April Update

Homeschool update? Well, everything is canceled. We planned to drive to Tahoe in June and then loop up through the Pacific Northwest. Hit North Dakota on the way home, a state M and I have never traveled through. We were in search of wild mustangs, high peaks, cool summer temps and a chance to travel again with all those lessons learned from our fall journey. I had so many good recipes to try. Have you heard of powdered butter? Anyway, all the races are canceled so we are staying put until further notice. Maybe forever. A lot of people keep saying "when things go back to normal," but I'm not sure that's a useful expectation to hold right now. This week we are closing out Stella by Starlight, working through an Art Assignment on paper weaving and homecraft, and following our whims of creativity. I've been following a permaculture course and digging a sort of swale/water abatement channel in the backyard. Laurel started ukulele lessons. Marko is building a wooden box and learning to use the drill, screwdriver, hammers, saws and sand paper. Max is experimenting with the synthesizer. M has set up all his guitar pedals and amplifier. Laurel is about 80% proficiency on 4th grade math and expects to finish it up by June. Marko finished the 1st grade math around Christmas time, but continues to practice with addition and subtraction facts. I feel confident that they are at or above grade level in all areas except writing. They produce plenty of comics, shopping lists, thank you cards, newspapers and plays, but getting them to write an essay response to a question does not yield excellent results. I'm pretty satisfied with the overall growth everyone made academically this year, and I feel like we worked out a lot of kinks in our schedule and plans. I have a good idea of what books I want to order at the beginning of the next school year.

The pandemic definitely changed some things for us. We were driving around quite a bit for activities or to visit people....and shopping for groceries almost every day. It has been very nice to do bulk orders from Frankferd Farms and meat and produce shares from Wild Purveyors. We are doing a lot of cooking from scratch and have reduced the garbage we put to the curb by half. Positive changes we hope to carry on.

M and I plan to give them a summer "break" from all subjects except writing. We will give each of them (and us!) a journal and write together every day. I put "break" in quotes because it feels impossible to tease out what is the Home part and what is the School part of our day. I doubt they'll stop learning over the summer. But we aren't going to log into Khan Academy or plan a STEM week or anything. I'm hopeful we'll do a lot of camping, finish more projects around the house, enjoy a bountiful garden, play a lot of music, read captivating books, make art and eat delicious food.

Poetry Tea Time in a Pandemic

We did some poetry tea time today. I got the idea from Julie Bogart at Brave Writer, whose writing helped me shift our homeschooling into something I enjoy. Joy is the best teacher. although admittedly joy has been hard to summon this week. We have had some significant disruptions in our schedule and are definitely just trying to get used to all being together all the time. I have learned a lot about learning this year and know better than to jam it through. When kids (or you) are stressed, back off. Make sure everybody is exercising and sleeping first. Read every day. Pay attention to each other. Play cards. Stare at the clouds. Once you feel ok in your skin again you can add more stuff in. If your kids are in elementary school, this will not set them back in the least, I promise. 

We skipped a lot of school this week, but I did have a book of poetry from the library, which we get to keep indefinitely I guess. I grabbed the book, our candle and some cookies and milk. It is so simple. Dim the lights, light a candle, give everybody a treat and read. It might only last five minutes at first, and this is fine. I have two fluent readers now, so we passed the book around and everybody read a poem, even Max. (I did whisper reading with him.) The poetry collection was all about small things, so when we were done, I sent everyone off to find a small thing. I told them I would write a poem about each of their objects. Old me would have asked my kids to write a poem about a small object, and they would have groaned and it would have gone terribly. But now I know to try the things I want my kids to do. Anyway, they came back with a horse figurine, a pokemon card and a piece of a jade plant that fell onto the floor. I'm not even going to ask them to write poems yet, I'll just leave out a dish of small objects and we'll see what happens. 

Anyway, here are my poems....

Laurel’s Object: Horse Figurine

The first time I saw her on a horse

It was like I saw her for the very first time

Focused eyes, soft mouth

Moving in tandem with a giant animal

And looking like she had been there always.

You never tire of watching your child as 

The best version of herself.

So if I step on a horse figurine in the night

I will still curse, until my fingers reach down

Curl around the plastic body, feel the trotting legs

Tail and mane flowing, molded to show movement

And then I will smile and think of her.

Marko’s Object: Jade branch fallen from the houseplant

Even in the best of times

A houseplant can be a burdensome ward

If you travel far and close your blinds

If you move it onto the radiator to dust the shelf

And it gets too hot

If you forget you have watered it

And water too soon

Or the other way, both are bad.

It’s a lot to keep track of.

But in the worst of times

A houseplant is a reminder of the way things

Used to be.

When your to-do list said something else.

Max’s Object: Pokemon Card

Stack of cards

Lay them straight

Flip them over

Count to eight

Who will be

The best in all?

Wait and see

Until I call.

