Back in LA: Catching up on the Sweet Simplicities of Summer

We are back in LA, and there is still so much to blog about from our trips, but I'm hoping to catch up over the next few days.

I'm giving the kids a "real" break from school work, meaning I'm not asking them to do any classes, assignments, worksheets or lessons. But since most of our "school" is life learning anyhow, I'm assuming we will have a rich unschooling kind of summer.

So far our 9-year-old son has spent alot of time playing Monopoly with his stuffed animals and with us. Last night we finished the first game ever. I remember playing Monopoly alot with my sister when I was about that age. The game would go on forever and never finish. I always thought that was a tragedy, but actually playing out an entire game last night made me realize a truth about Monopoly, and maybe Capitalism in general: it's just not fun to play it all the way out. The richer the rich get and the poorer the poor get, the less fun it is for everyone. Even the rich guy felt bad cleaning everyone out.

We had a nice little discussion about socialism and capitalism. Our daughter suggested we play "Socialism" instead, but we all decided that would get really boring, really fast. It made me think of the Ungame. Is that still around? I guess so, since I just found an Amazon link. LOL. The cover looked different in the 70s and 80s when our family played it.

I'm planning to take the kids to the beach every week this summer with our homeschooling group. Our son may go to a Cub Scout day camp or a Vacation Bible School. And our daughter wants to go to camp with a friend's church youth group. But we really don't have alot planned for the next couple of months, and I am really kind of happy about that.

Simplicity is good.

Open Window Distractions

I start most "school" days with a plan, but we have a problem.

We are distracted.

Window staring is the worst.  I personally have a highly evolved skill of staring, not only out the window, but at the ceiling and even at an actual blank wall for minutes, even hours, if inspired.

I'd like to claim that I'm involved in Zen-like peaceful meditation, but the opposite is true. My mind is not empty. I am not still. I am racing with thoughts, ideas, scenarios for apocalyptic movies starring ME as the hero. My overactive imagination is so busy that it shuts down my body and I stare.

My kids are the same.

Every open window is a distraction. Birds are interesting. So are the cars that drive by.

And nothing evokes the magic of the Great Outdoors like actual “school” work. Math worksheets entice squirrels to come up to our porch, draw their little rodent paws across their chests in an eerily human posture and whisper with their shiny black eyes, “Feed me, please.”

We feed two neighborhood squirrels: a skinny, formerly saber-toothed she-squirrel named “Toothy” and “Bruce” a big, fat he-squirrel whose cropped tail makes him look more like a beaver.

We feed Toothy because she is our walking, scurrying miracle. When she arrived several weeks ago she was nearly starved to death. She had patchy fur, a sparse twitching tail and a grossly misshapen face from two odd, overgrown teeth protruding from her lower jaw. She looked like a harelip squirrel.

So the kids and I talk about harelips and wonder if the condition occurs in squirrels. We Googled Smile Train and watched tear-jerking videos of compassionate doctors repairing harelips in third-world children. We talk about health care in third-world countries.

We talk about how people are doing small things to make a big difference in other people’s lives globally. We discuss the great questions of civilization.

And then it's lunch time and Bruce comes around.

We don’t actually like feeding Bruce. He is a fat little guy who bullies Toothy into giving up her factory-shelled walnuts. Sometimes we throw him a nut or two to distract him while our little squirrel nourishes herself.

Toothy is doing better now. She doesn’t have to cock her head to one side to painfully choke down her nuts. Her superfluous teeth fell out, and she almost looks normal now.

But the kids wonder where she lives.

What does her nest look like?

We look in the palm trees. We Google “where do squirrels live.”

My daughter disappears into her room to finish her lesson on negative and positive numbers --  added and subtracted, multiplied and divided.

It sounds easy enough until I have to explain how a negative number divided by a negative number becomes a positive number – every time. It is not enough to know that it happens. She has to know why and in what real life situations. I didn’t buy the teacher’s guide.

It comes down to a comparison with “I don’t have no cookies,” and she accepts that for now. I return to focusing on my son and his times tables. He has gone to wash his hands and returns 10 minutes later with a bubble delicately balanced between his thumb and forefinger. He is grinning.

“Look Mom!”

He explains how he did it.

I try to listen and not be irritated because I really had planned on him learning his times tables, maybe just one of them, this afternoon.

I had also planned on writing a little this afternoon. But of course, five minutes into the writing project my thoughts are interrupted by something important like a sudden need to fold laundry or update Facebook with a pithy little status about feeding saber-toothed squirrels.

I know that planning and taking deliberate steps toward a goal yield success. So I worry that all this distraction is hampering my children’s overall education.

There are those comforting unschooling “folktales” about children who follow their passions and arrive in adulthood with their creative energy and self motivation uninhibited.

But then there are also people who can’t keep a job because they are bored and distracted. Somehow I am hoping this is different.

Currently my favorite absolution on distraction comes from the highly imaginative writer, Norton Jester, who wrote The Phantom Toolbooth.

