Be happy, and get out of the way

I finished Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert on Mother's Day. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I don't feel any need to travel the world alone (which is just as well, considering my three children), but I am inspired to work a little on a meditation practice.

My favorite quote from the book is this:

As I focus on Diligent Joy I also keep remembering a simple idea my friend Darcey told me once – that all the sorrow and trouble of this world is caused by unhappy people. Not only in the big global Hitler-'n'-Stalin picture, but also on the smallest personal level. Even in my own life, I can see exactly where my episodes of unhappiness have brought suffering or distress or (at the very least) inconvenience to those around me. The search for contentment is, therefore, not merely a self-preserving and self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world. Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people. (p. 261)

I find this quote makes perfect sense, and it sends me out to find my own happiness in the realization that my happiness is what is best for my family. It also helps me answer the question of whether I as a parent am responsible for my children's happiness – I think the answer is that I need to do my best to teach them how to figure out how to make themselves happy so that they, too, can get out of the way.

Rushmore, a book review

We just read Rushmore by Lynn Curlee, and it's exactly the kind of book I look for to read with my children. Some interest in Mt. Rushmore had been generated by the second National Treasure movie, so I decided to follow up on that when I saw this book at a local library. The book is 48 pages with some of those pages being full page illustrations, and the text is medium sized with spacing between each line. The result is completely appropriate for the mid-elementary years – providing enough detail without getting bogged down. The story provides opportunities to talk about the time between the World Wars, the boom of the 20s, geography, immigration, art and sculpture, the Great Depression, politics and funding for federal projects, public works, the type of personalities needed to complete such a project, and engineering. And of course, adding biographies of the four presidents depicted, Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and the first Roosevelt, would make sense. It would make a fabulous spine for a unit study, and I'm not even into unit studies!


We followed up by looking at some photograps of the real Mt. Rushmore, since the illustrations in the book do not include photographs. I particularly liked these, which include some closups (look at the eyes!) and this one of the sculptures under construction.

A Nature Walk

I struggle with the nature walk aspect of the Charlotte Mason education. I agree with it completely philosophically. One of the reasons I want to homeschool is so that my children can see their connections to the world around them, and that definitely includes the natural world. It is when the rubber hits the road that I have problems. My kids whine. They would never choose to take a nature walk. And here in New England, it is extremely hard to motivate ourselves to get out in the winter. I did finally put up a bird feeder this year, though, and that has been a good addition to our days.

Last Friday I saw an opportunity to get them out -- we took a walk before I dropped them with Grandma. That way I didn't have to pack food, which made things easier. We went to a new place, too. I had one unhappy boy, but the other two were okay, and found things to see on our forty-five minute walk. We saw curled fiddleheads, a stream running next to a stone wall, a man made stone bridge, leaves and blossoms just emerging, birds (we heard a woodpecker making two distinct sounds, presumably on two different trees). We walked uphill to a pond and saw a little life in that, as well as a huge pile of logs on the other side of it. My four year old told me that beavers have their doors underwater and have long sharp teeth. He would also walk a few steps and then say with amazement, "Look, Mom, another part of the lake." And I would have to look before he would move on. On one stop we saw a pile of large branches under the water and he decided that it was the beavers' playground. My oldest was fairly observant also, and particularly drawn to the stream. About halfway through I did have to make a rule that there are no bad guys in the woods -- they are constantly building stories around bad guys! My middle guy was happier once we turned around. Strangely, he's the one who seems to like nature best, but not, apparently, on this day.

I hope to have more of a nature walk routine through the summer. We do have plenty of outdoor time, but not a whole lot of observation. I also have Wild Days, and would like to get them started with nature journals. My six-year old hasn't been much of a artist, but that is changing, and I think he could do a nature journal now.

I'm tempted to add the moral of the story, but in Charlotte Mason fashion, I'll hope that the writing itself makes it clear!