February

All the homeschool blogs I follow had lengthy posts about "getting through February" and I thought we were going to be spared, but nope. February was long and there were more than a few blow-ups, mishaps, giving-ups and throw-downs. Mostly me vs. various children, but also between the children. Odd since they usually get along very well. It hasn't been very cold here, but lots of gray, damp and muddy days. I had a lot on my plate outside of homeschool and parenting responsibilities and it seemed some new complication came up every week. I didn't take enough time for breaks or to be alone, and I'll try not to make that mistake again.
We did have a lot of success with our Brave Writer Arrow Guide for Wild Robot. We listened to it on Audible and the kids loved the story. They immediately asked for the sequel when we finished. Laurel totally understands the purpose of copywork and the practice is helping her. Marko not so much, but then again, these lessons are for grades 3-5 so I don't expect him to be able to do all of it. I tested Laurel and Marko using my Wilson Reading System materials from waaaay back and decided Marko needed a little phonics instruction. The spelling and grammar lessons included with the Arrow Guide are sufficient for Laurel's needs. We keep plugging away at math in Khan Academy. Instead of requiring that they complete a certain number of lessons, I set a timer and sit next to them until it goes off. I was sort of frustrated that they couldn't do more of this on their own, but it's actually been a nice opportunity to sit and cuddle with each of them 1:1. "Couch school!" they call it.

It's cookie season for Girl Scouts and somehow ended up with all the inventory for our troop! I'm using a lot of Girl Scout badges and activities for Laurel's homeschool. She is highly motivated by earning badges. My main focus, however, is still protecting a lot of time for unstructured free play or reading. We went to the playground last week after Laurel's horse riding lesson. By chance another family stopped by and even though it was 30 degrees, the kids all played together for an hour and a half. It reminded me of how quickly kids become friends at a campground when you are traveling. I keep having to learn this lesson, but if I prioritize play, exercise, and fresh air, then it becomes so much easier to accomplish the sit-down academic tasks. 

Snow Day

"...There is no bill to be paid, only union to be made...." - This line is from the Richard Rohr daily meditation email and references a certain Christian view of salvation, but it keeps running through my head as a personal slogan as we settle into this homeschooling life. When I was a teacher in a school, the learning was very transactional. Not that I expected to be repaid by my students, but we operated on the principle that I would say and do certain things and they would learn and grow in predictable ways. Inputs. Outputs. At home, I have had to lean into the reality that my children do not owe me anything as learners, nor are they firmly stuck in the position of learner. We are all learners. We are all teachers. We do best when we come together. I'm not figuring out world peace over here; it's just fractions for days. But a cozy approach, tucked under a blanket on the couch, high-fives after every correct answer. Tea for me, always. Low cortisol all around. Trusting that when she says enough, it's enough.

Friday Free Write

Every Friday, we have been doing a free write, with varying degrees of success. I ask the kids to write what they want or in response to a prompt for 8 minutes. After 8 minutes, I ask if they want to share. If they do, I listen and compliment anything I liked. If they don't, I fold it up and put it into an envelope. After 8 weeks, I will open up their envelope, ask them to reread their work and choose a piece to revise. Hopefully they will have something worth revising out of those 8 pieces. (Last week, Marko was delighted with his work of copying the word "the" over and over again for 8 minutes, so this is requiring a little bit of faith from me.) I got this process from Julie at Brave Writer, who also advises parents to do activities along with their children. It's a good way to gauge how appropriate (or difficult or ridiculous or scary or tedious or boring) the task may be, and also follows that whole children learn what they live approach. If you don't want your children to swear, don't swear. Ahem.

In the spirit of doing what I'm asking my children to do, I'm sharing this poem that I wrote during free write time (and then revised) and I will tell you it is taking an unexpected amount of courage to hit Publish. But doing this exercise myself is really helping me to anticipate and plan for reasons that my kids might have trouble with writing and editing. This was the only thing I wrote in weeks and weeks that I felt even had the potential to be shared. This is reminding me that a lot of what my kids pull out of their envelopes will be trash and that's fine and hopefully there's something in there they are excited to fix up and expand upon.



Sit With It

Sit with uncertainty, sit with your sadness.
Sit with your neighbor while she tells you all of the messy details you didn't want to know.
Sit with your bread while it crackles, just out of the oven.
Sit, especially on the Sabbath, while the laundry taunts you.
Sit with your daughter while she painstakingly pens her letter.
It's not how you would do it, but sit with that idea and wait for it to pass,
And compliment her cursive, and smile at her.

Sit under a a tree, on a cold mossy boulder, a park bench with a dusting of snow.
Sit with your coffee while it's hot, instead of migrating it from room to room and in and out of the microwave a half dozen times before noon.
Sit with your son, while he sobs in your lap, for reasons you can't untangle.
You don't need to fix it right now, or maybe the sitting will do the work.

Sit for one extra minute at the end of dinner, to see who else lingers,
Who has a last thought they need to say out loud, now that bellies are full.
Let the sitting be enough, as it is. It may fix something, but then, it may not.
Either way, you can still enjoy the feeling of your ankles curled around each other against the chair leg,
And the assuasive liberation of not doing a thing.

