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School/Unschool hybrid

So, I’ve told you all before about my Unschool curious ways and I said I’d let you know. We’ve been back to “School” a few weeks now so I thought I’d let you know what things look like at the moment.

First, just for my own record keeping purposes I’ve divided the year up into 6 week terms and I have them marked out on my (Google) calendar just so I can remember when things are happening. Then I have been using Evernote to record whatever we do on a given day or week. I have a notebook in Evernote for each term and I add notes to whichever term we are on most days.

Our first term started July 1 and we are in the last week of it now. In that notebook I have notes about the kids swimming lessons, my son’s sessions with his reading tutor, my oldest daughter’s attempts at baking, various art projects, day trips we’ve taken (Gettysburg!), a family vacation we went on and the various museums and things we did while we were there as well as the books we’ve been reading together either at bed time or during our morning read aloud time.

My kids didn’t even realize that school had started back because I was just recording the things they were learning about and we weren’t doing any formal school. The last two weeks, we’ve been doing some more book work so our unschooling has been more of a hybrid with our school work.

We’ve started doing our read aloud time every morning again. I found a lot of educational games and puzzles so that the little kids have something quiet to play with while we read things that are over their heads. I still try to start out read aloud time with a picture book or two just so they have something they are engaged in. I hate reading most picture books but it really does help.

Our read aloud time is really my favorite part of the day and it does take a while. I try to hit something from science, history, literature and the Bible each day.

After our read aloud time I ask my older ones to study what they like while I do some seat work with my little two. They are really excited about this right now, I have to keep them to a few pages in their work books a day. I don’t know why they are so excited but I imagine they are just happy to be included in the family activity rather than being sent off to play like they used to be. Now, my youngest does a few pages in Saxon Math Kindergarten level and Explode the Code A and then he’s done for the day. My six year old is in Explode the Code 1 and will do 2-5 pages a day. She is working on addition and subtraction in Life of Fred Butterflies and I supplement with additional exercises that she does on the whiteboard. (She loves those dry erase markers)

My 9 year old is my struggling reader and gets special tutoring for it every Tuesday. Between times, I ask him to read very simple books to me at home and I also challenge him with things that are closer to his grade level. He’s been making amazing strides forward and I want him to see his progress in the more difficult books. He’s working through Life of Fred Honey which I supplement with additional exercises. He’s enjoying
“A short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson which we are using as a science overview right now and when he’s done with his reading and math I let him play or read or explore whatever he’d like. I consider that free time the unschooling portion of his day.

My oldest spends most of her mornings lately with her watercolors. I found her a book from the library on how to use them and she’s ignored this and painted things out of the animal encyclopedia instead. She’s been recruiting the younger kids to bake with her while she explores her junior cookbook and she’s been putting together a gym class for the younger kids that involves them running around the neighborhood and doing push-ups on the deck. In the afternoons I sit down and do math with her from Khan Academy. She’s been wanting to “catch up” on a few things before starting the 7th grade math section and she seems to feel better if I’m right there with her so I’ve basically been reviewing my own 6th grade math skills for the last few weeks. She’s also reading “The Hunger Games” by Susan Collins and we’ve been following Brave Writers Boomerang study guide to hit on some grammar and writing as she reads it.

So that’s what it all looks like so far. I’m trying to give the kids lots of free time to follow their own interests while I require a few basics from them. We are still settling into the school routine so I’m hoping some more self directed learning will start to crop up with the older ones. We’ll see how it all goes…

Self care and homeschool so far

I’ve shared before that the 2017-18 school year was not our best. It wasn’t our worst but it wasn’t our best either.

I was doing a lot of stuff that I needed to do for me and time is finite. I’d let myself get into such a self care hole that I had to take a lot of time to dig myself out. So, without getting into all my various issues, here’s what I did last year.

February 2017, I started Therapy about 1x/week. Therapy is about 35 minutes away, I budget about 45 minutes (10 minutes for parking/paying/etc.) plus another 30 minutes after to journal in a quiet place by myself. I found that I couldn’t go straight from dredging up all my crap in therapy back into the chaos of my house around dinner time. It was just too much. That means that all in, Therapy takes 3 hours out of my week.

