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.