Instead of going to bed, tonight we are watching a History Channel show about the Sun. Ollie is amazed at the sheer amount of energy that the Sun puts out--more in a second than has been generated on the entire earth since its very beginning. Before this, we watched a show about Mars. It must be planetary week. Next week begins a new series on the Universe that sounds fascinating. I will need to put it on the calendar or we'll certainly forget it. Our study of chemistry this year probably feels rather relevant right now to the kids, which is just what I hope for what we learn.
Kerry says that he is going to start working with the boys on the upper times tables, which by all counts they should have down by now. They are still skip counting to find answers, which means that they lack automaticity. My goal is 2-3 seconds or less on these facts, and we're just not there yet. I'm not sure what Kerry has in mind--mostly the traditional speed drills that we remember not so fondly from our school days. I ordered Times Tales the other day, a program that is highly recommended by a lot of homeschoolers for learning the last little pocket of facts, the 6-9s, that are often simply hard to recall, and it uses a mnemonic approach with a story. The claim is that they will have mastered these facts within an hour, and I've heard personal testimonial as well as what is on their site and what I've seen elsewhere, so I hope this will be the magic bullet for us. Otherwise, I'm continuing to throw out to them the more unique concepts that are covered in Saxon 3 while I wait for another workbook to arrive, and we are using the speed tests from the first half of the year to review what we've already covered. Meanwhile, we're proceeding with Math U See Gamma on to double digit multiplication, though I'd feel better about this with instant recall of single digit stuff. In the middle of all of this, we are also experimenting with Time4Learning this month. Unfortunately, it lacks some features that would make it even more user-friendly--timers for the older grades (there is no timer after 2nd grade), and most especially something to make assignments so that when they log on they know what they are supposed to do next. Instead, I'm finding I have to be more involved than I want to be. Not that I don't want to be involved in what they are learning, but I had signed on to this with the idea that it might be a painless way to do extra practice and cover concepts that didn't require me to be on top of them like I am with everything else. But overall, I like the scope of what is covered, and I wish that the boys would be a little more enthusiastic.
Who wants to watch math instruction and do problems when there are Webkinz to buy flat screen televisions and air hockey tables for?! Today I found myself a rather irate help desk when the site seemed to be refusing either our password, our user name, our secret code, or some combination of the three. At least 30 minutes was wasted in increasingly frustrated ranting before I discovered that a "G" in the secret code tag had been rubbed off to become a "C," which was wrong. What is immensely irritating about this whole episode is that there is no interactive tech support or a phone number AT ALL for the site. If you can't figure out what is wrong using their FAQs, you're just SOL. I was cursing myself and Ollie for picking out something that requires either batteries or electronics of some kind. Nearly anything that we've ever had that is electronic or battery-driven ends up causing nothing but frustration, and eventually it is missing some piece or hits some glitch we can't get past and then it is tossed aside until it is completely obsolete. I'm so glad that we finally figured out what was going wrong.
Tonight Kerry and I played tennis in an attempt to break me out of my into-the-net rut. My serve was much more on (though I suspect that some of my Thursday morning troubles have to do with needing sunglasses that I can actually see through when I'm on the court), and though I buried a good number of balls into the net, I was a little more consistent in my ground strokes. I continue to have trouble with the "easy" shots--the ones where I have way too much reaction time and a whole clear court in front of me and where I end up blowing the ball too hard way outside the alley. So I'm going to try to breathe through these next time they present myself and not go for some big kill, just work on gently putting the ball away with placement rather than power. And for once, all three kids in child care were complaining that it was time to leave. This is quite good, since I have appointments both for clinic tomorrow morning and then for my match against Hilary on Thursday. I'm not supposed to be this competitive, but I have been a bit disappointed that my partner this week isn't one of our stronger players, which means I feel a higher need to compensate...at a time when I'm feeling like I need someone to compensate for me!
And tomorrow night is the long-awaited play and the rescheduled picnic. I need to go over lines with Passaportout, since it has been a while since he has read through them, and I need to figure out how I'm going to take four kids to Costco to pick up fruit to make my skewer kebabs. And get meat to grill. And I'm going to have to be organized enough to get it all over to Jenn's house without the benefit of Kerry being around. I am so excited to see how it all turns out. Now, if only I could find my camera.
Today we had a pretty good day. Schoolwork out of the way before 9:30, then over to Cheryl's for another meeting about her Homeschool Center idea that she needs to get off the ground by Friday. It was energetic, to say the least. It is an understatement to say that there were lots of kids--close to two dozen. But her project is really coming along, and I hope that enough people will join in to help this become a reality, because we so sorely need adequate and affordable meeting and class space in this area and a central location for homeschoolers to find one another beyond just the internet. After that, I was not very smart and bought us all Slurpees, and for the rest of the day, I could feel the energy of post-Slurpee buzz emanating from Walter. Arrgggh!
