Its an interesting concept, and one that I am toying with. Sitting on the veranda of our holiday apartment with lizards running up the wall, I’m reminded of those experiments they used to do in the name of science, where you take a small animal, peel back its skin, stick electrodes on and whack up the voltage to see how high you can make it jump. I hope they don’t do things like that anymore, though I’ve a horrible suspicion that my shower gel was rubbed in the eyes of some unsuspecting creature before I used it to lather up in the bathroom. It doesn’t sting my eyes at all.
The experiments I have in mind are less likely to get me arrested, and somewhat less stressful to the offspring. Apparently, talking to children using slightly more complex sentence structures than they use can, quite quickly, cause them to use more complex language. So, I thought, lets give it a shot with one of the simpler complexities – using more than one verb in a sentence. This sounds quite simple, but I’m struggling to think of when I last spoke to Mini (I refer to my kids as Maxi, Mini and Mini-Mini, in order of size), apart from saying “No!, that’s not a toy!”, “be careful with Mini-Mini, she’s not a doll, she needs to be able to breathe” or “I know it’s your favourite, but mummy says you’re not allowed it”.
So, the things I need do are 1) Talk to Mini, in sentences, and 2) Use more than one verb in said sentences. This proves more difficult than I anticipated. Firstly, I need to be able to construct sentences with more than one verb, and secondly, remember to actually do this. I find both difficult, and probably should have considered this before I applied for teacher training, but I forgot. The first I put down to my parents only ever telling me things like “No, that’s not a toy!”, the second to my increasing years. Like me, I doubt my parents are clear about exactly what a verb is. This whole “becoming a teacher” thing is looking a bit precarious.
The next experiment I consider is miscue analysis, which I plan to inflict on Maxi (age 6 ¼). For those of you who have no clue what I’m rattling on about, its getting a child to read to you, and looking at the mistakes they make to find patterns. Its quite complex, you need to identify a suitable passage and sort out your error classification system.
I set to. I’m on holiday so I reckon I’m allowed the odd can of local brew and the odd shot of rum as I work. The longer I work, the more complex my categorisation system becomes, the wavy lines start looking like the cloud symbol. By the time I’ve selected an appropriate passage, the heat must have got to the bottle of rum as half of it seems to have evaporated, maybe I deserve a hard-earned kip after all this exertion. Perhaps I should start experimenting some other time.
On someone else’s children.
