Category Archives: homeschooling

04.28.07
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New vocabulary word

Every now and then, you just have to teach your kid a big word. A little word won’t do.

Obviously, when discussing matters of religion, new vocabulary words like transubstantiation will eventually need defining. Perhaps your young man is into guns or crime shows or detective work. Ballistics might become part of his word list. And if your child is learning music theory, lots of long, foreign words like fortissississimo might be necessary to describe your child’s preferred style of expressing himself on the piano.

And sometimes, just regular conversation requires a good knock-out punch of a word. My parents always used big vocabulary words with us, and then directed us to the big dictionary to figure out what they meant. When big words started coming out of our mouths, they would praise us with, “That’s a fifty-cent word!” Eventually sophisticated vocabulary becomes a habit.

I often find myself using big words even though I know that the kids have no idea what I am saying. This most often happens when I’m getting excited about a topic, and the time space between my thought and the word coming out of my mouth is extremely brief. I’ll use the first words that come to mind, and they are often pretty hefty. Half the time the kids just ignore much of what I say and grasp the general meaning of my point. This worked to my great advantage once when I was pretty upset with the kids and started expressing in a loud and rapid manner exactly how I felt about their behavior. Out came one awful word, and I felt horrible and worried about using it – until I realized that nobody even noticed. They just thought mom had pulled out another big word that they hadn’t learned yet.

Whew.

Recently in grammar, Fritz is learning about adjectives. One of the exercises is to list two adjectives for each of the nouns. Horse: spotted, small. Boy: tall, skinny. Boat: big, fast. Building: tall, window-y.

Nope. That just won’t do. Window-y doesn’t cut it. I could have left it at that and had him come up with another adjective, but I also think a kid needs to learn how to express himself. If he wants to point out that a building has windows (as compared to places like many army buildings that don’t), this is a legitimate requirement. If there happens to be a word that fits the bill, why shouldn’t I teach it to him?

And so, Fritz learned the word fenestrated yesterday. We admire the city skyline filled with tall, fenestrated buildings. The prisoners longed for a fenestrated barracks so they would know when it was day or night. Fortunately, his grammar worksheet wasn’t being turned into a teacher who might think he was making things up. That happened to my nephew, Jack, whose third grade teacher, apparently unfamiliar with Lemony Snickett’s Series of Unfortunate Events, told him that penultimate was not a word. Ignorance is my penultimate pet peeve; arrogance is the trait I despise the most.

04.24.07
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Day N/A, Week 26/27

While traveling, I brought along a few workbooks – a minimal amount of school: mainly grammar and math. Math is just one subject you can’t cover quickly, at least not with my kids. Either they do it, or they don’t. And they can manage to take a long time to do it. At one point, one of my kids said, “What kind of a vacation is this?” I received crossed arms, a hostile stare, and a flat-out refusal to work. Is it any surprise that he spent the next hour in a chair in a time out? We moved on to the day’s events with his schoolwork undone. The next day, a not-so-busy day, he had twice as much work to do, and he sat working while his siblings played outside.

It amazes me how unreasonable children can be, even past the so-called “age of reason.” I explained at the beginning of our trip that we need to do math so that we can be done with school by the end of May. Everybody agrees that the sooner we are done with school, the happier we’ll be. Unfortunately, my idea of “done with school” is finishing the workbooks and textbooks, and their idea of finishing school is just a matter of stopping the work.

It’s not that I’m tied to the curriculum and feel we must plug along and check every single block. Believe me, I have disregarded more than a few things. Music appreciation is sandwiched in car rides with little comment or discussion about composers, music style, or instruments used. And the soundtrack to The Blues Brothers counts as classical music, right? If my 7 year old knows how to scat, this counts as culture, right, right?

Even though I don’t make my kids memorize every answer in the Baltimore Catechism or learn the names of the artists of all the fine art we sometimes observe, math is one subject I really don’t want to skimp on. Correction: we fail to do the speed drills, and perhaps my boys could use a bit more flashcard work to come up with their answers to “8+2” or “8×6” more quickly. Perhaps. I’m not convinced this is truly necessary, though. Time will tell.

