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I recently ran across this article titled "Why French Parents Are Superior." Well, I thought, who says? Offended as I was, I decided to read it. I was amazed! I think the title is purposely provocative to grab people like me and get me hooked. It worked.

I love the idea of teaching our children to wait and be patient. I love the idea of meaning what you say. I love the idea of giving your children firm boundaries, but allowing freedom within them.

Please read "Why French Parents Are Superior," and leave a comment telling me what you think.

Lately I've told some stories about the funny things kids say to me at Storytime. I got another one last week that I promised to tell you about, even though it's slightly, um, indelicate. But to me that's the whole point - when we look at it from the child's perspective, it's perfectly innocent and honest.

Here's the story - At Toddler Time I had called the kids up for a story. They all sat (on their bottoms, feet in front of them) and I introduced Come Along Daisy. I pointed to Daisy Duck and Mama Duck and told them what "Come along" meant. The little girl in front of me blurted out, "Do you poop in the toilet?"

Several things ran through my mind. Do I answer her? Will the other kids want to participate in the conversation? If I don't answer her, will she repeat the question louder until I do answer? Since no other kids seemed to have heard her, I decided not to answer, and fortunately she didn't persist.

This got me thinking about "impertinent questions." Between her and the boy a couple of weeks ago who asked what I smell like, I've thought about a child's perspective, and how at that age they really have no concept of a rude question. They honestly want to know. The girl is probably in the midst of potty training, and her mom tells her all the time, "Everybody poops in the toilet! Your parents do, your friends do, the clerk at the grocery store does!" So she looked at me and wondered, "Does Miss Teresa too?" And she asked.

No need to be offended or reprimand her. I know her mom didn't hear her, but if she did, Mom could just say, "That sort of thing is private, and we just talk about it in the family." We get upset when they do something they know they aren't supposed to do, and that isn't the case in these situations. The hardest part for me is not cracking up!

I'm a huge fan of alphabet books. My daughter learned all her letters by 17 months due to an alphabet book that just "clicked" with her. However, my huge pet peeve is alphabet books designed to be pretty, and not with the child's actual learning in mind. I get it that some of these books have a different educational goal in mind, like the ABC's of endangered species, but some products seem to be genuinely trying to teach the letters, yet don't seem to have the foggiest notion of phonics.

I taught kindergarten for three years, and a big part of math and science at that level is "sorting and classifying." It's just a fancy term for separating a group of objects into likenesses and differences - like sorting stuffed animals into dogs, bears, cats, etc. We had a tub of what's called "pattern blocks," colored wooden or plastic triangles, rectangles, squares, etc., and the kids would sort them by color, or by shape, or by three sides, four sides, and six sides. Children in the early childhood years love sorting and classifying.

You can create opportunities for your kids to practice this at home quite easily. Tons of stuff around your house can be sorted. Stuffed animals, as I mentioned. How about a box of pasta that's lots of different shapes mixed together? Or you can save bread wrapper tags - those plastic things that hold the wrapper closed - till you have a good collection. They can be sorted by color, shape of the hole, types of corners. Got a junk drawer? (Who doesn't?) How about all those pens and pencils? They can be sorted into pens and pencils, including mechanical pencils, or ones that write and those that don't, or by color of ink, erasers that work and don't. (Got an idea of what my junk drawer looks like?) I also have a pile of rubber bands that I've collected from the mail and the produce department at the grocery store. There are lots of ways to sort them - size, color, width. Sometimes at the craft store, you can buy a bag of buttons. Those are really fun to sort - by number of holes, color, size, smooth or textured, round or not.

Got the idea? Give it a try! I promise once your kids catch on, they'll love it!

Sometimes people wonder why babies always put things in their mouths. That's actually the best way for them to learn about the world around them. Your tongue and lips are the most sensitive parts of your body, far more so than your fingers. Try an experiment. Take an everyday object, maybe a pencil, and feel it very carefully with your fingers. Now feel it with your mouth (don't worry, it won't make you sick). Your lips and tongue can feel where the wood and lead meet, the ridges on the metal band next to the eraser, the difference in texture between the raw wood, painted wood and rubber tip. You can smell it and taste it too, even taste the different parts of the pencil. Look how much more information your senses got! Think how much more a baby learns about his environment when they feel, smell, and taste their world this way! All those distinctions are the building blocks of scientific thinking. So as long as it's safe, don't discourage your baby from exploring his environment instinctively.

