Today was one of those days when I just stunk all day long. And it was an all day long kind of day (I'm still in my gnarly tennis clothes even as I type this at 10:30).
8:20 this morning the sitter showed up for Frances and Rutledge. Bless her heart, she is the most charming girl I've met in a very long time. I don't know her at all, but I instantly had that feeling that I hope that my own daughter will be like her at 19. Frances is completely in love, wants to go to Haley's house, is still going on and on about how Haley carried how, what they played, and how she has to come back.
8:30 I left for my match at ACAC. The less said about the outcome, the better.
11:30 I arrived home with just enough time to barely stop the car and grab the kids to head over to play practice. Passaportout is learning his lines, slowly but surely. Walter seemed bored, but definitely has his lines down. Rutledge needed a nap.
3:15 I stopped by Rebecca's to drop off more items for the Saturday morning yard sale fundraiser and to get a drink and let the younger children play for a while. I left Frances there while I took the boys to gymnastics.
4:00 Gymnastics for Walter and Ollie. They plan to take a break for the summer.
5:30 I've been back at Rebecca's, where I watched her children so she could mail a package at the post office. Then back to gymnastics to drop off Frances and get the boys. The fabulous news of the day is that Frances has been promoted to Level 1, the infamous beginning of the Champions program. She will bump up to practicing for an hour and forty-five minutes twice a week once July comes. It is a big commitment.
6:00 The boys and I go to Panera to finish writing their pen pals letters to a student in Ghana. We finished the schoolwork for the day. Ollie's handwriting continues to be weak, but he is getting faster at producing nearly illegible scrawl. Their letters were detailed and took a great deal of hard work, and I was proud of them for putting forth such effort when I know that writing on paper is not their most comfortable task. Punctuation still seems very optional to them. Walter has been working in a new cursive workbook today and saw now reason to do math or any other spelling or language arts work. When he gets on something, he wants to do it exclusively until he completes the project to his satisfaction.
7:00 We met other members of our homeschool group at the community college to help pack donations of books and school supplies for the Thomas Jefferson School in Ghana. We saw some slides of the school and the students there. We played in the grass outside until the security guards got mad at us. I was interviewed for a local community newspaper and webcast about our group and our participation in this project.
8:15 Finally home, reeking of sweat, still dressed as though a court is going to appear at any moment. Had a snack, read to Frances, helped her with her own reading, and read a chapter of Down the Rabbit Hole to the boys.
And here I am now, with the dregs of the evening fleeting away, planning for another long tomorrow. Tennis at an hour when I'm usually not out of bed, packing diversions for the twins, trying to rustle up some cash to go strawberry picking with because I'll need to go straight from tennis to the berry farm. After that I said I'd help with tagging items for the yard sale. And somehow school needs to fit in there. At least I can't say we've been bored!
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Monday, May 7, 2007
Wah, wah, wah
It has been a day of much sobbing at Chez Clendenon. Frances sobbing because her tummy hurts and her legs hurt and her neck hurts. Walter sobbing because Ollie got to go on a playdate and he didn't. Rutledge sobbing because he's 2. Frances sobbing again because someone knocked her down and because she fell off the sink in the bathroom and, and....
We're enjoying _Down the Rabbit Hole_, but moving at an all too slow pace. We'll never finish at the rate we're going. I am having to concentrate on schoolwork day and night now to get the boys up to where they need to be for me to feel confident about taking them out of second grade at the end of the summer. Today we covered every subject I had planned, except that Walter didn't seem to get to the grammar page. But both of did 20 pages of test prep, two pages of math plus extra textbook work, two pages of spelling, two pages of Explode the Code, two pages of geography/social studies work, two oral spelling tests, and then writing each of their words seven times. The boys also did handwriting work. Tomorrow I'm going to try to bump up to having them write two sentences in their journals. The important thing is that they get a lot of time with pencils in hands so that their fine motor skills will improve. I need to study a bit more about other things we could be doing to improve their hand strength, but mostly I think they just need meticulous instruction in how to make lowercase letters with as few pencil strokes as possible.
