Posted in Homeschooling

Within the last year, I noticed that my life had gotten busier.  My biggest clue was that I no longer inhaled all available reading material (well, ok, the 4 children under the age of five kind of clued me in too).  The magazine our power company sends each month? Left forgotten on the corner table.  The one from our insurance company?  Same fate.

After a while of this, I actually started to just throw them away unread when they arrived.  And I stopped picking up the free parenting magazine that is around and about.  I discovered that, as a mom of seven with one already grown, well, it didn't have a lot to teach me.  It seemed a waste to pick it up and leave it for months on - you guessed it - the corner table.

But last Monday at the library I saw the parenting magazine and decided to pick it up to glance through while I waited for my daughter.  I just finished reading it tonight and had to blog about one article.  I actually read this sentence out loud to my husband and asked him to guess what age child it was discussing: "Watching him mature this year and become more interested in the academic part and more independent at home and away from home, along with the fact that I know about all the services X County has to offer...I feel he is ready to make this jump."

My husband refused to guess, saying he didn't have any idea.  I then revealed that the quote was from a parent of a four year old, a rising kindergartner. Four!  As I read on, I was more and more appalled.  The sidebar story, about transitional kindergarten, had this "reassuring" quote: "The pace is quicker than a regular 4-year-old preschool classroom, but there are still hands-on activities." Still hands-on activities??

Another gem: "Understanding the academic rigors of kindergarten is crucial in helping determine if your child has the emotional and physical maturity to do well." Do the words "rigors" and "kindergarten" belong in the same sentence? Not even Susan Wise Bauer goes that far! And then there's a kindergarten teacher saying, "Ninety percent of kindergarten is academics." Ninety percent? So these children are spending five and a half hours a day on academics???

Ryan is just finishing up his kindergarten year.  He has had no problem with the academics even though he just turned five in September. I'm thankful that he's been able to learn here at home with me, playing math games for an hour if he feels like it, asking his older sisters to give him math problems to do, and asking me about advanced phonics rules that I have to look up to answer.  What he didn't have to deal with was: exhaustion from catching a bus before 7 AM, dealing with a lot of people he doesn't know all at once, being separated all day from his three little brothers (he doesn't even like to do speech therapy without them), or spending his entire day just to do what only takes us an hour to two hours depending on what we do that day.

With our state law, Alexander and Christopher, who will be four in October, wouldn't even be allowed to start kindergarten until two years later if they were going to school.  I'm thankful that I can start with them whenever I choose, when I see that they are ready.  Even with their speech delays, they both know most (if not all) of the sounds letters make and can count a bit.  They sit at the table while Ryan does his work and play with the math manipulatives, making shapes on the geoboards and cutting out triangles with scissors.  They watch Ryan do his phonics flash cards and use the Handwriting without Tears wooden pieces to create letters.  Alexander can also write some letters.  They do it at their own pace, whatever they feel like doing.  By the time we get to the "academic rigors" of kindergarten, they'll probably have learned it all by osmosis.

As for the independence part?  I think it's a bit premature to be discussing independence in a four year old.  Don't these people know how quickly children grow up?  What is the rush?  While it's true that some children of that age have managed to live when left on their own, that is certainly not the standard we want to have, is it?  I'm happy to have my children become independent when they feel ready, not when society dictates that they should be.  I'll keep doing my kindergarten at home, where I don't have to employ a specialist with a Ph.D. to tell me if they are ready for kindergarten.  And I probably won't pick that magazine up again for a while!

Posted in Homeschooling

Twelve years ago this month, we decided to homeschool our oldest child, who was finishing up first grade in the public school. Our second child was almost one year old.  Throughout our time of homeschooling, we have had many challenging things happen, like being homeless, having zero income,  having twins, or mom going out to work in the middle of every day. However, I have to say that this year really takes the cake:  I think that this homeschooling year has been the most challenging one ever.  Of course, typical me only realized this last night!

I tend to think of our years as starting August 1 and running until July 31.  Last August 3, Brogan was born.  The rest of August was certainly not dull - Robert left for college, the twins learned how to climb out of their cribs and therefore stopped napping, Gabrielle began twice a week tutoring for her dyslexia and dysgraphia, and both girls' ballet classes began.

As the year continued on, we added in some medical appointments for the baby's condition, bumped Gabrielle's tutoring up to three times a week, got through our "birthday season" (we have six family birthdays from the end of August to the beginning of November, four of them within two weeks!), Roger began working seven days a week, and we faced the fact that the twins were not speaking the way that they should. In November I participated in NaNoWriMo, writing 30,000 words of my as-yet-unfinished romance novel.

We got through speech evaluations and Christmas and made the unhappy decision that Gabrielle just could not take two dance classes this year.  In January we dealt with MUCHO stress helping Robert prepare for his semester in Poland (if you have not heard that whole story, consider yourself blessed!), while worrying about the twins not getting speech therapy because the first therapist had gone AWOL.  Oh, and in January I hurt my back, making it so I needed help caring for the baby and the twins, and for several weeks we were thinking I had something like rheumatoid arthritis. Thankfully, I don't.

In February we thought we could relax when Robert got on the plane to leave, only to have him get stranded in London a few days later. Oh, and then there was the almost-24-hour period when I had no clue where he was.  No, I did not sleep that night.  We got a new speech therapist, who evaluated Ryan and found that he was only at the second percentile for his age.  To make up for the sessions the twins missed when the first one disappeared, we bumped up therapy to three times a week, now including Ryan.  Yes, tutoring three times a week and therapy three times a week.

And so on and so forth.  I don't think we've had all eight of us at home healthy at the same time since January.  Roger and I both work seven days a week.  Church attendance has been hit or miss.  We've had to deal with twins' fascination for flushing toothbrushes down the toilet (the toilet doesn't like it, and I don't think the toothbrushes care for it either).  The baby, for some reason, decided he needed to add mobility to the mix.