One friend, an experienced homeschool mom, told me she always does the speed drills, but only has her girls do half the problems on the worksheet. A non-homeschooling friend and former teacher of 5th grade also suggested only doing some of the math problems on the worksheet if it was taking too long. Honestly, the mere idea of only doing a fraction of the problems has me gasping for air and doubled over in mental anguish. I just can’t do it.

Looking back at my report cards from when I was my boys’ ages (my mom kept them!), I had glowing reports about my reading skills. I learned to read before kindergarten and took off from there. I loved it and devoted many hours of my childhood to devouring fiction. If my mom made me “play” outside, I took a book with me. I had reading and writing down.

But arithmetic? Naw, my skills lay elsewhere, or so my teachers thought. It just didn’t come easily to me, apparently. I don’t actually remember having trouble, except maybe with speed drills (Ha! Is this why I don’t make my kids do them?), but I guess when compared to my reading, where I was many grade levels ahead, I seemed rather dense. But despite my supposed stupidity, of which I was blissfully unaware, I remember in the 5th grade being placed in the “smart kid” math class. And that was that. I was smart in math, and nobody could tell me otherwise. In middle school, I was missing one math class a week to spend an hour talking about higher mathematical concepts like infinity, and in high school, I was doing my homework assignment for the next day during class time. Somehow this not-so-good-in-math-but-boy-does-she-read-well kid managed to get college credit for Calculus I and II with her AP test scores. Go figure.

And so I’m not willing to skip half the work, just because my kids struggle a bit. I’m not willing to accept their suggestion that they “just aren’t good in math” when it takes them a long time to do a problem. I have seen that it sometimes takes ten or fifteen times with me walking them through every single step of the problem before it gets easier for them. It just seems to me that doing half the problems means it would take me twice as long to convey a concept, no?

Many of our subjects begin to wind down as we get into these last six weeks of school. I could breeze through the rest of our history lessons in two weeks, probably. The same goes for science and grammar. I don’t care if they don’t finish their handwriting workbooks. And another trip to the National Gallery of Art will count as completing art for the year. But math? We’ve got five and a half weeks of math to go. And finish it, we will!

03.26.07
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Just another reason to homeschool

When Bill and I decided to homeschool, there was a long list of reasons why. Among the top five was his military career. We knew he would deploy during Fritz’s kindergarten year, and we knew that if he continued his employment with Uncle Sam, there would be many other times when it would be more convenient to have a school schedule that suited our needs.

Sure enough, six months after he returned, he began working in DC on temporary orders that did not give us an allowance to move. Unwilling to pay out of pocket to relocate the family from New Jersey, we put up with his weekend commute for about 6 months. It wasn’t fun, but it was better than deployment.

During the week, Bill lived in a one-bedroom hotel suite. He had a kitchen with a full-sized fridge, a microwave, full-sized range/oven and even a dishwasher (I didn’t have one of those in NJ!). The dining area had a table and four chairs, the sofa was a sleeper, and the bedroom contained a king size bed. I would have moved in at once, but it was in the city of Arlington and dragging four kids to the little playground a few blocks away would have been tedious to do 3 or 4 times a day. And keeping the kids quiet in a hotel for hours on end was not realistic.

We did go down for a few days at a time on more than one occasion, hauling Fritz’s 1st grade books with us. It was just an attempt to have a bit more family time. We were desperate.

Every day I was thankful to have the ability to homeschool. I’m not stupid. I know that administrators and teachers don’t appreciate it when kids miss school. I doubted I would have much trouble with the particular parochial school to which I would have sent Fritz, especially not in those really young grades. But now or a few years from now? You expect 3rd or 4th or 5th graders to spend much of their school day learning. Not learning in an ambiguous osmosis sense, but actually learning facts like history dates and state capitals and multiplication tables. How much of that does a good parent want their kids to skip? How often would I have pulled Fritz out to go have dinner with Dad in Virginia? I doubt more than once – if at all. School is important.

