The Email I Wish the School Would Send

This past week I got a peppy email from the charter school informing me that we have to do another round of testing this month.   The message was full of words like "exciting" and "dynamic."  The whole tone of it seemed to suggest that our kids are in for a huge treat.  Now, I'm not complaining about having to do the tests.  Well, maybe I am, just a little.  The testing is what we agreed to put up when we decided to sell out and homeschool our kids within the public school system so that we could have access to all that wonderful funding that makes things like music lessons and karate possible.  Mostly what irritates me though is the way the school tries so hard to sell the testing to us.  I understand that they are trying to put things in a positive light, and I also understand that the state of California is watching what they do, but just once I wish they would send out a testing letter like this:

Dear Families,

We regret to inform you that another round of testing is coming up next week.  We deeply apologize for the inconvenience this will no doubt cause you.  We know that as homeschoolers, every school day is precious, that you would like to spend every day that is free of dentist appointments or projectile vomiting on working on your chosen curriculum, or going on fun field trips.  We also understand that at this time of year,  when many families have fallen behind where they would like to be with their schoolwork and are struggling to get caught up, it is a huge nuisance to have to drop everything and fall even more behind while the children waste time on a test that is meaningless if you're not teaching common core (and we know most of you aren't, in spite of what our home page might say).  We know the frustration you must feel because you've only just gotten back into your school routine after just coming back from Christmas vacation.  In spite of all that we hope you will bear with us this necessary evil that keeps our school going, and encourage your children to do the best they can so that we can keep those instructional funds coming to you.

To show our appreciation,  we will be giving you parents free trips to Tahiti over the summer.  We know you need it.

Sincerely,

Some School Administrator

How to Make a Jesse Tree (for the craft and planning impaired)

Here is how I made this felt Jesse Tree for Advent.  It was a little time consuming, but well worth the effort!  (Thanks to my daughter for the photo and explaining the internet to me).

Step 1.   Look through Mom blogs, even if doing so fills you with feelings of sadness and inadequacy, until you find a Jesse Tree project that seems to be at your skill level and does not require any really expensive materials.  I suggest this one.

Step 2.  Forget to buy the felt, and make the project with construction paper instead, because you've got a huge stack of it anyway.  Promise yourself you'll do it the right way next year.

Step 3.  Next year buy the felt and work frantically to get the last ornament done before bedtime on Christmas Eve.  Since you can't find your glue gun, use craft glue which doesn't actually work on felt so that bits keep falling off the ornaments.  Try not to lose the bits.  Promise yourself that next year you'll get a glue gun and fix the ornaments, cause you're sure as heck not cutting out all that felt again.

Step 4.  Next year, discover that you have somehow lost the ornaments.  Throw up your hands in disgust and go eat some of the chocolate you got for your kids' stockings.  Don't worry.  You can buy more later.

Step 5.  Next year buy some more felt and and a brand new glue gun. Start the ornaments over again.  But only make five before you and your whole family catch colds.  Promise yourself you'll do the rest next year.

Step 6.  Get our your felt and your glue gun and then forget to start work on the project until five days into advent.  Make a few more ornaments.  When your twelve year old daughter (who was six in step one) asks to help, hand the whole thing over to her.  After all, she enjoys messing around with felt and glue guns way more than you.  She'll have it done in a few hours.

Step 7.  Use duct tape to stick the felt banner which will hold the ornaments to the wall, because if you have to go out and buy a dowel to make a proper hanger, it will be another year.

Step 8.  Your Jesse Tree is done, and you still have a few years to enjoy it before your kids go to college!


Now to spend the next seven years knitting a sweater for my husband!

Note to Mom Bloggers:  I'm just kidding!  Any feelings of sadness and inadequacy I might experience are 100 percent my own issues, and not a result of your blogging.

What We're Reading

Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder

I decided to start reading out loud to the kids again this year.  We got out of the habit of reading out loud as our two youngest children grew older and more proficient at reading on their own.  However, I decided to make reading out loud part of our school day.  Partly because my son is not a particularly enthusiastic reader so I want to expose him to literature and language he might not get to on his own, and partly because I hope to brighten up our school day a little.


And so we began our school year with "Farmer Boy" by Laura Ingalls Wilder.  I chose this book for several reasons.  First, as the title suggests, it's about a boy, which I thought might make it more appealing to my son.  Second, we are studying U.S. history this year (although we don't restrict ourselves to literature about the time period we're studying).  And third, Laura uses fairly clear, straightforward language which I hope will make listening easier for my son.


