Astounded

Tuesday  in mid-morning  Mystie

On a recommendation from Preschoolers and Peace, I made a CD a month ago with all that I wanted Hans to memorize over the whole year. It has the Apostle’s Creed, the whole catechism, plus Psalm 1 (for review), the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, Psalm 139, and a couple other verses. I put a few songs after that and then a few recordings of Winnie-the-Pooh stories so that he’s motivated to get to the end. :) He listens to it during his quiet time; in fact, the CD is 70 or 80 minutes long and the Pooh is his favorite, so his quiet time is now timed by the CD: he can come out when the CD is over.

Anyway, I was pleased when, on the second day of Morning Time, Hans took off and repeated the Apostle’s Creed all by himself, and we hadn’t hardly worked on that one-on-one at all yet.

Before we left off Circle Time before, we had just introduced catechism questions 27-30, so we went that far again beginning last week. Listening to my recording of it corrected his little errors I had been letting go, such as the first few abbreviated answers he learned because he was two when he learned the first few questions and also a few preposition mix-ups I let slide. So now, without my ever having corrected him, he says “God made all things” instead of simply “all things.” We also learned one answer incorrectly because I initially tried going off my own memory, so I taught him “Why ought you to glorify God? Because He loves me and takes care of me.” When the real answer is “Because He made me and takes care of me.” He had already learned it before I realized my mistake, so I just let it go and decided it was ok. However, I recorded the correct version on his CD and on our first Morning Time he immediately without hesitating answered with the correct version.

This thing works!

From day one, he got through question 30 with ease, my main focus was clarifying his enunciation of “conformity” and “transgression” and also explaining what the answers meant. So today I decided to move ahead and try introducing the next three. I asked question 31 (”What was the sin of our first parents?”) and Hans immediately came back with “Eating the forbidden fruit.” Ok. “Who tempted them to this sin?” “The little tempted Eve and she gave the fruit to Adam.” “The *devil* tempted Eve.” “Oh! Yeah. The devil tempted Eve and she gave the fruit to Adam.” So, out of curiosity, I just kept going. We got through question 138 before Hans said he needed to go to the bathroom and asked if he could be done. So, over 100 I had never asked him before and he got completely wrong answers on only 7 of those, with promptings on reciting each of the commandments and the Lord’s Prayer.

One month of listening to 145 questions daily and he has them all almost memorized. I am astounded. So my job is not going to be helping him memorize during Morning Time so much as working on his pronunciation and explaining and relating them to him.

So, my exhortation is for you all to go make CDs for your own little ones! It really works! It works more quickly than you would have ever thought possible.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 24th, 2007 at 10:37 am and is filed under Governess, Mother. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.