Seth’s Blog: Back to (the wrong) School

which reminds of one of my favorite Sir Ken Robinson talks

Do Schools Kill Creativity and, of course, another one that made the rounds Changing Education Paradigms

As a mother of six children, a home educating mother of six children, including a child with developmental delays, cognitive impairments, and other myriads of exceptionalities, I whole heartedly believe that we all have different learning styles. I believe we can all learn no matter what approach or style is used to teach a concept. I believe we each benefit from one or two styles over others, but that we are not limited by that one or two. As a child grows, develops, and matures, the style of learning the individual benefits from most will change. None of this negates the fact that every individual needs exposure to all learning styles and approaches. I could really write a whole article on my thoughts pertaining to learning styles and my philosophy of it all. No matter what my children’s best learning styles are I find they can get bored from time to time so we need to mix it up, even if that means using an approach that is not always the one that benefits the most. That’s why I love this quote from Dan Willingham (University of Virginia) from a recent NPR news story (transcript, listen):

Mixing things up is something that we know is scientifically supported as something that boosts attention. And we all sort of can feel this intuitively if you’ve been doing one thing for a long time and then something changes.

and this one from Patti Neighmond

In fact scientists have found that variety boosts both attention and retention.

So, what is my point? Whether you believe in learning styles or not, do not box your child in!

Usually by the fourth week of being back into our school routine we are out of the fog and have found our basic groove again.

Not this year. Not yet.

I know there are two more things added to that routine this year, but I think our plate is too full. Or maybe I shoveled too much into their mouths. This really is my fault. When I signed us up for co-op I thought the things we chose would be not only a bit supplemental but complimentary as well to what we are already doing.

I goofed. I thought wrong. I made a bad assumption. Not much is quite working out that way for us. The children really wanted to do co-op so they could meet other homeschoolers; after our two year fiasco with the group here in close-minded Our Town they hardly have any friends here. Being essentially kicked out of a co-op and ostracised for reading Harry Potter it makes for no friends with which to hang around and do things. Being a part of a small church also means there are is no pool of youth to pull from for making friends either.

My kiddos are so tired and worn out and doing so much school work that they are not really enjoying it. We have a heavy load this year anyway and I added to it by opting in to doing co-op.

By the time they get our regular lessons done and their other responsibilities completed they are exhausted and it is time for them to help me with the late afternoon chores, dinner, and nighttime routines. When I ask them about their co-op lessons, depending on the child, it is met with tears or sighs and drooped shoulders or a look of stress and anxiety for what has not yet been completed.

We have already lost so much. We have lost two of the reasons we home school to begin with: family and time. We are so stressed to get everything done that we do not have time together as a family anymore. We have no more outings to the park or the lake. Discussion at the dinner table is focused on what has to get done instead of enjoying being together and eating a meal and just talking.

I had three teachers approach me today to ask if I knew that the children had NOT done their homework for the week. One “yes”, one “no”, and one “kinda”. I have mixed feelings about that, too.

While I told Birdie not to worry about hers directly (we did it orally, multitasking while doing stuff in the kitchen) it is not fair to her teacher that she was “unprepared” for class. I did not know about one not getting work done because I was unaware there was homework. Now, that child is old enough to keep up with his assignments and get them done and suffer the consequences for not doing them. BUT…again, I couldn’t get on the message board to double check to see if he had any work so I could “gently” remind him he had something to do for that class. /*insert sad face emoticon*/ The “kinda” was because we were a bit confused about the work for that class and we have been too busy to put the regular work aside to follow up on it to figure out what had to be done and now we are about a week behind in that class.

I thought that registering two of my kiddos up for the same Science we were already doing would lighten the load a bit and give them another environment in which to do experiments and discussions would be helpful. It is proving to be more difficult and more stressful.

I do not want to quit.

Although, I am considering leaving the older three here (or at the church) with their father on Wednesdays while I take the younger ones to co-op and continue with my responsibilities. It would still be stressful in some ways for me as the time driving is a hardship and the gas is hurting our budget, but I can not drop the ball on the other teachers. This would be helpful as the stress for the older three would be greatly relieved and therefore the mom stress would be lowered. If the older three had less on them and the morning to do their regular work then we could spend some fun time at the parks every now and then at the lake and our weekends could get back to our own personal style of “normal”.

