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Today’s Love Thursday is dedicated to two things that LuLu is struggling with today at Ladybug Elementary (our pseudo-homeschool). Analogies always catch the poor child up. Frankly I’m sure she doesn’t see the relationship between many of the items, especially on analogies that are a bit esoteric. For example she didn’t flinch at “Rain is to storm as _____ is to blizzard.” But she struggled mightily with “_____ is to ocean as sand is to desert.” Who understands the reason why?
Of course she was totally lost on “Paris is to France as London is to ________” or “Governor is to state as ____________ is to country.” These required too many varied higher level cognitive skills, memory and reasoning skills.
Analogies are important because they increase your vocabulary, logic and reasoning skills. It is definitely LuLu’s working memory and executive functioning problems that make analogies so troublesome.
Oddly enough, LuLu attempts to use analogies all the time and has for years. It’s as if her brain is trying to find the inter-relatedness and connectivity of the world around her. But her analogies are unique and often down-right bizarre. Most have a negative tone. For example, if someone makes a mistake, she often says “that’s just like if the dog peed on the floor.” Ugh!
Decimals is the other concept she’s struggling with (fractions, too). These have only been recently introduced to her, but she’s having a bit of a problem wrapping her head around the concept that these numbers can exist between 0 and 1. She understands a ruler, but hasn’t internalized the concept of decimals yet.
So what’s Love Thursday got to do with it? Well, LuLu actually LOVES school, but she does get frustrated easily. Yesterday’s analogy lesson was a total bomb! But today, her determination pushed her through and she did much better. And math, well, it’s one of her FAVORITE subjects, so she’s working hard at grasping decimals too.
Our analogy for the day:
Love is to Thursday as Adoption is to Everyday.
good luck to her. I’m good at analogies, but horrible at math.
Simple math at that.
it’s cool that she likes school