Category: Homeschooling

Another Day in the Life

Posted on by Suki
Yesterday I got up to no e-mail and no cellphone reception! Oh, horrors! How could I survive?
Good thing the kids and I had decided that on this day of our “Staycation,” we would go to the Aquarium. So without further ado or hair-pulling, we were off to Monterey, where they had both Internet access and cellphone reception. From Medieval to Modern, just across the bay.
We have a membership to the Aquarium (the only one we keep up from year to year and income bracket to income bracket!). So going there is seldom dependent on any particular exhibit or event. We just go.
When we got there, I was pleased to see that the Aquarium, at least, seems to be recession-proof. When I was being “bad Mommy” at the end of our visit, giving in to my kids’ craving for more stuff to leave on their floors, the cashier told me that indeed, they were doing well. “I’m glad it’s still going OK, because I need this job,” she told me. “My brother-in-law just lost his. They’ve got kids, a house. We might end up having to do the communal living thing.”
She pointed out that is something they should have considered before. Think how much money they’d have now!
We were halfway through our usual stops when I remembered the seahorses. Oh, yeah, new exhibit, gotta see it. It’s replaced my favorite old exhibit, the jellies, and it’s done a great job. Jellies are weird and alien. Seahorses are just weird. They are definitely of this Earth, but odder creatures it would be harder to find.
First of all, some of them look like horses wearing camouflage. They’re covered with leafy things that hide them among the kelp. Gorgeous and very strange.
I love how they wrap their tails around the seaweed to anchor themselves, and then, for apparently no reason they let go and drift to another location. That little fin on their back ripples and propels them at a sedate and very dignified pace.
They had a video of seahorse love, which was fascinating and beautiful. I thought at first that it was an animation, because it was so perfectly beautiful. But it was real: a male and a female doing a dance, linking tails, moving their heads in unison, then doing the belly bump for a brief instant.
In that instant, she deposits eggs in his belly, and he carries them and births them.
Now that’s equality!
There are gorgeous pictures and information on the website, so if you can’t make it to the Aquarium soon, take a look at least. I would recommend waiting. If the rest of the Aquarium was bustling for a Thursday afternoon, the seahorse exhibit was positively stifling. It was the first time in the Aquarium that I got concerned about pickpockets — people kept bumping into me, my purse got snagged on their backpack, their stroller bonked against my shins. It was a hushed, reverential madhouse in there.
We got back into our car (I had great parking karma: I’d snagged one of those 12 hour metered spots), and drove back into Medieval times. We stopped at my parents’ farm to take a look at the garden and chat with my mom, and there she was in her office, brow furrowed, cursing dial-up. Trying to do a job for a Japanese client on deadline without broadband. What’s a modern woman to do?
But the kids and I, unfettered by computers or cellphones, made our way back home. We played Take Four, an excellent game we got at the Educational Resource Center. It’s like Scrabble on fast-paced steroids. I plan to write a review of it on EduSource, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. Will do.
I’m off to finish off our Staycation with a seder with friends. At Jewish holidays, I impersonate a Jewish mother. Our Jewish holidays, thus, have all the good stuff and anything that doesn’t work for me forgotten about. That’s one way to do it.

