Category: Homeschooling

Yesterday my daughter and I went to Staples and bought…a new stapler. It felt a little self-referential.

Anyway, she chose it (it’s pink, you might have guessed), but didn’t seem all that excited about it. Our other stapler, the one I must have brought to college with me, died. So it was time.

When we got home, however, something magical happened. It’s something that happens relatively often, and probably happens in your house, too, if you’re paying attention. It’s a quiet sort of magic.

I imagine my daughter’s thought processes like this:

New stapler. Pink. Very nice. Hm. What can you make with a stapler? I make books with a stapler. Mommy just brought down a stack of fresh clean printer paper, not that recycled stuff with printing on the back that she usually tries to get me to use. Why does she think it’s possible to do great art on the back of a receipt from drugstore.com? Hm. White paper. Stapler. I know, I’ll make a book!

Actually, I’m guessing her thoughts were a lot more interesting and indirect, but that’s as good an approximation as I can type.

So I had a bunch of things to do in the kitchen. She was in the breakfast room, just on the other side of the counter. I heard her humming. Then I had to go upstairs, so as I passed by I glanced at her. She was hard at work on the floor (both of my kids get more inspired on the floor…why is that?). I saw that she was writing furiously on paper. I went upstairs. Got some work done. She and her brother were in a room together for twenty minutes. Silence. Humming. No fighting. Something special was going on.

A new stapler! I came downstairs.

The book was done. She started to try to staple it, and for a moment I thought we were headed for a major blow-up. The new stapler didn’t work! Mommy to the rescue – she’d put the staples in upside-down. She stapled her book and presented it to me. We were just about to leave, so I asked if we could read it later.

When evening came I realized that in the flurry of activity, we hadn’t gotten to reading it. So I brought it to bed and read it out loud. It’s not often that I get to laugh till I cry. We giggled ourselves to sleep.

It was definitely worth the price of a stapler.

Oents Opon A ti thare was A BoY named: Jon He HAd Lost A tooth But He couLd not Find it so H LeFt A note to the tooth FiarY
the Ansre wAs He couLd nothAv monY so He wEnt to his mothrs Pers And stoL $1.00 And Pout it his PiLo And the next moning he seAde he Got monY FroM the tooth FiarY his MoM Loved he got monY From thE tooth FiarY so she SAede he souLd Go BY somnin At the Stor so he did.
the End.

Once upon a time there was a boy named: Jon. He had lost a tooth but he could not find it. So he left a note to the Tooth Fairy. The answer was he could not have money. So he went to his mother’s purse and stole $1.00 and put it under his pillow. The next morning he saw that he got money from the Tooth Fairy. His mom loved that he got money from the Tooth Fairy. So she said he should go buy something at the store. So he did.

The End

The kids I have known well…myself, my siblings, and my kids…are wildly, weirdly creative. Though I am a creative person, I also have the soul of the scientist. Whenever anyway says, “This is the way it is,” I think, “Who says so? How did they test that hypothesis?”

Today my daughter and I were having a really laid back homeschooling day because yesterday evening at 6 p.m. she was diagnosed with a massive double ear infection that she hadn’t even complained about till 15 minutes before. It turned out that we were in the doctor’s office to deal with my almost-ten-year-old’s minor fractured wrist (yes, it was that kind of day!), when the pain of the ear infections suddenly came to the front of her creatively active brain and she started to moan. Luckily, there was a doctor in the house.

Bck to creativity. So this morning I was basically following her lead, because she deserved a day off if she wanted one. A kid in school wouldn’t have had to go to school! (When I or one of my four siblings was sick, our mom let us stay home, hang around in bed, and drink Seven-Up. There was some Midwestern theory about Seven-Up calming upset stomachs. Our scientific minds did not argue with that theory since we got soda pop so seldom!)

The six-year-old creative genius started to unload the shelf of borrowed stuff I keep separate from the many stuffed shelves of stuff we own. Our stuff she gets to treat as she would like (creatively). Stuff we borrow I have to keep reminding her we have to treat like other people treat. For example, one does not decorate the boxes containing educational materials from the Resource Center, no matter how plain and white and uncreative that box may seem!

So she was unloading the shelf and looking at all the things we’ve borrowed from her school library and the Educational Resource Center. A talking clock. Nix. Pattern blocks. Double nix. Hm…what are these? Base ten blocks? What do you do with those? I absolutely hadn’t been planning to do math, but the law of homeschooling is that you have to go with it. So we unloaded the bag and looked at the ones, ten bars, and one hundred blocks. She was intrigued.

I got a piece of paper and separated the areas into 100’s, 10’s, and 1’s, then wrote a two-digit number and showed her how to represent the number using the blocks. That was intriguing. Then we added another two digit number to it, and she saw herself adding two two-digit numbers that she wouldn’t have attempted to add without the blocks. Hm…even more intriguing. “I want to do one with a hundred block,” she said. So I started to set up a number like 235. Then she started to do something…weird.

Homeschooling for me is all about holding my tongue. Because frankly, I’m one of those people who really likes teaching adults. You want adults to do something, so you get up in front of the class and say, “Do this.” Teaching children is like speaking in a sign language that they are making up one step ahead of you. It’s terribly frustrating for people like me, who like things laid out in straight lines. You just can’t ask a kid, “What’s your hypothesis?”