"Farmer Boy" is the only one of the Little House books that is not about the Ingalls family.  Rather it tells the story of her husband Almanzo's boyhood.  Unlike Laura, Almanzo spent most of his childhood living on his family's farm.  And although the time period of the book is a little later, it still gives us a good idea of what early American life was like.  Later this year, it will contrast nicely with "Little House on the Prairie," when we study the westward expansion.
As with the other books in the series, "Farmer Boy" is not one long story, but a series of stories set into the framework of one year in Almanzo's life.  Some are funny, some suspenseful, many just sketches of what ordinary life was like.  My kids particularly enjoyed the bits about how the schoolteacher dealt with the class bully,  and what happened when Almanzo gave his pig candy (it seemed like a good idea at the time!)
Overall, I found the book fairly easy to read out loud.  As I said before, the author uses clear and simple language.  However she does sometimes go into some highly descriptive passages, such as how to build a bobsled, which can get a little tedious, and I suspect is difficult for the kids to follow.  Other than that, the kids and I have really been enjoying it, and my older teenage daughter even sits in when she has the time. 

What We're Doing This Year

This year I'm homeschooling three kids who are in 6th, 7th, and 11th grades.  After doing some reading and listening to some talks given at homeschool conventions I decided to make a few changes to how we do things. 

First of all, I've decided to try out something called "Morning Time."  I first read about it in "Teaching From Rest" and Cindy Rollins writes a great deal about it on her blog.  Basically, the idea of morning time is to set aside a certain amount of time each school day to things you would like to do, but that often get lost in the push to get through all the "core subjects."  For example, things like poetry, art and music appreciation, and literature. Cindy Rollins and Sarah Mackenzie both have detailed descriptions of what they do for morning time on their blogs, but it really can be anything you want.  Any subjects or activities that you would like to give more time to. 

We are just starting out with morning time, and so I may be trying different things.  I stole a few ideas from Cindy Rollins, such as reading Shakespeare and doing grammar activities, but I have tried to come up with some ideas of my own as well.

Here is what we are doing for morning time:
 Every day: Catechism, memory work (mostly poetry, but also excerpts from speeches or literature)
Once or twice a week:  art and music appreciation, geography, history, Shakespeare, literature, grammar.

I've set aside ninety minutes for morning time, although we usually seem to get it done in an hour.

Morning time is something that takes a little getting used to. For years, our school days have followed a basic subject/break/subject/break pattern.  So it seems a little odd to jump from one subject to another.  I think my son considers it unfair, as though we are breaking some sort of rule.  You can't just go from geography to grammar like that!  However, as we have keep going with it, we are gradually becoming more comfortable with the pattern, and maybe even learning to enjoy it.

We spend the rest of the morning on math and English.  My husband gets home from work around lunchtime.  He teaches the kids science and Latin in the afternoon.

Things are a little different with my 11th grader.  She is taking classes at a community college this semester.   Since her classes take up so much of her time, she and I are only doing school together on Monday morning, where I give her assignments for the week, and on Friday morning, when we go over her work.  In addition to her college classes, we are doing European history, life science, and algebra.  If all goes well, she'll be finishing her high school math at the college next year.

Can We Accept What He is Sending Us Today?

This is the question Sarah McKenzie asks at the end of the first chapter of her book, Teaching from Rest: A Homeschooler's Guide to Unshakable Peace.  I don't read very many homeschool books anymore.  Probably because most of them are geared towards people just starting out or still making up their minds.  Sarah's book, however, is one that speaks to any homeschooler, and says some things that we all need to hear:  those who are just beginning to homeschool and those who've been homeschooling for a long time.

Homeschooling from Rest is not a how-to book on homeschooling, rather it is about how we should approach our homeschooling regardless of the particular methods we might use.  We homeschool moms have a tendency to get caught up in "getting things done," or as the author puts it, "checking off boxes."  We worry about finishing the sixth grade book by the end of the school year, we worry about whether our children are working at grade level, we worry about what the neighbors will think.  All these cares and worries are perfectly understandable, but they cause us to lose sight of what drew us to homeschool in the first place: raising our children to know, love and serve God.

In a previous post, I wrote about the idyllic image of homeschooling I had when I first started out, and while some of my expectations were kind of silly or unrealistic, the main thing that I was thinking about in that image was peace.  A peaceful family life in which we all pursue what is good, true and beautiful.  Over the years, there have been moments when we have come close to that, but all too often, our homeschooling was much less about truth and beauty than it was about getting things done because I felt like we had to.  In her book, Sarah writes that the first step to peace is acceptance.   Instead of being frustrated by the interruptions and disruptions that slow down our progress, we should recognize that these things are being sent by God, and look at them as an opportunity to serve God and our family.

So this week I am working on the question of whether I can accept what God is sending me.  Granted, we're on summer vacation and I don't have to worry about falling behind on school work, but summer is the time when I try to get household projects done, and I'm sure there will be  plenty of interruptions to slow that done.  Learning to accept that will be good practice for when we start up school again.  I hope.