October 2017, I start CrossFit because I started to realize how much I’ve let my strength and physical condition go. It turns out, if the most athletic thing you do over the course of about 10 years is give birth (which cannot be discounted), your strength and muscle tone and general physical condition go downhill pretty drastically. This has lots of implications for the regular, non athletic things that you want to do. Things like be able to keep up with your kids at the park or be able to bend down to tie their shoes or get up off the floor. I started CrossFit because there’s always someone telling me what to do and it was super close to my house. Each session is an hour plus shower/recovery time when I get home. The class I went to was at 9, I’d get home at 10 and actually be ready to start doing school stuff by 10:30-11, depending on how badly my butt had been kicked at CrossFit. That means no getting started until nearly 11am 2-3 times per week.

Then I overdid things at CrossFit and ended up with some tendinitis issues that made it difficult to do little things like sit or stand. I started seeing my doctor with more regularity to address these issues and even when those appointments aren’t long, they still take little bits of time out of our week.

Then there’s all the regular stuff like co-op, field trips, dentist appointments, occasional illnesses, etc. All of this eats into our school hours.

So, what is a homeschooling mom to do? Do you ditch school and take care of yourself or do you say screw it to self care and focus on the kids while you deteriorate? Neither of these is a good option.

So here’s the thing, I know how hard it is to do self care when you have little ones dripping off of you. I used to read those silly cliches like “you can’t pour from an empty cup” or “put on your own mask first” and roll my eyes because it’s so freaking hard to get yourself to the gym or therapy or anywhere when you have little ones. I totally get that and I’ve been there.

But here’s the other thing, you matter too. Your mental and physical health matter too. You are not just a caretaker and educator. You are a person and your health is important and it’s worth taking time for. When you neglect it, you neglect you and you settle for less than you could be. That will have consequences. It may not be today or tomorrow but a day of reckoning will come.

That day of reckoning will look different for a lot of us but it will come in one way or another. Mine came in decreased mobility and energy and a decreased ability to handle my life. It came in a shortened temper and a stressed out marriage. None of those things had to happen, they are not inevitable consequences of being a wife, mother or homeschooler. They come when you would rather watch Netflix and eat than think your own thoughts or deal with your sadness. I used TV to numb myself out because I was too mentally tired from carrying my baggage to actually deal with things enough to be able to put it down.

So, here is the kernel of advice that all of my bloated prose has been leading up to.

Take care of yourself, even when it’s hard.
Understand that it is worth it, even when it’s hard.
Find ways to make it work, even when it’s hard.

This is the advice that I wish I had heeded in the years before I hit my day of reckoning. I read a thousand blog posts about the need for self care, probably written by women who were then at the stage where I am now. I didn’t listen to them then, I don’t know if you’ll listen to me now, but it’s important for me to say.

We are making all this work now by letting go of some stuff, like housework and BS expectations. I’ve been letting the kids choose an educational show to watch while I’m at the gym or in Therapy. Lately they’ve been choosing Popular Mechanics for Kids which I highly recommend. Then I’ve been trying to let the kids choose the things they want to study because it means that they will continue to study even when I’m not there. My oldest taught herself to needle felt this year with literally no help from me. We have also outsourced a few things. My second is seeing a reading tutor and making terrific progress. My littlest ones spend a lot of time playing with legos and making messes and (feel free to judge) watching too much TV because that’s how we are handling things right now. Our life is a work in progress.

However you need to do this, it’s worth it. Wake up early, go to bed later (pick just one of those), hire a babysitter, ask the hubs to come home earlier or take over bed time, find a way to exercise with your kids, just find a way and stick to it. Don’t quit on yourself when it’s hard, find ways to make it easier, or find the fortitude to do it anyway.

You. Are. Worth. it.

