Car School

The sun came out today! Sometimes getting in the car and going somewhere is a good way to get the kids to finish their work. Today we went back to my parents to sled some more. The track was slick. Laurel and Marko both had math to finish. Laurel is working on dividing decimals and it's so tedious. I can do it very quickly and I wonder when she'll get fast at it. Was I fast at it in 5th grade? Max brought his big workbook and did some pages, all the while complaining that I was driving too fast and ruining his handwriting. 

One of my favorite routines we've adopted is Max's "Five Books." We each have to read to him and he reads to one of us every day. Today my mom gave us a bunch of her old books and Marko read a book about winter animals to Max while we were in the car. They really giggled over the weasel and the prairie dogs.

Laurel and I did some reading on Ida B. Wells. We learned that she actually owned a part of a newspaper in addition to being a journalist. She had to permanently leave her home in Memphis after she wrote an article about a lynching, and was threatened with being lynched herself. There's a new book about her that was written by her great-granddaughter that I want to check out. 

Last night some of the kids had trouble falling asleep, so I tried to get them to exercise more today. This mostly resulted in me doing a whole lot of tabata. I'm definitely tired! 

Snow, snow, snow

I just spent an hour slipping and sliding home on my evening walk. (Every night, M puts the kids to bed while I go for a walk by myself. It is the key to my sanity.) Tonight it started snowing quite heavily while I was out. I stopped by the grocery store to pick up a few things and was very focused on staying upright so I would not break the jar of pickles I had in my bag. Next time, I'm going to bring a pair of yaktrax! 

Laurel is really enjoying getting to read and respond to the introductions on her BW book club board. She was also highly motivated to sit down and start reading The People Could Fly (tearing her away from Rick Riordan books is a bit of a challenge these days). She also dressed up and put on jewelry for poetry teatime. Every Tuesday, we are eating a treat, lighting candles and reading poetry. 

Marko whined his way through all of his school work but he did get it done. We read a little bit about Chinese new year and then looked at the globe while paging through the How People Live book section on the different ethnic groups of East and North Asia. He picked up his Duolingo mandarin practice again for the first time in a while.

Max took his first zoom class and talked about the sense of hearing and made a telephone out of two paper cups and a string, and a flute out of straws. The hardest part for him was waiting for the class to start. Today Max remembered that there are haiku poems in his Cat Kid Comic Club book and he brought it to share with us at poetry teatime. His decoding skills are improving every day. 

I cooked blueberry almond breakfast cookies, lentil soup with butternut squash, and chocolate mousse made with silken tofu. 

M spends a lot of his day talking on zoom, but this afternoon he had a particularly important meeting that required the type of quiet our children were not able to give him. We made an impromptu trip to my parents' house to go sled riding right before the sun went down. It was cold, but the snow is all fresh and powdery and they had a good time. 

I keep thinking of the Chronicles of Narnia and how the witch came and made an endless winter. The Groundhog saw his shadow so six more weeks of winter for us anyway. 

Easing into a new month

February came in with a snowstorm! This disrupted our morning schedule a little bit since we had to spend some time outside shoveling the sidewalk. 

Max woke up thinking about Dutch baby pancakes, so I made one of those for breakfast. Some of our apples were getting sort of squishy so we chopped them up and fried them in butter and cinnamon. 

Laurel is enrolled in two online classes that start this week, so she spent the morning reading class expectations and upcoming assignments, and responding to all the cute little introductions the other kids wrote. We are reading The People Could Fly by Virginia Hamilton for Brave Writer this month, and one of her classes is a book club based on this. The other class is more of a life skills class called Don't Worry, Be Happy. She completed the first module of that one already and says she likes it so far. 

Laurel did not make it to her math worksheet, but she did do some Duolingo French study. Marko did his math worksheet and some handwriting practice. 

We returned a lone library book that somehow didn't make it into the huge pile that we returned a few weeks ago. The library is closed to patrons again, but the librarians are still in there filling orders and organizing curbside delivery of books and games and all kinds of good things. 

We delivered a birthday present to one of our little friends who turned 5 today. We built a lot of snowmen with them and went on a walk in the woods near their house during which every child shed a few tears. The woods were beautiful and the snow fell gently all day. 

The kids finished listening to the Greenglass House and the ending was kind of intense and scary and sad. It's the first book in a series and I'm sure they'll end up reading the next ones. The story within a story literary device that was used in this book was something they really connected with. Their play often revolves around telling a story while they act things out or build with legos. 

