Summer vacation & writing

In case you haven't noticed, dear Reader, we've been on a break. After all, even homeschoolers get to have vacation....whenever the hell we feel like it.

L has been going to a summer camp which I guess I would describe as "nature immersion", or at least as much immersion as a 5 year-old can handle. The kids spend all day out in the woods, rain or shine, learning about their environment in a very free-form playing sort of way. She's been climbing trees, wading in a stream, getting painted with mud, learning what plants taste good (and hopefully simultaneously learning which ones don't) and many other amazing things under the gentle guidance of camp counselors who don't boss her around as much as Mom does. Her best friend A is with her, and in fact A & her mom are staying with us for the month of July. T has also been in the same camp, but with me and only a couple of days a week. Not quite the dive-into-nature experience his sister is getting, but it's letting me spend quite a bit of time focussed exclusively on him, which is quite a treat for both of us. And I've learned how to build a shelter out of tree branches and leaves, so the next time you think you might need to fight for survival out in the wilderness of Central Park, invite me along.

So school has been shelved till the end of camp, and even then, while A is visiting I know it will be hard for L to really focus on anything (although maybe I could get A to "do school" with L....hmmmm, will have to think about that one). But I'm marking these three weeks down as Nature Study, so maybe it does count after all.

I had a conversation with one of the other parents in the Parent & Tot camp that I've been thinking about a lot. He is in the magazine business and I had been complaining to him about the difficulty of writing now that children absorb all my energy and focus. He commented on this blog, which he had found it by checking my email address (something I myself always do if I don't recognize the url), how great it was that I could write about a subject I was so deeply involved in and passionate about, i.e. homeschooling my kids. It's strange, but I had never thought about this blog as writing. It was just a place to unload all the things in my head at the end of the day which maybe a few of my friends would visit occasionally. I never wrote with the thought of anyone else reading it, which is totally insane, I know. I don't know how I feel about this idea. On one hand, it makes me feel better about not having published anything for past few years (I've been "collecting material"....yeah, that's the ticket!). On the other, it's not actually very well written. I don't think about the crafting of it, I don't check for cliches and run-on sentences, and half the time, I don't even know what I'm saying till I hit Publish and re-read it. Like this paragraph I've just written. It's crap, and that would be okay if I didn't think about it as anything else but an unloading of accumulated mind-crap. And why you're reading it, I really don't know.

So, do I start taking this more seriously and try to write as if I mean it? Or do I continue to take the satisfaction I get from banging this out whenever I can and simply focus on where I am right now, raising and teaching my kids? The age-old problem -- too busy worrying about tomorrow to enjoy today. Ah, shit, I should just shut up and go to bed already. Actually, I'm going to watch Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog online. Who needs sleep when you can watch Neil Patrick Harris in a musical?

Another lesson on letting go

After L's lame first day of school, I was determined to BE PREPARED for her second. I spent many hours after the kids were in bed, printing out worksheets, reading lesson plans, organizing projects. I decided that today we were going to be doing Math, Science, a read-aloud/narration session, Phonics, as well as our usual recitation of the poem of the week and reading.

We started the day downstairs in the den, where L & T cuddled up with me on the couch while I read a couple of Aesop's fables: The Wolf and the Kid, and The Tortoise and the Ducks. They were really interested and asked that I read each fable twice, though the moral lessons were as opaque to the kids as they were to me. But L got a kick out of the turtle hurtling to his death on trying to show off, so it was a good start to the day.

Bouyed by my first success, I turned to Science. After the fiasco with the Tanglewood nature study "curriculum", I had moved on to another free science course that seemed easier to prepare for: Math Science Nucleus. This curriculum was developed by a non-profit group of scientists & educators trying to bring science into classrooms. So there are detailed lesson plans, children's workbooks, basically everything you need to teach science. So I was psyched. Today's lesson was going to be on the different states of matter. I had the workbook, I'd read the lesson plan, I had rocks, water, balloons at my disposal...I was ready!

While I was gathering up the workbooks & everything I'd prepared the night before, L picked up a daddy-long-leg off the carpet and started playing with it.

"Is this a spider?" she asked.

"No honey, it's not," I answered, distracted because I'd misplaced something we needed.

"Is it related to a spider?"

"I don't really know."

"Can you look it up for me?"

I was about to tell her to put the bug down and listen to me while I lectured to her on solids, liquids, gasses and plasma, but then I realized that she was totally into this topic. She really wanted to know what it was. So I sat down at the computer and started researching daddy-long-legs and found a child-friendly site explaining what it was and how it is different from a spider. We watched the creature climb up and down her arm and she peered at it through a magnifying glass, enthralled. We ended up having her do a narration of what I had read to her about daddy-long-legs and draw a picture that she put in her nature journal.

What a wonderful surprise gift that daddy-long-leg turned out to be. It gave me the reminder that one of the beauties of homeschooling is the possibility and thrill of veering off course to discover something new. Serendipity should be a by-word here. All it takes is for me to let go. Not always easy to do, but worth it.

So the rest of the day went like that. Instead of finishing the day's program, we drove into town for lunch, then had ice cream, then went to Coxing Kills falls where the kids waded around trying to catch water bugs and fossil hunting. I consider it a day devoted to science.

