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. 

August Homeschool Recap

In spite of a very disruptive few weeks, we were able to get the school year off to a good start. In good news, Laurel found a kitten in our neighbor's garage. This poor thing was crying for days and Laurel finally coaxed her out and gave her some food. She was covered in fleas and only 3 pounds. We combed out all the fleas and took her to the vet to see if she had a chip. Our librarian gathered up all the books on kitten care that she could fine. We could not find an owner, so....we have a cat now. We named her Shadow and she's a very frisky and social 5ish month old kitten now. In less good news, M broke his arm and had to have surgery to repair it. The first few weeks of recovery were kind of rough, as it was his right arm and he basically could not use it at all. He had a lot of appointments at the hospital and could not drive, which in pandemic times involved some childcare gymnastics. Luckily, he did not have any complications and it's healing up really well. 

So how did we manage to start school despite all of this? First we started the year off with a celebratory breakfast on our porch with our neighbor Marlene. We drafted a schedule to give each kid 1:1 time with me on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Mondays and Fridays are reserved for outings, which at this point is just visiting relatives or friends, or going to a local park to play or hike. We also do group lessons at 3pm every day. Sometimes this also includes our neighbors. They joined us for a science observation activity. 

Laurel started a fifth grade science unit I downloaded from the Core Knowledge Foundation about matter. She designed a little science experiment with cotton balls that didn't work out how she thought it would, but was a good exercise nonetheless. Everybody started working through Khan Academy for math. Laurel and I are also working through a history course on Khan Academy. This month we learned about primary and secondary sources, and analyzing  context and bias. We listened to Franklin Roosevelt's inaugural speech, and then watched some of Joe Biden's and Donald Trump's speeches from the party conventions that happened in August. We finished listening to the book Wild Robot Escapes by Peter Brown, which is a sequel to Wild Robot. I highly recommend this book, it is a beautifully told story and raises many interesting questions about artificial intelligence and what makes something alive. We used the Arrow Guide from Brave Writer for discussion questions and copywork. Music ended up being mostly about synthesizers and recording layers of sound on Garage Band. We read a variety of articles on civilizations in South and Central America and watched a documentary on Machu Picchu. We learned a little about Hinduism and ordered a version of the Ramayana. We talked about how religion can influence a society and your life, even if you personally don't practice that religion. Laurel took a class on Outschool about the legend and lore of black cats. Marko and I started working through a program called Handwriting Without Tears. M reads stories to the kids at night. Norse Myths are in steady rotation, as is James Herriot's Treasury for Children (and we just found the old BBC series, which is delightfully wholesome television).

What I love about homeschooling is that once you set up a structure and some minimum guidelines for what must be learned or practiced, you can give yourself a lot of room to pursue whatever topic sparks interest. For this reason, I'm never really sure what the kids and I will talking about during their 1:1 time, or what they will pursue during their own time during the day. Marko tends to want to know lots of things about the ancient world, myths and legends. Laurel is more curious about American history from the 1800s and early 1900s. Max is very observant about our neighborhood and home and likes to explore these places in more depth. I check off what they are reading and studying about on our subject/book log so I can see if there are things they "should" be covering that their natural curiosity is not leading them through. Based on that log, we need to add more art and music. My neighbor just happened to send me a link to some fabulous art project ideas, so I think we'll do some porch art classes in September. 

Homeschool 2020

I'm actually excited about starting the 2020-2021 school year.  Last fall was rough trying to figure out curriculum, balancing work and travel, and getting used to spending a LOT of time together. (Now the whole world can relate to that last one, since everyone went through it in March.) Eventually we figured out a manageable and enjoyable rhythm. We will be using Brave Writer for Language Arts, Khan Academy for math, and a sort of modern Charlotte Mason approach for Science, Social Studies, Art and Music - basically using trade books instead of text books and just doing a lot of reading and discussing (what CM calls narration). I ordered copies of What Your Second Grader Needs to Know and What Your Fifth Grader Needs to Know, which served as helpful anchors last year. Each day, the kids will do some math, reading, writing and physical education and then we'll rotate through geography, history, civics, music, art, safety and anatomy, and science on a weekly basis. This week, we rearranged some furniture and I'm sorting through things we have lying around the house....musical instruments, art supplies, wood scraps, fabric, games and puzzles to set up some different stations. 