I am feeling particularly tapped out as a person myself lately. All I want to do is play tennis, and I can't find people to play during the times I'm available, and I'm just feeling like a terrible player in general. My performance has been very disappointing, and I know that I need to work on it, but the best way to do that is to go to as many clinics as you have time for, and I can't quite swing that. I have been unsuccessful in finding a sitter for Thursday, so I'm not going to be able to play this week. Next week I already said I'd be somewhere else, though to be honest, I'd rather be playing tennis. But the possibility that I'm going to find childcare is almost nothing, so it's probably better that I've found something to occupy that time. My need to play tennis is pretty intense; I'm craving that time to do something on my own without children. Now that Kerry is working until 6:30 or 7:00 every night, I am finding that more than ever, I need to get these breaks for myself. I am quite bummed that it isn't working out as I had planned.
Next year feels so up in the air to me. If my boys were smart, I would feel much better about the prospect of sending them to school. As it is, I worry that if they transfer to school, they will be lost in the sea of average students in the middle group, plodding their way through the system as one of a sea of faces. My intention in sending them to school would be for them to receive the attention and education that they deserve so that they can find their potential. Deep down, I want to believe that they are capable people, but at home, I am preventing them from really shining because I am not offering them enough work and enough scope of material. Up until now, I have been focusing fairly narrowly on reading and math, seeing the basic skills as what will allow them to explore their own interests. Most of our other "school" doesn't look all that much like school; we spend hours reading about all kinds of topics, looking up information to their questions, and doing projects. I miss some of these things, but unless we want to spend more than 5 hours a day on school, I need to drop some of this so that they can pick up the basic skills they are lacking: spelling, handwriting, math from several different books, proofreading skills.
Here's my favorite test prep question of the day:
Which one of these does not belong?
(a) grass
(b) dirt
(c) carpet
(d) flowers
We're enjoying _Down the Rabbit Hole_, but moving at an all too slow pace. We'll never finish at the rate we're going. I am having to concentrate on schoolwork day and night now to get the boys up to where they need to be for me to feel confident about taking them out of second grade at the end of the summer. Today we covered every subject I had planned, except that Walter didn't seem to get to the grammar page. But both of did 20 pages of test prep, two pages of math plus extra textbook work, two pages of spelling, two pages of Explode the Code, two pages of geography/social studies work, two oral spelling tests, and then writing each of their words seven times. The boys also did handwriting work. Tomorrow I'm going to try to bump up to having them write two sentences in their journals. The important thing is that they get a lot of time with pencils in hands so that their fine motor skills will improve. I need to study a bit more about other things we could be doing to improve their hand strength, but mostly I think they just need meticulous instruction in how to make lowercase letters with as few pencil strokes as possible.
I am feeling particularly tapped out as a person myself lately. All I want to do is play tennis, and I can't find people to play during the times I'm available, and I'm just feeling like a terrible player in general. My performance has been very disappointing, and I know that I need to work on it, but the best way to do that is to go to as many clinics as you have time for, and I can't quite swing that. I have been unsuccessful in finding a sitter for Thursday, so I'm not going to be able to play this week. Next week I already said I'd be somewhere else, though to be honest, I'd rather be playing tennis. But the possibility that I'm going to find childcare is almost nothing, so it's probably better that I've found something to occupy that time. My need to play tennis is pretty intense; I'm craving that time to do something on my own without children. Now that Kerry is working until 6:30 or 7:00 every night, I am finding that more than ever, I need to get these breaks for myself. I am quite bummed that it isn't working out as I had planned.
Next year feels so up in the air to me. If my boys were smart, I would feel much better about the prospect of sending them to school. As it is, I worry that if they transfer to school, they will be lost in the sea of average students in the middle group, plodding their way through the system as one of a sea of faces. My intention in sending them to school would be for them to receive the attention and education that they deserve so that they can find their potential. Deep down, I want to believe that they are capable people, but at home, I am preventing them from really shining because I am not offering them enough work and enough scope of material. Up until now, I have been focusing fairly narrowly on reading and math, seeing the basic skills as what will allow them to explore their own interests. Most of our other "school" doesn't look all that much like school; we spend hours reading about all kinds of topics, looking up information to their questions, and doing projects. I miss some of these things, but unless we want to spend more than 5 hours a day on school, I need to drop some of this so that they can pick up the basic skills they are lacking: spelling, handwriting, math from several different books, proofreading skills.