New Living Room Floor

I've tossed around the choices for a new living room floor for about a year – carpet, tile, laminate, or wood. I'm looking for an option that is affordable and environmentally friendly. I'm fed up with carpet, and with the dog turning ten, older dog or future puppy accidents are all too likely. We love the tile in our family room – we never fuss at the boys about what they are doing on it -- but we can't quite picture it in our more traditional living room. Also, the floor isn't quite flat. Laminate just doesn't suit my style – I really prefer less processing. I'm not completely comfortable with the engineering of bamboo, and the fact that it doesn't have the ability to be refinished (or at least not multiple times). We don't really like the look of cork for our living room. So we're left with wood, and the concern that wood and boys may not go together.

We do not have a formal living room. In fact, the boys may spend more time playing in the living room than in the family room. The stairs , the office, the front door, and the downstairs bathroom all abut the living room. Our TV is in the living room. Keeping the boys out is not an option.

I'm not crazy about the look of oak (just a personal preference). I've been looking at pine and hickory. I love the look of pine, and my hope is that we could manage to distress it in an attractive way. Hickory is much harder, but also more expensive. It's attractive, but I prefer the look of pine. I worry that hickory would get damaged, but not in an all-over way as is more likely with the pine.

I'm looking at penetrating oil finishes rather than poly. I like that I could refinish any parts of the floor that needed it. My top picks are Osmo, Bioshield, Velvit, Waterlox, or Tung oil.

I'm leaning toward the pine. I prefer the look, and I can get very affordable pine from a mill about an hour away – it's local, the logging has to meet any environmental standards here. Also, our boiler recently needed a new motor, using some of the money earmarked for the floor. I will finish it myself, probably with Osmo or Bioshield. I'd like to lightly stain it, so that it coordinates with our trim. We'll see if we have the nerve to purposely distress it when put it in – we probably should! Our tax rebate is going to be funding this project!

Homeschool Coop Update

Our homeschool coop has had a good year. In the fall we did a six week Lego League, then a winter program of ancient Egypt, and currently we're in the middle of six weeks of this and that -- whatever people were willing to offer. We have 18-24 kids, from eleven families. We're finding that if we have two groups, each with a leader and a helper, it takes about 40% of the moms to run each homeschool day. The activities I've mentioned have been for the older kids, seven and up. For the younger kids (3-6) we've had a coop kindergarten going. In the afternoons we've had a music teacher come in and teach two music classes -- one for the older kids and one for the younger. In the current session, we also have an art teacher teaching art to the older kids when the youngers are in music, and vice versa. We meet in people's homes. This year we've had two hosts.

I led one group during Lego League, and during the current session I've led two sessions for the older kids. Despite the fact that I have two children in the younger group, I haven't led that group yet! A few weeks ago I co-led a session on Leonardo Da Vinci. We did a little history and geography, read Leonardo's Horse, did anatomy measurements to corroborate the ratios he found, did a perspective art project, and did a picture study of the Last Supper, including having the thirteen kids line up as if they were in the painting!

Then last week, in two hours flat, I ran a restaurant with the older kids. There are so many things we could have focused on with this -- it's so complex! I tried to keep it simple -- this was my approach:

I asked that every student be sent with at least a dollar. This included the younger group, who were slated to be our customers. I brought in a bag of groceries: bread, butter, peanut butter, and jam, and asked the if they wanted to buy these groceries for the restaurant for $5. Five kids put their dollar in, and we wrote down that we owed them for the loan. I told the kids that they would each earn a dollar working at the restaurant today. Then we worked on the menu, and set up the table and kitchen space we would be using. The kids writing the menu had to come up with prices, and I recommended that $1 be the highest price, so that our customers would be able to buy something. They decided that a peanut butter and jelly sandwich would be a dollar, and various versions of toast would be less. (We could have talked much more about setting prices, but our first customers were due about 45 minutes after they bought their first groceries.) Once the menu was established, I acted as their first customer. Our original idea (that is, my husband's, since he came up with the restaurant plan), was to distribute that first dollar to the whole staff to make the point that we had to sell a lot more to pay each of them their dollar, and also pay our other costs. But I was vetoed by the kids, who thought it would be easier to divvy everything up at the end.