So I watched her. She was chaining up the little 1’s blocks, which were made to stick together. She made a chain ten long, measuring it against a 10’s block. Then she looked at the ones area in which I had written “3”. She picked up three 1’s blocks, and instead of putting them in the 1’s area of the page that I’d created, she started adding them to her chain. Bite your tongue! I commanded myself, and amazingly, I did. She hitched up three ones to the left side of her chain of ones, and then removed three ones from the other side. Those three ones, she proceeded to place on the paper in the correct place.

I know that if we’d been in a classroom with other children to distract me, all I’d have seen is that difficult girl playing again instead of doing her math. But in fact, she was not only doing her math, she was really GETTING her math. She was taking her chain of ten ones, popping new ones on one end of the stack, and popping off old ones at the other end. Exactly what a computer scientist might do.

This is the sort of creativity that turns into something meaningful. Later, when she got really excited that she had paint on her hands, and she painted the outside of the paint tubes with paint…that was creativity gone nutty. But the creativity with the base ten blocks was her way of exploring the pathways growing in her brain. It was darn cool to watch. The sort of thing that teachers in a classroom seldom have the luxury to notice.

So normally you wouldn’t introduce the idea of carrying a ten over from the ones area into the tens area on the first day, but she had already gotten that concept. I knew it just from watching her creative play actively. So we went on to that concept, and she got it, and then she said, OK, that was interesting. Now can we go outside and play?

Another homeschooling mom gave me great me advice about what to do when homeschooling isn’t going well. She spent weeks just taking her child on long walks. It’s amazing how much education can happen on a walk!

The thing about homeschooling that’s particularly difficult for me, and I’m guessing for a lot of parents out there, is that I don’t have a formal relationship with my child. She and I have an ongoing relationship that started the first time I felt her kick, so there’s a lot more complexity and emotion in there than there is between a teacher one of many students.

People who are homeschooling devotees will tell you that this is what’s great about homeschooling: you know your own child better than any teacher ever will. You are able to tailor your child’s learning to his or her interests and strengths, while working on his or her weaknesses at a relaxed pace.

The thing is, as I see it anyway, a great strength is always a great weakness when you turn it around and look at it from another angle. I certainly do know my daughter better than anyone else. Each time a teacher has told me something surprising about my daughter, it’s been something I knew. Not necessarily something I’ve thought about consciously, but something I knew in a deeper way.

But the negative side of this is that as we know our children better, it’s harder for us just to turn off that relationship and say, “Now is the time for math. Please stop playing and return to your seat.” A teacher has the authority to say this. A parent? Well, in my house, I certainly don’t have the authority. I’d love to have it, but my daughter is not interested in giving it!

She knows and I know that there will always be another day for us to be together. We are not in a nine-month relationship that ends with a grade and an apple. We’re in it for life, and that makes it so much more complicated!

So this morning I attempted to get her to focus on schoolwork. First, I let her have her time. My daughter is not what people call “a morning person.” But from another perspective, she IS a morning person. Mornings, to her, should go slowly. Much gets done while one is still in one’s pajamas, and those things are seldom (if ever) things assigned to you by your teacher, ESPECIALLY if your teacher is also your mom! Mornings go slowly and involve a lot of impromptu artwork, reading, crawling on the floor, playing with the cats, bugging your mom in the shower, and whatever else takes your fancy.

For a morning person like my daughter, mornings are definitely NOT the time that you follow a schedule, get your clothes on quickly, brush your teeth when asked to, then sit at a table and be told what to do. No Way.

That’s where the walking comes in. Some mornings, like a ray of sunshine breaking through the clouds, my daughter dutifully sits and does something that I consider schoolwork first thing in the day. This doesn’t happen often, but when it does I get immediately visions of grandeur: Amazing Homeschooling Mom Never Has To Give In And Go For A Walk!

On mornings like this morning, however, I try to start something like “school,” and my daughter rebels. Immediately she finds something so much more important than the subject I bring up, and always there’s One More Thing she has to do before she can join me to talk about our day. If I push, she starts getting abusive. You might think that nothing a six-year-old can say would upset you that much. You haven’t been my daughter’s mother!

So then we go for a walk. Today I packed her snacks while she filled her backpack with her doctor kit, markers, and stickers. Then we marched into the forest and down to the stream. Immediately, the abuse stopped. She started to riff on two raccoons that live in the forest, named Garbage and Compost. You might be able to guess that their mother’s name was Recycling (she didn’t believe in eating garbage, you know). We talked about mushrooms, spores, and mycelium, and wondered where the mycelium is for mushrooms that grow on solid objects like fallen logs. (She hypothesized that the mycelium lodges inside the rotting wood, which sounded good to me.) We met various other walkers and joggers along the way and practiced our social skills. Then I stopped at the picnic table while she went on to her secret “island” and checked on things there. She came back and checked my heartrate and blood pressure.

From the point of view of preparing her for standardized tests, I failed as a teacher today. For a homeschooling mom, it was a rousing success. We got back, she took a bath (having gotten muddy in the stream), and then we studied the grasshopper lifecycle and tried to figure out whether what we read was true, that locusts are grasshoppers who have lived longer than normal. She made a birthday card (spelling and penmanship), a gift for her father (art), and set up a store selling hand-colored stickers. She made $1.50, and figured out the correct change. Math!

It was cool. It was homeschooling. It was yet another day in our life.