Icy Morning Walk to the Bakery

We started the day out with a walk to the bakery and did our read aloud while munching on chocolate croissants. One of our neighborhood playgrounds is being fixed up and there was a lot of new equipment to explore. Max doesn't love Mrs. Frisby yet, so he can be a real pill about being quiet. Pure genius on my part; he was busy peeling his croissant apart and didn't interrupt too much. I bought a literature guide from the Brave Writer website. As a former teacher with a lot of materials stocked away, I am extremely resistant to paying money for more of these things. However, sometimes it's easier to have it all spelled out for you.  Sometimes someone else just did it better than me. The guide gives you a passage to study each week and suggestions for talking about spelling, grammar, literary elements and a few sample writing activities. Nothing contained in the packet was new information to me, but I love having a routine of activities to follow. You can pick the novels you do and order guides a la carte, and it's pretty easy to scale the activities for kids at different levels.

I keep having to wiggle out from under this idea that if the kids are having fun and the work is completed with ease, that they are not learning anything.

Marko made a drum out of a little candy tin he found and several layers of paper and stickers fixed to the top. Then he made a drum stick out of a little branch he found outside, sanded down until it made the sound he wanted. Laurel planned some activities for her birthday celebration this weekend (watching the Percy Jackson movie, making candy sushi). Max played Minecraft and Zelda with Marko. I sat down together with each child and went through some Khan Academy videos and exercises together. Marko set up and read through the directions for a very complicated board game called Oregon Trail.

I am reading so much these days. Wilding by Isabella Tree, No More Mean Girls by Katie Hurley, Food Not Lawns by Heather Flores. Flat Broke with Two Goats by Jennifer McGaha. Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng. The Year of Less by Cait Flanders. Farming While Black by Leah Penniman. There are books stacked on my bedside shelf, and always something on the Libby app on my phone, and a number of items on the holds list at the library. I signed up for movement videos from Katy Bowman and a class on homemaking by Hannah Marcotti. I'm working through an online course on permaculture. I'm going on an organized hike on the North Country Trail. Somehow I didn't have time for my own learning when all the kids were in school, or at least I didn't prioritize it...I squeezed it in. It feels different now.

Are you curious about the home-schooling?

Ah, yes, so we're homeschooling and I know you are curious because everyone asks, but the leading question is usually something about curriculum, which is, frankly, boring to talk about, so the conversation fizzles. 

What I think you really mean is "How do you spend your days? Do your kids listen to you? How do you decide what they should learn? Do you teach all the subjects? Are you paying tutors? Are they playing video games all day? Do they annoy you? Are they above grade level? Below grade level? How do you test them? How much are they reading? Do you give them homework? Will they be able to get into college? Is it better than school? Is it worse than school? Could I do it?"

And truthfully, I would love to talk about it to anyone. There's an incredible amount of freedom and flexibility and that can be daunting. I know we haven't hit our stride....yet. However, I can see it coming. 

I did make some decisions about curricula at the beginning of the summer. Spectrum workbooks and Khan Academy for math. Wilson Reading for any spelling and phonics issues. Core Knowledge Series textbooks for language arts, social studies and science. There are 12 required subjects, which I dutifully check off each time I feel I have provided some meaningful instruction. But this never feels like the meat of their learning for the day. I think it does serve to anchor us a bit and I do usually squeeze in what I needed to, but this is what actually happened:

Max built a 100 piece puzzle with help. Marko and Laurel did some math workbook pages.  Laurel and I looked at paragraph indentation choices in a number of books. I made an accordion book and then there was a flurry of crafting and I don't know where any of the finished products ended up, but they were all making little books and collages. Everyone played Minecraft. I played two rounds of Uno with the boys. Laurel made approximately 1,000 rainbow loom bracelets. She read a lot of graphic novels. We had a tea party and discussed the composer Debussy and whether or not "Impressionist" could be considered an insult, and how his music sounded like Chopin, or did it? We went to a library homeschool group and Marko and Laurel made little water color sketches of squash, corn and beans. It snowed on and off all day and they all went outside and played in the backyard for little chunks of time. I would have taken them to the park but our new snow/rain boots have not arrived yet. So they just wore their sneakers and dried them out in between. We decided to stop reading Pax (getting too scary and violet for some of us) and to begin reading Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. I have a Brave Writer unit plan to go along with that novel so we'll see how that language arts approach works for us. Marko read a lot of Star Wars books and then checked out even more Star Wars books at the library. I found a book on Islam with a lot of pictures to go with the unit Laurel is reading in the Core Knowledge textbook. We listened to a podcast called Tumble and the episode was about peregrine falcons. Marko practiced the next phone number he is trying to memorize. We read some more poems from The Lost Words by Robert MacFarlane nad Jackie Morris. We cut open the massive osage ball I found on my hike over the weekend. It looks tropical, they said. And then put it outside to see if the squirrels would take the seeds out of it. We tried our hand at sketching the osage ball using nature sketching principles but our colored pencils are very dull at the moment and the pencil sharpener was not effective at bringing them back. Marko made some attempts to fix his helicopter wing with tape, and failed. He watched some youtube videos that showed a guy fixing the wing by tracing it onto a shampoo bottle and then cutting out a replacement wing. The videos were all in French, but it was the exact same helicopter! We don't have an empty shampoo bottle yet, though, so this also failed. Sometimes there is a lot of failure and I think that's my favorite part of homeschool. Not that they failed, but that we have the space and time to fail. I think he'll probably keep working on that helicopter tomorrow. 

So that's the current status. 

Re-Entry

You have to ease back in after a trip like that. It was intense. We spent more time together than we had in many years. Homeschooling felt rough at times, but the kids actually managed to work through 2-3 chapters of math while we were gone. I thought we would do a lot of corresponding with people back home but we hardly wrote any letters or post cards. I thought they would have these beautiful journals full of thoughtful reflections, but they did a lot of random sketching in their notebooks. Looks like corn, is what they wrote on a lot of pages. I cannot disagree, there was a lot of corn. We drove about 7,000 miles, if you count all the driving around the East Bay we did. They did read a lot and we listened to a lot of interesting podcasts and books. One was called "To the Best of Our Knowledge" and the episode about the caves had us all breathlessly captivated. With all the distractions of home gone, we learned a lot about ourselves and each other. We learned to tell each other exactly what we needed. Not that we could always get it right then, but we learned to ask anyway. The decisions to travel and to homeschool were on rather different threads, although they do go together well. But what that hints at is that there were growing pains, along with the wanderlust.  Now that we're all back home again there's a temptation to settle back into the roles and spaces that were not serving us well.

Anyway, there was not a lot to come back to, schedule-wise. The calendar was blissfully clear. I did laundry and had my neighbor over for tea and we celebrated Laurel's birthday by eating breakfast at our usual breakfast spot down the street. I took the kids for a hike at a park near my brother's house and the hillsides were almost glowing, from the last of the fall leaves. When we went down into the trailhead, two hunters were dragging a buck out of the woods, much to my surprise. The trail smelled of blood and wet leaves. The most Pennsylvanian thing ever. Our feet were soaking wet because everyone outgrew their rain boots on our trip. I had sort of forgotten about rain boots, actually, until that moment I felt my feet sink into the water-logged soil under the grass. The next day we planned to go on another hike to look for the fox we had seen over the summer, but it rained and rained, hovering near 32 all day. We didn't actually leave the house the entire day. It was all dance parties and Nintendo. Today we we visited our librarian and got new books to read. It was sunny, but very cold.

I ordered rain boots.