Ballet is now over, but I have promised Gabrielle that starting in August she can take two classes a week.  Speech therapy and tutoring will continue through the summer.  I hope to sign Ryan up for a gymnastics class next year.  Robert will be home next month until the fall semester starts.  Ryan and the twins are improving. So I hope it doesn't seem like I am complaining.  I am reflecting, and with this reflection comes the understanding that, once again, I expected way too much out of myself this year.  Will I ever learn?  After thinking back over this year, I'm just relieved that we are all alive, somewhat healthy and mostly happy. And, yeah, we did some schoolwork along the way.  What more could I ask?

Posted in Homeschooling

Lately Ryan, who is 5, has been making connections between print and speech.  When we first started phonics, I thought he might have dyslexia because he was having so much trouble.  He still may, but I think his speech issues were interfering with his understanding of the sounds.  He had a lot of substitutions: /t/ for /k/, /d/ for /g/, and about 10 more, plus trouble with beginning blends.  He could not say either of the twins' names correctly.

After I realized that people were interpreting his version of "Christopher" as "Jennifer," I asked the speech therapist to work with him on pronouncing it correctly and he learned it pretty quickly.  Today during speech therapy, he spontaneously said, "Alexander" correctly too.  I was so stunned and happy!

Then later he was looking at some animal puzzles we had.  He knew right away that one animal was a crocodile, not an alligator, because it started with c.  Then he was looking at the giraffe and said, "Mommy, I don't know what this is, because it starts with a g, but g says /g/. "  So then I told him that g can make two sounds: /g/ and /j/.  He was amazed and then went through the entire alphabet (by memory) and made me tell him all the sounds the letters made.  It's been awhile since I did phonics, but I think I passed the test LOL! I also had to explain to him today that sometimes k is silent, like in "knee."  So I think we have now skipped a few lessons in Saxon Phonics!

It is always so exciting when they start to read!

Posted in Homeschooling

St. Nicholas knows me very well, and his present to me this year was a book I had on hold at the library - Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell.  I am thrilled to have my own copy!

I first heard of this book in Reader's Digest and thought it sounded interesting.  Basically, it studies what it takes to make someone successful.  In America we have the ideal of the "self-made man," who starts from nothing and through hard work, grit, and determination becomes a multi-millionaire.  Gladwell shows us that this is a myth.  No one makes themselves - they had help and opportunities along the way.  That's why Part One is called "Opportunity." 

However, they also worked very, very hard, and Gladwell tells us about the 10,000 hour rule.  It seems that in pretty much any field, you need 10,000 hours of practice to become a world-class expert.  As an example, he tells us of a study done at Berlin's Academy of Music.  The violinists were separated into 3 categories: possible world-class soloist, merely good, destined to become music teachers.  They were all asked how many hours over their entire careers they had practiced.  They all started violin at 5 years of age and practiced the same amounts in the early years.  Then the ones who were in the best group began practicing more and more, and totaled 10,000 hours at about age 20.  The good group totaled 8000 hours each and the music teacher group only 4000 hours.  (He doesn't explore the possibility that the lower group might be satisfied with where they are, and of course, to misquote the movie Mulan, "Well, we can't all be world-class soloists!")

Here's a quote from the end of that section: "ten thousand hours is an enormous amount of time.  It's all but impossible to reach that number all by yourself by the time you're a young adult.  You have to have parents who encourage and support you.  You can't be poor, because if you have to hold down a part-time job on the side to help make ends meet, there won't be time left in the day to practice enough.  In fact, most people can reach that number only if they get into some kind of special program...or...get some kind of extraordinary opportunity."

Another interesting chapter deals with "practical intelligence" - the way that you get what you need from others basically.  "Social savvy" is another term used to describe it.  Gladwell tells us of a study done by a sociologist who studied third graders from all different backgrounds and focused on 12 families.  Gladwell says,

"You might expect that if you spent such an extended period in twelve different households, what you would gather is twelve different ideas about how to raise children...what Lareau found, however, is something much different.  There were only two parenting 'philosophies,' and they divided almost perfectly along class lines.  The wealthier parents raised their kids one way, and the poorer parents raised their kids another way.  The wealthier parents were heavily involved in their children's free time, shuttling them from one activity to the next...That kind of intensive scheduling was almost entirely absent from the lives of poor children...What a child did was considered by his or her parents as something separate from the adult world and not particularly consequential...One girl from a working class family sang in a choir...Lareau writes: What Mrs. Brindle doesn't do that is routine for middle-class mothers is view her daughter's interst in singing as a signal to look for other ways to help her develop that interest into a formal talent.  Similarly Mrs. Brindle does not discuss Katie's interest in drama or express regret that she cannot afford to cultivate her daughter's talent."

After telling us more about this study, Gladwell sums it up by saying, "When we talk about the advantages of class, Lareau argues, this is in large part what we mean.  Alex is better off than Katie because he's wealthier and because he goes to a better school, but also because...the sense of entitlement that he has been taught is an attitude perfectly suited to succeeding in the modern world."

So basically, success is some natural talent, lots of hard work, and opportunities that help you get there.  Part 2 of the book examines cultural legacies, how some cultures are well suited to bring success in something, while others need to be changed to allow success.  It discusses the same thing I learned from the Right Start Math program I bought for Ryan: one reason that Asians are better at math is because their languages have more logical number systems.  It is easier for a child to learn to count in an Asian language, so by the age of 5, American children are already one year behind. 

In English, we count 1-10.  The next number is eleven, an entirely different word that must be learned.  In contrast, eleven is ten-one in Asian languages.  American children get stuck learning the names for the tens - my five year old currently knows twenty, thirty, and possibly forty and fifty.  If we had a number system like the Asian languages, he could count to 100 without having to learn any new vocabulary beyond 1-10, and the concept of place value would be so much more transparent.

There's a lot more that's fascinating in this book, but the two things I am most interested in are: how can I apply these findings to my children's lives and homeschooling, and how can I apply them to my own life?  I intend to reread the book with these thoughts in mind, but I do have some initial reactions.  Children who are homeschooled have much more time to pile up hours in their areas of interest, thus reaching 10,000 sooner than they could otherwise. Homeschooling parents do not have the attitude that the lower class families in Lareau's study displayed ("the school is responsible for my child's education), because they have already taken on that responsibility regardless of family income.  Most homeschool parents I know try to actively encourage the interests and talents their children show, as I have tried to do with Mary's interest in Swedish.