We assigned each customer a server, who was responsible for taking their order, getting their food, and giving them their bill. The customer either paid at the register, or the server brought the money. We didn't focus on making change, although that would definitely make sense.

At the end we counted up our money and talked about profit, and what other expenses a real restaurant would have.

I hope the kids got a sense of how complex it all is! We certainly could have done more with it, but I didn't want to get bogged down. I can see doing this a few times a year and letting the kids take a bigger part in the design each time.

Literature-based curriculum

(This is a work in progress. Expect eventual updates!)

So, like me, you like the Charlotte Mason approach, but figuring out how to put it together yourself seems almost impossible. There are many curricula that are options, or that can be used for their book lists when you build your own curriculum. I recommend finding the one that resonates best with you and your family (or even just the one child who will use it) and use that as a starting point.

These are the sites that I have found useful:

Winter Promise

Tanglewood Education

Ambleside Online

Mater Amabilis

Simply Charlotte Mason

Sonlight

An Old Fashioned Education

Bringing Up Learners

My Father's World

Beautiful Feet for history

Noeo for science

Five in a Row (and here) especially for younger children

And for some good reading:
Penny Gardner's site
http://liltinghouse.clubmom.com/the_lilting_house/2006/07/all_righty_when.html

Raw Detox

A few weeks ago I did the seven day RawDivas detox with a friend. I highly recommend it – there are no gimmicks, nothing that you have to buy, no supplements – just eat only raw food for a week. But there is support, and there are some recommendations, and emails that you can receive on each day of the detox. (They are a for profit business, but the seven day detox can be completely free, which is how I did it – sign up and they'll send you the link to the detox page. I haven't received any questionable emails as a result.)

I didn't feel great while I was doing it, but I have no regrets at all. I think I eat a little differently now, trying to incorporate more fruits and veggies into my daily meals. I'm also very aware that on any given day I only eat so much, and that if I want to eat well, I have to choose well. This seem obvious, but for me it's a bit of a shift. I expect I will try this detox again, especially if I can find a friend to do it at the same time. I'd prefer to do it during warm weather – both my friend and I found that we were cold eating only cold and room temperature food in the middle of New England February.

Today Oprah was discussing The Truth About Food. One study they (she and Dr. Oz) discussed was a raw food experiment. After only ten days, cholesterol was down by 25% and blood pressure was down also. They also discussed a detox experiment which showed no benefit to the detox as far as expelling toxins. However, Dr. Oz sees a detox regime as useful as a reboot or quick start to a better eating plan. They didn't put the two together, and I think that would have been a useful suggestion – detox by going all raw for three, five, seven or more days (I recommend at least four).

Pay off mortgage early?

I get the emails from Debt Into Wealth, and I must admit, it sounds awfully tempting not to have a mortgage. However, we've decided instead to have a savings plan and continue paying our mortgage at the regular rate, and here are some of the reasons:

• We want to build up savings to the recommended three to six months worth of expenses. If my husband lost his job , savings and investments will help a lot more than a lower mortgage balance.
  
• We want to save money to make a down payment on a new car when one is needed.
  
• Although I'm not sure about this, I think having a mortgage may result in more financial aid when the boys go to college. Even if we paid an extra 1K a month (ouch!), we wouldn't pay off the mortgage for another eleven years, which is about the time our first will be heading off to college. My guess is his college would be happy to help us out with that sudden extra cash flow.

We've set up a plan with ShareBuilder where we invest regularly each month, some in the stock market, and some in a money market account. I really like having the money taken out automatically -- much less temptation to spend it instead of saving it each month. Yet if we need it, it's there and available to us.

We don't have credit card debt to pay off, and rollup into the next debt. But we will use future raises to increase our ShareBuilder allotment, and when we pay off our HELOC, we'll increase our savings amount by that figure (as we did recently with our car payment).

