A couple of weeks ago I was on Craigslist and stumbled across a listing for a preschool desk with two chairs. It looked adorable and I knew, given research I had done previously, that it was at a pretty good price. I’ve been thinking about getting Calvin a desk for a while but just haven’t. I seriously considered the desk on Craigslist but I’m trying to avoid buying any bulky items that we have to sell or will be difficult to store when we move in a couple of years. So, I passed on the desk and wondered if that was a good choice.

Yesterday, I was practicing the piano when it suddenly occurred to me that we already had the top of a desk, we just needed legs for it. I ventured down into the basement and pulled out one of the desk tops that belong to the cubicles Jaeger inherited. It’s about 2’x4′ and fit perfectly in a corner of the family room. However, the cubicle legs it’s suppose to attach to are obviously too tall for Calvin. I did some research and found a website that said the desk should be between 18-20″ high. I briefly contemplated whether I could take some of the unpacked boxes and stick them under as table legs. However, the idea wasn’t appealing to me. I continued thinking of low-cost solutions and then hit upon the idea of trying out concrete blocks.

I went to pick Calvin up at preschool and told him we were going on an expedition to look for a table for him. Calvin insisted that he didn’t want a table and I briefly considered abandoning the idea but I had a bee in my bonnet. I told him that I wanted to try it out and if he didn’t like it, we’d take the table down. Off to home depot we (crankily) went and I picked up four 8x8x16 concrete blocks. Including tax, they cost a little less than $8. We went back home and I arranged the concrete blocks and then placed the table on top. Next, I dragged down my old 8″ mini-exercise step that has recently been a step-stool for Calvin and set it as a seat in front of the table. It turned out to be the perfect size for Calvin. I then setup Calvin’s old computer, Illyria, and Calvin got a chance to try out the new setup. After seeing it all together, he decided it was an improvement and wanted to keep the table.

About a year ago I had setup Illyria to be more toddler/preschool friendly. My parents had given us a kids keyboard that had some special games with it which Calvin enjoys. However, I wanted to setup the rest of the computer specifically for him too. I found a couple of websites that I thought he’d like to play and then found a Firefox add-on to whitelist websites so he could only go to the ones I allowed (and, more importantly, he doesn’t accidentally get to other random websites due to accidentally clicking on ads). I setup the desktop with shortcuts to the website and then changed the default to have shortcuts open with a single click rather than a double click. Calvin tried it out and the theory seemed to work fine but the mouse was really hard for him to use and he kept asking for help. We didn’t have a spot for his computer to be and it was a pain to get in and out so we mostly ignored it for a year.

Yesterday, when I got the computer out again, Calvin seemed to remember the games he had played before. The mouse is still a little tricky for him to use but at this point he has enough coordination that he can eventually get it to move the way he wants and click on things. The main site Calvin has been playing with so far is Sesame Street.

Illyria is pretty old at this point. You can see her specs here. She has no wireless card so I have her hooked to one of the handy nearby ethernet jacks Jaeger installed when we moved into this house. Getting decent software for Calvin that can run on Windows 2000 may be a bit of a challenge. The library actually does check out some software but we’re straining to meet even their minimum requirements. After Calvin went to bed, I contemplated various children-friendly Linux options. I did some research and came across a couple of decent looking possibilities.

• Edubuntu – From what I’ve read, it looks pretty full-featured but seems to be mostly aimed for classroom use. Also, Illyria is not beefy enough to run it.
• Sugar – Apparently it was developed as part of the One Laptop per Child project. However, while Linux based, I understand the interface is radically different than adults are use to dealing with. I was still curious but some browsing made it appear that, once again, Illyria would have trouble handling it.
• Qimo is yet another distribution but this one looked more promising as one website reported, “Qimo uses a customized Xfce interface thus allowing it to be used even on computers with the lowest of specs.”
• DoudouLinux received high marks from a number of sources and looked like Illyria might be able to handle it.

I started with Qimo. I downloaded it and burnt it to a CD and then had Illyria boot to CD. Qimo has a handy feature where you can either choose to install it or run it as a Live CD so you can evaluate it without making irreparable changes to your existing OS. It booted very slowly and the programs took a while to load but it did work. The slowness would drive me nuts but I really need to stick Calvin in front of it and see what he thinks. Qimo, like most of the other kid-focused Linux distros comes with a suite of Linux-based edutainment options.

Next, I dried Doudoulinux. Doudoulinux also runs as a Live CD. However, it turns out that Illyria wasn’t quite beefy enough to run it. It would mostly load and then randomly stop before we got to the desktop. However, I was successfully able to pull it up on Adara and see how it works. Tentatively, I think I might like the interface a bit more than Qimo.

At this point, I’m not willing to commit Calvin to an exclusive relationship with Linux. I still need to tinker a bit more and also see how much Calvin is really using his computer before I decide what the best long-term option is. I haven’t run out of kid-friendly Linux distros to try so there might be an even better option available but Illyria is old enough that nothing runs perfectly on her.