Apparently he wrote that book when he was supposed to be working on another project. Ironically his little escape became his greatest work. He has been quoted as saying “I find the best things I do, I do when I'm trying to avoid doing something else I'm supposed to be doing.”

So yes, we never get as much done as I plan. But I’m hoping that my kids schooling experience is better because of the distractions and not in spite of them.

Three hours later, my daughter returns from the bedroom, half-finished math assignment in hand.

“Mom, I just wrote the best song!”

More Distractions

And now more distractions to entertain you and keep you from what you should be doing.

He was suppose to be coping the paragraph from the whiteboard behind him. I left him alone and found him like this 10 minutes later. It's a Cheerio map to the treasure.

What do you do when you find your kids and their friends walking on the wall?

You try it too!

How much time can you "waste" on time lapse photos of the electric trains in the night? When was bedtime suppose to be?

And since when does "clean up your toys," mean wash and dry the entire army?

And if all else fails, quick, find a tree and climb it before you get too old.

Homeschooling by the Hour

Homeschooling styles differ family to family, and in our family, I should say year to year, week to week, maybe hour to hour.

We have homeschooled independently and with a charter school. I have followed curriculum and unschooled. We have tried Thomas Jefferson education, Susan Wise Bauer’s Well-Trained Mind method, Charlotte Mason ideas, and just about anything else that my friends have been excited about at one time.

And I have found that while I glean helpful strategies from each model, I can’t commit fully to any of them.

So I am more likely to describe myself as Sonlight inspired or somewhat unschooling. I admire people who follow the full Sonlight curriculum, or allow their kids a rich unschooling environment, but I know it doesn’t work for us.

And what does work is always changing.

Right now we are trying a method I developed based on Oliver DeMille's concept of "structuring time not content," and an article I read about a large homeschooling family who uses Leigh Bortin's Classical Conversation. My kids call it that "timer thing."

It goes like this: We set the kitchen time for an hour and focus on one subject during that hour. No more. No less. Well, less if you are little.

During the language arts hour I sit on the couch with my 8-year-old son and begin with a basic 5 to 10-minute grammar lesson. Right now we are using First Language Lessons by Jessie Wise. I think it was written for first and second graders, so we are moving through it pretty quickly, but he is learning basic things like the definition of a noun and the difference between a proper and a common noun.

Today he worked on memorizing the Mother Goose rhyme that goes … “Thirty days hath September.”

My 11-year-old daughter didn’t need to go through a lesson book like this. We discussed the parts of speech one afternoon while we were driving around in the car.

Then she got into Mad Libs and has never really wondered what a noun or verb was since then. At some point in the next year I would like to go through a more intensive study of grammar with her, but for now, it is not a priority. She is learning other things on her own.

When my son and I are finished with the language arts lesson, he reads a short phonics book or we look at a couple pages of his Explode the Code phonics book. Once we preview the phonics workbook he can work through it on his own.

Then he copies a few sentences and draws a corresponding picture if he wants to. We often use ideas from the Draw Write Now books. Since we started this his drawing and his handwriting have improved.

He is not reading anywhere near grade level, and I am still committed to not pushing, but we do work on it a little bit every day. When he is finished with his assignments he gets to play for the rest of the time.

During the language arts hour, my daughter reads from a biography or writes. Both of these are independent. I sometimes ask her to read to me. Sometimes we take turns reading a paragraph, especially if the reading content is difficult for her and she needs some encouragement.

During the writing hour she works on something she wants or needs to write. Sometimes it is a response about something she is reading. Most often it is for a speech she is preparing for her favorite homeschooling activity, Speaker’s Club.

She likes writing, and so I let her writing time be free for her to just write without my editing. It can be filled with creative spelling and no punctuation, but it's amusing for me to see how much her writing has improved this year simply by reading more challenging books and writing e-mails using a spell checker.

For the math hour I once again work with my son for the first 20 minutes or so.  We do math games, flash cards, etc. We also use the Singapore curriculum. Because he struggles to read instructions and the text in word problems, I sit with him and help him read.

My daughter tries to work through Singapore Math curriculum herself, and I help her when she needs assistance. She likes the challenge of working through it on her own, so as long as she is not staring at the wall, I try to leave her alone and let her figure it out.

She likes that there is a cap on how long math can take. If a lesson is particularly laborious, she is not obligated to complete it in one day. And if she flies through an easier lesson, she can go on and do the next one.

Reading, writing and math are the important core subjects that I think we need to purposefully schedule time to cover. But it is not a full picture of our educational experience. We take plenty of field trips. We listen to audio books. I read historical fiction to the kids every night. We watch historical and scientific documentaries. We do science experiments, art projects, etc.

If the hour-timer strategy is not working, sometimes I let the kids just play. Today my son got through his language arts lesson with me and came to me in tears after 15 minutes of “trying” to do his handwriting lesson. I told him to take a break and he has been building Lego models ever since.

Earlier in my homeschooling experience I would not have let my daughter get out of academic work to play, but I have learned to respect the power of play and imagination. Someday soon he will be able to read and write four sentences together without frustration. And someday, he won’t be quite so excited about building Lego models.