An imaginary piece of her candy
It is getting sweeter. Unbearably sweet. I go to the park with Miru to let her play on the swing and drink water from the fountain while I lie in the grass with an electronic book. There are always many children there to play with her. There is no lack here. This should be anyone's ...
She holds the spoon
Today, I took Miru out for a walk through the park and the few blocks I wanted to discover today. She strolled casually next to me on the sidewalk (and less casually when we went downhill). The part of Lisbon we explored is made for cars, and so I had the opportunity to teach her ...
Learning from Miru
What do you do when your two year old daughter points at your plate of spaghetti and says "papa" when you come into the kitchen? I was late for dinner the other day, due to trivial computer work that ate up my hours, and I hadn't eaten enough. Miru knows this exactly, and readily takes ...
A Digital Genius
We live with a digital genius of 011001 months old. When any object with keys or buttons is within her reach, it's hers and all the buttons get pressed in an order that to me, her father still with one foot in the analog age, appears as random. Her fingers fly over the keypads from ...
Do you have that too, dad?
Recently, I purchased a used Konica Hexanon prime lens with an aperture of 1/1.4 and I am enjoying the amount of light that it can take in. With such apertures, the field of focus becomes very thin, and objects really stand out. Because the camera takes over some of the routine work of our eye, ...