This afternoon we went to the pool after our stress-fest with the Webkinz and the all-too-short nap from Rutledge. I'm still not quite ready to get terribly wet there because the water still feels a bit chilly to me, but it didn't stop anyone else except Rutledge. I'm telling you, I tend to make these very unwise parenting decisions when I'm put on the spot, and today was no exception. I allowed Ollie to buy something from the snack bar with his own money, and the next thing I knew, I had three other children sobbing and whining because they had nothing and didn't know they could have brought money. Ooops. That was my big sign to go home, so that's what we did.
Right now I'm going to snuggle up with some of my favorite bedfellows, Ollie and Frances and enjoy the sweetness of a little girl with her head against my arm, snoring.
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
Monday, June 4, 2007
Okay, I'm lost in a technical muddle today. Really. It's a trend, actually. Yesterday I spent probably an hour trying to sort out user names and passwords on two services I use. You know you're having a bad day when you can't even remember your own name.
Today I am deep in thoughts on what my ideal coop for next year would look like. I am reading around and have been trying to gather ideas for myself. As Walter and Ollie get older, I am finding that I am wanting more substance. I love this idea of a cultural studies coop or group--one where you study a particular culture, perhaps in depth for several weeks. I'm wondering if I could incorporate that into my Latin class or Latin work for the boys next fall. There are a number of homeschool "academies" in our area, but they all seem to have a strong Christian component, not that I'm not Christian, but these really have the focus on the religious element more than the academic in many ways, or the academic is purely presented and viewed through the lens of a "Christian worldview." On one level I'm fine with that, but is this my Lutheran-Presbyterian worldview or something else? Add in that often the classes they offer costs hundreds of dollars, sometimes even stretching a bit toward piecemeal private school tuition, and with three children, they just don't make sense. I can't say for sure at this point that I'm looking for a small-scale Westminster Academy, one such homeschool outsourcing school in our area, but I wouldn't rule that quite out, either. What I'm hoping for is creativity and high-engagement, but with a strong substance component.
There seems to be an ongoing question among homeschoolers about whether one can truly do "school" with other families or whether anything that happens outside of your own home can only aspire to enrichment/fun, but not have any impact on what goes on at home. Perhaps it's my severe slacker ways, but I myself believe that meat and substance are, indeed, possible when you cooperate with other parents and their children. At the very least, my children are open to listening and taking direction from other adults in a way that they aren't always willing to do with me They get exposed to topics that I might not have given much thought to. They are motivated by the opportunity to share their work with other people. Knowing that they will be need to present information or explain homework or share what they know or care about provides the kind of meaningful context that can be lacking in a homeschool life at home. Sure, I could assign them a book report or a presentation about electromagnets, but without either the extrinsic motivator of a grade (the old "We write so that we can get a grade from our teacher and because he told us to do it and we'll be in trouble if we don't") or of an actual audience other than me, who is not giving a grade...well, there doesn't feel like there is a point. Communication feels so vitally important to me across the curriculum. Writing, of course, is all about sharing ideas and communicating with an audience. Remove the audience, especially if you yourself are not writing for your own personal gratification (and my boys generally aren't, if truth be told), and there's simply little meaning left in the process. But even something like science or a language is about expressing what you know to someone else. What good is it to translate in isolation? Isn't a primary goal of experiment and discovery to make known and make useful what you have learned?
With those ideas in mind, I am trying to imagine my ideal situation for the fall. And needless to say, my utopian schoolyear is not taking into account a certain fellow who revels in ripping paper, writing on non-consumable materials, and throwing heavy objects at our heads and legs while we are trying to do timed math drills. But details, details. I would like to have all three of my children experience a discussion of literature of some kind. It could be Junior Great Books, which we have been using both in our classes in the past and sporadically at home. It could be novels that they find interesting (though I'm wondering whether a whole group of 8 year olds finds the same books exciting...unfortunately, mine seem to have inherited my own lack of interest in the fantasy/sci fi genre, which nearly obliterates common fascination with other readers). I would also like to have some opportunity to share learning about the social sciences. This is Ollie's particular interest, and he would be rather keen on doing research in any number of topics--US politics, international relations, current conflicts, anything related to history, comparative government, US government... The list goes on. Walter would enjoy some sort of science class or opportunity to present material and do experiments. For Frances, something involving thinking games, critical thinking, exploration of world cultures, and a chance to discuss stories or do writing would be what I'm looking for. She also has not had the benefit of doing many of the simpler science experiments I used to do with the boys, so something concentrating on kitchen chemistry or experiments you can eat or something like that would be fun for her. Or studies of animals and biology.