Another thing discussed in the book is the advantage that some children have by being born closer to the cut-off date, whether it's in school or a sports league.  Many NHL hockey players are born in January, February, or March. Why? Because Canada's very well organized youth hockey programs have a cutoff date of January 1.  The kids born in January are nearly a whole year older than the ones born in December of the same year, so they are bigger and more mature and play better, so they are chosen as all-stars and go on to elite leagues and receive more practice and training which makes them better, and on and on.

The effects, especially in regards to education, are never made up.  Gladwell mentions a study that "looked at the relationship between scores on...math and science tests given every four years to children in many countries around the world and month of birth. They found that among fourth graders, the oldest children scored somewhere between four and twelve percentile points better than the youngest children...[which] means that if you take two intellectually equivalent fourth graders with birthdays at the opposite ends of the cutoff date, the older...could score in the 80th percentile, while the younger one could score in the 68th."  I believe this could have been a factor in my husband's education, since he started school as a four year old with a late September birthday.

Obviously, homeschooling helps a lot with this issue.  There is no pressure to keep up with the class, and kindergarten can begin when the child is ready.  My five year old, whose birthday is also in September, could have started kindergarten this year if we didn't homeschool.  He is academically ready for the work, but would have floundered in the school environment as a very young five.  At home, he can work at his own pace and not have to compete with children a year older than him.

As for applying these findings to me, it's a wake-up call that goes perfectly with my last couple of posts.  Basically, the idea is to spend my hours wisely.  Right now I cannot write for 20 hours a week (20 hours per week, 50 weeks per year, for 10 years will get me to 10,000), but I can set a goal of 10 hours and work to increase.  The important thing is not to waste those hours with non-essential activities.  And I need to examine the cultural values I have and see what might need to be adjusted.

This is my 200th entry! It seems appropriate that it was a book review!

Posted in Homeschooling

Slipping Through My Fingers - ABBA

Schoolbag in hand, she leaves home in the early morning
Waving goodbye with an absent-minded smile
I watch her go with a surge of that well-known sadness
And I have to sit down for a while
The feeling that I'm losing her forever
And without really entering her world
I'm glad whenever I can share her laughter
That funny little girl

Slipping through my fingers all the time
I try to capture every minute
The feeling in it
Slipping through my fingers all the time
Do I really see what's in her mind
Each time I think I'm close to knowing
She keeps on growing
Slipping through my fingers all the time

Sleep in our eyes, her and me at the breakfast table
Barely awake, I let precious time go by
Then when she's gone there's that odd melancholy feeling
And a sense of guilt I can't deny
What happened to the wonderful adventures
The places I had planned for us to go
(Slipping through my fingers all the time)
Well, some of that we did but most we didn't
And why I just don't know

Slipping through my fingers all the time
I try to capture every minute
The feeling in it
Slipping through my fingers all the time
Do I really see what's in her mind
Each time I think I'm close to knowing
She keeps on growing
Slipping through my fingers all the time

Sometimes I wish that I could freeze the picture
And save it from the funny tricks of time
Slipping through my fingers

Slipping through my fingers all the time

Schoolbag in hand she leaves home in the early morning
Waving goodbye with an absent-minded smile

This song is a great reason for homeschooling!  It reminds me that all my children have been growing and changing while I have been wasting my time doing things that don't matter.  I have them home with me because I want to be with them, because I want to share their learning with them.  I guess I needed to be reminded of that.  I don't want to have my last one leave and think, "What happened to the wonderful adventures/The places I had planned for us to go/Well, some of that we did but most we didn't/And why I just don't know."

Posted in Homeschooling

It went pretty well.  Monday we followed the routine I figured out and it worked!  What I did was make a table like I used to for schedules and decided who had to be doing what when, but I only put one time on there: Rosary at 9:30 AM.  I will post it at the end of this entry. I think that as long as we start our day then, it doesn't matter what time the other things happen.  We just do them in order.

Tuesday morning I had an appointment, and then in the afternoon I started feeling sick.  By late afternoon I was pretty much out of it.  So that day I only got done school with Ryan.  I kept falling asleep while reading him Sir Cumference and the First Round Table!

Wednesday I was still sick, but managed to get mostly everything done, just not in the routine.  That's where also having a checklist helps!

Thursday is ballet day, and Gabrielle has been meeting her tutor beforehand.  We did our necessary schoolwork before leaving.

Friday my mom came in the morning.  Brogan was baptized on Saturday so she came for that.  Obviously, we didn't do our normal routine because we were all thrilled to see Grandma!

I think that if I make sure we do our work, even if the day is crazy, we will make good progress!

Here is my routine:

Mom	Gabrielle	Mary	Ryan	Alexander/ Christopher
Morning Stuff	Eat breakfast Get dressed Make bed Quick clean of hall bathroom	Eat breakfast Get dressed Make bed Clean up breakfast	Eat breakfast Get dressed Make bed	Morning Stuff
9:30 Rosary	9:30 Rosary	9:30 Rosary	9:30 Rosary	9:30 Rosary
School with Mary   School with Gabrielle   With A/C     WATP	Do activity with R/A/C   School with Mom   Math Handwriting Reading History	School with Mom   Reading in the quad     Handwriting Writing History	With Gabrielle   Watch movie     With mom	With Gabrielle   Watch movie     With mom
Lunch	Lunch	Lunch	Lunch	Lunch
School with Ryan   Activity with Gabrielle and Mary   Laundry Kitchen Make dinner Clean quad	Clean up lunch      Activity with Mom   Free time     Clean quad	Straighten playground     Activity with Mom     Free time     Clean quad	School with Mom     Nap in Mom’s room     Snack Free time   Clean quad	Nap in room       Nap       Snack Free time   Clean quad
Dinner	Dinner	Dinner	Dinner	Dinner
Put R/A/C to bed Read to G/M Write Prayer time	Clean up kitchen   Free time Bed	Clean up kitchen   Free time Bed	Bed	Bed

Posted in Homeschooling

Mary just turned 10, and here is what she will be doing this year:

Math: She will complete Singapore 3A and do 3B.  I am planning to finish 3A by Christmas.  She is currently about halfway through the book.  Math is very difficult for her, and we take it very slowly.  Ideally, I would like to do two short sessions a day with her, but we will probably only get one in.  I also plan to get her the books Addition the Fun Way and Times Tables the Fun Way  (link here), because I think these books, which associate stories and pictures with the basic facts, will really help her to learn them.