Max prepared his materials for his first zoom class that will take place tomorrow. It's a science class for 4-6 year olds so I'm eager to see how this teacher makes it work, but he's very excited. He needed paper cups and string and straws and tape, and they are all counted and laid out on a tray so he'll be ready. 

I made baked beans from scratch, from a recipe for a Heinz English style sauce. They turned out pretty good and stretched the pound of sausage and 1 bunch of kale I had on hand for dinner.

It was STILL snowing after dinner and I went on a long walk and got soaking wet. 

January Homeschool

Anyone else tired of living through a pandemic? Also, I'm not a fan of armed insurrections. January was a long month. I did notice that most of the Trump signs in people's yards were taken down after the vote was certified by Congress, which I will take as a good sign that people still have some trust in the election process. The vaccines are out and slowly getting into the communities where they are most needed. There are new variants of coronavirus that are more contagious, which are probably already circulating widely in this country. The death rates continue to be in the thousands per day range. You can't fix problems if you don't acknowledge them, and the most frustrating thing for me is listening to people downplay the current situation, like frogs slowly boiling to death. We just need to get back to normal! Everything is fine! 

It is truly not. 

Life must carry on nonetheless, though, so for homeschool, I tried to be organized. I wrote out all of our Brave Writer activities on the calendar and also added other little things that we had to do on a certain date....Girl Scout hikes or birthday celebrations. We continued on with Spectrum workbooks instead of Khan for math, although the kids do refer to the Khan videos if they are confused about something. They check their answers against the answer key. If they miss any, they go back and redo them and also write a sentence about what mistake they made. I used this strategy when I taught high school math and it really does help.

We made good progress with copywork, dictation, studying the literary device of "story within a story" and listening to an audio version of the Greenglass House. 

We kept up with current events by discussing the Capitol violence and comparing the current voter suppression efforts by the republican party to those that have happened throughout the history of our country. Voter suppression is a particularly relevant issue in Pennsylvania so we'll be following this closely over the next year as it plays out in our local elections and legislation. We also watched some of the inauguration speeches and read all of the poems from past inaugurations. I thought the flag display on the Mall was really cool, plus the new Mississippi flag has a neat design. 

We failed to complete the writing project of the month. It was supposed to be a simple research exercise + essay construction on a topic you enjoy, but the kids hated it for some reason and balked at every step. I signed up for the Brave Writer parent class to try and figure out some of this writing stuff. We'll give it another go next month!

We made another art project from Art with Mrs. Filmore. This time we did 3D mugs that had little bits of polyfill sticking out the top for steam. They are currently on display in M's office. I love her website! The projects are very easy to follow and she talks about the elements of art and design in all of them.

We started using a geocaching app and this helped us to get outside in the less pleasant weather. If you want to get outside in the winter, make sure you have clothing that keeps you warm and dry and is easy to move around in. Also, bring snacks. Girl Scout candy and fig bars are the go-tos for us right now. 

On Saturday, Laurel and I went out on a hike with our Girl Scout troop. When we were gathering, my co-leader pulled me aside and whispered that she found a dog wandering around the parking lot. The dog had fairly recently given birth as she was visibly engorged...and there were no puppies around. As it was only about 20 degrees outside it was a pretty critical situation for this dog and worse for the puppies. Luckily we had an extra volunteer with us so we took the girls on the hike, while my co-leader was able to get some help, get the dog warmed up in her car and give her some water and food. Afterward Laurel and her friend searched for the puppies again, but we couldn't find any signs of them. We think somebody may have sold the puppies and dumped the mother dog. It was nice to see my co-leader spring into action to help a creature in need, though. Girl Scouts are always ready to lend a hand!

For February I'm challenging myself to write every day about our days. No links, no photos, no editing. Just a quick summary of what we did and my thoughts on it. 

Your Kids Seem Happy and Other Pandemic Musings of 2020

We say a prayer each night at dinner. When I was a kid, the prayer was God is great, God is good, let us thank Him for our food. But now we say God is God, God is God, let us thank God for God's food. Amen.

This means, God just is. Relieve yourself of any notion that God will bestow good things on you if you are good. Bad things happen to all sorts of people, no matter how nice or mean or generous or greedy they are. Pray for them. Pray for yourself. Nobody deserves anything more than anyone else and none of this is really yours. Thank you for all of it anyway. Let's eat.

