Category Archives: homeschooling

01.03.07
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Clerihew – Part 8

My sister, who is literally half the woman she used to be, sends me an email complaining about feeling left out. My goodness, people, I really did have to run a household here yesterday! She sent her own clerihew:

Barbara Kaine
Had only one bane.
These last fifteen pounds
As bad as that sounds.

Please feel free to write your own, about yourself or someone else, and post it here.

For me, though, it’s back to the grindstone. Bill is back at work, and we will return to school, shrugging off the undisciplined ways of the last month to engage our minds in pursuits such as solving for x and maybe, just maybe, figuring out that H-A-T is the word hat and other intellectual endeavors between those.

12.27.06
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The Carnival of Homeschooling – Anniversary Edition…

…is looking for submissions.

Fortunately, they’ll take things that were written in the last few months. I had to go back a ways to the last time I blogged about homeschooling. We’ve been on a bit of a hiatus. I recently read an article about unschooling. In this past month, I can say that perhaps unschooling would work for my daughter, Katie. Katie nags me to death to give her work to do, to teach her to read, to give her projects. She can barely be convinced to take the weekends off. Yet, still, I say only perhaps unschooling might work for her. I’m sure that her love of learning a particular subject might wane should the work prove to be a bit tedious. And math, though I do really love math, is tedious.

Unlike Katie, my boys would be quite happy to ride bikes or scooters or skateboards or roller blades all morning long. In the afternoon, for a change of pace, they’ll play football or baseball or basketball. If pressed to sit at the table, they may be inspired to draw pictures of Batman or pirates or the characters from Star Wars. It is possible that a die-hard unschooler may say that I need to encourage their creativity and point them to a career in comic-book illustration or animated movie production. Alas, the dialogue between characters would be unintelligible. I know. Bill and I have puzzled over some of the speech bubbles on their drawings. It’s a bit mysterious, and that may make it interesting…or it just may make it completely worthless for entertainment.

In their teenage years, said Grace Llewellyn, author of The Teenage Liberation Handbook, unschooling kids can study biology with a textbook, in a community college or with software. Or they can befriend a doctor and brainstorm on books to read or projects to do. Or they can volunteer to work in a veterinarian’s office.


Or they just may never learn biology at all. If they get to choose what to study, naturally, their interests may not direct them to certain subjects. And I don’t think that’s a good thing. I have a hard enough time trusting that the classical education approach is enough. I believe it in my heart, but honestly derive much comfort from checking the blocks of education, from the memorization of facts and data, from the passing of tests and the writing of dissertations. Unschooling is not for everybody. It’s definitely not for me, and I think it’s probably not right for most.

11.28.06
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Jump ropes

Recently, the kids have been singing:

Cinder-ella
Dressed in yella
Went upstars to kiss a fella
Made a mistake
Kissed a snake
How many doctors did it take?
1…2…3…4…5…

I think I taught this rhyme to Fritz years ago, and he must have pulled it from the deep recesses of his memory. In my neck of the woods growing up, it was a jump rope rhyme, usually sung by the two girls holding the ends of a long rope while the girl or two in the middle tried to break the record and jump to the highest count.

The only times I remember jumping rope during recess were the two years I attended a Catholic school in Canton, Ohio – second and third grade. There was no playground. The little kids (like me) played in a concrete courtyard, and the older kids played on the asphalt parking lot. There were balls and jump ropes, and that’s it. No slides, no swings, no basketball hoops. We were highly encouraged to expend vast amounts of energy by jumping rope (mostly by the girls) or running in some sort of game with balls (mostly by the boys). I don’t remember feeling deprived or bored. I also don’t remember any public school I attended having jump ropes. They all had playgrounds.

Bill went to Catholic schools from 1st through 12th grades. Same deal: jump ropes or balls on an asphalt parking lot for recess. But he says they took the ball away because the boys were getting too sweaty. Yeah.

Fondly recalling those jump rope days and inspired by my kids Cinderella chanting, I went online and found these playground jump ropes just like the ones from those Catholic school days, but with lighter beads. I bought them as stockings stuffers – one for each of my 4 older kids. I also bought a “Double Dutch” set, so my kids can play together.

I’ve got an asphalt alley behind my house. Next up: plaid jumpers and navy slacks, and SMARTY PANTS will have a professional air.

Does anybody recall any jump rope rhymes from their childhood? I’d like to have a full repertoire to teach the kids.

11.17.06
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Day 50, Week 10

I’ve scheduled a hard break after week ten – meaning we’re taking all next week off. Hooray. Billy and Katie managed to get all their work done in a timely fashion, but Fritz, ever the foot dragger, had trouble getting his math done. He has six long division problems left for today (I’m sure he’ll drag it out for the next hour). Then he’ll have just one math test to do, and I’ll probably make him do it tomorrow just to get it over with. In all fairness to him, we ran out of time for school on Monday and Tuesday and so he’s had to do 5 lessons in 3 days. It’s a lot of work.

I’ve been using Abeka math from the beginning. I think it’s an excellent program. Last week, a friend told me that her 1st grader (Fairfax County public schools – among the best in the nation) is being moved up to 2nd grade math. The first graders aren’t doing addition yet. Katie, my kindergartner, is about half-way through the very easy Abeka K math, and is doing addition.

Yesterday, another friend whose son, like Fritz, is in the 3rd grade (Fairfax County public schools) asked me what Fritz was doing in math. I showed her that day’s assignment: adding numbers like $56.87 to $42.55, multiplying 23,765 by 6, basic word problems, what time does the clock say, write the Roman numerals from one to twelve, and dividing numbers like 5,421 by 5 (using remainders). Her son isn’t even doing multiplication yet. Not even 2 times 5.

Today’s assignment made me drop my jaw: pre-algebra!

N + 5 = 12 + 6
Solve for N.

I can see that Abeka has been leading up to this moment for years. In 1st grade math, a child has to fill in the blank with the right number for problems like blank + 2 = 5. In 3rd grade, you get N + 5 = 18. Abeka is not having the student subtract 5 from both sides, and I am frustrated that it doesn’t, since that’s how I learned algebra. But for now, I’ll trust the program and see where it heads (and I’ll teach Fritz to subtract 5 from both sides!).

But here we are at the close of business on Friday with most of what we set out to accomplish in 10 weeks done. I look forward to “relaxing” next week – I have 30 yards of ACU pattern fabric due to arrive on Monday.