And so when I read this article, and I see that envisioned nightmare of mine happening to another military family, I am reminded that this reason of mine to homeschool is a very valid one. Dad is due back for a two-week leave from Iraq. One week falls during their spring break, but they’d like to keep the kids home the other week too. The principal initially told the mom the kids would get zeroes for the missed work – that it was an unexcused absence.

“I said, ‘We’re not talking about Disneyland here. Their father has been at war for the last eight months and all we have is this little bit of time together.’ God forbid if he goes back to Iraq and something happens to him,” Keila Rios said.

My bet is that the media stink will make this principal a wee bit more tolerant of the family’s request to do the schoolwork at home. Oh, and the best line from the article:

Griffin (the principal) told the Star he is a former soldier himself, and that he supports the troops and sympathizes with the family.

Yes, sir, I support you, I will just do absolutely nothing within my power to make your life even the tiniest bit easier or happier or nicer. But if you give me your APO address, I’ll be sure to send you some beef jerky and gum.

Thankyouforyoursacrificetoourcountryhaveaniceday.

03.04.07
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New Neighbors

I planned to head to my friend Stacy’s house as we were out in the warm, sunny weather yesterday. Then I saw a family with four kids (four kids, my goodness, what a huge family) ringing her doorbell. I thought perhaps I should not go over there, because I really don’t like to intrude, but then decided to just keep moving toward the playground if my presence there was awkward.

They were all hanging out on front lawn talking. Stacy introduced me to the new neighbors who had moved into “Crystal’s” house. That’s the thing about a military housing community – you always live in a house identified by the previous occupants. And then Stacy, herself a homeschooler, identified them as homeschoolers too.

We’re taking over the world.

Now, I wrote before about how people sniff each other in a manner similar to dogs. Once again, it happened. Interestingly enough, it was the husband who asked me what curriculum I used.

“Mother of Divine Grace,” I replied. Even if you’ve never heard of it, it screams CATHOLIC, does it not? Naturally, I asked him what they used.

“Sonlight.” Yes, Protestant: Son + Light, get it? And they seemed like such nice people…

I’m just kidding! When we moved in to this neighborhood it was only 1/3 full. I did ask God to give me lots of Catholic homeschooling neighbors. So far, I’ve met one. My second choice, I told God, was lots of Catholic neighbors. I do have some of them, and two families have children too young for grade school. I guess God understood my third choice to be lots of homeschoolers. And that we have in abundance.

UPDATE: Lorri, of The Mac and Cheese Chronicles, confesses to being a Catholic who uses Sonlight, and she claims she’s not the only one. I’m pretty sure this new family is a more traditional Sonlight user, though. They didn’t know the secret Catholic homeschooler hand signal.

02.12.07
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Jesus, a fan of poultry

Today, Billy’s phonics lesson was “CH.”

He had a word list, which he breezed through with ease (oh, I love teaching this kid to read).

He had riddles: A fruit used in pies? Cherry! A place where we worship God? Church! Jesus said, “Let the little (blank) come to me”? ??

He was a bit stumped. I pointed to his word list to offer some assistance. He thought I pointed to one word, when I pointed to another. “Chicken?”

“Let the little chickens come to me? Billy, does that make sense?”

“OH! CHILDREN!!!”

They’ve been clucking around here ever since. Yes, I suppose the Lord loved the little chickens, too.

01.30.07
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A sliver of my life

I’ve just read Celeste’s post about how proactively busy her homeschooling/homemaking day is. Incredible. I think I must have had that kind of energy at some point, but not in recent memory. She’s very pregnant too. And she’s not the only one. Frequently I read account’s of someone’s day, and I just don’t know how they do it.

My day, yesterday, just doesn’t seem to be nearly as productive.

OK, I was up at 420 am and went for a 30 minute run with the dog in the freezing cold. I don’t know any other bloggers who get up so early, and I’ll lord over you all what little superiority I may have in that one regard. Then it’s morning prayers with Bill before he leaves at 530 am, and computer time until about 630 am. Pete gets up at some point in there and joins me on the computer.