Frozen Mud Pie

The pain of the pandemic has been unevenly distributed, and we have been very lucky. We did what we could to support local businesses and charities. We tried to help neighbors and family when they needed help. We wore masks and practiced social distancing, recognizing that we could play a small but vital role in reducing community spread. We connected with our loved ones in new and interesting ways. We kept the Girl Scout troop going. M still logged 2,000 running miles, although he didn't run in a single official race. Our family is good at pivoting when circumstances change and this trait helps a lot when the world is in upheaval. 

Several people recently commented on how happy our kids seem. I assure you, they experience the FULL range of human emotions. But they continued to grow and learn this year and are generally happy and healthy. Yesterday we took a walk with our neighbors and found an ice-covered pond. After the kids had been playing with the ice for a while and had broken through it in several spots, a red-tailed hawk soared down from a tree and landed just yards away from us to take a drink of water. One of the coolest things I have ever witnessed. An auspicious end to a tumultuous year. 2020 was filled with extraordinary moments extracted from ordinary daily activities. Everything was stripped down slightly. Less people around us, empty calendar pages, very little reason to rush the kids out the door. There were so many times the delight expressed by one of us was infectious enough to raise the mood of the other four. 

This is what I wish for 2021, an unstoppable pandemic of delight over frozen mud pie or the thrill of catching a leaf in your hand before it hits the ground. Plenty of time for everyone to experience deep breaths and deep sleep and deep laughter. Happy New Year!

Happy Christmas, Pandemic Style

We are blessed with a huge extended family pretty local to us, so Christmas usually involves a lot of visiting across many counties. The pandemic has spread through every state, and there are no longer places with low transmission. The good thing is that treatments are better and several vaccines are starting to be distributed...an end in sight for COVID-19! However, the health care system is pretty overwhelmed at the moment. You aren't supposed to gather with people outside of your household, so we had to change a lot of our usual traditions. We are still having fun and making the best of it. 

Usually, Laurel and I kick off the holiday season by caroling with the Girl Scouts. In the past we have gone door to door in our neighborhood and to a nursing home. This year we made greeting cards and craft kits for our local food pantry to distribute with their Christmas food boxes. We aren't currently having an in-person scout meetings, so we met on Zoom with our troop, while we each decorated cards and made kits. It was actually a lot of fun. Our troop decided to use some of their money from the fall nut/magazine sale to donate to the food pantry since we probably can't go to winter camp this year, and they also started to organize a coat drive. Our scouts always have big plans!

For the past 5 or 6 years, we have gone to the Four Frozen Farmers Christmas tree sale, but they canceled their sale this year. Instead, we upcycled an artificial tree my neighbor was tossing. I pulled off all of the lights, which weren't working anyway, and cleaned it off and fluffed it up. It looks beautiful!

We couldn't do our usual celebrating with my parents, but we lucked out with some amazingly warm and sunny weather and had a campfire in their front yard and ate on the porch. We made a craft wreath by outlining each of our hands and pasting them on a piece of cardboard. The kids decorated their Christmas tree and we exchanged gifts on the porch. My mom even got a pretty good family picture of us!

We did a quick drop-off-presents kind of visit with M's family and on Christmas Day, we did a video call with them. Luckily, his parents and sister live near each other and are already podded up, so nobody was alone for Christmas.

Instead of visiting my extended family, we are going to do a massive video call with everyone. This is kind of cool, actually, because it will include some relatives that are usually too far away to be there in person. My aunts even organized advance delivery of the traditional Christmas poppers, which we will "pop" during the call and then somehow try to get a screenshot of all of us wearing our crowns. 

We did something kind of different with my brother and sister-in-law. It was way too cold that day for standing outside and visiting so we went on a car tour of holiday lights in his neighborhood. I printed out bingo cards with themes to look for and we put our phones on speaker so we could talk the whole time. We had a great time! It was snowing so everything was really pretty. 

We still celebrated with our next door neighbors, since we already have a lot of contact with them, but we opted not to eat anything together and we always wear masks anyway. We did crafts and exchanged gifts. I made my usual holiday version of Tic-Tac-Toe (Tic-Tac-Snow, lol), and holiday charades cards and my neighbor organized a candy cane reindeer craft and the most adorable mason jar lanterns with these really cool solar lights on the lids. 