I have a tendency to swallow books whole.  I get excited about a new book and read it much to fast.  When I first bought Teaching from Rest I read it in two hours.  The trouble is after tearing through a book the content doesn't stick with me for very long.  So I actually bought the companion journal, even though I usually think of those things as kind of goofy.  I will be going through the book slowly with the journal, and will also leave some notes about it here.  So that hopefully some things from the book will stick with me.  Also, it gives me something to blog about for a few weeks. ;)

Random Thoughts for the Week

Random thought number 1:  The closer we get to the end of our school year, the farther away that end seems to be.  June 13th is our end date, but I don't think it will ever get here.

Random thought number 2: We watched "Raiders of the Lost Ark" last night.   It's a movie that strongly reminds me of my childhood because I somehow talked my Mom into taking me to see it, in spite of all the violence and gross stuff.  It occurred to me as we were watching last night that at the time this movie came out,  the idea of having movies like this one to keep at home and watch whenever one wanted would have been absolutely amazing, yet there I was checking facebook, writing emails and crocheting instead of paying attention.

Random thought number 3: Ever read a text or an email and momentarily find yourself looking for the "like" button?

My Homeschooling Story, Part 1

When my husband and I decided to start homeschooling I was so excited.  I read lots of books and looked at all kinds of homeschool curriculum catalogues.  My favorite book on homeschooling was "Designing Your Own Classical Curriculum," by Laura Berquist.  Partly because it really was full of useful information,  but I think I just liked the title, too.  Something about the words "Classical Curriculum" brought this happy image to my mind.  An image of my family gathered in the living room some evening, older daughter playing on the piano, or maybe the harp,  younger daughter painting (younger daughter was only 1year old at the time, so I must have been imaging us in the future) Older son looking thoughtful as he reads Homer in the original Greek, and younger son reciting lines from Shakespeare for my husband and I. Oh, and did I mention the house was spotless?  And that we were all dressed like Jane Austen characters?

Now, it's not like I was naïve enough to really think that homeschooling would result in such an idyllic home life.  As I said, it was just an image that came to mind.  And even though I knew it was unrealistic, it was still what I was hoping for. 

Of course when I actually began homeschooling it turned out to be messier and much more difficult than I expected.  When we first started, my two youngest children where three years and fifteen months old.  Both were able to entertain themselves for fairly long periods of time, but like most small children, rarely did so when their Mom needed them to.  Some of those homeschooling books that I read had suggestions for how to teach with babies and toddlers around.  I did as one of them suggested and brought their little play table out to the kitchen (which was serving as the schoolroom) and set it up with picture books, blocks, paper and crayons.  Lots of fun things that they loved, so of course that morning they had no interest any of those things.  No sooner had I begun my very first lesson of our very first day of school than Miss Toddler flopped down on the floor and started crying.  Mr. Preschool had no interest in what was on the table either, he just wanted to go out to the living room and watch his shows on Playhouse Disney, like he had always done when his brother and sister had gone to real school.  I ended up teaching school from the kitchen floor while handing blocks to the toddler sitting on my lap.

Meanwhile, the two older children, one second grader and one fifth grader, were definitely not as enthusiastic as I had hoped they would be.  I suppose it must have seemed strange to them, especially the fifth grader, sitting at home being taught by their mother.  For my part, I was surprised by how hard a time I had just trying to explain the assignments I wanted them to do.  Those first couple of months felt like walking knee deep through molasses.  By October we were way behind the spiffy lesson plan I had bought.  By December I had given up even looking at the lesson plan.

But in spite of things not starting off as well as I would have liked,  our family actually was happy with homeschooling.  Our mornings were so much more relaxed.  No more frantic push to get out of the house in time for school with the inevitable hunt for someone's missing shoes or lost homework.  We had more time during the day without all the running back and forth to pick up and drop off from school.  We even started getting to weekday Mass on a regular basis.  And I'm sure my kids didn't miss the hours of homework after dinner every night.

Nine years of homeschooling have not exactly led us the way I expected it would.  Our family life does not look like one of those Regency era paintings, or even one of those watercolors that appear on the covers of certain homeschool catalogs (you know the ones I mean). My daughters may not be playing harp and piano in the drawing room, but they do like to have guitar and violin jam sessions out in the garage (which has become the music room, among other things.) I don't have a painter in the family, but one child has taken to drawing cartoons that make us all laugh.  Neither of my sons have learned to love Homer yet, but one has grown up to be a good, hard working young man, and the other loves nature and the outdoors.  I realize now that what we have accomplished, in spite of all the daily chaos and frustrations, is actually better than what I had first hoped for.  Although we're not as well dressed.

Results not typical.