I am also rambling in a stream of consciousness that has lost anyone trying to follow this. No decisions are final, of course; we have to figure this out soon…

or I will be bouncing off thickly padded walls.

I think it is time to make our chart of priorities a visual reality. *sigh*

I hope I don’t corrupt those sweet girls via my sarcasm in the 2nd/3rd period class with which I’m assisting. Two of my own girls are in there as well and so our natural banter seems to be coming through a bit. I noticed one girl chuckling a lot at my remarks (I’m so glad she “gets” me) but there were two rather quiet ones who I am thinking are not quite sure what to think of me. I’ll have to “behave” a little better next week.

Yesterday evening, RevMrKnowTea asked Flynt (6yo) if he met some new friends at co-op.

Flynt: “Yes, I did! The first one I met was named Joshua”…

RMKT: “Oh, I know him. He lead the parade that brought down the walls of Jericho.”

“Wha?”

“Who else did you meet?”

“Well, I also met a boy named Daniel.”

“Oh, yeah?! I know him, too. He was that guy who went down in the den with all those lions and they didn’t eat him.”

“Paa-paaaa.” laughing

“Ok, ok, ok, so did you meet anyone else?”

“Well, there was another boy I met named Noah.”

“Wow, I thought he was dead, he must be really old now.”

“???”

“Well he built that really big boat for all those animals.”

At this point Flynt rolled his eyes and walked away. Only to return to say, “Oh I also met a girl named Katy.” Then stared at his father waiting for a reply.

“I don’t know Katy.”

And Flynt walked away feeling rather victorious.

So RevMrKnowTea asked Bairno (3yo) who he met today and Bairno said he met, “Cake”.

“Cake? You met someone named Cake?”

“Yes.”

“Is that short for Cupcake?”

“No, her name is Cake.”

“OK.”

Me: “I think her name is Kate.”

“No, Cake is a girl’s name.”

*post about this tomorrow

We were able to order Birdie’s Science for this year. We really like Sonlight’s Science guides. She will be doing Science 5 this year. This will prove to be a rather interesting year for her. She is still very much interested in all things pink, glittery, and of the world of princesses and faeries. She cares not about the changes just around the corner.

Lottie (9yo) and Flynt (6yo) will be working through the Sonlight Core 1 and Sonlight Science 1 together and I am sure that Bairno will be joining in as well. Flynt is doing the Sonlight Advanced Reader 2.

Portions of the two science levels will dovetail nicely, not the whole, but some of it. they both have a mix of health and basic biology.

Order #2: 2 large, 1 medium

Example of a conversation this past spring:

Moggie was working through some square roots and had a question about one of her problems. RevMrKnowTea answered it and she continued working. Flynt (just turned 6 at the time) looked up from peeling his tangerine and said, “What’s a square root?”

RevMrKnowTea: The number you get when you multiply another number by itself. The number that is multiplied is the root of that square. So 2 times 2 equals 4. The number four is the number that is square and the square root, the root number times itself to get four, is the number 2. So 3 times 3…

Flynt: (interrupting quickly)…is 9, so the square root is 3. And 4 times 4 is 16 and the square root is 4. Yeah, yeah, I get it.

So what do you do with a child who just gets stuff sometimes. This is how he was at four when he asked me about multiplication. After a quick answer explaining what a set is he replied, “Oh, so four sets of five blocks is twenty blocks.” He just gets it.

He’s not had much in the way of formal reading lessons either. He hears me or his father teaching another child and he remembers it. We have never pushed him, but he reads above a fifth grade level. I am going to use the Advanced 2 Readers with him as a base for introducing other language skills. I am not sure how much of the LA IG we will use, but it is nice having a guide.