It's been a lot more sitting around in our pajamas and reading books this year. I lost weight, exercised more, drank less alcohol and slept enough almost every night. We shifted into full "unschooler" mode for Christmas break. This means that I don't require any particular study or schedule but I log things the kids do that meet academic standards. For instance, we got a game called Sumoku that provides plenty of addition and multiplication practice. Reading books is another obvious one to track. They also keep up with Duolingo on their own (gotta keep the streak going). The kids feel like they are on a break, but never stop learning.

So, all in all, it has been a weird but still pretty fun holiday season. 

November Homeschool

November was...a lot. I really don't even know how to wrap my head around a lot of what happened in this country over the past few weeks. We tried to do a civics unit on the election process, but it's kind of difficult to wade through some of the speeches to use them with kids.

We got an epic library order from Ms. Molly, our beloved children's librarian. Everything is curbside right now, but she picks the best books, and there's always something we haven't heard about before. 

We started watching documentaries to learn about people who have different experiences than us. On the heavier side, we watched the Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, which is a fantastic movie, but very sad and scary at times. On the lighter side, we watched a series on Disney called Becoming, which features actors, comedians, and professional athletes and what they had to overcome to get there. 

Marko started working on a lapbook project on Greek gods. Laurel became very motivated to sell nuts and magazines through Girl Scouts and did great at the sale, torching her goals and becoming one of the top sellers in our troop. Max started to sound words out a little bit and I gave him an official "reading lesson" from some of my decoding materials. Some kids don't need very much instruction in decoding, so we'll see if he asks for more lessons, or just starts reading. Marko is almost done with the second grade math curriculum. I'm not sure what to do about that for the rest of the year. He does Handwriting Without Tears every day with me and that does seem to be helping his penmanship a lot. He continues to balk at righting in a journal, but he does like dictating stories into Google Docs. 

December is always a tough month for school, whether in a building or homeschooling. I think we're going to ditch math for the month and double down on art and music. We made some silhouette art for the front window that is gorgeous at night.

Happy Thanksgiving! I am so grateful for friends and family who have adapted to new ways of staying in touch with us and making us feel connected and loved during this crazy year. 

October Homeschool

October was filled with beautiful sunny days. We did a lot of camping and hiking and went horseback riding several times. Laurel worked on a fundraiser for Girl Scouts by emailing her family and making a video. Marko took his first online class on Outschool. He enjoyed the content  (Scratch programming) and had no difficulty with logging on, using the mute/unmute button to participate and following the teacher's directions. Max is learning to read and also loves getting his time on Khan Academy, Scratch, or Garage Band. 

We listened to The Boy Who Saved Baseball by John Ritter. We haven't read a lot of sports themed books, but everyone enjoyed it. Baseball is also a good entry point to study immigration and segregation. I didn't really plan this, but just asked our librarian to pick out baseball books. They ended up being about the Negro League, women who played professionally during various wars when there weren't enough men to field teams and a team that formed at a Japanese internment camp during World War II. We also revisited some of the themes that came up a novel we read last year, Stella By Starlight. In that book, Klan members burn down a Black family's house after the father registers to vote. We followed a few news stories about current voter suppression, as well as efforts to register more people to vote. Laurel and I have tried to watch some speeches and debates, but they are basically unwatchable. 

However, it's generally going pretty well. From last year, I remember the need to switch things up, especially as the seasons change, so I'm trying to think of some ways to make November feel fun and cozy.

September Homeschool Recap

Not quite the end of September, but close enough to offer a summary. The weather here has been uncharacteristically divine. We have been camping and hiking a lot and M finally got back into running after a 6-ish week break due to surgery on his shattered wrist. As for homeschool, we are on track to finish our novel, Bronze and Sunflower, and covered most of the language arts material from the Arrow Guide. We pretty much just read through them and talk about it. The ex-teacher in me wants to come up with lesson hooks and practice exercises...surely they can't learn if you just have a conversation about it (!?)...and yet, they do seem to learn just fine that way. 

Kids are making great progress in Khan Academy...it's way smoother than last year. Everyone can log in on their own and they have finally been convinced that watching the videos before trying the exercises makes it a lot less painful, and dare I say even faster. It helps that Khan awards points just for watching a video and they are highly motivated by the points, even though it leads to nothing other than being able to change your avatar. I find myself doing a lot more clarifying, rather than full on teaching. This is a free program, but I like it so much I sent a donation. 