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Unschool unsure

So…we are considering unschooling this coming year. I have 4 kids from preschool to 7th grade and managing all their activities and school work is a monstrous task. I can’t really keep up. All this year I felt like I was failing everyone because I couldn’t spend enough time with my little ones, I couldn’t make sure my 9 year old actually did everything he was supposed to and I couldn’t provide enough to keep my oldest one challenged. I did little bits of all of those things but it wasn’t ever enough and I’ve just felt like a giant failure all year.

I don’t want another year like this one.

So I’m trying to figure out a way that my kids can be in charge of their own learning and need less one on one time from me so that I can do all the things I need to do (cook, clean, laundry, write, knit, read something, think my own thoughts, go to the gym on occasion, life) and their education isn’t compromised.

I’ve also been pretty frustrated at my kids lack of retention on the things that I’ve spent hours and hours teaching. I will go to great lengths, spend many dollars on curricula, find activities, buy supplies and engineer a great educational experience that they forget a week later. I don’t want to do that anymore.

Added to that, my kids seem to hate school. They always talk about it in a negative way. I don’t want that for them. I don’t want them to spend their childhood doing stuff they hate and I don’t want to spend my life forcing them to do stuff they hate. No one wins with that.

So, we are looking at unschooling.

For those unfamiliar, unschooling is a term coined by John Holt and it’s been around since the 70’s. It refers to a set of educational philosophies that basically boil down to allowing your kid to learn what they need to know by studying the things they are interested in. When they study what they are passionate about they then retain more of what they learn and they don’t have to be forced to learn, they want to. It works with a child’s natural curiosity rather than working against it.

From the reading and podcast listening that I’ve done, it might look something like a student gets really fascinated by Greek mythology so he reads everything he can about it and he might spend some time learning to sew so that he could make a Hermes costume and then he might spend some time studying ancient Greek culture to see where those myths come from and what they say about that culture. Then he might spend some time learning about the geography of Greece which then makes some of the myths make a bit more sense and then he might spend some time learning the techniques of Greek pottery and then move on to the legacies of Greek culture from vocabulary to democracy. So there he has learned reading, history, home ec, vocabulary, art and civics all by studying something that he was interested in on his own.

I love the idea of all of that but…and this is a really big but…I don’t want the inmates running the asylum. I want my kids to have more freedom, but I’m still the mom. I don’t want them watching Netflix until their eyes bleed. I’m not sure how to give them lots of freedom without giving them enough rope to hang themselves with. Also, I want them to know math.

My goal in homeschooling has always been for my kids to have as many options open to them as they want when they get to the end of their schooling with me. If they want to go to trade school and be a mechanic, that’s great. I just don’t want them choosing that route because they weren’t adequately prepared for college so they didn’t feel that it was available to them. Be a mechanic because you want to be a mechanic, not because you couldn’t be an engineer.

So, I want them to enjoy their education. I want them to be free to discover their passions and talents. I also want them to know math. But I want them to feel free to study the things that interest them most. I don’t know how I put all of those things together and still have them ready to take the SAT in 4 short years. I don’t know what that looks like. But I want all of those things for them so I’m going to keep trying to figure it out. This will probably be messy.

This boy decided to learn about the history of boats and he made this presentation for the project fair. I love that it’s messy but he did it all on his own. I helped him look up a few things but otherwise I was pretty hands off. If only every school day could look like project fair day.

Follow your Bliss???

I went to a talk in Pittsburgh last week. I got lost twice on the way there and then went around the block three times before I found the parking garage which was far more obvious than I was expecting. I told you real life was messy, especially so when you are me. I was there 20 minutes late but I was able to get the gist of what this very fancy educational guru was talking about.

Said guru’s name is Ted Dintersmith and he’s written a couple of books on education. I’m reading one of them now and it’s making me want to completely change the way we home school next year. I feel like this is a frequent thing for me to feel toward the end of a school year so bear with me if this is a passing phase.