And Bairno is just behind him with the reading skills. He will look at a word and say, “How do you spell _____?” I think he is wanting confirmation he is correct, but I always chuckle a bit because he is obviously reading the word he is asking about.

a really bad picture; I was in a hurry and forgot to change my camera settings

The other day I was playing Angry Birds on my iPhone (oh my, you have to get that game if you have an iPhone.) One of the screens looked like this:

and Bairno said, “Are you gonna crash that Hollywood wood?” Dude is three years old!!

I got off track, didn’t I?

Well, we got the rest of our books ordered. They arrived Wednesday morning and I spent the rest of the morning checking off the shipping list, sorting the books and making new todo lists for myself.

I didn’t really have all the preparation time I wanted before we started on Monday, but we started anyway and will hit it hard on Tuesday.

When the scholarship money came in at half of what we needed we prayed real hard about what we were supposed to do: stick with Sonlight and go ahead with our plans or completely shift gears. There were no real clear cut answers. Nothing seemed to be God saying do not do this, switch to another curricula and style and system of doing things, or put them in school. No real clear answers so we moved forward. We looked at what we had decided to order. We discussed paring it down, combining in a different way, doing something else, totally different for the younger ones. I was working on it and had accepted that the best plan of action was to take the weight of the work on myself to create, last minute, something totally new for the younger three and sue the money for the oldest ones where high school credits and records were of the most important right now. Box Day came on August 7, 2010!

Having only ordered what we were going to use for the two oldest and the core for our Birdie, we were trying to keep our hearts open to what God wanted. There were already so many new changes in our lives that I thought maybe God was doing something else and I needed to step out of the way and let Him. I’ve made a decision to do what I wanted, my way, before. Going against what God is telling you to do does not end well. Just trust me in this. Please. I know as human nature will have it some of you will have to learn this the hard way, by doing it for yourself. Like I have.

We had worked out what to do and how to do it. We thought we were headed in the right direction. Then this broke and that broke and this fell through and that fell through and our budget for the plan fell apart as the priorities rearranged themselves on us. I hit panic mode. I cried into my pillow that Tuesday night (the 17th) while talking to God and begging for answers. “Do we send back our Sonlight order and send back the scholarship money? Do we put them in the schools? God, we have less than 48 hours to get the paperwork done, school supplies bought, and uniforms for five children bought. Please tell me what you want us to do.” Then I cried into my pillow some more as I laid out the fleece before Him and I fell into a deep sleep.

So I awoke Wednesday morning (8-18-10) at peace and said on facebook:

Big decisions today. Decisions I don’t want to face, but must. I sat with my morning coffee to check emails and I found some Happy there waiting on me. I can hardly wait to show you why there is a big silly grin on my face right now. Alas, the Happy wasn’t for me BUT for one I love and THAT makes me happy too!

For anyone curious about the Happy in my inbox it was the artwork at the top of this page!

Cropped just right he looks a bit Quaker or Amish. Doncha think?

Sometime mid morning on Wednesday someone knocked loudly on our front door. I got away from what I was doing and when I opened the door and looked around no one was there. Something fell to the ground at my feet and I picked it up. We have had a high number of politicians or their volunteers come by lately and leave things for us in their attempt to win our vote. Some of these people stay around to see if someone opens the door and talks (or tries to talk) with them. Some of them just place, knock and leave. Since I was a bit slow getting to the door I wasn’t too surprised when no one was there. I looked around for the politician volunteer since no one was there, but I could not see one. It did not help that I did not have on my glasses nor was I wearing my contacts. I am blind without, not able to see clearly more than, maybe, three feet in front of me.

I turned to walk in the house and realized that I was not holding a political ad, but an envelope with some cash in it. I turned around and looked outside again. Then I came back in again realizing that who ever did it wanted to be anonymous. Whoever you are I want you to know that you were a direct answer from God to a very specific prayer. You were God’s messenger and we thank you. I am not going to tell anyone exactly what that prayer was or exactly how that prayer was answered. What I will tell you all is that because of the answer God sent, the children are staying home this year and we are all so very thrilled.

The cash was not enough to cover everything we would need to fill in the gaps to order the rest from Sonlight, but a specifically answered prayer made it clear we were to keep them home and that the financial would definitely work out, even if I needed to accept another style of schooling or another curricula. I was at peace and I knew that no matter what route we took it would all work out.

