My eldest (I guess I’ll just start calling him Eldest) has been taking a once-a-week afterschool class on coding for kids.
“How do you spell ‘maker’?”
I usually have to yell the letters across the house; he is not patient enough to wait for me to finish whatever I’m doing and walk back into the dining room, where he has set up a workstation that he pulls out as part of his “I’m home and can relax now” routine.
For six, he is actually a very good speller, but he’s still in that stage in which it takes some time to read or write, and sometimes he needs a grown-up to do it for him, either to speed things along or so that he can enjoy a story without laboring too much over it.
He codes, at the moment, in Scratch, mostly because I learned a little bit of it back when I took a couple of programming classes, so I can help a bit and show him some things.
Eldest, like me, tends to dive headfirst into everything, but noting so much so far as programming. He loves to code. He works on an old i-pad and, gradually as he has developed his route, we have added a keyboard and a mouse (Logitech, of course), as well as a paper book that he can reference. I am not ready for him to have unfettered access to Google yet.
How do you spell “danger?”
This puts some limitations on him when I’m not around to help him, because I sure as hell don’t want him going to Google image search to find photos to use for his sprites. He is not ready yet even beyond the safety concerns – finding a transparent png or using Pixlr to magic wand away white space can be a little tricky. It’s fine; Scratch has a lot of built-in assets and he is actually already pretty good at drawing his own. One of his games, a platformer, has three “stages” that he made entirely using the software’s drawing tools.
It’s gratifying that his current obsession is at least something that he can learn with and something that allows him to exercise some creativity. Coding is filled with puzzles to solve, and mostly, they’re puzzles you create for yourself. How can you make the coding blocks simulate a jump, such that the sprite goes up a certain height and then descends until connecting with something solid?
He explores the games other people have created and peeks at their code. He asks me to clarify. He flips through his book. He has idea after idea after idea, and all of them are beyond his current ability. That’s good, I think. A stretch forces you to think of where you can start. Often, he’ll make a program, and then instead of going back and editing it, he’ll recreate it, reinforcing the ideas that he has taught himself.
R-E-P-E-T-I-T-I-O-N. That’s a tricky one, with an E that sounds like an I and one of those “tion” endings that sounds like “shun.”
He has to ask to spell things almost every minute. Every variable, sprite, and method needs a name, descriptive of what it is or does. I don’t mind, except that sometimes I have to tell him to wait while I’m calming the youngest down or talking something through with the wife.
He has trouble with transitions, Eldest. When it’s time to put Scratch away so that he can eat or sleep or go to school, he gets upset. Well-versed in language about emotions, he will tell us (after we have exhausted the number of “just five more minutes” that we can allow) that he needs time to be sad or that he needs us to comfort him.
At one point, over an hour after his normal bedtime, he and I had to sit on the couch and have a conversation: it is okay to feel your feelings and to ask for comfort from the people you love, and both of us are willing to devote the time to helping him move past his sadness, but, certain things are time-bound.
School starts at the same time every morning and if we don’t get in the car at the right point, he will be late. Supper is roughly the same time every evening and if we don’t eat it, it will get cold. Bedtime is the same time every evening, and if we don’t adhere to that schedule, he will not get enough sleep and he will be tired and cranky in the morning. We cannot control the sun and moon.
He looked at me, face still wet with tears, and said “Sometimes it feels like everything is time-bound now.”
Oof. All those spreadsheets I have that are missing checkmarks, those video games I want to finish but haven’t been able to because I have to go to work, or shower, or eat, or wash the dishes, or take out the trash, or I’m because I’m just too damn tired.
How do you spell “relatable?”
This is one of the hard things about being a parent, finding the right balance between structured activities and unstructured leisure time. Will he be sad later that we haven’t signed him up for piano lessons or soccer? He already has school, swim lessons, Hebrew School.
I only get a couple of hours with him on the weekdays and I have to spend half of it trying to get Youngest to eat or get both of them to clean up their toys and get ready for bed. If it were up to me, we’d all have a lot more free time, I want to tell him, but it isn’t up to me. All I can say is that sometimes it feels like that to me too, and remind him that he did get to watch his show, or build Legos, or code, and the weekend is always around the corner. That he likes going to school, really, because his friends are there.
It helps to remind me, though. We only get so much time, and it’s important for me to spend a lot of it taking him to the movies, watching Amphibia with him, making a treasure map with clues for a pirate game.
And spelling words while he teaches himself to code.
P-L-A-Y.