Long time, no blog

I can't believe it's been so long since my last post. Pix coming soon...

Gentleschoolers, start your engines!

We officially start kindergarten tomorrow.

Egad!

I've got a notebook outlining the stuff we'll be covering (reading, writing, math, Spanish) along with afternoon activities (arts & crafts, field trip ideas, games, etc.). I've got a giant box filled with school and art supplies--paints, construction paper, rulers, glitter, lined paper, workbooks, modeling clay, you name it. I've got a list of the specific learning outcomes I'm shooting for K-S to achieve by the year's end, which I've based loosely on the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for Kindergarteners. (We're trying to overshoot where possible; if I can't do a better job of teaching my kid than an underfunded public school, I'm in big trouble.)

I've also got a freezer full of food that will buy me a "night off" at least once a week for the next couple of months--granny-licious fare like homemade lasagna and sweet-and-sour meatballs and beef-and-veggie soup and blueberry cobbler and sugar cookies. (The kind of stuff I grew up on but eschewed pre-kid when I actually had time to chop eight different kinds of vegetables for a single side dish.) On account of I won't just be homeschooling this fall, but finishing up a master's degree in education that won't leave me more than a couple of nanoseconds of spare time to whip up something to feed us.

So why am I all googly-moogly inside?

K-S is excited, as I've told her we'll get to do more "fun stuff" in kindergarten than we did before--including math, which for some reason she's fixated on these days. (Must've skipped a generation :-) And we made a special end-of-summer brunch today--homemade sausage and angel biscuits--to celebrate our new undertaking.



So I'm ready. K-S is ready. Husband is the most ready of all: he never stopped the music lessons he started with K-S last year, and he enrolled her in jiu jitsu at the beginning of the summer (music and P.E. are both subjects he got dibs on), so he's not even sure what The Big Deal is all about.

And still, I'm all googly-moogly...

How "real" teachers do it

Homeschooling is a lonely business.

K-S and I are getting out more these days, beating the bushes for other homeschoolers and hooking up at museums and parks. I'm on a couple of online homeschool groups and lists, I subscribe to a couple of homeschool-related magazines, and I have a growing library of books on education in general (and homeschooling in particular). All of these have been crucial in strengthening my resolve and maintaining my sanity.

But on a day-to-day basis, it's just us.

With no active homeschool group in the area (I'm not counting the one that wants to pry into my personal relationship with the Big Guy Upstairs) it's tough to get a feel for what's normal.

Yes, I know K-S is unique. Yes, I know the whole point of homeschooling is to Do What Works For Your Family. Blah, blah, blah. That's not how I work. I work by researching as much as I can, making sense of what I find, and then choosing and adapting what I believe is the best approach.

Take reading, for example. I know what I'm doing with K-S, and why. And I know how far she's gotten, and what she struggles with. What I don't know is where she fits on the spectrum of "normal." (Yes, yes, there's a wide range of variability at this age, but there's also Something Seriously Isn't Right Here.) What could I be doing better? Are there things I haven't thought of? Approaches I could learn from and adapt?

All this wind-up is to say how excited I was to come across Annenberg Media Teacher Resources. This site might not be big news to folks with televisions, but for me, it's a bonanza. It offers a wealth of educational workshops and documentaries (most of which I suspect have aired on PBS) for instant viewing: how to teach art, how to teach math, how to teach reading, and a gazillion more. Science. Geography. Algebra!

Some of them you can buy on DVD, but a lot of them are free, such as this Teaching Reading K-2 video that shows a "teach the teachers" workshop. You get to see teachers conducting reading exercises with kindergarten, first grade, and second grade classrooms. You get to see what they're doing and why, what they could improve, and how their students respond.

Best of all, you get to see that you're right on track--and that your very own K-S is doing as well as you secretly thought.

Ouch!

Here's a biology question for you. How do you look up a weird-looking thingmajig--make that a weird-looking thingmajig that stings to high heaven--if you don't know what to call it?

You google it, of course. (Am I the last one on the planet to find Google Images?)

Turns out the headless, legless "mouse" that nailed K-S awhile back is actually called a puss caterpillar, although it's sometimes referred to as a stinging asp and, in our neck of the woods, un perrito (a "little dog").