Here's my favorite test prep question of the day:
Which one of these does not belong?
(a) grass
(b) dirt
(c) carpet
(d) flowers
Sunday, May 6, 2007
It's all Downhill...
We bought the furniture today. Although it felt like we spent all afternoon in the furniture store, the reality was that we were there for a very long two hours. Two hours that included considerable time in the bathrooms, even more time peeling a toddler away from breakable objects, and just incredible indecision. We went in with the intention of purchasing a leather sofa and loveseat and cocktail ottoman. The next thing I knew, we were back and forth fifty times between fabric and leather. The fabric would be more cozy, softer, perhaps warmer for the room. The leather is probably more durable, more wipeable, more sanitizable. But the warmth of fabric! Then there was the question of dark brown vs. red. Red leather. It would be fabulous in a chair, but in a sofa and loveseat? The look was distinctly diner.
In the end, we chose the dark brown leather. And a bed. Which was not at all in the plans. It is a lovely four poster, and I hope that it will match our bedroom furniture and transform this into a more finished room. So from henceforth, we are even more destitute than before.
Then talk about an evening sucked away. Loud, loud children while I was trying to read. Excessive energy that didn't want to settle down. And then nearly two hours of printing schoolwork for the week. I'll be shocked if I'm not being begged to send them to school by the week's end! We have gone from doing schoolwork that resembles schoolwork 4 days a week to 5-6 days a week, and I've gone from asking them to do three worksheets a day on average to doing 10-12. If their scores don't improve with this, it's not from lack of trying. And they also will be learning the discipline of sitting down at a desk and following someone else's agenda for their education. I have a bad feeling that we're still on the downswing with this, the precipitous drop toward hating school and all of the subjects I am trying to cover, but once we hit bottom with Walter, it should be a positive trend in terms of what he retains. In some ways, the new regime is tough on all of us. I miss being able to read to them, but between the added time it takes to do the work and the added time in our day they spend sobbing about not wanting to do the work, my nerves are pretty frazzled and we just don't have the free space for it right now. Ollie is becoming more and more interested in history, but right now, because this isn't something they will be tested on, we can't put undue focus on it. I'm really seeing the limitations faced by public school teachers, and in an ideal world, with bright, self-motivated children, it would take far less time to cover far more material at a mastery level, but I feel like I'm locked in a battle of wills that I am determined to win. There are thrilling moments in one's homeschooling life, the ones where you feel like you are learning and discovering as much as your children, and then there are close encounters with the darkside of education. Let's just say we're currently no longer with the force, but darnit, we'll appear successful on paper if my new plan works the way I intend it to.
I am doing a terrible job of reading on my own. At the rate I'm going now, I will be 70 years old before I finish the fourth Harry Potter book again. What am I doing? I'm just plain tired. Cleaning and straightening up and getting children to bed is consuming most of the evening, and then I'm just too exhausted to focus my eyes. Oh, for more hours in the day!
In the end, we chose the dark brown leather. And a bed. Which was not at all in the plans. It is a lovely four poster, and I hope that it will match our bedroom furniture and transform this into a more finished room. So from henceforth, we are even more destitute than before.
Then talk about an evening sucked away. Loud, loud children while I was trying to read. Excessive energy that didn't want to settle down. And then nearly two hours of printing schoolwork for the week. I'll be shocked if I'm not being begged to send them to school by the week's end! We have gone from doing schoolwork that resembles schoolwork 4 days a week to 5-6 days a week, and I've gone from asking them to do three worksheets a day on average to doing 10-12. If their scores don't improve with this, it's not from lack of trying. And they also will be learning the discipline of sitting down at a desk and following someone else's agenda for their education. I have a bad feeling that we're still on the downswing with this, the precipitous drop toward hating school and all of the subjects I am trying to cover, but once we hit bottom with Walter, it should be a positive trend in terms of what he retains. In some ways, the new regime is tough on all of us. I miss being able to read to them, but between the added time it takes to do the work and the added time in our day they spend sobbing about not wanting to do the work, my nerves are pretty frazzled and we just don't have the free space for it right now. Ollie is becoming more and more interested in history, but right now, because this isn't something they will be tested on, we can't put undue focus on it. I'm really seeing the limitations faced by public school teachers, and in an ideal world, with bright, self-motivated children, it would take far less time to cover far more material at a mastery level, but I feel like I'm locked in a battle of wills that I am determined to win. There are thrilling moments in one's homeschooling life, the ones where you feel like you are learning and discovering as much as your children, and then there are close encounters with the darkside of education. Let's just say we're currently no longer with the force, but darnit, we'll appear successful on paper if my new plan works the way I intend it to.
