a little good, a little bad

I'm 35 weeks today!  I woke up to use the bathroom at 4:04 a.m. and when I laid back down, I was too uncomfortable to sleep.  So, here I am, blogging at 4:33 in the morning after a bowl of chocolatey Special K.

So, after feeling panicky about schooling the kids this year, and knowing that just having one or more of them attend public school wasn't really an option for us at present (mostly because I knew this would just alter the stress into a new form, rather than eliminate it...and the last thing I'm up for is a NEW stress right now), I got an email from a homeschool/charter school affiliate (called Harmony Ed) that Spud attended last year for one day a week.  We called it Friday School, because his happened to be on Friday, and it was basically a day of "elective" classes for homeschool students.  This took place at a charter school in Springville.  He enjoyed it well enough, probably about as much as he can enjoy most things, truthfully (he's a bit of an over-thinker), but there were a few reasons I had decided to not have him do it this year.  One, I didn't want to drive down to Springville every Friday morning and afternoon.  Two, the program coordinators were not terribly good at communicating and it got frustrating at times.  Three, we could get more financial support for our homeschooling curriculum through MyTechHigh, which he is now old enough for.

But shortly after my blog post about feeling stressed about school this year, David and I were talking about how it really might be better for everyone if we enrolled Spud in school.  Public school was seeming like the only option, which I did not really feel good about.  A couple of days later, I get an email from Harmony Ed announcing a new program at a new location here in town!  Instead of just the elective days, they were offering and had openings for students in a 2-day/week Multi Age Program (MAP) that covers language arts, math, history and Science.  Spud (2nd grade this year) will be the middle grade of his MAP, which I think will be a good fit for him, as he's a sharp kid but not necessarily where he could be in some of the basics, and I think it will be motivating to him to have other kids that are older and younger to gauge his own skills against.  At first he wasn't at all excited about this "new" opportunity, but David took him out on some special time and they were able to have some good conversation on what we hope for him to be able to do, both this year and in the future of his education.

Unfortunately, when we went to the Open House on Wednesday, Noodle was feeling a bit left out as she is NOT going to be participating in the program this year (and she didn't last year, either).  We reminded her that she is going to be doing her Musical Theater class, as well as continuing with her girls club activities, AND playing Junior Jazz starting in January with her best friend.  She is at a stage in her education where a fair bit can be accomplished independently, and I don't think she would be as benefited by attending a program like the one Spud is doing.  It can be difficult to have kids doing different things, though, as they always tend to look at what the other is doing as so much nicer.

And Sprout is the first of my kids to be going to preschool.  It makes me laugh, because it seems really silly for a homeschooling family to outsource preschool of all things, but it is 1) just across the street, 2) very reasonably priced, and 3) a good chance for him to get some "friend time" during the craziness of what will be my life this next year.  As the youngest child by 4 years (for now), he sees Spud and Noodle going off to play with friends and has had a hard time not having the same freedoms.  Happily, he has a good little buddy from church nursery that he gets to play with on occasion, though judging from his talk, he'd like to be playing with him all the time! 

(This post seemed a little too text heavy, so I thought I'd liven it up a bit with some pictures we snapped of the kids at Anita's wedding three weeks ago. Did I mention we have another wedding tomorrow?  Good, crazy times.)

P.S.  It wasn't until linking this to facebook and looking again at the title that I realized I had forgotten to mention the bad.  Well, about 5 weeks ago we were delighted to have found a "mother's helper" who we paid to come every day and help out with things that I'm not really up to getting done lately.  The plan was for her to come at least through the fall and help with cleaning, running kids around, and some cooking.  Last week she broke a toe and is on limited mobility for the next 6-8 weeks.  Kind of leaving me in a lurch.  I need to figure out what we are going to do.  In the meantime, I've reached out to some of the local family for help and received some very generous offers of help, which I am so grateful for.  I still think I'll want to find someone to come in during the week for a while, but haven't had the energy to look around.  So, that's the bad.  

a good thought...

