I've been teaching a "Before Five in a Row" class at the homeschool enrichment center for this five week session. I had originally not planned to teach anything this year because I wanted to concentrate for now more on meeting my own kids' needs and to reduce general stress and obligations in my life. But since the twins are taking a Latin class and I'm out there anyway with two extra kids in tow, I thought I might as well use the time doing something with them and with anyone else with younger children knocking around.
Before Five in a Row is a really lame curriculum. Five in a Row is really super for giving gentle suggestions for ways to stretch some lovable children's books. It's not rocket science, but the activities or topics to talk about help me to apply the same kinds or tenor of ideas to other books, and the book selections this author makes have been perfect for Frances--she loves the books, remembers them and the special time we spent rereading them and putting story discs on maps and making apple pies and visiting statues of soldiers and sailors. Before Five in a Row is really unnecessary. But I thought hey, this is pretty simple to carry out, doesn't even require the book (which, like I said, is pretty useless), and it won't take a lot of my prep time. The first week we read _Going on a Bear Hunt_. It's a perfect book for a three year old, but I wasn't sure about the five and six year old who turn out to be the only other people signed up for the class. I need not have worried. We watched the author read the story on Youtube, which was beyond amusing and because we had to watch it four times, took most of our class period. We painted and decorated our own bear cave. We ate some bear-themed, bear-shaped snacks. We sorted gummy bears, did some comparisons, and made a bar graph. I had about ten other things planned that we never got to at all. So when I had to come up with something in ten minutes or less for _Caps for Sale_, I was focused, I was on a mission. And hey, I still planned more than I needed to! We read and/or listened to the story...get this...six times in 50 minutes. I read it once. Read a sequel to it. We listened to it on cassette. We acted it out. Four times, with four different "peddlers" and standing on the desks as monkeys. We ate bananas. We practiced walking with ten hats on our heads. And that was it. Easy peasy!
So next week, I'm going to just revisit this week's book and take a quick glance back at the bear hunt. I'll look for yet another media version of the cap story, we'll count some coins to see a few ways to make 50 cents. We can make coin rubbings. And the stuff for all of this is already in my bag, because the golden rule of classes with preschoolers/Five in a Row is that however much you prepare, you're only going to use half of what you brought.
And I'm not teaching after this session ends. Even ten minutes of prep the night before is still the beginning of a cascade of morning prep. Loading all that stuff in your car (today I had a new plan to bring a big bag on wheels and put all of my little bags in it--this worked, but then I left the bag with the kids' Latin homework in it on the floor in the kitchen at home), running off a few more copies of this, slogging all this stuff (50 pound bags of rice, ten cans of shaving cream, giant tubs of Crisco to put in plastic bags to see how polar bears keep insulated in the ice, a bucket of plastic jewels, etc.) through the rain, because the more you bring, the worse the weather is going to be.... I don't think the return on my investment of sanity is quite high enough.
Kerry hates Christmas. I know that. He thinks that *everything* about it is tacky. He thinks that *anything* that I do with regard to decorations is over the top and "gaudy," a word that he grossly mispronounces. How can a tree with nothing but white lights on it be gaudy?! He faulted me for putting on another string of lights so that there was even coverage. We have wreaths on each front window of our house and a single white candle in each one and a red berry wreath on the door. To me, about the only thing that you could say was cheesy about this is that the wreaths and candles are fake, as they should be, I think. I like to decorate the mantle. We have a small nativity scene and a larger one that is falling apart but that has great sentimental value to me (my parents bought it the first year they were married at a nursery where we went every year to see an animated Christmas display and that had several cute mini-Christmas shops). There are a few things that get put on a shelf here or there or on the piano. There's a small stash of Christmas toys and books that come out for the month. But there are no loud, colored lights, not an excess of plastic. I think it's really offensive to him that we have two trees, but I can honestly say that I'm really glad that the ornaments Bilbo is chewing up are the ones that I bought in a big set from Lowe's for $16 instead of the ones that my aunt made for me in her pottery studio when I was a child or the ones that my children have made for me over the years. It simply wouldn't be Christmas without the ornaments that have always ben part of the holiday for me; as an only child, I have all of my parents' ornaments from when I was growing up, and every year we add at least one for each child. I don't care if any of them are "ugly" or if there are getting to be too many of them. And I love seeing Christmas trees in people's front windows, but I also like to have the tree where our family actually spends our time. So I can live with two trees and not feel totally crazy. Neither of them is 12 feet tall, made of fur, flocked with silver, made of tinsel--they're just regular happy trees. And I'd honestly risk divorce in order to have the kind of holiday for my children that I know they love and will remember. Frances, like me, just loves to see lights and decorations, the more the better. It devastates all of my children, just as it used to devastate me, that we aren't one of those crazy Christmas houses. Every night, Rutledge just stands, with the front door open, looking at our neighbor's wild and random display. There are just haphazard multi-colored lights everywhere, looped up high onto trees and from one tree to another. What's scary is that I could so easily be one of those people if I was given encouragement from the right kind of obsessed person. Instead, I have to live with the fact that any work I do to make Christmas happen is work that I will do all by myself, no matter how much help I might need, how much easier something would be with an extra set of hands even for a second, or how helpful an extra two or three inches of height might be. I have to work extra hard to tune out the dissonance about how vain I am and how I'm wasting my time and "bringing it on myself" if I have any trouble. But this is my favorite inside-the-house time of year, and it's hard to let it go and take down the extra bit of warmth from a few more glowing lights when January comes.