And tell me, did you try the pencil experiment?

The foundation for learning to read begins way earlier than most people realize. It's not just learning the ABC song, and it's not just learning to recognize letters. It starts way back when you hold your baby on your lap and read the first little board book out loud. Babies learn that books have pages that turn, and pictures that are different on each page, and that when you use this book, you always hear this story, but when you hear that book, you hear that story. Next comes print awareness, knowing that print has meaning, and the same print always has the same meaning. They may recognize the word "McDonald's" even though they don't understand how to sound out the letters.

I think many children can begin to read on their own well before kindergarten. Of course, it's also like learning to ride a bike - for some it just clicks way before others. But there's no need to wait for kindergarten to start teaching your child the basics, just like you don't need to wait 'til the magic age of five, or six to try to teach your child to ride a bike.

One of the best ways (in my phonics-biased opinion) is to get a very simple alphabet book, one that shows just the letter, a picture, and maybe the word. And make sure the word represents the main sound of the letter, not something like "owl" for "O". (My one big complaint about my blue alphabet rugs.) Read the book aloud by saying "A says a like apple. B says b like ball. C says c like cow." Read it over and over and over. I found a great alphabet book like that when Lauren was about 15 months old. She fixated on that book, and I didn't really understand why until I saw her looking at a book (not the alphabet book) and pointing at a word, saying "f". I looked at her book, and sure enough, she was pointing at the letter f. I quizzed her and she knew lots of letters. She knew the whole alphabet by the time she was 17 months old, and I definitely credit that alphabet book. Something just clicked with her, like a child learning to ride a bike at 4. I do believe, though, that kids are capable of getting started way before kindergarten, even before preschool. You are your child's first and best teacher!

I know people call them the "Terrible Twos," but I love this age. The world is a magical place to them, and they are so joyful about discovering new things. Imagine, you walk into a small room, the doors close behind you, and when they open again, you're in a whole new place! Magic! (No, just an elevator.)

This is also the time of passionate feelings, intense and sometimes uncontrollable, made all the more so by the inability to express them in words. We can help with this. These little ones are acquiring words incredibly rapidly. I've read statistics that say a typical 18 month old knows eight to ten words, and by 36 months knows 1,000. Phenomenal! This is obviously a time when we can help them match words to these feelings. When your toddler wants something she can't have and throws herself on the ground in hysterics, tell her "I know this makes you feel frustrated and angry, but I want to be a good mommy so I can't let you have a doughnut instead of lunch." When your little guy thought he was going to the park, but it started to rain and he cried, tell him "You must feel so disappointed. We'll go after it stops raining."

When your toddler has heard these words repeated many times, you can ask her/him next time these intense feelings crop up, "Are you feeling mad? Are you disappointed?" And your child will feel better knowing he/she can communicate those feelings.

How about "Phonological Awareness"? This is a wonderfully geeky way of saying your child can hear the different parts of a word - that "dog" sounds like "duh aw guh" Children usually start with hearing the beginning sounds of words most easily. That's why babies will babble "duh duh duh" for a dog - or a duck. They probably don't hear the difference between the "g" and the "k" at the end. That comes later.

Scientists (or "They") say that learning nursery rhymes as little tots helps with phonological awareness. All that Hickory, Dickory Dock and Eensy Weensy Spider really does make a difference! When those rhymes and songs with nonsense words and silly patterns are repeated over and over, the syllables and sounds imprint in their brains and help them hear the parts of words. This is an important pre-reading skill. Children need to be able to hear the three sounds of the word "dog" before they can know which letter goes with which sound.

So keep coming to Storytime! Bring your little ones as early as you can! Even if your child just sits on your lap and watches, it's all sinking in.

Now can you make your toddler say "Phonological Awareness"?

