it's Greek to me

Greece has been the topic of much discussion and interest around here lately. My kids have suddenly become obsessed with the Greek alphabet and are constantly forming various Greek letters out of shoe laces and pieces of food and quizzing me on which letter it is. I, with almost no knowledge of Greek, have been doing a lot of shrugging and saying "huh" in response to the boys' repeated attempts in getting me to take an interest in it.





A little sleuthing led to me to discover the catalyst for all this interest in Greek. Here's a passage from a recent "Magic Tree House" book they read, in which the heroes discover this word in code -- turns out it's "Pegasus" written in Greek leters. Which certainly explains the interest in Greek, but not necessarily some of the other things that started happening.

Like this for instance:
???? It's Greek. Or it's at least some word in English rewritten with Greek letters. Which is bizarre enough in itself, but I was pretty stymied as to where the kids were learning the Greek letters. It's not like they're just googling up the Greek alphabet.





But as it turns out, that's exactly what happened. Via their enabler (i.e. their father). They bugged him incessantly, and he finally gave in and printed out this Greek alphabet key for them.

At first, I was less than thrilled, and gave The Map Man a quick lecture in how we should be introducing language via a living format, not just shoving keys at them and encouraging pure decoding skills and direct translations. I explained how I'm bringing Spanish to them as a form of communication and sharing on our morning walks. I described how the brain processes that form of learning as opposed to how it processes decoding.

And then I watched Zoo Boy spend the better part of the afternoon decoding bird names into Greek. Here he is on his mission -- to his left is his beloved bird song identification book (complete with an electronic library of bird songs -- no 5 year old should be caught with this! Otherwise how will they identify Belted Kingfishers calling unseen from the reeds on the other side of the lake they are swimming in? VITAL STUFF!). To his right is the above-pictured Greek Alphabet key. In the middle (on his lap) is his Doodle-Pro, and that's him WRITING on said Doodle-Pro. He would refer to his bird book, search the key for the letter he wanted, then meticulously form the Greek letter, continuing until he'd completed his work, then race down the hall to show J. Then he would erase it and start over with a new bird.

So I told The Map Man he was off the hook for giving them that key. Anything that inspires Zoo Boy to write willingly on his own (not to mention voluntarily working on the type of tracking skills needed to keep re-finding his place in both the book and on the key) is OK by me.