I am doing a terrible job of reading on my own. At the rate I'm going now, I will be 70 years old before I finish the fourth Harry Potter book again. What am I doing? I'm just plain tired. Cleaning and straightening up and getting children to bed is consuming most of the evening, and then I'm just too exhausted to focus my eyes. Oh, for more hours in the day!
Friday, May 4, 2007
Home Sweet Home
It's interesting. When I get on one of these kicks where I am serious about looking at other houses, the end result has always been to come home after looking to discover that I really do love our house. It's not even a fixating on a specific thing to love about the house or where we are; it really is a deep kind of contentment and appreciation for what we have.
Tonight we spent about an hour at the prospective house, and I think Kerry and I both left feeling rather confident that even at a lower price, we're pretty lucky to have what we already do. It needs work. It looks lived in. New carpet would feel nice. Decent furniture would be extremely satisfying. A family room that we actually wanted to sit in would be welcome. But the basic bones of what we have are just fine. Enough space, but not too much. A useable layout. Nice features here and there. So many things to do all around us. As safe a place as you get these days for kids to play. Friends for them. There's really very little to complain about except the commute.
Tomorrow morning we are going to the Waldorf May Faire. Walter has a new book about Gnome Crafts, so we need some wool felt sheets to make our gnomes this coming week.
Today was a difficult day for Walter. I'm not sure what happened at the park this afternoon, but we left with him in the worst meltdown I have seen in probably three years. He was hysterically inconsolable, shrieking and crying for no clear reason, spewing out nonsense sentences and wailing that he was going to sell his bike. No, he was going to sell his bike for $25. No, for $1. Then for $.25. And finally he was giving it away. Something about how he didn't want us to bring his bike in the first place. I could figure out now precipitating event for his misery. I'm unsure what to make of this. His food today was pretty standard: Koala Krisp cereal, a ham sandwich, and water, so nothing unusual there. My first reaction was to think that he needs no gluten, no milk products, and a super clean diet. Then I realized that maybe it wasn't the type of food, but the lack of food that was the problem. Maybe his blood sugar was low. He ate Gorilla Munch from the box on the way home and his mood seemed to stabilize.
I continue to nearly torture the boys with enhanced schoolwork. And I am still trying to come to terms with Ollie's test scores. We have had some serious talks about how to take these tests, namely you don't quit just because you get to a question you can't answer. Even if you aren't getting a "grade" on the test there are people who might be looking at this test to see how much you know and how you are doing with your schoolwork, so it is a good idea to do your best. These are, believe it or not, concepts he needed to be explicitly told; he is a child who is punished by rewards. Today he took a subtest in math as part of our test prep, and he only missed one out of 16 problems, and as soon as I mentioned he had missed one, he knew exactly which one it was and what his answer should have been. This, the CAT, and his daily performance in his book tell me that something went pretty wrong with the test, probably the fact that he ended the section once he had a problem he wasn't sure about. I'm wondering if part of Walter's emotional control problems and behavioral regression are a result of the added stress of all of the extra work he has been doing this week. I've doubled the spelling words, doubled the Explode the Code pages (we're now done with book 6), added in two pages of handwriting practice, and am doing test prep on top of that. Despite my best efforts and dogged determination to keep him seated for an extended period of time, he hasn't quite been broken yet to the point where he can get through all of the work in a morning. We're dealing with a lot of tears and protests that there is too much work, but I keep my focus on how much he would be doing if he was in school, and this seems rather little to expect. I am already seeing greater facility with forming letters, so the liberal use of the eraser that I have been requiring so that letters are directly on the line and all lower case where needed has produced some fruit. Even Ollie is having an easier time with some lower case letters now, and it gives me hope that we will have progress and eventually it won't take him ten minutes to write something as short as, "I like candy."