There's something about coops that is, well, so confusingly uncooperative. Or maybe things just become more difficult than they need to be, or the focus becomes too narrow and constricting. I don't know that it has to be this way. We get kind of stuck in our ruts of how things have been in the past or the paradigm of what we did last year, and it becomes more difficult to imagine other boxes, other alternate schemes. I'm hoping that this Thursday's meeting won't end up being divisive, or worse yet, result in no coop at all...my largest fear. Instead, I hope that we'll be able to come in with fresh ideas and a commitment to working out something that will be in the ballpark of what everyone is looking for.
Today I am deep in thoughts on what my ideal coop for next year would look like. I am reading around and have been trying to gather ideas for myself. As Walter and Ollie get older, I am finding that I am wanting more substance. I love this idea of a cultural studies coop or group--one where you study a particular culture, perhaps in depth for several weeks. I'm wondering if I could incorporate that into my Latin class or Latin work for the boys next fall. There are a number of homeschool "academies" in our area, but they all seem to have a strong Christian component, not that I'm not Christian, but these really have the focus on the religious element more than the academic in many ways, or the academic is purely presented and viewed through the lens of a "Christian worldview." On one level I'm fine with that, but is this my Lutheran-Presbyterian worldview or something else? Add in that often the classes they offer costs hundreds of dollars, sometimes even stretching a bit toward piecemeal private school tuition, and with three children, they just don't make sense. I can't say for sure at this point that I'm looking for a small-scale Westminster Academy, one such homeschool outsourcing school in our area, but I wouldn't rule that quite out, either. What I'm hoping for is creativity and high-engagement, but with a strong substance component.
There seems to be an ongoing question among homeschoolers about whether one can truly do "school" with other families or whether anything that happens outside of your own home can only aspire to enrichment/fun, but not have any impact on what goes on at home. Perhaps it's my severe slacker ways, but I myself believe that meat and substance are, indeed, possible when you cooperate with other parents and their children. At the very least, my children are open to listening and taking direction from other adults in a way that they aren't always willing to do with me They get exposed to topics that I might not have given much thought to. They are motivated by the opportunity to share their work with other people. Knowing that they will be need to present information or explain homework or share what they know or care about provides the kind of meaningful context that can be lacking in a homeschool life at home. Sure, I could assign them a book report or a presentation about electromagnets, but without either the extrinsic motivator of a grade (the old "We write so that we can get a grade from our teacher and because he told us to do it and we'll be in trouble if we don't") or of an actual audience other than me, who is not giving a grade...well, there doesn't feel like there is a point. Communication feels so vitally important to me across the curriculum. Writing, of course, is all about sharing ideas and communicating with an audience. Remove the audience, especially if you yourself are not writing for your own personal gratification (and my boys generally aren't, if truth be told), and there's simply little meaning left in the process. But even something like science or a language is about expressing what you know to someone else. What good is it to translate in isolation? Isn't a primary goal of experiment and discovery to make known and make useful what you have learned?
With those ideas in mind, I am trying to imagine my ideal situation for the fall. And needless to say, my utopian schoolyear is not taking into account a certain fellow who revels in ripping paper, writing on non-consumable materials, and throwing heavy objects at our heads and legs while we are trying to do timed math drills. But details, details. I would like to have all three of my children experience a discussion of literature of some kind. It could be Junior Great Books, which we have been using both in our classes in the past and sporadically at home. It could be novels that they find interesting (though I'm wondering whether a whole group of 8 year olds finds the same books exciting...unfortunately, mine seem to have inherited my own lack of interest in the fantasy/sci fi genre, which nearly obliterates common fascination with other readers). I would also like to have some opportunity to share learning about the social sciences. This is Ollie's particular interest, and he would be rather keen on doing research in any number of topics--US politics, international relations, current conflicts, anything related to history, comparative government, US government... The list goes on. Walter would enjoy some sort of science class or opportunity to present material and do experiments. For Frances, something involving thinking games, critical thinking, exploration of world cultures, and a chance to discuss stories or do writing would be what I'm looking for. She also has not had the benefit of doing many of the simpler science experiments I used to do with the boys, so something concentrating on kitchen chemistry or experiments you can eat or something like that would be fun for her. Or studies of animals and biology.
There's something about coops that is, well, so confusingly uncooperative. Or maybe things just become more difficult than they need to be, or the focus becomes too narrow and constricting. I don't know that it has to be this way. We get kind of stuck in our ruts of how things have been in the past or the paradigm of what we did last year, and it becomes more difficult to imagine other boxes, other alternate schemes. I'm hoping that this Thursday's meeting won't end up being divisive, or worse yet, result in no coop at all...my largest fear. Instead, I hope that we'll be able to come in with fresh ideas and a commitment to working out something that will be in the ballpark of what everyone is looking for.
