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
Shopping alone when you are five
The world must be so exciting for her. I try to imagine how she experiences the shops, the distance to the riverside park or the large playground, the roads full of traffic, the market. Buying a snack in the corner store is something trivial for us, a relatively meaningless act we won't remember. It's no ...
Experiment
It is not because I have conclusive evidence of it, but because I enjoy teaching new things to my daughter Miru, that I believe we should introduce the most basic concepts of science to our children as early as possible. When Miru and I were wondering if the sea could freeze over, I suggested that ...
Laughing with Miru
There is nothing like humor to discover the signature of a human mind. Tell me what you find funny, and I will tell you who you are. Okay, I may not be able to fathom the trenches of your soul, but I'm pretty sure I'll have some sense of your political leaning, your raw intelligence ...
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 ...
Learning by improv theatre
Dear Miru, You are four years old now. We have real conversations. When I pick you up from kindergarten and I ask you what have you done today (in Dutch) you tell me brief but wonderful stories about making a snowman, observing insects and hedgehogs, dancing or taking the bus together with all the other ...
Predictability
Dear Miru, When I walked you home from the kindergarten to your grandparent's house today, you made me very happy. The sky was grey and light rain drizzled on the pavement as I knelt down in front of you. Then you said exactly what I had imagined you would say: "Regent het! Naar binnen!" ("Does ...
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. ...
What is a ball?
Dear Miru, We were playing with a ball today, but you said it wasn't a ball. Or, as you put it, that the ball was "kapot". You meant that the ball lacked significantly in "ballness"; that its "ballness" was broken. I understand your intuition: The ball we were playing with didn't look like any other ...
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 ...
Alphabet
Our letter 'A' started his career as Aleph, the first letter of the semitic abjads or writing systems, including Aramaic, Syriac, Phoenician, Arabic, Armenian, and Hebrew. The Phoenician letter was derived from an Egyptian glyph depicting the head of an ox. The Greek alfa has its origin in this Phoenician letter, and it's obvious how ...
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 ...