The next two hours are spent showering, getting dressed, eating, feeding children, squeezing in an occasional email, checking my calendar, pulling meat out of the freezer for supper, unloading the dishwasher, and searching for dry underwear for Jenny. I think I may have rotated the wet clothes into the dryer, but can’t swear it.

At 830, the kids are chased upstairs to get dressed while I look at the lesson plans and fill in a two-day checklist for each child. At 9 am, I call the boys down. Billy still isn’t dressed, but I tell him to come down anyway. He runs away. He gets sent (dragged) to my bathroom (the most boring room in the whole house) and told him he must stay there until he’s ready to comply with household SOP. I start school with Fritz, quickly running through the memory activities: states and capitals, Latin and Greek roots, his new poem, the list of dates from history he needs to know. I go up to check on Billy, and sure enough, he darts across the top of the stairs trying to return to the bathroom before I catch him. I go back downstairs and retrieve his clipboard, some pencils, a page with 5 sentences he needs to copy for his reading, and then 3 more pages. At the top of one, I write, “I’m sorry, God.” One another, I write, “I’m sorry, Mom.” And on the last, I write, “I will obey God and my mom.” I tell him to fill the three sheets with those sentences, copy his reading sentences, and then he’ll be “allowed” out to come out to finish his schoolwork.

I assist Fritz with whatever he’s working on, give him some additional instruction, and then turn to Katie. We do math, and her reading. We review the latest story from the Bible – Manna from Heaven – and she happily occupies herself with drawing a picture for the story: huge disks of bread falling on people’s heads.

Billy has completed his handwriting tasks and comes downstairs to do his math and other assignments. While I work with him, Fritz completes a few things and then goes off to do 10 minutes of piano. He’s working on a level 2A version of Fuer Elise and it sounds lovely. Around 1040 am, he is permitted to take recess. I don’t get recess though, because Billy doesn’t get recess. We sit and go through his schoolwork.

Just after 11 am, I call Fritz back to the table. We continue to blow through his list of assignments: science text, grammar lesson, reading out loud, math…oh, we don’t blow through math. He enjoys lingering over math, savoring every drawn out minute of his worksheet, seeing just how long he can prolong the pleasure of staring at those problems. I notice one section of three problems where it shows students how to add columns of numbers from left to right. I look at the teacher text, work the problem to get a feel for it, realize that after you total them left to right, you still have to add the final numbers right to left, and put a big X over the section telling him he will not learn how to do it that way. What stupidity. If I, an adult, had to quickly add a bunch of numbers, I would use Excel or a calculator. Or I would take my time and do it right. I just don’t see that this “shortcut” will do anything but add confusion. And I looked ahead in the text and they have no other problems like this in the next few weeks, so even they aren’t pushing the method. This is the third time I’ve disagreed with their methods given to teach students how to solve problems. Thank goodness math doesn’t intimidate me.

Around 1130 am, Pete is whiny and needs to go down for a nap. The boys have assignments. Everyone is instructed to be quiet and work. They know the drill. I take Petey upstairs. All I need is 10 minutes to put him down. Within 2 of them, I hear a party going on: laughing, running, playing. It takes an extra 5 minutes for Pete’s eyes to stay closed. I’m a little mad. The kids are chastised and returned to their seats where we finish the majority of the work by 1215 pm.

Yeah, break time! We have lunch, and the kids watch Nick Jr while I check email. At 1 pm, I tell them it’s time to go back to school, but they beg for an extra half hour of TV time. Since they are so far along, I tell them it’s OK, and I spend the next half hour entering receipts into Quicken and getting some bills paid. They return to school with little complaint and are done by 2 pm. However, Fritz needs to work on a report about extinct and endangered animals for cub scouts, so we head to the computer. We learn about the Carolina Parakeet (gone) and bats (6 species in the U.S. are endangered) and learn reasons why animals become extinct. We are thorough, because it is interesting, and this continues until 4 pm.