Lilypad Surfing
Lilypad surfing-that's what the Webkinz are doing right now in the background as I type. Rutledge is lying sprawled across my lap, leaving my ankles throbbing in pain from his weight. Which, incidentally, only appears to be about 30.5 pounds with his clothes and a cloth diaper on, according to our dr's scale this morning. There's always something to feel guilty about when you are a parent, and right now it's Rutledge's hearing and speech for me. I took him in, thinking maybe I was being reactionary (do I just want to part with a $20 copay, Kerry wanted to know), because he has been waking in the middle of the night every night for the past 9 or 10 weeks with a wet, uncontrollable cough. I have also wondered whether he has fluid in his ears, since his speech is still very slow developing. At his age, we should be understanding 70-75% of what he says, and I'd say that a generous estimate is 25% right now. I wish we had done something earlier. He has only had one ear infection that I know if in his life, but he has frequently been found to have fluid in his ears when he has been in for other minor illnesses or well visits. Now I'm feeling like I've created a disability that may affect all of his early years because I didn't push to have tubes put in his ears months ago (not that anyone offered, or that it was even offered that we see an ENT). The game plan now is to give him an antibiotic for two weeks, then see an ENT in 4-6 weeks, have a hearing exam done, and perhaps go through the early intervention services in our county. If only I had insisted that we have surgery back in the fall, we could probably have spared ourselves a lot of grief!
This morning was fairly productive. The boys worked on their schoolwork--math, handwriting, and spelling, as well as doing the timed DIBELS tests, which haven't really revealed anything I didn't know. Ollie reads well above grade level, though I don't have any specific test that indicates just how far ahead. He can pretty much read anything and has comprehension higher than his actual decoding fluency level. Walter reads at grade level--around a 3rd grade level and meets close to the benchmark for end of third grade in terms of speed and fluency. My expectation is that both of them will be reading at least three to four grade levels ahead, but I'll take on target for now. I'm not sure how I feel about timing things. I guess it does show how much you know, or at least how well you can display what you know with someone breathing down your neck. But really, who cares if you can do 20 math problems in 1 minute or read X number of words in that amount of time. Isn't quality more important than quantity? Is pain the only way to learn?
I plan to use the summer to poke around through the options I have for approaches to teaching. You would think that four years down the line I would have at least a genearl philosophy all figured out, but I find that the longer I do this, the more that I see what I'm doing as a dynamic process. The only thing that is certain to me is that we are always changing, that what we need is evolving, that I couldn't have anticipated what a 9 year old was like (or what my orientation to a 9 year old would be) when I had only 7 year olds. Little snippets of information from here and there affect my attitudes toward where we are now, and dabbling in the descriptions of what other people do sparks my interest in trying something that I hadn't been open to before or that I might not have come up with on my own. Then I surprise myself sometimes, shocked that I care about something that I didn't think I gave a rat's ass about. It bothers me that Walter and Ollie can't spout off multiplication facts in under 3 seconds, for instance. Who knew that I cared that much?
So here we are, constantly changing, always feeling the ground under our feet, and hopefully still having fun and challenging ourselves along the way and not being worn down by the mainstream demands that I can't seem to ignore the way I'd like to.
This morning was fairly productive. The boys worked on their schoolwork--math, handwriting, and spelling, as well as doing the timed DIBELS tests, which haven't really revealed anything I didn't know. Ollie reads well above grade level, though I don't have any specific test that indicates just how far ahead. He can pretty much read anything and has comprehension higher than his actual decoding fluency level. Walter reads at grade level--around a 3rd grade level and meets close to the benchmark for end of third grade in terms of speed and fluency. My expectation is that both of them will be reading at least three to four grade levels ahead, but I'll take on target for now. I'm not sure how I feel about timing things. I guess it does show how much you know, or at least how well you can display what you know with someone breathing down your neck. But really, who cares if you can do 20 math problems in 1 minute or read X number of words in that amount of time. Isn't quality more important than quantity? Is pain the only way to learn?
I plan to use the summer to poke around through the options I have for approaches to teaching. You would think that four years down the line I would have at least a genearl philosophy all figured out, but I find that the longer I do this, the more that I see what I'm doing as a dynamic process. The only thing that is certain to me is that we are always changing, that what we need is evolving, that I couldn't have anticipated what a 9 year old was like (or what my orientation to a 9 year old would be) when I had only 7 year olds. Little snippets of information from here and there affect my attitudes toward where we are now, and dabbling in the descriptions of what other people do sparks my interest in trying something that I hadn't been open to before or that I might not have come up with on my own. Then I surprise myself sometimes, shocked that I care about something that I didn't think I gave a rat's ass about. It bothers me that Walter and Ollie can't spout off multiplication facts in under 3 seconds, for instance. Who knew that I cared that much?
So here we are, constantly changing, always feeling the ground under our feet, and hopefully still having fun and challenging ourselves along the way and not being worn down by the mainstream demands that I can't seem to ignore the way I'd like to.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Ghana
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!
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!
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.
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