If we didn't have an automatic savings plan, or our weren't disciplined enough to use it, paying off the mortgage might work -- but I think it's a big risk to put extra money into a mortgage without an emergency savings stash.

There are a lot of articles on both sides of this argument -- I like this one: http://www.fool.com/foolu/askfoolu/2001/askfoolu010307.htm.

Recurring Chores

I'm not generally a New Year's Resolution type, but this year I seem to have some, and they're all the stereotypical ones, one being to keep my house better. I've been trying FlyLady again, without complete success. If I get on track with zones, I seem to fall down on weekly tasks. One step I took that I think was helpful was to split my own house into zones that work for my house: 1: Family room and Mudroom (which are connected), 2: Kitchen (which must take 80% of my cleaning time), 3: Bathrooms, Laundry room & sewing room, 4: Bedroom and Office, and 5: Living Room. I also printed out one of these calendars and marked out six day periods and labeled the weeks with zones. That way the family and living rooms don't get shortchanged.

Then I rediscovered Motivated Moms. I must have looked at it before, because I have the free 2002 calendar on my hard drive. Like any system, it doesn't fit me perfectly, but isn't that weekly checklist awful cute? So then I spent obsessive hours trying to figure out how I can make my own Motivated Moms calendar, with my own tasks and intervals that are right for me and my house. I want to be able to easily move a task if too many tasks end up on the same day, and I want to print it out. I looked at Outlook and Microsoft Project and a bunch of pages Google turned up, and didn't find anything that does what I want it to.

But it turns out that Palm Desktop will. I have a monochrome Sony Clie with DateBk5 and it handles recurring tasks pretty well. But I don't always look at it, and the tasks start to build up after a while and become daunting! But Palm Desktop will print out a weeks worth of my calendar. The only fault as far as I'm concerned is that it displays each task with a diamond rather than a check box. I'm surprised it's so difficult to figure this out. I wonder how Motivated Moms makes theirs?

And how does my house look? Well, I just moved the office into the living room so that the new carpet can get put in on Thursday, and it's a wreck!

Choosing Floor Covering

All of a sudden, my whole house seems to be falling apart! I took apart the room we use as a home office last spring and moved the computer into the livingroom. It fits there so well that we lost the impetus to redo the office. Also, in the middle of painting the ceiling I gashed my arm open -- that slowed me down too. But, the office is finally painted (Benjamin Moore Moroccan Red with a white ceiling and medium brown stained woodwork), and for the last few months I've been waffling about what to put on the floor. I'm concerned about allergies, the environment in general, and the environment inside our house. There's another floor that I want to replace, too, money permitting. The living room floor is eight years old and between the kids and the dogs is totally trashed. Our livingroom is at the center of our house -- it leads to a bathroom, the stairs, the kitchen, the office, and the front door opens into it. The TV is in the living room. Shutting it off to kids is not a good option, so the floor needs to survive the boys.

In the end I choose an affordable Berber for the office and then spent at least a month second-guessing myself. I looked heavily at Flor carpet squares. I wanted to like them, but I didn't love any of the options I looked at. So the Berber is being installed tomorrow. I don't feel great about it, but I do think I'll like it, as long as it isn't stinky.

And stinky brings me to the livingroom. The carpet is about eight years old and has been misused by the dog. It isn't bad in the cold weather, but once it starts to get warm and humid, the odor is noticable. I'm really struggling with this one. Affordable, environmentally sound choices don't seem to be prevalent. I'm looking at wood, currently.

A good homeschooling day

Currently my three children are productively employed. The oldest has taken pictures of Lego and has figured out how to print them, three to a page, directly from our new printer. He is planning to write a story and make a "book" with them. Earlier he listened to a Burgess Animal story, which I'll check off of Week 14 of Ambleside Online Year 2 curriculum. The five-year old is listening to a tape of the King's Singers Reluctant Dragon, and the youngest found Yahtzee and was messing around with it -- he's since packed it up and put it away (I was impressed!). About half an hour ago they all needed me at once, but they've since gotten the help that they needed, and have gotten on with their projects. I'm working on some chicken broth, knitting a sock, sewing a Tiny Happy bag, and blogging. I need to clean the kitchen.