Fritz wants to play at friend Caleb’s house. He gets his watch, I set the alarm for 5 pm, and he takes his bike to go the two blocks. I clean up the kitchen and do basic domestic chores and finish my pot of tea. I planned to make pork chops, but realize the cooking time is over an hour, and I just can’t do it. This typical situation makes me want to kick myself. Quick switch to Tuesday’s planned food: chicken. Dinner’s almost ready, it’s 515 pm, and no Fritz. We eat at 530 with still no sign of him. At 540, I call Caleb’s house. He’s not there. He had come by at 4, but they were leaving to run errands. I call my friend two doors down: not there. I call the next likely spot another 3 houses down: why yes, he’s there and they’ll send him home. This is not the first time he “hasn’t heard” his alarm, nor is it the first time he has “forgotten” to call and tell me his change of locale, but it’s the first time he’s done them both at once. Yes, he’s grounded this week.

At 620 pm, a neighbor comes to take Billy to his scout meeting and at 645 another neighbor brings her kids over so she can go to our “town hall” meeting. The kids watch a movie while I clean up the kitchen. Billy returns at 720 pm, Bill gets home around 815 pm, and the neighbor gets back around 915 pm. The town hall meeting was pointless. “They” feel good about listening to our complaints, but do nothing to address them.

Except for watching my friend’s kids and my kids being up an hour later than normal, this is a typical day. And even though the kids went to bed late, they fell asleep immediately instead of bouncing around in their rooms for a half hour or more. The last thing I did before heading up to bed was to put dry clothes (unfolded) in a basket, wet clothes in the dryer, and dirty clothes in the washer. Some days I’m more on top of things like laundry or dinner prep, but usually schooling three kids fills my day so completely that household responsibilities are squeezed in at any available moment. If the breakfast dishes are in the dishwasher before lunch, it’s a real good day. If none of my kids run and hide when it’s school time, I consider myself lucky.

And if at the end of the day, I can lay my exhausted head on a pillow and can breathe a contented sigh knowing that I have taken care of all the truly important things and can optimistically hope to accomplish a few bonus things the next day and can be thankful for this labor that fills my day and tires my body but invigorates my soul, I know that I am blessed indeed.

And, praise God, that is most typical of all.

01.19.07
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The Realities of Homeschooling

A friend emailed me this link: What Non-Homeschoolers May Not Know. It’s a list of things that friends, relatives, and neighbors who don’t homeschool don’t seem to understand.

Those for whom homeschooling is completely foreign tend to fall into two categories. One group seems to think that you spend eight hours in highly structured activities. The other thinks you do nothing all day long. The former thinks you are either a saint or a masochist. The latter thinks you have time to babysit their preschooler.

I don’t agree 100% with this list. I don’t want to use homeschooling as an excuse to not clean my bathroom or brush my hair. If manicured nails are your thing, a homeschooler has just as many hours on the weekend as a woman who works full-time to tend to that “need.” Personally, my relaxed appearance and the often chaotic state of my home are the real me, and I don’t notice people tsk-tsking over them. That doesn’t mean that they don’t, it just means that I’m not the type to care or pay attention. You would have to say some pretty obnoxious things right to my face for me to note your disdain of my lifestyle…but then, to say those things would make you a really obnoxious person and after a momentary flare of ire, I would likely calm down, forgive you, and make a mental note to avoid you in the future.

Also, I don’t want any help – not with housecleaning, not with babysitting, not with schooling, not with money. I definitely appreciate educational gifts for the kids, but we’re not poor by any stretch. I choose to not give my kids every little thing their hearts desire. And since my closest relatives are not local, Grandpa taking the boys to a museum or Grandma baking cookies with the little ones or Auntie doing weekly arts and crafts are not possible scenarios, and I just wouldn’t be comfortable having neighbors do that sort of thing. Honestly, I hate it when a non-homeschoolers says, “Oooh, let me watch your kids for you one day next week. You need a break.” Please, if you’re going to have a pity party, find another guest of honor.

But that’s just me, and situations vary. So the list is a good one.

01.18.07
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Learning Latin

This year, Fritz is learning Greek and Latin root words, and next year he’ll move into Latina Christiana. I’m floundering with just the roots! I have little idea how to pronounce the words, and so I do the flash card drills with less confidence than a teacher ought to have.