2019

Currently all five us us are wearing matching plaid pajamas and the kids are laughing and shrieking their way through a MarioKart race. They plan to stay up until midnight, but they do not like watching the Times Square countdown party. They just want to play video games until it's obscenely late and then go outside and bang pots and pans together. I'm not sure how my neighbors will feel about this, so I might have to veto that last part.

I just scrolled back to the start of this blog and read all of the year end posts. Things have changed a lot since 2006!

Spiral Jetty, UT

2019 has been a wild ride. We finally bought a road-worthy camper and spent about 12 weeks in it this year, traveling through 23 states on several different trips. We love a good road trip and this one was full of excitement like forest fires, a car break-in, unseasonably cold temperatures, and even an earthquake. Also, beautiful scenery, visits with friends, junior ranger badges, sunsets on the beach, aquarium visits, giant trees, bison, meeting campground friends, and sharing way too many jerky sticks.  This trip had some highs and lows. The hardest thing was probably balancing the work-from-road and the driving with the needs of our kids, which turned out to be...not driving so much. They like the stopping part a lot more.

We started homeschooling our kids. This has been a huge shift for everyone, but an overall positive change for our family. Everyone is getting better sleep and exercise and way more outdoor time. I'm confident that they are keeping pace academically. Marko learned to read really fluently in the last few months. Even Max is starting to read a little. Laurel just took an online class and she enjoyed the format a lot, so I think we might try some more of this style.

Marko tried kung fu for about six months, but he decided to switch to gymnastics recently. Laurel went to sleep away Girl Scout camp for the second time and she moved up to Juniors. She rides horses whenever she can get to the stables. M's grandmother died and we gathered with all of his aunts, uncles and cousins for the first time in many years. I started working with my aunt and uncle at their restaurant (as a cook!) and the kids usually go to my parents' house while I do that. I love that they have the opportunity to spend time with their grandparents and also get a taste of that running free through the backyard kind of suburban life. We met up with my friend Leah and her family for another successful Pennsylvania cabin vacation. We babysat some guinea pigs.

Photo Credit Jennifer Kamienski

M did some running this year, naturally.  (I can't even remember what he was like before he started running.) His favorite races this year were Hyner and World's End, and I would have to say these were also the most fun for our family. We also went to the Vermont 100, and M finished it and got his buckle, but the heat was brutal.  M and some of the kids ran an aid station at the Rachel Carson Trail Challenge. We have lots of friends in the running community now so going to these races has a very social feel to it. It's also so much easier to cart along three kids now that everybody is out of diapers and naps. It helps that they love going to races. Endless snacks + M is easily convinced to stop for ice cream for up to a week afterwards.

On the GAP.

I turned 40 this year and did a solo bicycle trip from Washington DC to Pittsburgh, something that has been on my bucket list forever. It was a really fun trip and my 5 day itinerary was just challenging enough for me, although I would have put fatter tires on my bike for the C&O portion of the trip. I had great weather and met some cool people on the trail. My dad biked down to meet me for the last stretch into Pittsburgh and that was pretty awesome. Traveling alone is so different, but I loved it and I am planning to do more bike trips like this. There is actually a trail in Missouri with my name on it. Literally!

So that's what I can remember from 2019. I wish I'd written about it more as it was happening. I hope my kids will remember the good parts. I am aiming for 2020 to be even better.

Homeschool Update December

We just finished Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, using the Arrow Guide from Brave Writer to study literary devices, vocabulary, capitalization and dialogue markers. I was happy (but not surprised) to see that Marko was able to follow the story and the activities even though the guide is for grades 3-5. I have to modify his writing to what the guide calls "Jot It Down" - which basically means he has great ideas and I should just write them for him, unless he grabs the pencil away from me and wants to write independently. This would be impossible in a classroom setting, but it works quite well at home. I'm saving these drafts in the hopes that they will look impressive next to whatever he will be able to produce on his own by June. Focus on progress. To get through this book, I borrowed an audio copy of the book from the library and we listened to it in the car. Nobody talks or fights because they want to hear the story, although Max falls asleep, more often than not. Our next book is Artemis Fowl and now that I know how these Arrow guides work, I think we'll be going a lot deeper with it.

We have still been plugging through the Spectrum math workbooks and alternating that with Khan Academy. Marko just needs to keep practice sums/differences to 100, but Laurel is going to get into geometry and is going to need a lot of instruction for that. I'm going to take a break from the workbooks and Khan until January and just play games.

I got a bunch of the Girl Scout Badges that we probably aren't going to do with our troop and Laurel is going to work through some of those to meet her social studies/civics standards.

We've been watching a lot of Crash Course World Mythology videos, singing along to holiday songs, and doing some HIIT inside because it's super cold and gloomy outside all the time. Youtube makes it so easy right now and I'm sure it's going to be either riddled with ads or require a subscription before long.

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.