Raise a daughter who is confident in math and science

I think I need to pay more attention to the “confident” part of this goal. Daughter tends to be a bit shy when it comes to sharing her knowledge and as she goes on in school, this may translate into the teachers not asking her the good questions and maybe assuming she doesn’t know much…which may lead her to assume the same about herself.

She’s been studying anatomy at daycare. I love that I have her in this arrangement. Her teacher/caregiver has the kids talk about the body parts and sing songs about what they do, colour pictures of organs and velcro them to their bodies and then for their “test” they have to put together paper versions of internal body parts. OK, not nearly as morbid as it sounds. When they move on to the next science subject, they follow the same format.

To build confidence, I’m setting aside time once a week for daughter to “teach” me everything she learned at school. This will not just reinforce what she has learned, but build some pride and confidence. Plus it’s her own subject, so her big brother can’t take top billing.

We did this today and she was so proud. Yay. Mom, your brain is what feels things but it’s in your head, not your fingers…and it feels like JellO, but don’t eat it

but I think it needs to be an ongoing goal since kids interests can change so quickly.

Daughter has become a rock hound. Everywhere we go, she collects rocks to bring home to study. She washes them, then brings them to me and wants “to know the story” about how each rock was made.

Her new favourite bedtime reading, believe it or not is this

It has very detailed scientific jargon that I have to explain as we read (and sometimes I have a hard time figuring out), but she’s fascinated.

And every night, after lights out, she pulls out the children’s science books and I can hear her explaining the diagrams to herself.

is teaching what you know to others without being asked. Daughter has drawn out insect life cycles and is explaining the whole process to her brother.

I must say, it is so sweet it almost sends me to tears, to see the two of them cuddled over a pad of paper and hearing her little girl voice say “metamorphisis” and “Crysalis” and explain it all so clearly.

I guess that visit to Bug Lady last month made a good impression!

“I’m going to be a scientist!!!“

She said it to my mom today, she says she’s going to be a scientist and save the environment.

I arranged for daughter to be in an afternoon session with “The Bug Lady”. She’s an entomologist with a collection who caters to groups of preschoolers. She had many large and exotic live insects that she showed the kids, while explaining how insects work and what they all have in common. Daughter was very excited by the whole experience.

Long after little girls should be in bed, I was watching TV and daughter came running, in a panic, and crying “Mom, Mom, I did something bad” tears, tears…..she can’t tell me, “you have to see”.

She leads me into my bedroom and points at a now scarred and disfigured lamp. She has taken the lampshade off and encased the spiral flourescent bulb in clay. And she cries, “am I gonna burn da house down”.

I manage to contain my snicker and be firm mommy, “no sweetie, you did the right thing by coming to get me, but what you did to the lamp was wrong. What made you do that?”

Bawling into her clenched fists, she proclaims:

“I wanted to do an EXPERIMENT!!”

Ok, so there’s a bit of science there, but definately needs work on the confident in science part of this goal. Anyway, I told her it was great that she wanted to do experiments, but next time not after bed time and not without a grownup.

^{Need to explain hypothesis a little better too. Because an experiment without a hypothesis is just vandalism}

We read a book together about astronauts and outerspace. I got an initial reaction from her that the book was for boys (sigh), but perservered and she found some things interesting and was especially fascinated with the frozen underground ice on the moon. Which was cool, because how many 4 year old princesses are there who wear tiaras and pink hearted clothes while talking about lunar soil science.

I really don’t feel like I’ve spent enough time working on math with my daughter. I know most people just leave it up to when the kids start school, but now I’m thinking that if she starts school ahead of most kids in math, that will help keep her confident for a while.

I made something last night, sort of based on the Montessori beads at my sons’ school, but improvised with a few extras. And I used her favourite colours and made it girly so she would know it’s for her, and girly.

There are beads for counting, single beads for single digits and I strung 100 into groups of ten. I got a little box for keeping the beads in and painted it purple and then glued sequins, a butterfly and a ladybug all over it. I used the girliest beads I could find, shades of purple and looking like “diamonds”.

I used stiffened felt for the workplace, and also to cut out cards for digits (3 sets of one to nine, ten zeros), math symbols and the words for all the numbers (one to twenty and then twenty, thirty, forty…)

The dark purple squares are for her to put the beads onto for working out the math. Right now she can count to twenty and that’s about it, so we’ll start just with using the beads to count up to 100 and matching the words and numbers.

^{(redfaced) I just noticed that I put “ten” under the number 20. I was up really late doing this :(}

I’ve taken to occasionally calling daughter “science girl” which draws a shy smile from her. And hubby has started saying things like “ask mum, she’s the scientist” to try and get daughter to think of science in the feminine.

We had a hailstorm today. I made a point of explaining hail production to daughter, in her 4 year old terms. Usually I explain things to my son because he’s asking the questions and is more interested. But I think his huge enthusiasm and knowledge of science is intimidating for my daughter. I banished son for a while so that daughter and I could talk about the water cycle and draw some pictures together of terrain. Son already knows the water cycle and was interfering too much wiht my attempts to have my daughter form hypothesis and reach conclusions.

So now she knows about arctic outflow, altitudinal temperature change, updrafts, precipitation and the water cycle. She seems interested, but is also acting really shy about this.

under other goals. Here and especially here so I won’t explain this goal all over again.

We have a couple of science based trips planned, Drumheller for a dinosaur dig and another one to the Powerhouse, an old hydroelectric damn that has been converted to a hands-on museum of electricity.

I also decided to eliminate Bob the Builder from what the children are allowed to watch. I know it’s not exactly science, but I don’t like the way Wendy is second fiddle even though she obviously knows more than Bob, has better communication skills and all of the business management skills. It doesn’t completely offend me, nothing I’d start a petition over. But I don’t want my daughter seeing the stereotype all the time, that boys hang out with the machines while girls do the wallpapering and answer the phone.