Not all days are like this! In fact, even the rest of today won't be like this!

Kids giving gifts

This year it seemed like it was finally time for the boys to start giving gifts as well as receiving them. In past years it has felt like too much work – in fact, this year it felt like too much work, too, but it also seemed like the right thing to do. A fairly trite case of doing what was right rather than doing what was easy. So we buckled down and figured out doable projects. I thought of beaded gifts, since we have some beads around, but bracelets and necklaces were too big for me and my kids. For one thing, I have a thing about gifts – I don't want them to be clutter. So if we made jewelry, I'd want it to be wearable. But if the kids make gifts, I want them to feel ownership. I could see myself hovering and fixing, and it wasn't going to be a good thing. So only a week or so before Christmas I thought of earrings. Now earrings don't work for everyone on our gift list. They don't even work for all the women, because not all the women have pierced ears. But for the women who do, my five-year old made earrings.



You can buy pieces of wire like pins, with a head on the end to hold the beads, load it with a few beads, leaving enough wire at the end to twist around the earring finding that you can get at a craft or bead store – I got ours at AC Moore. M did the beading – he chose the beads and put them on the wire, often more than once if they fell on the floor. He made two to match. Then I wrapped the wire onto the earring finding and voila, a beautiful gift. (Although, don’t underestimate the wrapping procedure if you’re a beading newbie like me. However, since it was a gift from a five-year old, I didn’t feel perfection was necessary.)

For people who don't have pierced ears, we made bookmarks on a ribbon. These were less successful in my opinion, because I had to be involved the whole time, to help him thread the beads onto the ribbon (we used a waxed piece of thread, folded in half as the "needle"). With the earrings I could walk away while he prepared the wires, and attach them to the earring piece later – he could watch or not.

P, who is eight, had trouble with the earrings. He wanted to use big beads, which slip of the end of the wire. He didn't want to hear me tell him that if he started with small bead, it would hold the big bead on. He stuck an ugly button on the wire which looked terrible, and my perfectionist tendencies kicked in. So to cut to the chase, he drew pictures on bookmarks that we cut out of cardstock, and felt very proud of them, and I'm sure the recipients will like them too. They meet my criteria because a little piece of paper, used as a bookmark (I use old envelopes all the time) just cannot be clutter. At least not as long as people read books, which isn't a sure thing, I guess!

E, who is three, made a single gift – he climbed on my lap and said he wanted to make a present, so we did. I didn't feel that he was up to making more than that. Maybe next year.

Need more money?

Here are my options for finding more cash to pay the holiday bills, the astronomical oil heating bill, or to fund replacing the stinky living room carpet (the nine-year old dog has issues):

• Pinch the grocery budget
• Stop all (or most) discretionary spending
• Earn some/more -- get a contract job, or try to sell some sewing (kids pants and baby carriers are the top of the list). Anyone know the best way to sell things like this?
  

That's it. Nothing that isn't obvious, but sometimes I have to remind myself.

NaNoWriMo, Week 3

Today is the first day of the third week of NaNoWriMo. it's also the fifteenth of a thirty day month. So event the mathematically challenged among us can easily figure out that NaNos should be near the 25,000 word mark.

That is actually in shooting range for me, although I've had a busy week. I'm within 1667 words of 25,000.

I cracked the chapter of No Plot, No Problem that talks about week 3 this morning. Week 2 is notoriously hard, and my experience was, indeed, that it was difficult. Last nightI used a scene that I had saved in a different file to bolster my word count -- now that buffer is gone. The urge to quit is strong. Why am I doing this again?

Well, Week 3 is supposed to get easier as the story takes off on it's own. So I'm hoping that's what happens to mine. On the other hand, the support network tends to get pretty tired of this endeavor.