Mr. Dintersmith talked a lot about empowering teachers to do what was necessary to engage their students passions. He said that our economy has changed and we need to teach students to channel their creativity through their passions to be the innovators of tomorrow. He explained that the way our schools were set up was to produce reliable employees who didn’t mess up and performed their job without complaint. Our country was in the middle of the industrial revolution at the time so we needed people who could reliably do a job. Our economy doesn’t look the same as it did back then but our schools use the same structure and system. Technology and automation have driven many of those rote jobs out of existence so now we need to find other uses for ourselves.

The way we do that is through creativity and innovation so we need lots of creative and innovative people. The problem is that our schools are turning out lots of graduates who would be really good at memorizing facts and taking tests but who’ve had all the creativity drummed out of them in the interest of remembering the answer to a series of useless tests.

The basics of our education system as it stands do not work for this new economy and policy makers keep coming up with silly ways of trying to patch this leaky boat. Now we have more and more standardized testing, our teachers are evaluated on how well their students do on these tests and larger and larger portions of the school day are taken up by prepping for and taking these tests on which we base so much.

Mr. Dintersmith posits that maybe the test doesn’t matter as much as we think it does. In the age of the internet when the whole body of knowledge for the entire human race is available at our fingertips, why do we need to have all that information stored in our heads to be recalled on a test and then completely forgotten about a moment later? If we need to know about the war of 1812 in our future life, we can look it up. Why would we need to memorize its starting and ending dates? Is this really the best use of our students time?

It’s what we do with the knowledge that we have that will make us successful later on. How do we take our knowledge of history or math or literature and turn it into something that is actually relevant and needed in our life today? So maybe what we need to be doing is allowing kids to show us what they are really interested in and then teaching them the full depth and breadth of that topic. This could cover may different disciplines and students would actually end up retaining more information than if they were just told to learn about these things.

For instance, every year our homeschool group does a project fair. The kids all pick a topic and do their own research and then have to present it to some judges (other people’s parents) who tell them what a great job they did. This year my daughter did needle felting. She takes wool and shapes it and agitate it until it’s the proper size and shape that she wants and creates all these cute little sculptures usually of animals. To do this for the project fair we looked at the biological properties of wool (each strand has microscopic scales, did you know that?), micron count (how soft and fine it is) and the history of felting (shepherds in the middle east stuffed wool in their sandals to give them some padding, when they finished their journey, the wool was felted and probably pretty smelly.) These things will stick with my girl far longer than if I’d read her something out of a text book or made her look it up because the curriculum said she was supposed to do that next.

I couldn’t help but think that I’ve missed a lot of opportunity here. I am already empowered to engage my student’s passions. I have the freedom and the opportunity as a homeschooler that most public school teachers can only dream of and I haven’t used it to its fullest advantage. I allow my kids to engage their passions (outside of extracurricular lessons) on one school event a year.

All this has got me to thinking, what would it look like if our whole homeschool was more like project fair? What if my kids were allowed to follow their passions and I was more their cheerleader and helper and less their teacher and taskmaster? If I am serious about wanting to give my children the best education that I can, why am I not taking advantage of the freedom we already have and turning them loose on the vast stores of human knowledge? Why am I worrying about my kids keeping up with a system that is failing the kids in it? Shouldn’t we be playing a different game here?

So, all that is a lot of questions and I’m working on answering them. They all seem like leading questions but I honestly don’t know how all this will look or if it will work for our family but I find myself more and more convinced that the way forward in our homeschool doesn’t look like our previous years of schooling. My kids need less of my educational priorities and more of their own for them to be effectively learning.

She’s got crazy eyes

It’s still September, this month will not end. Every mom I know, home schoolers, public schoolers, private school, doesn’t matter, every single one has crazy eyes this month. We all are getting our kids back into a routine and there aren’t enough hours in any day and never enough days in the week for all the stuff that seems like such a good idea at the end of August.

Here’s the run down in our family. Monday we do school. Tuesday we have co-op all day, we get home about 40 minutes before the Walnut has dance. Wednesday the Peanut has horseback writing lessons while the other kids and I do school at a nearby coffee shop. We usually end up running errands in the afternoon so that day is about done. Peanut does some school work in the car on the way to and from all of this. Thursday we do school until we have Music in the afternoon. Friday we have Odyssey of the Mind in the afternoon. So we really only have one day where all we do is school. The beautiful schedule I had worked out in August got blown up when September hit. I honestly don’t know how to make this all work.