Also turns out the sting it delivers via cleverly hidden spines is bad news, with pain lasting for up to a couple days and implications for the unfortunate sting-ee's lymphatic system.

Poor K-S didn't get hit quite that hard, but she did complain of pain for hours after her encounter with Mr. Puss--and this is a kid whose pain threshold his so high that if she cries, it's 100% certain there's blood spurting out of her somewhere.

Not quite as Norman Rockwell an encounter as the nest full of cheeping baby birds we watched being fed by their mother yesterday morning--but then who ever said education is supposed to be painless?

Crafty us

Picture someone who thinks remembering to put paper towels on the table is "haute dining." (That's me.)

Now picture this someone giving birth to Martha Stewart in miniature (that's K-S).

I never got the whole "craft thing" before K-S came along. I mean, seriously, who in her right mind would spend an entire afternoon gluing crap to paper plates? Thinking up ways to adulterate egg cartons? Painting a bunch of perfectly good recyclables, just to throw them away a couple days later?

Well....(ahem)...as it turns out...me.

It's astonishing that it never occurred to me, before we Officially Declared Homeschooling Status, how much kids learn by making stuff. For example:

• Math. K-S draws, traces, colors, and cuts out two-dimensional shapes, such as circles and squares and triangles. She decides whether to make her shapes and drawings bigger or smaller. She constructs three-dimensional figures, such as boxes and cones, and sees in action concepts like volume and area (although I haven't introduced the nomenclature yet). She calculates the number of legs she still has to add to her insect, or how many eyes a "tomato ogre" should have. She counts the number of stitches she's sewn or knitted, and how many she still has to go to finish.
  
• English. Sometimes, K-S's drawings need dialogue balloons with short messages--and an artist's got to do what an artist's got to do. Other times, K-S's stuffed animals misbehave, so she has to construct signs that tell them to cut it out (for example, Don't Hurt the Sea Creatures). Before a neighborhood walk, K-S likes to take a paper bag and write on it all the things she hopes to find and put in the bag. These lists are sometimes accompanied by sketches.
• Spanish. Several of K-S's drawings (and stuffed animals) speak Spanish, apparently
  
• Biology. We don't do much in the way of formal copy work yet, although we'll get to that eventually. For now, K-S relies on the insects and plants and fruits and animals she's seen in the yard, on walks, in the zoo. Some days, it's important to her to get all the details right, so without any prompting for me she's gotten good at remembering and recalling the exact salmony-white of a green anole's skin flap and the precise, eery blue of a cicada's eyes. Easy crafts like adding food coloring to flower water demonstrate biological concepts (water uptake in plants, and by extension nutrition in humans).
• Social studies. Crafts are a natural choice for holidays and other cultural events, which opens the door to discuss stuff like religion (Easter), geography (Halloween in the U.S. vs. Mexico's Day of the Dead), civics (Fourth of July), ad infinitum.
  

All this in addition to the obvious fine-motor/language/science/self-esteem stuff kids learn by crafting, such as how to maniulate scissors, how to distinguish gradations of hue and saturation, how liquids and solids affect each other (homemade playdough and papier mache are good for this), and how to make something beautiful out of whatever's handy.

K-S was in the bathroom recently while I was replacing the TP roll.

Hey! she yelled excitedly. We can make something with that!

There was a time in my life when a reaction like that would have struck me as embarrassing.

These days?

Yeah! I yelled right back. Let's save it in the craft box!

Thinking like a teacher

Now that we're "officially" homeschoolers, I find my brain works differently.

Take last weekend, for example. It was Father's Day, but it was also summer solstice.

K-S and I made Dad some gingerbread with whipped cream (for breakfast, because we are wild women) after which K-S presented Dad with a homemade pop-up card and some cork coasters she'd cut out and stuck tape on and then painted. (Who can't use a nice set of coasters?)

The old me would have left it at that.

But now that we're homeschooling, I'm thinking differently. I'm thinking like a teacher. Summer solstice, I'm thinking, is a great time for introducing concepts related to the sun and the earth and the seasons.