I'll keep pressing forward. I have no idea how I'm going to tie up my novel, but my experience has been that I can write another 1700 words (or so) each day, and move the plot forward somewhat.

Please continue to wish me luck!

NaNoWriMo update

I'm still writing. I'm on track for 50,000 words, although it's only the one-fifth benchmark at midnight.

What's easy: I don't find writing 1667 words in a day that difficult. Even when I think I'm too tired I've managed it. On the other hand. I stop when I reach that goal, which could easily come back to bite me if anything happens this month -- like, say, hosting Thanksgiving (oh yeah, we're doing that). I have a rough story. The details that are part of my own life are easy.

What's hard: actually coming up with made up stuff is hard. Creating characters is hard. Creating a reasonable story arc is hard. Filling in the mystery's details is murderous.

Please wish me luck!

NaNoWriMo

I'm looking for more outlets for my energy than houswork, cooking, and Sudoku puzzles. Every now and then the universe bops me on the head, and that's how I felt when I heard about National Novel Writing Month. Can I do it? I have no idea. But I really like the idea that you don't have to have a plot to start a novel. And since I think I would like to write fiction, and I'm not working right now (for money), this seems like the right thing to do.

So far (day 3) I'm on course for 1667 words per day (for a total of 50,000 words in 30 days). That gives me ten extra words, but who's counting (well, I am, about every thirty seconds)! I find that the power of a goal is amazing. It's only day three, so we'll see how it goes, but I think I'm out of ideas, but the word goal pushed me on. What I have is not great, but I'm pretty happy with the whole process, and I'm interested to see how the process goes.

The NaNoWriMo community is faboulous, so I have hope that when I get stuck, I'll be able to get help from them -- at least some questions to get the juices flowing again. On the down side, the boards are really slow.

Students need different tools for success

A teacher writes about school from much the same perspective that I wrote my letter. In Waging a Battle on Standardized Tests by Dan Brown in the Boston Globe today a teacher writes about his students unique needs and how the current system, with its emphsis on testing, fails to nurture students individual strengths. He writes "American public schools have more money than ever, but students are still widely denied the most crucial tools for their success: individual attention and specialized support."

No answer here, but an agreement on the problem.

NaNoWriMo Warmup

Preface

Imagine that you’re trying to write a novel – 1500-2000 words a day for a whole month. What would that be like? In the beginning, there’s the lack of a plot – or maybe just too many fractional plots. Fantasy pops into my head – like Crystal Singer or Wrinkle in Time. Or maybe an upscale romance like the Luanne Rice book I’m reading right now, or the Eileen Baker I just finished. I love historical fiction, but that seems like it would need too much research. I don’t have time for research in addition to one thousand words a day – I have a household to run and children to homeschool! I’ve been saying that there should be more romance novels (good for sex life) for married ladies. If it’s true that minivan drivers have sex only three times a month, and that romance novels improve sex life (according to Christiane Northrup), then that seems like a niche waiting to be filled. But what does that look like? If you don’t get the thrill of a new love, that makes the story much harder to write – it might even need actual skill! Yikes! Plots are what I don’t have. I can put one word after the other, I can write non-fiction, but fiction is elusive to me – I feel like it’s just out of sight of my peripheral vision, I can’t quite reach it. I have a scene written of a minivan with a mom and three kids crashing into water – my own fear. If I can include that, it’s a whole three hundred words. Woo hoo.

Alright, so it turns out I’ve already written about a thousand words – I opened my other file and found them. Of course, some of them are in the form of a list – not exactly fiction. But here’s the idea – a woman living my life (because I know that) and her daydreams of living an exciting life. She can live in a Jennifer Crusie novel, a Janet Evanovich novel, a Judith Tarr novel, a Diana Gabaldon novel. I can combine them all – how’s that for cheating! I’m not sure where the tension will be in the “real life” side, but, hey, this is all about word count, right? About people not actually throwing up when they read it? And about finding my inner fiction, because, god dammit, I’m sure it’s there. Hidden under layers of junk, but there somewhere. And, oh – I challenge myself to put in a sex scene.