To me, the best toys are the ones that fire the imagination. I always steered my kids away from the toys that only did one thing. "You'll be tired of that in an hour," I'd tell them. One of my all-time favorites is Playmobil, the figures in the blue and white boxes that create worlds for acting out all kinds of stories. Sara, my now 20-year-old started collecting Playmobil figures when she was a toddler. She got the Indian set with the teepee and the campfire, the operating room with the ambulance, the playground with really cool swings and a merry-go-round, and lots of horses, including a gorgeous carriage and a farm wagon. Of course, many people came with all these sets and she would spend hours acting out the stories of these characters' lives. Every gift-giving occasion brought more characters (animal or human) or equipment.

My daughters are six years apart, so by the time my now 14-year-old was old enough for the toys, Sara was ready to pass them on to her sister. Lauren got the whole collection as a Christmas or birthday present one year. More gift-giving occasions came along, more allowance money was spent, and the collection grew. She and her friends had the playroom floor covered with ongoing worlds for days at a time, maybe weeks at a time. Hair was switched from head to head, accessories passed from figure to figure. Lauren could rummage through a huge bin of Playmobil for exactly the right miniscule piece she was looking for. We had to get sets of drawers so we could organize it into a people drawer, an animal drawer, an accessories drawer, a big stuff drawer. We got the school bus, the modern house, the stable. Oh happy day that we got the Peter Pan set! She lived and breathed Peter Pan for several years as a preschooler, and one day we spotted a Playmobil set with a figure in green, a pirate, a sidekick with a red and white striped shirt, even a treasure chest and a tiny parrot. Perfect! Along the way we added lots of magical figures - a dragon or two, fairies with magic wands, a wizard.

One thing I so appreciate about Playmobil is that they never use licensed characters. Can you imagine a Spongebob line or Barney figure? 99% of the children's imagination would be squelched if the characters were recognizable as movie or TV or even book personalities. With Lauren, the Peter Pan set was something she still had to use her imagination to identify, and I'm so glad they weren't exactly like the Disney characters.

The day came when Lauren sat down with her figures and said, "Mom, I've done every story there is to do, and I can't think of any more." It was time to put it all away. Sad day for me, but I knew it was coming soon. We sorted it all, boxed it up and put it in the attic where it awaits the next generation. Can't wait to see the two girls duke it out someday. "I get the red dragon, you get the green one." "You get the carriage, I get the teepee!" "You get the ambulance, I get the school bus!"

Since I started this blog last June, I've posted what I've called "Opinionated Postings" on subjects near and dear to my heart. I called them "opinionated" because they were just that - my thoughts on a particular subject, to be taken with a grain of salt. I thought it might be a good time (more than six months later) to put them back out at the forefront for those who may be new to the blog. Also because my "labels" section to the right has gotten so long that newcomers may not want to scan the entire list to find postings on particular subjects.

On reading aloud to your children I wrote about using your voice to create interest in Your Voice is a Symphony. For parents new to Storytime who are looking around trying to figure out if they should stand or sit, sing or not, or visit with the friend beside them, I wrote What Should Mom Be Doing? Then after those parents figure out what to do with themselves, they get discouraged because their child just sits and watches and doesn't seem interested in doing the songs or sitting up front for the stories. So I wrote My Child Won't Participate! That got me to thinking about expectations - mostly expecting too much from such very young children - but also about what's reasonable for toddlers and preschoolers. More on Expectations is what came of that.

Often a child wants to tell me something, and I feel bad when I have to ask him to repeat it three times and I still can't understand him. That got me thinking about how we model language for them, and I posted Talking to Little Ones. While I was writing these postings I was getting impressed with the labels and how many rhymes and songs there are. Yet these kids, especially the three year olds, probably know almost all of them. I contemplated the power putting words to music and wrote Music and Memorizing. A trip to the grocery store got me thinking about shopping when my daughters rode in the cart, and all the learning that can take place at the store. My Grocery Shopping Buddies came from that daydreaming. Watching boys and girls at the library, and remembering my girls brought Boys and Girls Really Are Different. Watching the kids watching the parents led to They're Listening.

So those postings are a trip through my brain - scary thought! I hope you find something of value there (in the postings, not my brain).