Marcy Almon

Haley, 10, told me about 20 minutes ago that someone she thinks from Italy
was asking her how to download
Scratch. She'd put a "make a request from me" project on there and that was
his request. She said she
was even pretty sure she had read and understood one word, "grazie". She was
excited about that. I told
her she could probably google a translation and off she bounced.

She came back just a bit later to say that grazie did mean thanks and that
wiki was so cool! That's where
she's found it. And that she'd told him how to do the download...I said,
"So, he reads English but only
types Italian?" I was confused. She said no he only knows Italian as far as
she knew. So, how?

She had used her web cam to take a shot of the front page and drew a large
arrow to where the download
button was. Amazing! I wonder if the years of using the internet not knowing
how to read or write
English, she's only been reading 6-9 months now, has anything to do with her
not thinking a thing about
helping someone speaking in a different language?

I just had to share.

Marcy


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Pam Sorooshian

That was a very cool little story. I'm super impressed with her
confidence and resourcefulness! Awesome.

Did she find a translation site like babelfish - where you can copy and
paste a whole block of text in, in one language, and it translates the
whole thing to another language? I used babelfish a lot when my daughter
was in France and I wanted to order things from amazon.fr to be sent to
her there in paris.

-pam

On 6/19/2009 7:40 PM, Marcy Almon wrote:
> Haley, 10, told me about 20 minutes ago that someone she thinks from Italy
> was asking her how to download
> Scratch. She'd put a "make a request from me" project on there and that was
> his request. She said she
> was even pretty sure she had read and understood one word, "grazie". She was
> excited about that. I told
> her she could probably google a translation and off she bounced.

Jenny C

This is such a good example of what makes unschooling so awesome! When
you don't tell kids how to do things, or that there is a right or wrong
way, they find really creative solutions to their problems. Sometimes,
well often, the solution is one that the parent, or at least this
parent, never considered!

It's one of those never ending surprises that happen on a regular basis!
It wasn't something that I expected out of unschooling. It's so fun to
watch my kids do things and discover things in ways I never could have
imagined!