Lifelong Learning

Posted on by Suki
Yesterday I wrote about what younger homeschoolers can accomplish in a short time, and then today into my inbox came a mention of this great project. A high school homeschooler is starting on a journey through the cuisines of all the countries in the world (presently 192, though I suppose that depends on who you ask!). He’s learning about the cuisine of each culture then learning to cook a typical meal. He’ll post the recipes for the meal on his blog with information about each country he covers.
This is the sort of project that only a homeschooling high schooler would have time for, except maybe as a very densely packed summer project. My son is only in fourth grade, and I’m starting to see our future. He gets home from school, has a short time to relax, get a snack, unpack his lunch box, etc. And then it’s homework, dinner, violin practice, reading, and bed. There’s no time in his schedule for messing around, including learning about the cuisines of the world.
Of course, he’s also doing things that we couldn’t do as homeschoolers. His school has an emphasis on performing arts, and they just put on an amazing production for their Cultural Awareness theme. Each year they choose a culture and learn about it in depth, exploring the history, geography, language, art, food, music, theater… Then they do a performance of the sort of quality I’ve never seen at another school.
His school is very definitely not homeschooling — I miss my boy now that he’s at school so much. But it has something in common with homeschooling: the parents at his school don’t just pay lip service to parent participation. The Cultural Awareness performance couldn’t have happened without them. The head of the school introduced a Grandma and Great-Aunt who sewed costumes. Moms did make-up. Dads did sound and lighting. The lesson is clear: his school has the sort of proud, tight community that it takes to create extended learning projects like this. It’s the sort of community that schools have trouble creating in our test-heavy, leave it to the professionals setting.
What homeschooling and a school with a dedicated parent community have in common is a commitment to lifelong learning. It’s what my friend Heddi of the Educational Resource Center refers to as “the learning lifestyle.” She, like me, didn’t plan to be a homeschooler. But when we started, it wasn’t that big of a stretch for us because we’d already been living the learning lifestyle.
What is the learning lifestyle? First of all, it’s talking to your kids. The first longterm babysitter we found for our kids was when my daughter was a baby. She was from Colombia and was truly a gift to our household. But she told me that she had gotten something from us as well: she said that where she grew up, parents never spoke to their children like they understood anything. Children were children and you just told them what to do. She was impressed that I talked to my son about everything and he understood. And even more impressive, I didn’t speak babytalk to my daughter. She was just a baby, but we used a full vocabulary with her and listened to her opinions even when they were voiced as a baby’s scream or giggle.
Secondly, we read to our kids, and still do. It’s harder now to read to our son (see crazy schedule above), but we still do sometimes. And recently when he read a book that he really loved, I and then my husband read it too. We wanted to share his enjoyment!
Third, we modeled the learning lifestyle for them, showing obvious enjoyment in doing things that we were unfamiliar with, that were hard, that were a stretch for us. We tried new things — my husband will try almost any non-meat food, no matter what the smell. How else could our daughter have discovered that she likes those dried little anchovies they sell at Asian markets? I tackled things that I was clearly uncomfortable with — I’ve never been a skilled builder of mechanical things, but I learned along with my kids.
Living the learning lifestyle isn’t easy. My sister recently laughed that I’d brought along a video for my daughter to watch on a long car-ride. She pointed out that before I had my high-energy daughter, I’d not even allowed most videos in our house. I agreed, but proudly I pointed out something: I brought the video, but what my daughter wanted to do was listen to her Spanish language tape and talk with her cousin. Not letting our daughter become a video-head has been a major success in our learning lifestyle. It was such a relief when she was younger to be able to plug her in occasionally so we could get some peace.
But as the high school homeschooler I mentioned above shows, lifelong learning can take many forms. I wish him luck and bon apetit on his journey. I hope when my kids are in high school, whether homeschooled or not, they attack such large tasks with gusto.