Can you imagine? Delusions of grandeur already. A published novel! Ooh, that part is pretty good. Alright you – yes you, author lady! You have to actually have a plot to publish a novel! Some pretty words strung together is not enough! What a surprise. It takes actual work! So let’s say seven hundred words in the morning and seven hundred every evening. Now that the Red Sox have won the World Series, baseball season is over and there are three extra hours in every day. Of course, Christmas is also coming, but hey – two hours to write and one to plan for Christmas. If the words will flow, one hour to write might do it. Is that true? I’ll have to measure my speed some day – that will be good for a few more words.

I need to name my protagonist. Christine is a nice uptight name. But Aria is prettier. Gives her something to live up to . More Luanne Rice-like. Hmm.

What's wrong with kids these days?

A recent letter I wrote to our local paper was chosen as Letter of the Week! My pen (gift from the paper) arrived today!

Columnist David Brooks writes about the odyssey years, the years of wandering during young adulthood. He claims this wandering is a sensible reaction to the uncertainties of the modern world.

I think he comes closer to the truth when he quotes, “Young people grow up in tightly structured childhoods, but then graduate into a world characterized by uncertainty, diversity, searching and tinkering.”

How do we prepare our children for life in a world of uncertainty? By putting them in a highly structured environment for 13 or more years; by teaching them many facts, facts that are at their fingertips in this wired world, which they know how to navigate better than their elders.

We separate them from the fluid world so they don’t get the chance to figure out how they are uniquely qualified to serve the world and live a fulfilling adulthood until they are on their own. The system doesn’t encourage the creativity and innovation we need in the world today. Do children have the opportunity and encouragement to enable them to find their gifts?

If we can figure out how to structure childhood to give children a basic smattering of facts, to learn how to find out what they need to know, and, most of all, to nurture their individuality and give them the freedom to figure out where they will fit in the world, we might find that young adults had a tremendous amount to give to this troubled world.

A friend wrote me that on reading my letter her husband was convinced that they should homeschool, even though he had never considered it before.

This is, in fact, my philosophy of why we homeschool. In it's current incarnation, I do offer my kids a fair number of facts, but not for more than an hour a day or so, and they have most of the rest of the time to explore their own interests. This is what works for us now, but as time goes on my kids may need/demand something different.

I believe that every child should have the opportunity for a childhood like this, not just those whose parents have the time to nurture their individuality. I don't know what this model looks like in an institutional/mass setting. It is not a simple change by any means, but an important one. If I figure out how to work toward it for society, you'll hear more about it here.

More thoughts on Kindergarten

On a whim (or maybe it was a parental panic attack (PPA) day), I bought a used copy of My Father's World kindergarten package. Here is my review.

I'm very happy with it, but first the issues I have with it. I think it's a bit too academic in general and for my kindergartener if you do everything, and some of the crafts are a little too "canned" for my taste, but it has a fabulous list of topics and activities. Another caveat is its religious name and themes, but those can easily be omitted (or included only when they are in line with your values) without losing the value of the curriculum as a whole.

It starts with the Biblical creation story which I decided to include. I hope we will discuss many creation stories, and this one is quite beautiful. It suggests many pre-reading activities, some of which I will do, and some that I will skip. After the creation unit a week is spent on each letter of the alphabet and a science topic that begins with that letter. The list is available here. It suggests books and activities for each topic, and there is plenty of content to choose from, and plenty of content for your kindergartener to soak up. The letter flash cards are really nice, and I like the inclusion of simple games. Of the programs I've looked at (Oak Meadow and AmblesideOnline Yr 0) at this level I like this best. That said, please read the articles referenced in my other Kindergarten post about not pushing your Kindergartener too much academcally!

The recommendation in the curriculum is 90 minutes six days a week. I'm thinking I'll do more like 30 minutes at a time!