Language Arts: We have started going quickly through First Language Lessons Level 2.  By "quickly" I mean 3 or 4 lessons a day.  This is definitely easy for her, but we are doing it for two main reasons: one, to make sure she has the basics of language arts down, and two, I couldn't afford to buy a new book and this was free (my friend lent me her copy!).  I also hope to finish this by Christmas and begin FLL3 in January with her.

Handwriting: I had planned to switch all my children to using Handwriting Without Tears this year, but when I went to the homeschool store, they only had one copy of the cursive book.  So I gave that to Gabrielle, and Mary will continue with Italic handwriting since I already had that book for her.  Eventually I will probably get her HWT.

Reading:  She will continue to read through the Seton readers.

Latin: We have started Latin the same way I did with Robert, by playing the card game Rummy Roots.  It teaches common Latin and Greek roots, their meanings, and how to combine them into English words.  Most likely in January we will begin Latina Christiana.

Swedish: This summer I got a little book called How to Learn Any Language Quickly, Easily, and On Your Own.  After reading through it, I thought it might work to use the system to study Swedish with Mary.  I'll blog about the method later, but basically right now we're translating Swedish versions of ABBA songs, and we'll learn some basic conversational phrases.

History: We just started Story of the World 3, which covers Elizabeth I to the Forty-Niners (the San Francisco 49ers? no, that's another blog post I'm planning!).  We'll basically listen to it and she'll do the student pages.  Maybe we'll get out some historical fiction to go along with it, and if some activity in the student book looks thrilling, we might do that too.  But both she and Gabrielle love history, so I don't want to ruin it by micro-managing!

Science: Below high school level, organized science here is really hit or miss, mostly miss.  This year I hope to do Lyrical Life Science with the girls.  I bought it last year but we never got around to doing it.  A friend and I are also planning a science coop for this year.

We'll do some other some other supplementary things for art and music and religion. I'll probably blog about those things as we do them.

Posted in Homeschooling

Ryan just turned 5 a few weeks ago and is ready for kindergarten. (Believe me, if he wasn't, I wouldn't be doing it!)  So this is what his school year looks like:

Phonics: Saxon Phonics K.  I love this program.  It is what actually taught me phonics!  I didn't understand it when I began to teach Gabrielle to read.  We had started with "Teach Your Child to Read in a Hundred Easy Lessons" and it was not easy at all!  Between her dyslexia and my cluelessness, we had to quit in the early 20s.  I remember once telling her the sound for short a, and she said, "I thought that was the sound for short o," and I realized she was right.  I had said them both the same - I just did not get it!  I am happy to report that I am no longer phonics-challenged and am capable of teaching Ryan to read.

Math: RightStart A.  I am so hoping that this program will be good!

Handwriting Without Tears:  So far he loves playing with the wooden pieces, but the first day we did the book, he cried.  I thought that was ironic!  He needs help learning how to hold the pencil.

Religion: He is very interested in learning the Mysteries of the Rosary, and I am also going to read him a little book called Child's Bible History.  He will also be around for whatever I do with the girls probably.

I also plan to try to read to him more than just at bedtime.  If I get really ambitious, I'll work in some German with him!

Posted in Homeschooling

In my effort to hold myself accountable for homeschooling, I will be posting about what we do each week on my blog.  So here is the checklist I am working from now (which my husband so nicely formatted for me into a table):

Well, apparently, I can't copy and paste the table, so I will just post the list that I made up.

Hmm, apparently I can't copy and paste that either.  Don't know why.

OK, I'll just describe how I see my day going.  At some point in the morning, we will say the Rosary.  I may make this a fixed time.  I did this before and it worked well.  No matter what anyone was doing, they stopped and came to the living room to pray.  So we'll see about that.  Also, I will read the Saint of the Day, most likely at lunch.  I am also thinking that I will read to them all while they are eating, and then eat myself.

Sometime during the morning, I will do school with Gabrielle while Mary watches the twins, and then vice versa.  I will read to the twins in either English or German and have them do some kind of morning activity like going outside, playing with the water in the kitchen, or something more planned. I also will try to read to Ryan at some point.

In the afternoon right after lunch, I will do Ryan's schoolwork with him and then have him go to his room for quiet time.  Then I will finish whatever didn't get done with the girls, and then do some sort of enrichment activity with them.  On days we go out, that won't happen obviously.  After the twins get up from their nap (which hopefully we can make them take, otherwise it's really just playing in their room), I'll make dinner. I have been doing pretty well at having dinner ready around when Roger gets home from work.  This is especially important with the twins and Ryan not really napping - this way we can eat around 6 and get them ready for bed and in bed by 7 PM.  I will try to stay on top of the kitchen and make sure it's cleaned up throughout the day, and do 2 loads of laundry at some point throughout the day (most likely in the evening).  And then I will end the day with my prayer time.

I guess somehow copy and paste is turned off - I just tried to link to my previous post about my prayer notebook and that wouldn't work either.  My tech support guy is asleep right now, so it will have to wait until tomorrow!

Our official first day of trying to get to everything will be October 6. I made a list also of the lesson planning I need to do over the weekends to make sure I am prepared for the week ahead.  Hopefully later this week I will be able to post what each child will be studying this year!  Bedtime!

Posted in Homeschooling

Once after reading way too many ads for different private schools and preschools, I started thinking about what an ad for homeschooling would say.  Here's what I came up with!