I modified the forms we used last year for tracking what subjects we covered. For each month the form has a place for checkboxes for each subject and you just mark off what days you did them. On the back, there is a book list to write down what the kids read. Each month, we will gather whatever journal entries, writing samples, tests, etc. that we think are reflective of what we've done and stick them in a file folder until May. In May we'll go through our work and choose pieces to include in the portfolio. I know now from going through an evaluation, that this will meet the legal reporting requirement, at least for the evaluator we used this past year. I guess they vary a bit. 

Laurel will need to take a standardized test this year. I decided to not think too hard about this one and will just sign her up for the Stanford-10, which is one a friend used last year. I ordered a test prep booklet for her. 

But how do I decide what lessons to actually teach? Brave Writer has guides to go along with novels so we just read them together and discuss the points. It also has writing projects laid out, so we'll do about one a month. The only preparation I do is to read them in advance, and then I actually do the activities alongside the kids. When we do Khan Academy, I sit with them and basically watch them do the problems. I occasionally provide tutoring if they are stuck, but the website itself provides hints and and extra videos so I try to get them to use those first. Khan is limited in the number of unique practice problems so I bought each kid a basic Spectrum math workbook for extra practice if they need it. 

For the other "subjects," I have a file folder for each one and if I come across a video, book, podcast, event, or place to visit then I'll stick in the folder. Once a week, I pull the folder and just do the next thing. It's a little haphazard. We aren't exactly going through the centuries of human history in an orderly manner. Last year I had them keep daily journals and they would usually write or draw (or sometimes dictate to me) things about what they were learning and reading. This year we're going to work on making timelines to understand how things fit together so hopefully this will help. Last year I reviewed the state standards every month or so (searchable at pdesas.org), just to make sure we weren't skipping over something really important. I also have a few units from Core Knowledge Series and I use some of the tests and writing prompts to assess how Laurel can read and write clearly about a topic on a fifth grade level. 

Anyway, so that's the plan. I'm sure 2020 will come along and f*** that right up, but for now, we're going with it.

In Case We Want to Remember This

....and I'm not really sure we do. Nonetheless, this blog has served as a journal for many major milestones over the past 14 years and what is happening now is significant. 

We've been homeschooling and working remotely for over a year now, so when the pandemic first hit, we did not experience a major disruption. M was still able to work. The kids carried on with school. We have an 1,800 square foot house, a small yard with a jungle gym and a 600 acre park nearby. And of course, we have each other, probably our biggest asset. We were not isolated or lonely during stay at home orders.

Our routine did change a lot. The kids used to spend one day a week with my parents. I used to work at my aunt and uncle's restaurant. We used to take my mother-in-law to the library and out to lunch every other week. We regularly got together with my extended family. We were trying out some new homeschooling groups. The boys went to a three hour gymnastics class on Fridays. Laurel went horse riding or to Girl Scouts every week. M took the boys to an indoor skateboarding park and Marko went to a bunch of all day camps there. We spent lots and lots of time at the library and public parks meeting new people. Most of our road trips were planned around trail races, where we got to see our friends and meet new people. When we traveled the kids would immediately find some awesome family in the campground and start playing with them. We miss all of these things terribly. 

We planned to relax things a bit after a few weeks in the "green phase," but the uptick in cases made us change our minds. So where we are right now is basically where we've been since May. Visiting with people in small groups, mostly outside. My aunts have this social distance set up for their pool so everyone can visit and use it but not be close to each other. (They even drew a map!) Mask up if you have to go in to use the bathroom. Mask up if you share a car. Our kids are playing with a few other kids in outdoor settings. M is running with a couple of people a week. We went swimming in a pool at a state park that was not very crowded. We've gone camping a few time and just used our own bathroom instead of gas stations while we were driving. Basically, we try to be outdoors for all interactions.

Is this enough? Too much? I have no idea. If I follow the news, the world seems like it's ending. If I sit on my porch and watch what is going on outside, everything seems normal except people are wearing masks. I definitely would like to see more people. I also definitely don't want to get COVID-19. Not sure the two are mutually compatible. 

Someday I might think this was ridiculously conservative. Do you remember that time we basically stayed home for six months for no reason, lol.

Someday I might look back think oh, I'm so grateful I had the foresight to protect my children from a disease that left so many dead or permanently disabled. 

At this point, there's really no way to tell which of those future scenarios is the real one. Everybody's gambling on one of those two outcomes.