Self-Paced Learning

Posted on by Suki
As I’ve noted before, there is one clear division between homeschoolers: those who chose it, often even before they had children, and those who ended up doing it out of necessity.
Because I’m in the latter category, I seem to have an endless capacity for appreciation of the surprising ways in which homeschooling works.
Yesterday my daughter announced that she wanted to go get a donut. In itself, I don’t see anything wrong with this. I believe in having a healthy attitude toward food, which means including fun food in with the stuff that’s good for you.
The thing was, we hadn’t had what I’d call a brilliant homeschooling week so far. So I informed her that before going to get donuts, we would have to do some math. OK, she said, and promptly got interested in something else. The day before I’d noticed an activity in a book we were using (totally excellent book: Critters Life Science). The activity had a chart of animals, split into their major groups: vertebrate and invertebrates, then down into the subgroups, mammals, amphibians, fish, etc.
She suggested that we make the chart, and we did:
Animal Chart
For each category, instead of copying down the animals in the book, I asked her to come up animals of her own. Some of them were pretty hard (echinoderms are invertebrates with a spiny exterior — sand dollars didn’t come immediately to mind). Some of them were quite easy, but she made them fun by naming particularly funny ones, like gila monsters.
In a classroom, this activity would have been modified. If I had a whole class of first-graders and no one to help me, I probably would have prepared cards with animal names to save time in writing. Or I would have done the writing. With all the kids at different levels, some of them would still be needing help with reading the long words, writing, spelling, and concepts, not to mention keeping focused on the task and not shooting erasers at their classmates!
As it was, our impromptu lesson involved word etymology (talking about the “vert” in “vertebrate” and other words that contain it), spelling, handwriting (my daughter, like many kids her age, has trouble with forming some letters and still writes a few of them in capitals), categorizing — all this on top of the science involved, and all of it centered on her interests and her abilities.
We posted her chart on the wall, and she cheerfully said, “Now we still have to do math before we can get a donut!” So she happily brought out the base ten blocks, which she has been enjoying. Again, in class she would have been presented with the same worksheet as all the other kids, or perhaps the teacher would have been able to differentiate at this point and she might get a more advanced math worksheet.
In our homeschool, we didn’t bother to use a worksheet. Her favorite thing to do is to make up problems to use the base ten blocks with. And don’t think she’d just make up the easiest problems possible: she loves making up ones that she knows will involve transactions with changing ten of one size for one of another. Kids who aren’t in school with lots of other kids take a long time before they start trying to go the easiest route, something that kids in school seem to learn way too young! My daughter thinks of the challenging problems as more fun, and she revels in making up even harder problems for me and having me solve them. That way, I can model the skills I want her to learn, all the while seeming to bend to her will.
By the time we got in the car to get the donut, we had done approximately two days of schoolwork. And if I hadn’t had to do other errands after the donut, I could have incorporated a walk to the donut shop, which itself becomes an educational experience.
Obviously, homeschooling changes as kids get older. There are more and more things that take focused time and require practice. But since by public school age rules my daughter should still be in kindergarten, I just love the self-paced lifestyle we’re leading. Our learning comes in creative bursts, and the rest of the time we just relax and have fun.

My Monthly Crisis

Posted on by Suki
I’m having my monthly crisis of confidence.
On the one hand, I’ve been trying to pat myself on the back about my son. For every little setback, it seems like there’s a beautiful burst of speed in the right direction. OK, so he does disappear for twenty minutes and when you call and call and finally find him, he’s sitting on the rug, staring at his toes. But isn’t that par for the course when you’re ten?
On the other hand, with my daughter I feel like it’s a step forward and one-and-a-quarter…or perhaps-a-half back. When I picked her up from art class today, her teacher called her, gently and kindly, “my aggressive little painter.” I was feeling in the mood to take that as a positive comment about the energy of her painting style, till it was divulged that she was throwing things at her painting buddies… again.
I remember when I was in elementary school and we were in the enormous, well-stocked art room. (Wow, public school in the seventies…they had ART? What a waste of the taxpayers’ money!) (Sorry, just had to get that off my chest.) In our school, there was an intercom button in each room that called the front office. No, they didn’t expect a child to stomp in with an automatic weapon; it was just for ease of communication. The office would call up and say, “Johnny’s lunch is here!” or the teacher would call up and say, “Can Mr. Mean-Looking Vice Principal come march Johnny to the office? He’s throwing paint again.”
Or something like that.
Anyway, one day I was sitting there, little miss goody-two-shoes, straight-A’s before we even got grades, always has her hand up first. And that button was beckoning me. It was downright calling me.
I was sitting near the button. The kids were bent over their paintings. The teacher had her back to us. The little demon on my shoulder said, “Do it! Just do it once! No one will see you.”
So I did it. Almost immediately the school secretary’s cheerful voice answered, “Office!”
“Who did that?” asked the teacher, turning around, not looking at me, little miss… oh, you know the routine.
“Suki did it!” yelled a chorus of thrilled little voices. Oh, to be able to tattle on little miss you-know-what!
I was mortified. A deep flush burned my cheeks. Tears came to my eyes. I had done wrong. At church they said I’d go to…
You can bet that I never pressed that darn button again.
Back to the present. My daughter has been told not to throw things when she’s doing art projects. In class, she has experienced the anger of classmates, lectures from her teacher, explanations about how it feels to have things thrown at you. At home she has been given time-outs, had consequences, had her art supplies taken away for specified periods of time. All that after we did the nice stuff, the talking about it, the promising, the all that stuff that’s supposed to work before you go on to the not so nice stuff.
And she still throws things in art class.
Your child is probably like most children. They are told not to do things, and usually they try the things they’re not supposed to do, once, twice… maybe more. This is totally normal. Feel OK about it, OK?
Then there are the children like my daughter. When she is having an oh-so-fun tactile experience, no consequence is bad enough to remind her not to do the things she does. No time-out will deter her the next time.
Everyone who has worked with her, from doctor to therapist, says she’s going to grow out of this. And I know she will. I remind myself of the brilliant saying of T. Berry Brazelton: I’ve never known a kindergartener in diapers. To quote our parents, Kids WILL be kids!
Just in case you thought I was writing this blog to show you what a Fantastic Parent I am, here is this reminder. Anyone who thinks about parenting deeply enough has gotta be scared. Am I getting this right? Will my child grow up to be a psychopath? Will she throw erasers during her SAT exam?
It’s that time of the month for me. Take a deep breath. Relax… Oh, wait. Someone’s downstairs screaming, “Mommy!” Gotta go.