At our school, we offer:

individualized learning programs

extremely low student-teacher ratio

warm homelike atmosphere and facilities

integrated age levels

genuine love for the students

close teacher-student relationships

intense relationship training and formation

emphasis on service to others

multi-faceted learning environment

hands-on activities

life skills integral to the curriculum

supportive nurturing environment

frequent field trips

assistance with indepth learning in areas of interest

and last but not least -

stimulating parent-teacher conferences!

Posted in Homeschooling

Sigh. It's Monday night and I am NOT watching football.  Sigh. (If you don't know what I am talking about, read My Top Pet Peeves  - scroll down to paragraph 11.)

But, both the Tar Heels and the Panthers are 2-0, so that's cool.  I am very happy.

I am slowly working on beginning this homeschooling year.  Piece by piece, hopefully it will come together by October.  I have a checklist put together for me to keep me on track.  I will make one for each of the girls.  I am also going to have sheets to keep track of what schoolwork each child does each day.

So far my plan to add in a new subject each week is working well, especially with Mary.  Last week she got upset that I was making her do Language Arts in addition to math.  This week, she got upset that we were going to do Latin as well.  Next week she'll be used to that idea and then I can add in something else LOL.

I plan to post what each child is doing this year later this week, as well as goals to accomplish by Christmas.  Outside activities are still in a state of flux.  A friend and I are thinking of organizing a science coop.  I am trying to figure out how to have some fun homeschooling with the girls while taking care of all the little ones too.  I'll let you know what I come up with.

The girls have requested to learn more about the United Kingdom this year, especially Scotland.  This stems from their current Redwall obsession.  My mother was delighted to discover that they didn't own any of the books and that there are a lot of them - now she has birthdays and Christmas covered for several years!  So if you know of any good resources, please leave a comment!

Posted in Homeschooling

We have just received the results of our daughter Gabrielle’s dyslexia testing.  While we knew that she had it, we did not understand the severity of it nor the effect it could have on so many areas of her schoolwork.  She also was diagnosed with dysgraphia. At this point, the recommendation is at least twice weekly tutoring for the next 18-24 months to get her up to grade level, at which point she would begin high school.

This news means a serious reevaluation of our homeschooling.  We will need to be much more structured with some things than we have been in the past.  We will have to add in some areas that will help her.  And we will have to make time for the tutoring. In addition, my other daughter needs more in several subject areas.  This year our homeschool is adding in a kindergartner, who will need phonics and math at a minimum.

Then we have the fact that I was hoping to have the children involved in more activities this year.  I had thought to do a choir and ballet for the girls, a Friday co-op, and other things as they came up, plus try to make new friends.  Now I don’t know if we will be able to do anything besides ballet.

Besides all that, I will still have three-year-old twins and a newborn to take care of. I’m thinking that it’s a good thing I haven’t signed a contract to teach at the charter school again this year yet.  If I did, it would only be once or twice a week, but at this point, I am not sure I can fit it in, mentally, physically, or otherwise.

Of course, this realization that I may not be able to work in any real way comes at the same time as the news that we will have to figure out some way to pay for her tutoring, plus meet all our other expenses and pay for gas to get to and from the tutoring.  And this all comes when I am 36 weeks pregnant and have no energy at all.  I know I will have more energy later but right now I am a bit overwhelmed.

I don’t know when or if I will be able to work on my Spanish and German, take online classes, think about teaching or doing any of the things I have been considering doing.  But I also don’t know how we are going to pay for everything!  I think I’ll go take a nap; that should help, don’t you think?

Posted in Homeschooling

Way back in 1985, my family took a two week trip to New England.  Two of my sisters were on the trip, and they spent the entire time pretending not to know my father (they were 20 and 16, and should have been capable of behaving better).  My mother and my father were also not really speaking to each other, and for some uncomfortable reason the trip coincided with their 25th wedding anniversary, a day neither of them really wanted to remember, let alone celebrate in any way.  And I was stuck riding in a car and living in hotel rooms with everyone for two very long weeks.  This may be the only time in my life that I wore sunglasses to hide my eyes, because normally I hate them, and I spent most of my time making up a romantic fantasy that involved me and a member of Duran Duran (give me a break, it was 1985, and I'd never heard of Enrique yet! He was only 10 or so then anyway).

But I had a strategy to convince my father that I was having a good time.  Everywhere we went, I would find one interesting thing and be sure to point it out to him.  I distinctly recall being in the stupid yacht museum in Mystic, Connecticut, and seeing a model of a yacht with tiny little lifeboats, so I showed them to my dad.

Why am I telling you this story?  Well, I was thinking about it yesterday at my end-of-the-year faculty meeting.  We were discussing getting the students to follow their interests and to realize that they can make careers out of them.  And while that is an admirable goal, and one many homeschoolers agree with, I still feel that it falls slightly short of what I would like for my children.

At my son's graduation a week or so ago, I said, "To me, homeschooling isn’t just about instilling knowledge in the child, it’s about sharing the world as a fascinating and exciting place."  And I realized yesterday that one of the lessons I would like my children to learn is that everything can be interesting!  Even things you think are boring.  Even things you have no desire to know about.  Even things you don't care about.  They are all interesting in their own right.  Not just to other people, but also to you.  You can find the one little part that is like the puzzle piece you were missing in your understanding of the world, and that expands your thoughts and your horizons.

And this essentially is the reason that I could never really unschool.  As a Spanish teacher this year, I had to coordinate my classes with several interdisciplinary units the whole school was doing.  When I was doing research for one of the units, I learned why it's always windy at the beach, and thought that was so cool I made everyone in my vicinity hear the reason.  And I have now become interested in wind power and have even thought of getting a wind turbine (either a model or a real one).  Six months ago I didn't even know the word "turbine"!  I never would have sat down one day and said to myself, "Jeanne, I really think you need to research wind!"

So, maybe that vacation back in 1985 really did help me out.  My other strategy from that trip paid off too: in order to get some alone time, I volunteered to sleep on the cot every night.  And then when we ended our trip in Boston and had two hotel rooms because my aunt had joined us, my mom declared that I would get a double bed all to myself since I had so generously taken the cot the whole trip!