So Wednesday we woke with broken, but open hearts, ready to listen, to accept what we may not want. God is awesome! He makes the way clear & bright! Keep your hearts open to what He wants to do. Be prepared to put aside what you want, your plans, and you may just find that they are His plans, too.

* * * * * * * * * *
When RevMrKnowTea came home for lunch he walked in the door with a black cowboy hat in his hands and said, “Hey, who left this here? It was in the front on the sidewalk in front of the porch.” I was dumbfounded. How could I not have seen a black cowboy hat that close to the house? Oh yeah, no glasses/contacts. But I have no idea if this hat has anything to do with the knock on the door or not.

We got a little silly with the hat. I will not the boys play with it even though they are dying to do so. I posted on facebook about the hat find and an old friend from college (coughcoughMarkcoughcough) begged me to take pictures of RevMrKnowTea in the black hat because “he’s such a black cowboy hat person”

screen shot from facebook, blurred because I didn’t ask first

Mr. Smirk. (This one’s for you, JMarkT!)

I don’t know whose hat this is or how to get it back to its owner. I don’t know who to ask if this is their hat. They obviously acted with anonymity in mind. If it is yours I want you to get your hat back, so I have to think how to do this, but I’ll figure something out that will allow you to keep your anonymity status. Maybe next time we make a run to the Twin Cities I’ll post on fb when and we’ll leave it on the front porch or something so you can come get it while we are gone. hmm, yeah, maybe.

Mr. Anonymity, all rights reserved (by me)

Part 3 tomorrow.

We began reading about it and decided to go for it. The scary thing about it was that we wouldn’t know about it until time for ordering books was just about up to start at a decent time on the calendar. We filled out the forms, made copies of income statements, tax forms, listed our choice of curriculum, signed it in blood, stuffed all of that along with our first born child and some of my organs as required by the organization.

It was a long, painful wait to find out if we would be getting any of the scholarship and if so, how much. We got our letter 5 weeks after we applied and while grateful we only got half of what we would need. We felt a mixture of relief and remorse at the same time. Thrilled for the help at hand, but remorseful not knowing what to do now. Here we were just a couple of weeks out of the start of what I had planned to be our first day as well as near the day for the public school to start.

We really didn’t want to send our children back to the public school, for many reasons. Many of those are the same reasons we homeschool to begin with and many for other reasons, especially for some abuse our special needs daughter experienced. Trying to balance three at home and three in school was more than my sanity wanted to even fathom.

We decided that we would keep our minds and hearts open to the fact that maybe God wanted them in the local schools this year. This was hard to accept even the thought of doing so when this is what we wanted. Or what the children wanted.

I posted on facebook that it looked like we were going to have to send our Sonlight order back and put the children in the schools. The outpouring of ideas and wishes to help was wonderful. I had not expected that. I had expected words of encouragement about the schools, but I didn’t expect the encouragement to make it work. We began looking into other homeschooling styles and curricula and options. It was a very scary concept to make a change of that magnitude, one forced on us (read: me and my time) to buy what we would need with half of what we thought we could do it.

We pushed forward in faith that it would work out, that we were doing what God wanted our family to do. We proceeded to order what the oldest ones needed from Sonlight this year. August 7th became Box Day, part 1.

the first three boxes (taken on iPhone)

Moggiepillar will be using Sonlight‘s Core 200, Sonlight’s Schedule for Apologia Biology (woot! for dissection)via home and our homeschool co-op, Teaching Textbooks for math, and some other Literature and writing thrown in.

unpacked and ready to sort (taken on iPhone)

Mc will be using Sonlight’s Core 7 (World History Part 2); he did Core 6 (part 1)last year. He will be tackling Apologia’s General Science text this year via Sonlight’s schedule and our homeschool co-op. He is also using Teaching Textbooks for math, along with some other Literature and writing thrown in as well.