Walter is my big question mark. What is he? Who is he? Will he ever really grow up and be like others his age, or will he always be young, eccentric, and quirky, with daily life seeming to be an unfamiliar chore to him. I wish that I could say that he will make it in the world on his own, but I go through phases where I have very serious doubts. Tonight he is curled up beside me in the bed and looking forward to tomorrow morning, when we'll go out together with Frances to the Waldorf School, the land of his beloved gnomes and craft supplies. The one thing you can say about him is that he is definitely special.
Tonight we spent about an hour at the prospective house, and I think Kerry and I both left feeling rather confident that even at a lower price, we're pretty lucky to have what we already do. It needs work. It looks lived in. New carpet would feel nice. Decent furniture would be extremely satisfying. A family room that we actually wanted to sit in would be welcome. But the basic bones of what we have are just fine. Enough space, but not too much. A useable layout. Nice features here and there. So many things to do all around us. As safe a place as you get these days for kids to play. Friends for them. There's really very little to complain about except the commute.
Tomorrow morning we are going to the Waldorf May Faire. Walter has a new book about Gnome Crafts, so we need some wool felt sheets to make our gnomes this coming week.
Today was a difficult day for Walter. I'm not sure what happened at the park this afternoon, but we left with him in the worst meltdown I have seen in probably three years. He was hysterically inconsolable, shrieking and crying for no clear reason, spewing out nonsense sentences and wailing that he was going to sell his bike. No, he was going to sell his bike for $25. No, for $1. Then for $.25. And finally he was giving it away. Something about how he didn't want us to bring his bike in the first place. I could figure out now precipitating event for his misery. I'm unsure what to make of this. His food today was pretty standard: Koala Krisp cereal, a ham sandwich, and water, so nothing unusual there. My first reaction was to think that he needs no gluten, no milk products, and a super clean diet. Then I realized that maybe it wasn't the type of food, but the lack of food that was the problem. Maybe his blood sugar was low. He ate Gorilla Munch from the box on the way home and his mood seemed to stabilize.
I continue to nearly torture the boys with enhanced schoolwork. And I am still trying to come to terms with Ollie's test scores. We have had some serious talks about how to take these tests, namely you don't quit just because you get to a question you can't answer. Even if you aren't getting a "grade" on the test there are people who might be looking at this test to see how much you know and how you are doing with your schoolwork, so it is a good idea to do your best. These are, believe it or not, concepts he needed to be explicitly told; he is a child who is punished by rewards. Today he took a subtest in math as part of our test prep, and he only missed one out of 16 problems, and as soon as I mentioned he had missed one, he knew exactly which one it was and what his answer should have been. This, the CAT, and his daily performance in his book tell me that something went pretty wrong with the test, probably the fact that he ended the section once he had a problem he wasn't sure about. I'm wondering if part of Walter's emotional control problems and behavioral regression are a result of the added stress of all of the extra work he has been doing this week. I've doubled the spelling words, doubled the Explode the Code pages (we're now done with book 6), added in two pages of handwriting practice, and am doing test prep on top of that. Despite my best efforts and dogged determination to keep him seated for an extended period of time, he hasn't quite been broken yet to the point where he can get through all of the work in a morning. We're dealing with a lot of tears and protests that there is too much work, but I keep my focus on how much he would be doing if he was in school, and this seems rather little to expect. I am already seeing greater facility with forming letters, so the liberal use of the eraser that I have been requiring so that letters are directly on the line and all lower case where needed has produced some fruit. Even Ollie is having an easier time with some lower case letters now, and it gives me hope that we will have progress and eventually it won't take him ten minutes to write something as short as, "I like candy."
Walter is my big question mark. What is he? Who is he? Will he ever really grow up and be like others his age, or will he always be young, eccentric, and quirky, with daily life seeming to be an unfamiliar chore to him. I wish that I could say that he will make it in the world on his own, but I go through phases where I have very serious doubts. Tonight he is curled up beside me in the bed and looking forward to tomorrow morning, when we'll go out together with Frances to the Waldorf School, the land of his beloved gnomes and craft supplies. The one thing you can say about him is that he is definitely special.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