I googled and found some nice, basic explanations of the solstice on the BBC web site. I found a few more relaxed "lesson plans" on this Waldorf-inspired blog.

We ended up somewhere between YouTube videos and naked bonfire dancing. (Honestly, if I had room in the backyard for a bonfire....)

Here's what we did. I told K-S to come up with a sun. (She settled on yellow construction paper and yellow chalk.) I had her blow up a blue balloon, and then used a magic marker to draw an equator, a couple of poles, and the continents--with a big fat X over the little patch of ground we call home.

Then we took turns being the sun, who stood in the middle of the living room; and the earth, who revolved around the sun, spinning to make the days and bellowing out the year each time she whipped past the stereo.

After we were both dizzy, I got out a flashlight and showed her what summer solstice, equinox, and winter solstice look like from outer space. (Well, you know. Reasonable facsimile.)

It was fun. It cost maybe 8 cents and took maybe ten minutes. And while I'm pretty sure K-S wouldn't be able to explain in great detail today the concepts we covered last weekend, I do know she'll recognize the concepts when she hears them again in about three months.

That confidence is part of my newly-wired teacher's brain, too.

Nature is disgusting!

One of the things that's struck me over the last couple of years is the reaction so many parents have to their children interacting with the natural world.

I can't tell you how many times I've heard moms at parks and in backyards yelling at their kids for picking up sticks (you could put your eye out!), touching plants (it could be poisonous!), inspecting bugs (it could bite!), and playing in dirt (you'll get filthy!).

Perhaps the saddest--and the weirdest---was the playground mom who brayed like a drill sergeant at her skittish 4-year-old son for daring to stamp in a shallow rain puddle. You should have seen the poor little thing flinch.

Sanitized for Your Protection

Ironically, afterschool (and in-school) programs in our area seem to be packed to the rafters with "nature" classes.

Feed the fish, one such class description read. Hands-on activities. Learn what makes fish different from other animals.

The zoo that offered this particular Saturday morning class has a decent fish/amphibian exhibit, and K-S (for some reason) was obsessed at the time with what kinds of diseases fish get, so I signed her up--and was more than a little cheesed when I picked her up and discovered the students swilling kool-aid and watching an animal show on TV. (The "hands-on activities" turned out to painting handprints on white paper and touching an old snakeskin.)

Reason #103 why we homeschool.

Yeah, I know it's cheaper and easier and less lawsuit-provoking to show kids pictures of fish than actually let them see and smell and touch fish.

But it's also teaching them on a deep, intrisic level that nature is something apart, something to be kept at a remove. A kid who grows up differentiating between the bugs in his backyard and the bugs on the Nature Channel will never resolve that schism, nor--if you want to be dramatic about it--be able to integrate the part of himself rooted in the natural world.

Up Close and Personal (and Smelly As All Get-Out)

Reason #14 why we homeschool is that most adults (including the elementary-school teachers we run into from time to time) don't listen to kids.

When I dropped K-S off for her zoo class, for example, the first thing she did was make a beeline for the instructor and ask him what kind of diseases fish get. Instead of answering her, he told her that zoo fish were all healthy and walked away.

I understand that no teacher can take time to answer every question a roomful of hyper 4-year-olds asks. God knows I can barely keep up with the questions K-S asks some days. But the fact is, it doesn't take a lot of being ignored before a kid will quit asking.

Bugs or Bust

I place few restrictions on K-S when it comes to nature stuff. She happily soaks herself with the hose, covers herself with mud, and picks up lizards, cockroaches, grubs, and worms. (I draw the line at spiders, some of which are bad news where we live--and taught her at age 3 how to tell a spider from everything else.)

She found several tomato hornworms recently and we decided to keep them in a terrarium until they did their pupa thing.

To be honest, I'm not exactly nuts about caterpillars, and even less enthused about having pupae hanging around the house. But K-S is enthused, and after I did a little research on these caterpillars I decided to go for it--and was amazed to find myself fascinated with the way they transform from green squishy-looking things into brown, leathery, segmented-looking things before they burrow into the dirt for their final stage.

Best of all, K-S gets to ask as many questions as she likes. And get answers.