For science, we've been studying physical matter and changes of state and are starting to get into the periodic table of the elements. We read through a Core Knowledge unit on this topic. It's a grade 5 unit, but the younger kids have no problem following the content. I will give Laurel the chapter test so we have some kind of written work for the portfolio. 

For physical activity, we just added a slack line to our collection of random outdoor equipment (basically just a wide piece of strap you connect between two trees as a tight rope). It's a lot of fun and keeps Marko especially engaged. 

They have been scavenging leaves and nuts and seeds and pods to make crafts and we did some fall garlands with wax resist watercolor leaf rubbings that turned out quite lovely. They found a whole bunch of black walnuts that they will attempt to process and eat. Once October officially arrives, we'll start decorating our house and making Halloween costumes. 

History is unfolding in front of us, so we are doing a lot of constitutional rereading and looking at election law and times in history when voting has been suppressed. Laurel and I talk a lot about state vs. federal rights and responsibilities. 

We are continuing to work on our personal timelines and found a website called TimeToast where you can plug your text and pictures into and it will generate a timeline. It's very cool to see them add things from way in the past and see how their lives are just minuscule blips on the timeline of human history. Then if they delete those and just add a bunch of things that happened in the last year or two, it changes their perspective entirely. This project has definitely turned out to be more about process than final product, although I do hope to have something cool to show for it eventually. We were supposed to wrap this up by the end of this month, but I don't think we'll be done with it for another few weeks.

Our biggest challenge this month is interrupting each other. It's a constant puppy-dog pile of energy swirling around me. Max is the worst offender. I realized the other day that he is almost 5 years old, and while he can is doing some pretty advanced reading and math, he still cannot put on his socks and shoes by himself. He refuses to participate in most chores and spends a lot of time laying down on the floor in protest, or climbing into my lap when I'm with one of the other kids. Last year I started listening to Dr. Ross Greene's podcasts about behaviorally challenging kids and this phrase stuck with me..."Kids do well if they can." He assumes that behavior challenges come from kids not having requisite skills for handling different situations. I have found that to be a very helpful approach. So instead of focusing on not interrupting, I'm working at teaching independence at each of the things they interrupt me for.  

For October: 

Read The Boy Who Saved Baseball

Make Halloween costumes and fall decorations

Incorporate more music (playing, learning)

Bike rides and camping

Conduct a required fire drill and let the kids practice climbing out our bedroom window onto the porch roof.

Continue election study and actually vote, if my ballot comes

Finish-What-You-Start Month - digging out all the old Highlights puzzles and craft kits from the dusty corners of the house and actually finishing them or tossing them out, also applies to miscellaneous home improvement projects

Untangling History

We don't use a history curriculum. There's so much history they leave out! I don't think I can possibly teach my kids everything, but I hope not to overlook whole continents or entire cultures of people, which is definitely a problem in most of the options I've seen. Our problem is that we skip around a lot. Marko is really interested in ancient myths and legends and Laurel likes 18th and 19th century American history, so they tend to read a lot of books featuring those periods. M and I are really interested in the Americas before European contact. We also study the history and geography of settings in our language arts materials. Right now it's Bronze and Sunflower, which takes place in rural China during the Cultural Revolution. A lot of our history content just comes up in the course of us reading what we think is interesting, or from books that people send us. My aunt just sent us a book called The Girl Who Drew Butterflies and this provided some really useful insights into how some people in the 17th century viewed science. 

So, we don't lack content. But "history" does come up in some pretty random and unplanned ways.

My solution to all the jumping around is to keep a globe and a timeline on hand at all times to put things in perspective. We start with our location and then look on the globe to see where the history is happening. Then we look in the timeline book to see what was happening around the world at the same time. We have this Usborne Timeslines of World History book, which does an adequate job of showing what was happening on all the different continents at the same time. Our first writing project of the year is creating a personal timeline of important events and things that led to our existence, to reinforce that history is something you are a part of, influenced by, and can change. And that our interpretation of events is often very different in hindsight than it is when we are in it. (Ahem, 2020. Can't wait to see what we say about you.)

How do I grade history? We don't use grades at all in our homeschool. I record our reading materials, videos, and topics covered on our homeschooling log after we do them and periodically I have the kids write an essay about a topic that is particularly compelling to them and then I save it for their portfolio. I use the What Your Fifth/Second Grader Needs to Know books to get ideas for civilizations and topics that we haven't encountered yet.