Fortunately, I have an aunt who taught Latin – at the collegiate level, I think. I emailed her an S.O.S. last week, and she said she put some pronunciation guides in the mail. I can’t wait to get them.

She also sent me a link to Living Bread Radio. They have the Our Father and the Hail Mary in Latin, and you can listen to a Latin expert recite them to learn how to say them properly. The Latin expert happens to be my aunt. I thought it was neat to hear her. And now I can learn those prayers.

This weekend I listened to Living Bread Radio for a bit. I left it running on my computer and would hear bits and pieces. I had a funny kind of nostalgia. The station is out of Canton, Ohio – what was once HOME for me. I lived in that area until I was 9, and the vast bulk of my mom’s family still lives there. One ad was for Walsh University. I remembering attending my father’s graduation from Walsh College. One thing I remember about my grandmother’s house was that she always had the radio on in the kitchen. She would listen to Paul Harvey as she went about her chores – cleaning up after and feeding a house full of men who were all working the farm. Living Bread Radio doesn’t have Paul Harvey, but I bet Grandma have listened to it had it been around then.

I need a mini-computer for my kitchen – an under-cabinet mount kind that has nice speakers. An ordinary radio won’t cut it because I’m stuck with local programming. Do they make such things?

01.12.07
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Day ???, Week ??

Actually, it’s not as bad as all that.

By close of business today, we should be almost finished with Week 14 of our 32 week curriculum. This is where I planned to be before we took our Christmas break. And that’s not too bad, since I think Christmas break was to continue through last week. That’s only one week behind.

I felt some guilt not doing much in the way of formal schooling that second half of December. There was no drilling of states and capitals, no struggling to remember that A-N-N was the same name all six times it appears in the same extremely short story, no recitation of poetry, and precious little solving for x.

On the other hand, we did manage to focus on other subjects. One thing I struggle to include in my kids’ school day is art and music. Kat wrote about this recently, and I feel much the same way. Art involves messes made by little fingers – not those of the students, but of the toddler. Art is work – and requires creativity that I just don’t feel I can summon from the depths of my exhausted being. As for music, I feel that Fritz’s piano instruction covers it for him. Everybody else is left to watch Little Einsteins. That counts, right?

But in December, we had the time and I made the energy to step away from the checklist of school subjects and do more creative endeavors. We listened to music more during the day than usual. Before Christmas, it was mainly carols, and the kids sang along. Then everyone got some great CDs for Christmas: Sousa, Handel….the soundtrack to Happy Feet…and we listened to this good stuff all day long and even in the car while running errands. And with music and children, you also get dance. And that means everyone is having a good time.

For art, I still didn’t include the dreaded medium: paint. But they did make some crafts from the Oriental Trading Company that required glue and glitter, which is bad enough. I and my kitchen survived. There was also lots and lots of coloring of Christmas cards for different people. Katie attended a craft co-op for Little Flowers where she went from station to station making different things. Billy spent days making cookies that looked like elves (very tedious). And Fritz used beads to make snowflake ornaments (also very tedious). On their own, with no TV, cold or rainy weather, and loads of free time, my kids often opt for drawing and coloring (when they’re not perfecting sibling torture techniques). And so, these worthy pursuits were what filled those fantastic weeks surrounding Christmas.

Ideally, I envision school on a beautiful spring morning. We are outdoors in the shade of an old oak tree. One child is sitting at an easel capturing the bucolic view with watercolors. Another is reading aloud from a book of poetry, while two others rehearse a flute and violin duet. Someone is lying on their stomach with a math book pondering geometric theorems. The younger ones are studiously observing the local invertebrate population and discussing various schemes to track a single ant with a yet-to-be-invented microscopic GPS system. Doesn’t that sound lovely?

We are a far cry from this vision. Not only are there no verdant pastures to be seen, we don’t own an easel or a flute! I realize, though, that the children in that vision are many years older than my current brood. Perhaps someday we’ll come closer to this picture in my head, and art and music will be naturally incorporated in our everyday school day. Even if my artist is painting a still-life instead of our tiny, muddy backyard.