I talked about it with the kids today between horsey lessons and our monthly stop at the nursing home where we practice public speaking. We were eating our lunch on the grass at the side of their parking lot because that is our life right now. I told them how hard this schedule was for me. I told them I wanted them to have a happy school year but that we needed to get things done too. They told me they were having a good time this year and that they wanted to keep it up.

sophie horse

See that picture, this girl is doing something she really loves. She gave up art lessons so she could brush sweat off a smelly beast, I don’t understand that but I respect it.

libby balet

This is my Walnut doing something else I don’t understand but that she loves. Who cares if it’s on our busiest day? Who cares if my feet are weeping after a day of managing a great big co-op? She is doing something that she loves so how could I not make that happen?

OMSpontaneous

Look at all that wacky creativity happening here! This is part of Odyssey of the Mind and I love it, my kids love it. This one is a no-brainer for us. They solve problems, they work as a team, they get creative, what’s not to like?

And this is how we do it, we love all the things so we get over-scheduled and family and school and those beautiful, unstructured hours of childhood get pushed to the side. I’m keeping it to a minimum but it still feels like too much.

So for now at least, we press on and hope that all this busyness starts to feel like our new normal pretty soon. Hopefully the crazy eyes can be hidden by makeup.

Ditching my planner

Every year I think, “This is the year, I’m going to get really organized and do all the right things because this is my year!!!!” I’ll leave it to your imagination how well that works.

One year I happened to find a teacher planner in the dollar section at Target that worked really well when I only had to fit two kids into those little boxes. I could’t find it again and even if I could have, it would be hard to fit three different kids into it. Last year I did bullet journaling which worked surprisingly well for my disorganized self. My only problem was long term planning with that. Day to day was great but then I’d forget that a BIG HUGE EVENT was coming and not be prepared.

This year I got a trail membership of Homeschool Planet and at first I really liked it. I could plan our regular routine out so that I didn’t spend the first twenty minutes of each day figuring out what we were going to do that day. Each day, assignments would just pop up, cool right. However, I started to feel really pressured to complete our list each day and then we have all these activities that take up huge chunks of our day and we end up working on school work after dinner. I HATE that.

None of this is Homeschool Planet’s fault, I did really like it but I think maybe, for my own mental health (always a fragile thing) I should not have a planner like it. It made it way too easy to make my expectations too big for our family to handle and we started missing the flexibility and spontaneity of homeschooling. Maybe I’ll revisit this all when we get to highschool but as long as I can, I want to keep those things a part of our homeschool.

So, I’m going back to the Bullet Journal and I resolve to use my google calendar for long range things and here’s hoping I will forget fewer things.

My point in all my ramblings here is not to recommend a type of planning or any particular system but only to encourage you all to do whatever you need to do to keep yourself sane because, no matter what kind of education you give your children, the biggest impact on your children will be from you. Don’t get me wrong, education is important, I wouldn’t be doing all this if it weren’t. But its nothing compared to family. Do what you need to do to be happy in your home schooling, find ways to make it joyful for yourself as well as your kids. If you are making yourself miserable by running around to 15 thousand activities and still expecting your tiny ones to diagram sentenses with precision, you’re probably making your kids miserable too and that is not how you want them to remember their childhood or their education.

So find ways to make the whole family happy. Ditch the planner or the activity or the curriculum that makes you both miserable. Find another option. Your life and their childhood is too short to do otherwise.

What Homeschooling looks like some days

9am; Peanut suddenly finds a deep well of compassion for our ailing chicken Marge. This coincides with my stated desire to start our school day.

9:14, We finally sit down for “Read Aloud time” and all is well.

10ish; we finish read aloud and begin our history work. Peanut is doing hers independently so she’s on her own and I read to the Cashew and the Walnut.

10:25, We hit a wall when they actually have to do something. Cashew has to label things on a map, which apparently should have been mentioned in the Geneva convention.