Homeschooling Role Model

Posted on by Suki
Before we ever knew we’d be homeschoolers, we got to know our first homeschooling role model. Our daughter, newly turned four, was not having an easy time at preschool. In hindsight, I know that we kept her there way too long. But my image of my life had so far not changed: I’d get both of my kids firmly settled in their schools so that I could have that coveted alone-time that would keep me sane. When I picked them up from school, I imagined being able to focus on them so much better, having had time to do what I needed for myself.
It wasn’t working out that way. Our daughter was clearly distressed by preschool. Long since potty trained, she was wetting her pants daily. She was having nightmares and wetting her bed. It wasn’t a cry for help — it was a scream.
When we finally gave up, it was on the advice of a wonderful family therapist who has this way of asking us the important questions: Does she really NEED to be in that school NOW? Well…no.
So we took her out. I put an ad on the Cabrillo student employment board, and immediately got a call. I spoke to Vanessa for a while about our situation before she said, Wait, what’s your daughter’s name? Of course I know her!
It turns out she was the wonderful substitute teacher who had been so unflappable and kind with my daughter in her most difficult weeks after a favorite preschool teacher suddenly resigned.
Vanessa is, to my mind, a perfect product of homeschooling. She doesn’t run her life in a way that has anything to do with what she is supposed to do. She does what is right for her and her family. It turned out that we had other connections — when her mom had had to go back to work, Vanessa had attended the charter school where my son was in first grade. She was in the process of getting her AA degree and getting ready to get married, so our situation worked perfectly.
She became my daughter’s best friend when she was unable to form friendships with people her own size. They would look at the photos on Vanessa’s cellphone and go on shopping trips together. Vanessa would tell her all the details about her upcoming wedding. My daughter was happy when Vanessa was around. This was a major change in our lives, and such a relief.
When you have a child in emotional distress, there is nothing better than seeing your child in a situation where she can relax and act like a “normal” child. It reminds you what the goal is, and that the goal is attainable. Vanessa reminded us that our daughter would not be confined to “home arrest” indefinitely. She also redefined what it was — not arrest, but choice.
Through Vanessa I got a much more positive view of homeschooling than I had inherited from our culture at large. Like most people, homeschooling to me was something that people did to keep their children away from our general culture. The most prominent homeschoolers are, of course, Christian homeschoolers, so it’s not uncommon for people to have that view.
Vanessa’s homeschooling was more like what I’ve encountered since. It was the choice to educate children in a freer, more creative way. Vanessa’s mom knew she could do a better job than the school they were attending, and she did.
It was a full year from when we hired Vanessa to when I came to the grudging conclusion that I would have to homeschool our daughter. In the intervening months, Vanessa got married and got a full-time job at the preschool. We chose a small, intimate kindergarten program where we thought our daughter would thrive. That started a whole new nightmare, a reprieve of the first. Along with the bed-wetting and nightmares we got self-portraits labeled with the word “BAD.” Clearly, we needed to ask that important question again: Does she REALLY need to be in school?
I started this schoolyear with one resolution: This year, homeschooling would be our choice, and we would celebrate it. Vanessa came by recently with her new baby, and I asked her whether I could write about her in my blog. Because one way of feeling comfortable about an unusual parenting choice is to be able to cite role models. And I can’t think of a better one than Vanessa. As a new mom, she is still a homeschooler, educating herself and making choices based on her own reasoning, not just what is expected of her. I can’t think of a better role model for my daughter.

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