Posted in Homeschooling

Recently my oldest son and I were discussing another family's method of homeschooling: they have all their children enrolled completely in the Seton program.  I told him that the mother wanted her children to have an excellent education, and she felt that Seton would provide that.  Robert then joked that because I didn't want to enroll them completely in Seton, I didn't want them to have an excellent education.  So I said, "No, I believe that an individualized education IS an excellent education."

When I was in high school, I took a class my junior year called "Individualized English."  I didn't realize when I signed up for it that it was a euphemism for "Remedial English."  We started the year with a battery of placement tests to find weak areas.  When I met with the teacher to go over my results, she bluntly asked me, "Why did you take this class?"  I said, "Well, I thought I could work on my vocabulary and read some classics that I haven't yet read."  She rummaged around and came up with a college-level vocabulary book, and I worked through that despite already knowing most of the words.

Then I read.  I remember specifically reading and discussing with her Pride and Prejudice, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Importance of Being Earnest, Gulliver's Travels and Wuthering Heights.   I also shared some of my poetry (yes, I used to write poetry) with her and she encouraged me to study sonnets and write a sonnet.

My point about this class is that it is one of the only pleasant memories I have of high school.  The only other class I unreservedly enjoyed was Spanish.  It was wonderful to focus on what I needed and wanted to do, rather than what twenty other students needed.  It would have been heaven to do my entire high school experience this way, especially if I didn't have to leave home to do it.

Another memory I have from high school is planning my junior year with my guidance counselor.  I remember that I wanted to take Biology 2 instead of Chemistry, and that I wanted to add Italian while continuing Spanish and French.  My counselor looked at me and said, "What are colleges going to think when they see all this biology and languages?"  And I replied, "That I like biology and languages?"  But in the end, they won, and I took Chemistry and didn't take Italian.

The tremendous advantage of homeschooling high school in my opinion is the time it frees up to do what you want to do and study what you want to study.  I was always so frustrated in high school that so much of my time was just wasted.  I used to sit on the bus going to school and wonder why, of all the places in the world, I was going to school.  I used to take a book with me in the morning and finish it by the end of the day.  Pretty much every day.  My mother conveniently worked in a bookstore and would bring home boxes of books, so I never ran out.

Thankfully, I was able to complete my senior year of high school at college.  Here's another example of wasted time: although I only needed one credit of American History and one credit of English to graduate, my school would have required me to be present all day.  Instead, I took freshman English and American History at a nearby college, and at the end of the school year, I had 12 college credits and received my high school diploma.

And I have been individualizing my education ever since.

Posted in Homeschooling

I wrote a while ago about how so far my children don't like math (here's the link if you want to read it).  Mary, who is almost 10, especially does not like it and seems to have some sort of acute math phobia.  She has been working lately on subtraction with borrowing and just could not get when she needed to borrow.  She would take a problem like 9300-1500, and say the answer is 8200. She subtracts the zeros, looks at the 3 and the 5, and even though the 5 is below the 3, will subtract 3 from 5 and get 2, and then subtract the 1 from the 9 to get 8.

I kept saying, "If you can't subtract the five from the three, you need to borrow" but it didn't help at all.  Illustrations did not seem to help.  She just couldn't understand.  Then, this past weekend, I was researching TPR a bit more (which I mentioned in my last entry) and found some articles by Dr. James Asher, who founded the method.  I was intrigued by the article Some Mysteries of Arithmetic Explained: Secrets Revealed that May Help Parents and Teachers clarify mathematics for youngsters  (link here) for two reasons; one, my problem with Mary, and two, why is a guy who founded a language teaching method writing about math?

So I didn't find the answer to my question, but I did find an idea that helped the situation with Mary.  Dr. Asher says, "I discovered that the standard arithmetic we learned in school has some severe limitations that are hidden until one begins to doodle with arithmetic. Here are some examples:

Posted in Homeschooling

Another reason why we started homeschooling goes back to the events surrounding Robert's birth.  It was a typical mismanaged, medical birth, in which I ended up with just about every intervention short of a c/section.  I didn't want pain medication - I knew I could do it without it, but I didn't count on the hospital making me lay on my back in bed, or that they would come into my room frequently and say, "Are you sure you don't want something?"  Eventually I gave in and agreed to an epidural.

Shortly after his birth at 1:52 AM Monday, they took him to the nursery and me to another room, where I slept off the epidural.  At some point, nurses came in and made me get up and go to the bathroom - they literally had to drag me in there, and I rewarded them by throwing up on them and fainting.  For years I thought this was a reaction to childbirth, and it was only later that I realized it was from the epidural and other medications.

The next time I remember seeing Robert was during the night, so it had been nearly 24 hours since his birth.  They brought him to me to nurse him.  After trying a bit, and realizing that I had no idea how to actually do it, I called a nurse.  All she did was give me a nipple shield, which I found out later should not be used.

We went home on Wednesday, with them warning me that he looked like he was suffering from jaundice and I needed to bring him back for a test the next day.  The next day it was worse, and they told me to bring him back again on Friday for another test.  They called Friday evening and said that his levels were low enough that he needed to come back and be admitted for treatment under the lights.  I stayed with him in the hospital, but was not allowed to nurse (not that this was going all that well anyway) or hold him because he was in the isolette under the light.

At the hospital Saturday night, I began to feel really sick.  A nurse came in to check on Robert 3 times before I managed to tell her that I didn't feel well.  She suggested I walk down to the ER, and I said, "I don't think I can."  She went and got me a wheelchair and someone took me to the ER.  By that time, I was so sick I could barely talk.  My fever was very high, I believe I threw up again, and I had no idea what was wrong. 

What actually happened went back to the day I went into labor.  I had thought I might be in labor and went to the hospital to be checked.  They told me I was not actually in labor yet, but that I had an infection.  They gave me a prescription to fill and I left.  However, I continued having contractions and did go into labor that day.  The prescription never got filled, and they never followed up when I went back into the hospital to have the baby. My doctor actually told me later that if I hadn't been in the hospital when the infection hit, I could have died from it.

So in the wee hours of the morning that Sunday, I was readmitted to the hospital for the uterine infection and a few hours later, Robert was released.  They would not put me in the maternity ward so I could have Robert with me.  I remember holding him and being wheeled to the front door so I could say goodbye.  My heart was breaking.