The first day of first grade

Well, today is the first of our new 12-month school year, L's first grade. We had a graduation "ceremony" yesterday at L's insistence, where we all sang "Happy Graduation to You" and she passed out mini carrot cupcakes to our friends who were visiting us here in New Paltz.

I did some late night preparation for the first day, but felt pretty prepared. Ummmmm....nope. Wasn't prepared at all, it turned out. L requested that we start the day with Science. I whipped out my science curriculum, which I had copied and pasted from the Tanglewood website nature study curriculum, and all it said was "Study the movement of sun and time." I drew a total blank. Though I had read that thing over and over again in all my prep work, I never noticed that it actually doesn't tell you how to study the sun and time. Woops. I did some lame scrambling, read out loud to her from some book I found on the sun and tried to pretend we were done. L was pretty unimpressed.

Things went a little better after that--we did the introduction to the Story of The World (luckily L is excited to do it again, though we've already gone through the first few chapters already) and did a fun game identifying the continents. Later I read aloud Kipling's How the Whale Got Its Throat from the Just So stories and we did a narration.

We broke for lunch out on our deck, enjoying the sun and breeze and yummy fruit salad, then started math lessons with one from the Center for Innovation in Mathematics. It's interesting, as it introduces from the beginning mathematical concepts that most math courses save till much later on, for example, this morning's lesson on using the notations for more than, >, and less than, <. We're skipping around with that because while it brings in advanced concepts early, it also takes a long time to get to higher numbers (it gets to the number 10 only several weeks in), so will use it in conjunction with Singapore Math.

Now we're taking another break, and still have reading to finish. It's turned out to be a much longer day than I expected, but I think it will go more smoothly as we get into a rhythm and I learn how to be prepared (!). And know what to skip.

Nature study and curriculum decisions

We've been spending a lot of time up here in New Paltz. The house is so surrounded by trees and other plants that sometimes the green light sifting through makes me feel like I'm underwater.

We've started incorporating a lot more nature study into the day simply because it's such a large part of our lives here. Yesterday, L, T & I went for a walk to find a tree to "adopt". We found it on what L calls her island, a little bump in the course of the stream. I don't know what kind of tree it is yet, just that it's a bit bigger than a sapling, but not quite a mature tree, and L says it speaks to her. Through the year we'll research what species it is, look at how it appears in all the seasons, measure the trunk circumference and just generally visit it regularly and keep a record in our nature book.

The really good news of the week is that I think I'm settling into a curriculum, at least for this year. Charlotte Mason (CM) is one of the major types of homeschooling philosophies, not quite as strict and full-on as Classical Education but with more structure than unschooling. It's named for a British educator who created a philosophy around the education of children that incorporated a lot of nature study, short lessons, and learning through the reading of classic "living" books. I'm still educating myself on exactly what all this entails but what I see of it so far I'm really attracted to. (You can find out more about this philosophy here). What I like about it is that it is flexible, doesn't require us to follow a rigid schedule of courses, and incorporates much of what we already do--read classic children's literature, use narration for example.

So CM is going to be the driving philosophy behind my choices for what and how to study & teach. I'm still going to use Starfall for phonics, Singapore Math (though I'm really intrigued by this free math curriculum which I might incorporate), do nature study ála Tanglewood for science, and follow Ambleside Online's art & music schedule. For the history/geography core, I'm going to use this online curriculum, Mosaic Introduction to World History, which, on top of being free, uses Story of the World which L loves.

So now I just need to file my paperwork with the Board of Ed, figure out the bones of a schedule, and get started!

Dead bird

With all this curriculum insanity going on in my head it seems hard to focus on what this is all about, which is teaching L. Luckily, the past few days the weather has been perfect: bright, blue blue skies, breezy with just enough edge of chill that it feels good to wear a snuggly sweater but nothing more on top. Good weather means we've been spending time outside where almost everything we do serves to teach us (at least me) something. For instance, yesterday while raking the remnants of winter leaves out of the flower beds --I'm city girl and had no idea that this was even necessary till the day before when a gardener came by and was shocked at the amount of leaf crap that was smothering all the baby green things to death, but I digress-- we found a dead robin that we suspect flew into one of our windows; its neck was bent at a disturbingly unnatural angle.

We decided to give it a funeral, so L dug a little hole next to China's grave (my brother's kitty who is buried in the front yard). I gingerly scooped the little corpse up with a rake (the empty eye sockets freaked me out too much to touch even with gloves) and deposited it in the ground. The whole family assembled, we all said a few words. I gave a short lecture on how the bird would be eaten by worms and bugs and decompose so that it would become earth again. D said, "Rest in peace, birdy." T yelled, "Get up birdy! The birdy not listening to me!". And L read a very zen poem she wrote:

On a bird's death
As we don't know if it is a boy or a girl

Then we covered it up with dirt, decorated the site with flowers, maple leaves and a rock to remember it by.

One dead little bird and we got to talk about death and decomposition, write and recite poetry, and do art. Not bad for a totally unprepared afternoon.

I'm going nuts

I'm driving myself crazy researching all the curricula that's available out there. There's just too many things that look cool. I'm going to start listing the more interesting ones on the side bar. The best thing I've stumbled across recently is The Handbook of Nature Study blog. This homeschooling mom is leading a nature study course online, with weekly assignments that involve getting your kids out in nature and looking at plants and animals and birds. I love it.

It's midnight. I've been surfing online for three hours with no end in sight. Got to just pick something and shut up already.