Oh, Look! Sonlight sent me a boy. (taken on iPhone)

It was hardest deciding what to do for Birdie. Already having Core 6 on our shelf this would have been the most economical choice but she has already had so much US History and a good bit of general world history and western history that we decided the focus on the Eastern Hemishpere would be the best fit for her. She has been very inquisitive lately of the Asian history and culture and she adores it so this is a good year to do this. Core 5 is extremely full we will have to work hard at making sure we don’t get all bogged down in it. She will also be using Sonlight’s Science 5 and Teaching Textbooks.

Where’d he go? (taken on iPhone)

Flynt will be using Sonlight’s core 1 with the advanced Reader’s 2 this year. His Language Arts, Math, and Critical Thinking skills tested well above a 5th grade level a few months ago, but he is still a 6-year old boy. Balancing his abilities with proper content can be challenging. We will probably push through the readers at a faster pace (whatever pace he sets) than Sonlight uses; I want to make sure that he doesn’t miss any important skills that might be left in the cracks because he can already do so much. Technically we don’t have to register him with the state until he is seven years of age. I used a very relaxed approach with him last year and I’m thrilled that he asked for more this year and we are really excited about moving ahead. This year we are going to give Horizons Math a try, but I am still not sure about this for him. I am second guessing this choice.

Ah, a perfect fit. (taken on iPhone)

Master Bairno will be going along for the ride although I have put together some Preschool 4/5 basics for him. We are going to do some loose handwriting skills this year. He writes really well for a three year old, but I have noticed some bad habits I want to break now instead of later. Simple practice and reminding the of the correct way to do some things is all he needs.

Race Cars! Airplanes! Speed Boats! I see a theme here. (taken on iPhone)

Lottie, being our special needs child, will be working along with her brother, Flynt (for the most part). Teaching a special needs child whose retention levels are so very hard to measure can be a real struggle. We never want to leave her out of anything, but the reality is there are some things she just can not do. We always allow her to try and encourage her as much as we can. We teach to mastery in this house, no one moves on to the next thing until they show mastery. This often means a lot of repetition with Lottie. We are having to rethink a few of these philosophies with Lottie. She can not always show us she has mastered something via testing. Often times her tests are worked into life
skills. I really need to write a post just about her and teaching her. So look for that in the near future if you are curious about teaching a child with special needs.

all sorted and ready for shelving and use; this photo has notes on flickr

Last year there were some technical problems and I missed a good bit of the first day of that conference, then I was smacked across the head with what would be the beginning of one of the darkest times of my life. I had intentions of trying to connect with some other homeschooling moms who had similar views to ours because there aren’t any around here that share any common grounds with us. I really miss having someone with whom I can discuss and throw ideas around. That dark place got in the way of that and really held me back emotionally longer than I ever thought it would. I tried to (re)kick-off our home school blog again last year, right before all this happened, but I failed at that. I really would like to make that work, the personal blog stuff here and the school stuff there. I could use some advice on that. LOL. I have trouble separating the home school from the home. But that is my desire. Maybe it’s not advice I need but encouragement and some linky love to make it work. The children are cooking up a little some thing they hope to jump start soon (with a little kick in the pants from mom).

This year the HOTM conference was something I considered, but not seriously. I didn’t have the money for the ticket and I was not sure about what I really wanted to accomplish by attending. My organizational to-do list is already so long. This year’s conference was also from 8:15am to 3:00pm Monday through Friday of last week, not exactly the best timing for me (see previous sentence).

A few weeks back I jumped in to join a twitter chat, didn’t even know that was really possible. In all honesty I had no idea how to twitter chat or know anything about the concept. I twitter, but I think maybe I use twitter differently than most? I don’t use twitter to follow people with whom I don’t already have some connection. I do not follow celebrities, just because they twitter. I don’t follow any Hollywood stuff anyway. I follow people whose blogs I read or that I went to college with or a few techie things I might want to keep up to date. If you twitter let me know. I like the twitter connection, it’s not the Rainbow Connection, but it’s still fun. Back to my point, in the twitter chat they were giving away tickets to this year’s HOTM conference. I had no idea. AND . . . I won one. AGAIN!

So I have much to say and share, some good, some constructive, some not about the conference, but triggered by the conference. All providential.

To be continued . . .