Funny question from Frances today: "Do adults ever throw up?" Her gymnastics teacher got sick and had to go home today. I think she heard her answer.
What we're reading: _Because of Winn Dixie_. This is a book that I had thought of as a book for younger kids, more like Frances's age. But the themes and treatment of them is really much more mature than what could easily be related to by a seven year old. I'm finding it right on for Walter and Ollie--they are much better able now to empathize with the people in the book, have a broader sense of socio-economic variety and disparity, slightly more knowledge of the effects of things like alcoholism, how older children view younger ones, and all kinds of things over the head of most six to eight year olds. So again, I'm seeing that some books are useable by a variety of ages, but have a greater impact at some times rather than others. I have this theory I've been tossing around in my head about children's books that one of the best judges of whether a book is a really good fit for your child is to look at whether the main protagonist's age is older than your child or younger. I think that most of the time, a book's timing is most dead on when the age is the same to slightly younger. I think of the Ramona books--they're at their funniest and most relatable when the reader has already gone through the stage that Ramona is at. It's not that a younger child couldn't understand the plot or find some humor, but it's your ability as a reader to share Ramona's perceptions and empathize that make them such great accounts of growing up in a middle class family. It's too bad these books are often discarded these days as being "below" the middle grade students for whom they are really intended. Anyway, in addition to Winn Dixie, we also just finished _Lily's Crossing_ and read another short novel, _On My Honor_. I think that one was an eye-opener in many ways to Ollie about the emotions that a book can explore. It was a very sad book in so many ways, and it's main theme was guilt, fear, and our terrifying sense of responsibility for what happens to the people around us. It didn't wrap up neatly at the end; everything wasn't okay. Ollie kept remarking about how he didn't know a book could be so sad. There was a lot to talk about--whether the boy was honorable, why he didn't tell his parents or the parents of the boy who had drowned, whether it really was his fault, whether it was the father's fault, whether things like this could really happen and how we can't know how we'd respond. These are so much the kinds of books that I seek out (far more than this one about a Sammyead that grants wishes or one about dragons and dragon riders). And it seems like Ollie shares my preference for realism, for books about real people, real emotions, and real settings. We're on a Patricia Riley Giff kick right now, and I'm looking forward to the next book of hers we're going to read--a spinoff from Lily's Crossing, also taking place during World War II.
Somehow, in here, we have to read Eragon. I am dreading it. Neither Ollie nor Walter is taking any initiative to read it on their own, and I have told them that they don't have to finish it, but they do need to get through part of it. If I was a better mother, I'd be knocking myself out to get it on audio, but all of the audiobooks of it are checked out in our library system, and I haven't checked the neighboring county because I don't make it over there very often these days. Plus Walter and Ollie really are capable of reading the book themselves if they choose to, and they're choosing not to. I don't really know what to do about this kind of situation. They want to go to book club to see their friends, but they don't want to take the time to read a larger book on a topic they're not interested in. I don't want to let them skip months when they don't like the book and go when they do like it (like, say, when they chose it...) because that isn't fair to the other members. But at the same time, I know I've been to book clubs where I haven't finished the book or other members haven't even started it, and they come anyway. I also totally sympathize with not wanting to read some books, especially if those books are really long or will take a lot of time. I know that if someone asked me to read a 500 page book about dragons, especially at a time when I was busy with school or when I had a lot of other projects I was in the middle of, I'd choose to skip it. And I'd go to book club anyway ;) But kids can't do that without (a) making me look bad and (b) looking like incompetent readers below the dreaded Reading Level of everyone else and (c) being rude to their peers. In my book club, if someone suggested something too time consuming or that I really couldn't see myself reading (a thousand page sci-fi novel; an 800 page bodice-ripper with small print), I'd definitely speak up. So I'm torn. I guess I'll see what happens by next week. If they want to be with their friends, then they're going to need to cooperate with the demands of the book club, fun or not. And who knows, maybe they'll enjoy the book.
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