Look It Up

We were sitting in my bed watching the Little Einsteins last Sunday night (I’ve been running around this week and haven’t gotten around to writing this up - good thing I take notes with the kids' quotes on them!) when Briana looked up at me and said, “Mommy, aren’t there any girl’s who do the music?”  She was asking if there were any female composers.  My husband, who is an intellectual property attorney, followed up my “yes, of course there are” with “Honey, the reason that the Little Einsteins uses old men composers' songs is that they are off of their copyrights and the show doesn’t have to pay to use them.” 

I told the kids that we could look up women composers this week, primarily because I couldn’t pull any names off the top of my head, other than more recent top 40s artists.  As I thought about what additional value we could get from the activity of looking up women composers it struck me that we could do either ‘women’s studies’ or ‘research’.  I picked research because we just finished doing MLK Day stuff and I don’t want to spend weeks in a row highlighting the differences between people.  So this week we’re going to learn about how to look up the answers to things you don’t know.

I asked the kids, “How do we get answers to questions?”

Bree tells me, “My brain already knows the answers to lots of stuff.”

Ok, so we remember the answers, how else?

“Computers!”  Say both kids, quickly following up with “The iPhone!  The Nook!  The laptop computer!”  I was sad.  I had this whole thing planned out about how I was going to get them to think about the world of electronics as a new way to look things up after we went through teachers and adults and then books and the library.  Of course my kids have grown up in the electronic age and they already knew that electronics like computers and the iPhone could help them answer questions.  In fact Abby even proposes that we “get an App on the iPhone” to find out.  She’s obsessed with iPhone apps lately ever since my husband turned his phone into a Nintendo DS for the kids with age appropriate games.  For the record, I have no kid games on my phone because I don’t want the kids messing up my phone.

I ask the kids if they know how to find out the answer to if there are women composers using the computer.  Briana shouts, “Computer, where are the women composers?”  They both sit and wait, staring at a laptop that is not even on.  Nothing happens and Bree rephrases the question to “Computer, show us one woman composer.”  They sit and again nothing happens.  Abby realizes that it is off and turns it on and then Briana shouts to it again.  It takes them a few more minute to realize that Mommy’s laptop is not voice commanded.  They quickly discuss other options among themselves while I sit and watch.  Then they start swiping across the screen like they are turning pages on the Nook.  I ask what they are doing and I’m told that they are waiting for the screen to move and show them the girl ones.   I tell them that I don’t think that will work.  They poke the screen to “open the internet”, not knowing which icon will work, but soon realize that the laptop is not a touch screen.  Then they start banging away randomly on the keyboard.  I gave them too much credit.  They understand what a computer is used for, but not how to use it.

I show them how to use the mousepad to open Safari and then go to Google and type in the word of what they want to know.  We sound out w-o-m-e-n and c-o-m-p-o-s-e-r-s and I let Briana type it in.  Abby gets to push ‘enter’.

Sadly we discover that there aren’t a lot of women composers, but we do look at Fanny Mendelssohn (who Abby thinks looks like her), Clara Schumann (who the girls think plays scary music), and Amy Beach (who Bree thinks is “like a ballerina music maker”).  We talk about how they lived a long time ago.  Bree says that playing the piano looks just like typing on the computer after watching someone play one of Mendelssohn’s songs on YouTube.  The kids then decide that they want to be women composers.

Then I ask them how we could find women composers if the power was out.  Abby says “iPhone”.  Ok, technically if the power went out the cell phone would still work.  I rephrase.  “What if none of the electronic things worked?”

Bree surprises me with, “Newspapers!”  My husband and I only read newspapers online so she must have gotten that from school. 

Abby has her own surprise answer, “Signs!  Signs can tell you to ‘STOP’!”  So true, if you don’t know when to stop, or how fast to go, or if you can turn from the lane you are in (all examples given by the kids), you can read street signs.

Bree then adds, “School – there’s a reading corner.” And “experiments” to the list.

I tell them about how when I was a kid we looked in an encyclopedia or went to the library.  Abby has been to the library once, the week that the new library opened by our house, and she was about 16 months old then.  Briana has never been.  I’m not a germaphobe in general, but the thought of the kids’ section in the library and all of the chewed on and sneezed on books therein kinda gives me the creeps.  I decide to take them on an outing to the library later in the week. 

We all have a blast at the library and are all glad that we went.  We read books, play on the computer there, do some word puzzles (Briana) and some letter puzzles (Abby), get a library card, and then check some books out. 

So this was a very small step towards self-sufficiency for the kids, but if they can learn how to answer their own questions, there’s no limit to what they could know.

<3 Pedigreed Housewife