I did not see him again until Wednesday night, and then when I was released on Saturday.  My baby was nearly two weeks old, and for half that time, we had been apart.  While I was in the hospital, a nurse had wanted to change my sheets but I wouldn't get up.  She finished everybody else, and then came back to me, but I still wouldn't get up.  So she and another nurse physically lifted me and put me in a chair.  She told me while changing the bed, "I know what's the matter with you.  You have the baby blues"  in a very nasty tone.  I replied, "Only because he's not with me!  If he were with me, I'd be fine!"

Since I was ostensibly a nursing mother, they had brought me an electric pump, but no one showed me how to use it and I couldn't get it to work.  I settled for manual expression, but with no privacy in the hospital, that was extremely difficult.  The Sunday after I left the hospital, I sat with Robert for an hour trying to get him to nurse.  At this point, he was just about two weeks old, and had been having bottles the entire time practically.  I still had no clear idea exactly what nursing looked like and no one to help me, so I gave up.  I couldn't bear to listen to him cry.

What does this have to do with homeschooling?  Well, as I learned more about birth and nursing, I realized that all of our problems came from institutional interference and bad advice.  If I, as a first-time mother, had received my care in a place that supported natural birth and breastfeeding, most of this wouldn't have happened.  If I had had continuity of care, the infection wouldn't have been overlooked.  If nursing had been supported, Robert wouldn't have developed jaundice and they would have known that breastfeeding can and should continue during treatment.

And when my son started school, I felt it happening all over again.  Again an institution was interfering in my relationship with my son, telling me when I could and could not see him, what I could and could not do with him, separating us from each other.

I am glad that we began homeschooling and spending our days together.  Just last night, we were laughing about how we finish each other's sentences.  And now that he is 18 and about to start college, I am ready to let him go.  I got to have him for all these years, and he is such a wonderful young man that I know he will do well in the world.  It is not an institution telling us that now he needs to leave and go to college, it is clear that this is the next step in his life.

Posted in Homeschooling

I wanted to review punctuation with my daughters, and just happened to see this book on the library shelf.  They love it!  The text and the illustrations are really amusing.  My daughters, who are almost 12 and almost 10, have begged me to read it to them every day this week, some days multiple times.

All the punctuation marks go on vacation to Take-A-Break Lake.  They send back postcards to Mr. Wright's classroom that give clues which mark it is from.  My girls love saying who each postcard is from!  Meanwhile, in the classroom, nothing makes sense without punctuation, and they have to borrow some unruly punctuation from Mr. Rongo next door.  It ends up in all the wrong places, and today my daughters went through and told me where they all should be.  So the children ask punctuation to come back and they do.  The book ends with some punctuation rules, and on the very last page, there are amusing little anecdotes about the vacation.  For example, the period has a picture of himself stopping two sentences from crashing into each other on the corner of Bay St. and Lake Ave.

I also just saw on Amazon that the same author and illustrator have a book called "Nouns and Verbs Have a Field Day" which I will pick up at the library next week.  I wanted to share this great book with everybody!

Posted in Homeschooling

Since my oldest is about to graduate, I guess I am feeling nostalgic.  So I was reflecting on why we began homeschooling in the first place, eleven years ago.

My husband and I both had horrible public school experiences.  When it was time for our oldest to start school, we wanted him to go to private school.  I researched all the private schools in our area and found out several things: one, they are all REALLY expensive; two, none of them were really what we wanted.  We settled on the Catholic school at our church, but had a difficult time getting him registered.  Frankly, the school seemed more interested in receiving their money than in educating Catholic children.  I told myself, "Well, they are a business, they have bills to pay, what else can they do?"  And it was then that I had a vision of a Catholic school, operating on faith and trusting in God for the money they needed, and I knew I could never put my son in our church's school.

Public school was left, so we decided that would work.  During his kindergarten year, I was finishing up my master's and pregnant with my daughter Gabrielle.  I went on the field trips and volunteered in the classroom every week.  I knew all the children and most of the parents.  Everything seemed to be fine.

For first grade, he had a wonderful Catholic teacher with whom I became friends.  However, now I had a new baby, and I couldn't volunteer as much, so I wasn't on top of what was going on.  There was one boy that Robert had problems getting along with, and at one point, they were both sent to the office for fighting.  Towards the end of the school year, an incident happened that shook us all.  On the playground, Robert and this other boy were arguing.  The other boy grabbed Robert, pushed him up against a brick wall and began shaking him so that his head hit the wall repeatedly.  Robert hit him back to get free.  An adult on the playground reported Robert for hitting the other boy, and because it was his second incident, he was suspended.  This happened on a Thursday, and I was told on the phone that he could not come back to school until Monday.

Now when I was in school, suspension was something that happened in high school, possibly junior high if you were really bad.  But first grade?? Come on!  I went to the school to pick Robert up and found him sitting in the office.  When I said we needed to go home, he said he needed to get his stuff and then said, "Well, I can just get it tomorrow."  Stunned, I realized that no one had explained to him that he was suspended, what that meant, and for how long.  So I explained to him.

The following week, my husband and I met with the principal.  He apologized for not explaining to Robert and said that it had been very busy that day.  We made the point that explaining to a first grader that he had violated the rules and was being suspended ought to be higher on the priority list.  We asked why the other boy had not been punished.  No answer. We asked the identity of the "informant." No answer. We asked what Robert should have done in this situation.  We were told that the school had a policy of "zero tolerance" for violence, and that Robert should have gone to an adult to ask for help.  We asked exactly how he should have done that, since the other boy was holding him against the wall.  No answer.

We also asked about other things that had been concerning us: why the children did not say the Pledge of Allegiance or learn any patriotic songs, and why there was no American flag in the classroom.  The answer was that there were many international students in the school, and they did not want to offend them or make them uncomfortable.  Our reaction was that they came here to this country and put their children in our public schools, and they should expect that their children would learn American things.  If we put our children in school in Germany, we would expect them to be taught the national anthem and other patriotic things.

