So a while back I wrote about how we got tickets to go see King Tut. I was sequestered in the deepest reaches of the Midwest the last time he came around, so I was particularly interested in seeing the exhibit this time around.
Little did I know it would turn into a homeschooling lesson par excellence.
Good homeschooling Mommy (that’s me when I lose my head and think I’m actually doing a good job at this) ordered lots of Egypt books from the library weeks ago, after we got our tickets. I thought, boy, my six-year-old drama queen will just love mummies! My ten-year-old technophile will just love learning about how the tomb was discovered and all the details of archaeology.
As they say: Not!
I left the books lying around like a good unschooling parent. The kids ignored them.
I got the first video in the series “King Tut, the face of Tutankhamun” from the library the other day, and they watched it with, let’s say, mild interest. They’ll watch anything that moves with mild interest!
Yesterday evening I tried to read the books out loud, figuring that the six-year-old loves to be read to. She pinched me, she kicked me, and finally, she got out the big guns: she stuck her feet in my face! That’s how you get Mommy really mad in our house. It’s not something you do every day. You save it for special occasions.
The ten-year-old pretended that he was listening, and got huffy when I told him to close his computer.
OK, so at this point I’ve failed as an unschooler, and I’ve failed as a classical homeschooler. How else can I fail?
I gave up and went to bed early.
This morning I got up with grim determination. I would forget about this homeschooling stuff and just have fun. I was going to meet some of my favorite homeschooling buddies there, as well as a new homeschooling friend who was a mom at my son’s preschool. People have a way of getting to homeschool by the long road; in her case, her daughter was so excruciatingly bored at public school she had to do something!
So we went into the exhibit and it was amazing. It was fantastic. The other moms and I were asking each other questions: What did they make that turquoise colored paint out of? What were civilizations in the New World doing in the time of Tut’s reign? These are the questions we were supposed to be asking our kids, but as one of my homeschooling friends said, homeschooling is all about getting to relive childhood, this time being able to enjoy it!
My six-year-old groaned, she flailed her arms, at one point she sat down in the middle of the crowded, dark floor. “I’m bored!” she wailed. “I hate this!” My ten-year-old looked at things impassively and seemed to have little to say.
I had given up on thinking about it, but if I had thought about it, I probably would have been thinking, I am such a total homeschooling failure!
All the kids seemed to perk up in the last room. Perhaps it was because it was the room where they displayed the amazing jewelry that Egyptian royalty wore. Perhaps it was because from the last room, they could see the you had to go through the gift shop to exit.
Oh, those wily museum exhibit designers!
My children wheedled and manipulated, and I got out of there for an amount about equal to what we spent on tickets. OK, that’s a lot.
Six-year-old insisted on a one dollar plastic sarcophagus. Well, I said dubiously, I guess you could make a little mummy to go in there.
Suddenly, I was homeschooling genius mom! Apparently, she was thinking about that suggestion all the way home, because as soon as we were home and she’d flexed her muscles on her bike back and forth to the dead end a few times, she had a plan. “Let’s make the mummy with paper cache [sic],” she said. I suggested she find a stick to use as the base, so she took her little sarcophagus outside and found a stick that fit. We stuck a round bead on its head and ripped up an old pillowcase to make rags dipped in watery glue. She suggested that the glue should look “old” so we squeezed in brown paint.
The mummy made and drying, we then proceeded to make my six-year-old into a mummy. We ripped the rest of the pillowcase. We ripped a couple of t-shirts. We ripped another old sheet. (Hooray for the ragbag! Another homeschooling triumph!) Soon she was wrapped in strips of cloth that kept slipping off her limbs like she was covered with, let’s see, I know: living skin! The darn things wouldn’t stay, but she was happy. And something had been learned. It wasn’t necessarily what I’d planned, but that, I guess, is homeschooling.
Teachers make lesson plans. Moms just have to make do with life.
ps: The ten-year-old was inspired to practice magic tricks. I don’t know what that had to do with homeschooling, but since he goes to school, I’ll leave that to his teacher to decide!