Timetables! We act as if children were railroad trains running on a schedule. The railroad man figures that if his train is going to get to Chicago at a certain time, then it must arrive on time at every wtop along the route. If it is ten miniutes late getting into a station, he begins to worry. In the same way, we say that if children are going to known so much when they go to college, then they have to know this at the end of this grade, and that at the end of that grade. If a child doesn't arrive at one of these intermediate stations when we think he should, we instantly assume that he is going to be late at the finish. But children are not railroad trains. They don't learn at an even rate. They learn in spurts, and the more interested they are in what they are learning, the faster these spurts are likely to be.

Not only that , but they often don't learn in what seems to us a logical sequence, by which we mean easy things first, hard things later. Being always seekers of meaning, children may first go to the hard things, which have more meaning, and later from these hard things learn the "easy" ones.

John Holt in How Children Learn

I think this is a fabulous point. Many, and hopefully most, people understand that infants and toddlers reach developmental milestones at different rates, and this is to be expected and perfectly okay. But for some reason, we expect all children after they have reached school age to be ready to learn and comprehend the same facts, grammatical rules, mathematical formulas, etc simply because they are the same age. This is ridiculous, and not an expectation we hold outside of primary and secondary education. Generally, by college, we have acknowledged that people have different strengths, and we no longer tell the English major that he must take all the same classes as the physics major. Nor would we expect either of them to easily comprehend all that is required of the other.

happy homeschoolers

So as my friends' kids and many neighbors headed off to begin their new year at school and Noodle stayed home, I must admit I was having some doubts about continuing on our homeschooling adventure. I wondered if Noodle would feel like she was really missing out or somehow deprived, or if I would be able to get a routine that worked for us. Well, we've had a lot going on, what with David's computer programmer staying with us for the past week and a half, but in spite of all the chaos, we're doing really well and I'm feeling really positive about this choice. Noodle is a happy and willing pupil, and we're both excited about all the things we get to learn. I'm amazed at the opportunities that arise naturally to learn things. Last week while we were on a morning walk she was interested in shadows, so we marked our shadows throughout the day and talked about how the angle of the sun determines how long they are and which direction they face. On Sunday we talked about camouflage and defensive coloration in animals, prompted by her questions and what she already had learned about the subject. Yesterday in the car she came up with new words to "Row, Row, Row Your Boat," which were "Buzz, buzz, buzz your bee, buzz down the hill," and she wanted to write them out on a paper so she wouldn't forget, so we helped her spell the words and she wrote them out. This took some considerable effort and patience on her part, but because it was a task that had meaning to her, she happily persevered.

In our Thomas Jefferson Education study group last week we were discussing how there are windows of learning that open in kids' minds, and these are not the same for every child. The advantage of homeschooling is that you can recognize these windows and act while the interest and ability is there. Deby related the story of her daughter attending a beginning music class taught by a friend, and the other girls her age were in tune (forgive the pun) and really "getting" everything, but it was obvious to her that her daughter had no idea what was happening. I think this frequently happens with children when learning math, especially if it is presented as abstract relationships of numbers without real, tangible applications. Sometimes you just don't get it. I was always a good student in math, but I still remember in my high school calculus class one chapter in the book that absolutely and totally went over my head. Try as I might, I could not grasp it, and in a class that I aced every exam, for that chapter I scored a 67% on the exam. I remember the frustration and futility that I felt, as I could not comprehend the material, and it wasn't for lack of trying. It's sad to think that many kids feel this way at a young age when working to learn something that they aren't yet capable of understanding. I'd always been an "advanced" student, so I didn't experience this awful feeling until my senior year of high school. Had I felt it earlier, I may not have developed the academic confidence that I had by that point. The next year, when I took calculus again in college, I understood the subject material of that chapter without too much difficulty.

I think to really learn rather than just regurgitate facts, at least two keys are required: relevance and readiness. Without those, temporary learning (i.e. regurgitation) are the best we can hope for.




And just for fun, I'm including this picture of the kids rolling the water barrels around to sterilize them with bleach last week. They had such a good time, they were disappointed when I said we were done. Happily, we have two more barrels to do and I finally bought some more bleach!