Every so often Calvin and I bake together. Usually it’s something unhealthy like cookies or brownies. For some reason, they’re usually more fun. Plus, they don’t tend to require as many sharp objects in preparation as entrees do. The more I cook, the more I’m convinced it is one of the best practical forms of math for children. I remember fractions being a really hard concept for most of the people in my elementary school. Yet, fractions are all over the place when cooking.

When Calvin “helps” me cook, I usually measure things out but then let him pour whatever the ingredient is into the mixing bowl. A couple of days ago we were making a dessert and I was doling out the cocoa powder. He put the first tablespoon of cocoa powder in. Then, I told him that we needed a total of 3 tablespoons and asked if we already put one in, how many more did we need? To my mild surprise, he correctly answered 2. Yes, a very simple problem but I hadn’t seen him do anything more complicated than basic counting before. A little later on in the process, we needed to add a 1/4 cup of something. I told him we were adding “a fourth cup” and asked him, if we wanted 1 cup, how many fourth cups should we do. He responded with “four.” I can’t guarantee this answer wasn’t a fluke but I still thought it was interesting.

Several months ago I contemplated an allowance for Calvin but, after a bit of research, decided he probably wasn’t ready for it. Most of the books I read recommended starting at school age because it’s hard to understand money without understanding quantities. At that time, Calvin wasn’t exhibiting much numeracy other than some very basic counting so I abandoned the idea. However, my recent cooking experience with Calvin made me think it was perhaps a good time to reconsider the allowance concept.

A rule of thumb I’ve seen several places is to give a child $1 per week per year of age. Since Calvin would be turning four in March, I decided to start with $4/week because it’s an easier number to deal with than $3. My tentative plan is to pay him on Fridays and give him $2 with no strings each week with $1 to go into a “giving” and $1 into a “savings” categories. With giving, I’m hoping to find some child-friendly charities he might be interested in and give him a choice. Then for savings, I’m going to give him an interest rate of 5% compounded monthly. My reading suggested that interest rates have to be fairly high for children to understand the value of savings. I’m not sure if he’s young enough to really understand interest yet but I figure it can’t hurt to start out with it and than backpedal if it confuses him too much.

I picked Calvin up from preschool and as he was getting in the car, I asked him what he’d like to do that afternoon. I suggested reading, playing with legos, or an art project. Calvin informed me that he wasn’t interested in an art project because he was out of glue. Then he asked me if we could go buy some more glue. I figured this was as good a time as any to discuss the concept of an allowance with him. I told him that we couldn’t go buy glue today but we were going to start giving him an allowance on Fridays of $4, two of which he could spend immediately. I also told him that if, once he had the $2, he wanted to go buy glue, we could go do that. Calvin seemed very excited by the idea of allowance and mentioned that when Jaeger got home he wanted to “tell daddy the good news.”

We got home and Calvin immediately wanted to find something he could use to put his allowance in on Friday. I had actually been hoping I could stick to virtual money. I don’t remember when my parents started an allowance with me, probably around school age. However, until I was a teenager, it consisted of a ledger where mom would enter our regular allowance and then subtract anything we bought. I was hoping the same system would work with Calvin but from what he was saying, it was obvious he wanted tangible money he could touch. I gave in mainly because it made sense that at this age he would better understand the concept of money if he could hold it.

Having resigned myself to giving allowance with physical money, which also means I need to make sure to have physical money on hand, we needed to figure out what he was going to store it in. Calvin suggested a piggy bank which I thought was a little odd because I don’t remember talking about piggy banks with him before. Though, maybe there has been some mention in some of his story time books. However, I didn’t want to spend the money to buy a piggy bank, didn’t want to deplete his allowance before he even got it for the cost of one, and didn’t have a convenient container that could be retrofitted as a piggy bank. We searched the house for some sort of minimalistic zippered wallet but came up empty. Finally I settled on the idea of using duck tape to make a duck tape wallet. They’re pretty popular so it was fairly easy to come up with instructions for making one. Calvin started out “helping” me make the wallet but wandered off before it was completely finished. That may have been for the best. It turned out reasonably well. It has a place for dollar bills, a tiny ziplock-like bag that I duck taped in for his change, as well as one credit card slot to hold his library card.

Since Calvin hasn’t had his first allowance yet, all it has at the moment is his library card, which I had been carrying around in my wallet. I showed the wallet to Calvin and he seemed excited by it. I wrote his first name and my phone number on the inside and then he “decorated” the outside with a black sharpie. I told him that to make sure he didn’t lose the wallet, he needed to pick a safe place in his bedroom to store the wallet anytime he wasn’t taking it to the store to buy something.

Tonight, as Calvin went to bed, he sung to himself to sleep with, “money, money, money.” I’m not entirely sure why he’s so excited by the idea of an allowance but he definitely is very excited. Jaeger is dubious but I think I’ve more or less convinced him, at least for the moment. Truthfully, I’m a little dubious too but it should be interesting to see how Calvin handles the concept of an allowance.