My husband and I left this meeting with the principal completely unsettled by his answers.  We began to realize that when we dropped our son off at school every day, it was like dropping him off in Cuba.  He had no rights at all.  He couldn't defend himself from attacks.  We weren't there to make sure he was safe.  And further, we were worried about what they were and weren't teaching him.  Perplexed, I began asking a few friends for advice, and one of them said, "Have you ever thought of homeschooling?"

We began looking into it and liked what we saw.  We attended a panel discussion on homeschooling and got the book I Am a Homeschooler out of the library. While discussing homeschooling one night at the dinner table, Robert asked us if he could be homeschooled.  We had already decided to do it, so we said yes.  I was happy that it didn't come down to us taking him out of school against his wishes.  Since it was so close to the end of the year, we had him finish out the year and then just not go back.

When I spoke to his teacher, she said that she was absent the day the incident on the playground occurred, and that it never would have happened if she had been there.  She was thrilled that we had decided to homeschool, and said that she spent most of her time dealing with discipline issues, and children who really wanted to learn, like Robert, got shortchanged.

We also called our extended family members and told them of our decision to homeschool.  When I told my mother, I started by saying that we were very concerned about what had happened at school.  She said, "Me too!"  I then said that we had researched homeschooling and had decided to do that instead.  She replied, "Oh, I've read about that too recently, and I think that's a wonderful idea!"  She has always been very supportive of our homeschooling.

My father had never been supportive of public education, even while he let my sisters and I attend.  He had been saying for years that the public schools should be shut down, so, obviously, he had no problem with our homeschooling Robert.

We were more concerned that Roger's mother would have a problem with it, as she had been a public school teacher and most definitely did not believe that the public schools should be closed!  So my husband called her and told her, and then said, "Are we going to have a problem about this?" and she said no.  She did say things like "Well, you don't know if you will keep homeschooling" for many years, but eventually she gave up. On the whole, our families were supportive, and in that, I know we were blessed.  But we would have done it without their support if necessary. 

It was only later that I realized that my vision had come true: we were now a family school, giving our children a Catholic education, operating on faith and trusting in God for whatever we needed.

Posted in Homeschooling

Susan Wise Bauer, that is, author of The Story of The World I talked about in my Reflections on History post, then you will love her blog.  She cracks me up!

A quote from yesterday's entry: "I haven’t had a horse since I started having babies instead. They don’t necessarily go together. "

Posted in Homeschooling

My daughters might not like math, but they love history!  And they especially love The Story of the World by Susan Wise Bauer.  I always buy the bulk of our new homeschooling resources when we get our tax refund, and this year we completed buying everything SOTW.  We now own all four volumes in both book and CD format, and every activity guide.  The girls love doing the sheets and do them entirely on their own.  I am not even sure they would consider it school!

Mary was especially happy to get the CDs, because Gabrielle would always beg her to read the books out loud.  Mary said that she would rather read the book than listen to Jim Weiss.  I really like Jim Weiss - I have heard him several times in person - and I keep meaning to listen to his version but haven't gotten around to it yet. 

They really have learned a lot, and they remember it too!  I was reading them something from their English book that mentioned the ancient city of Biblos, and Gabrielle exclaimed, "Oh, we know about Biblos! From Story of the World!"

History in school for me was rather inadequate, probably made worse by the fact that I don't like taking history classes.  History as I remember it consisted of "Well, we'll do some study of ancient Greece and Rome, because that's the basis of our country, and then, well, we'll skip the fall of Rome, because that doesn't bode well, and then nothing much happens until Columbus discovers America, and then we will cover everything that happened on the North American continent until the end of WW2, because it's the end of the school year and we don't have time for anything more, and that ends on a good note because we won that war.  Oh, and nothing important ever happened in South America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, or Australia, so don't worry about that." 

So, in 2001, I bought Christ the King, Lord of History and Christ and the Americas and read through them.  I read all of history, in order, from a Catholic perspective, for the first time. It was very interesting! Well, SOTW Volume 4: The Modern Age was lying around a week or so ago, and so I started reading it.  The girls kept asking me, "Why are you reading our book?"  And so I told them, "There is a lot of information in this book that I never learned."  Which of course brought up, "Well, why not?" (for the answer, see above note about my history education!)

Volume 4 covers from the Victorian Age to the end of the twentieth century.  It is 470 pages of people killing other people for usually no good reason.  It is filled with fights for independence to end tyranny, only to lead to those same people tyrannizing others.  It is quite honestly, a depressing read. (Shh! don't tell my husband - I am not supposed to read depressing things when I am pregnant!)  For the first time, I understand why people say that they would not want to bring a child into this world.

Juxtaposed with this, I was also reading a children's biography of St. Benedict.  He lived around 500 AD, and was the monk who first wrote a rule of life for his monastery.  He also taught about peace.  Towards the end of his life, God granted him a vision.  "He saw the trials that someday would plague the world.  He heard the tread of millions of marching men.  He saw bloody battlefields, weeping widows, orphaned children.  He saw crafty men in high places, their hands heaped high with the profits of war.  And he saw, too, that only a few people would dare to make his motto, 'Peace!', their own" (Saint Benedict: The Story of the Father of the Western Monks by Mary Fabyan Windeatt).

It really made me wonder if St. Benedict's vision had been of the twentieth century.  Can you imagine having a vision of something 1500 years in the future?

Honestly, however, I think that Susan Wise Bauer did an extremely good job of explaining how things got the way they are over the last hundred years.  I did not know the background of many things, like why Korea is divided into north and south, or, umm, really why anything is the way it is in Africa, South America, or Asia.

My other thought while reading the book was this:  imperialism continues to the present day.  A main theme in SOTW 4 was the carving up of Africa, Asia, etc, and then later the inevitable fights for independence.  The attitude of the European powers seemed to be, "You are not important and we are, so we will take control of your land for you."  But isn't that exactly what happened with my history education?  "You are not important, so we don't need to study you."  I thank Susan Wise Bauer for writing a history of the whole  world, so imperialism doesn't continue with my children's generation, and maybe we can work on that whole peace thing that St. Benedict was into as well.