11, That’s right, it took 35 minutes to label 7 things on a map. Can you guess what delights were next in our history lesson? Go on, guess what is next for the kid who hates moving a pencil across paper. Give up? It’s copy work! He has to copy the definition for the word just.

11:01, The Filburt is running around the living room playing loudly and enticing the Peanut to play with him. She is only too happy to have the distraction and is joining in. I intervene. Cashew and Walnut are finding every possible way to avoid their small bits of copy work. It’s too hard, it’s too much, their pencil smells weird, their bladder has shrunk to the size of a thimble, their page won’t lay flat, Etc.. It’s fun, homeshooling is fun.

11:23, I get so frustrated with the delay and bad attitude that I kick everyone out for a break. I think what I actually said was, “Get out! Get out of my house! Go!” I had that nice shrill edge to my voice that makes me remember Snow White’s Evil Step-Mother. That’s just what I always hoped I’d sound like when I thought about having kids.

We stop for lunch at noon and I sit with a book unseen in my hands and contemplate what I’m doing with my life. I do NOT drink anything stronger than coffee.

1:03, We get back to it and some miraculous body snatchers have stolen my children. The Cashew cheerfully heads to his room for his reading time. The Peanut finishes her short essay about monasticism. The Walnut works through her phonics pages like lightening. WHAT IS HAPPENING?!?

1:15, The Cashew apparently thought I said he was done for the day. I said he could be done with reading when he finished x number or pages. Stubborn fussing ensues and I start to feel more curious about the public school.

2pm, we’ve made it through spelling! Cashew did great! He didn’t get bogged down by little mistakes, he got most things right, he seemed like he was actually understanding the concept of short vowels. Peanut has discovered the idea of a timeline and is entering every historical event she can think of. The Walnut and Filburt are happily ensconced in front of the TV watching something educational. I can finally get to the laundry and dishes.

2:30, Peanut has finished her daily reading and timeline fun so we dig into spelling and grammar. She sails through both and I remember why I love homeschooling. My children need someone to stick with them through the hard stuff and see them through to the other side. I get to be that person for them. I get to take the time to fight through our troubles with them and get to the other side where we all like each other again. The view from that side is pretty great so I think we’ll do this again tomorrow.

Except that tomorrow is Co-op day and someone else has to teach them for a little while!!!

Messy Homeschooling

This is a place for those of us in the trenches of homeschooling our kids. I think of this blog as one big love letter to the frazzled, over scheduled, harried moms out there. We struggle to find time to give our kids that magical education we envisioned when we first dreamed of homeschooling. This is the place where that dream meets the reality of never enough time in swiftly passing days. It’s where our ideals meet the honest to goodness reality of our actual children.

I’ve followed a few homeschool Instagramers. Their photos are beautiful, their children are well dressed and studious, their homes are gorgeous and well kept. They always have coffee sitting next to their well organized planners. They have great ideas and I find some value from keeping those ideals in my mind but they do not reflect my reality.

My homeschool looks more like me dragging myself out of bed when a three year old informs me that I’m required to wipe his bottom. I blearily get myself dressed(ish) and ready and I head downstairs where my older kids are already halfway through breakfast. I settle a few fights while I brew my coffee and cruise facebook. I clean up breakfast and ring the bell (yes, I have an actual bell) and read to my kids. I convince them that we really do need to do school, yes, we all do. We go through the schedule that I’ve convinced myself we can do. If we don’t have any appointments we might actually finish.

It’s more likely that we have music lessons or co-op or Odyssey of the mind or dance or a field trip. In that case our day begins with a blaring iphone and a faster breakfast, a harried hunt for shoes and me carrying about 15 tote bags to the car.

I realize that none of this makes homeschooling sound at all attractive. It’s messy and hard and there are days when I see that big yellow bus and I wonder why on earth I’m doing this instead of off making some money or doing yoga or something. But then I get to have a really great discussion about the fall of Rome with my big kids or my little ones need my help to make a medieval hat like they saw in a book. I get to be the one there to have those conversations and participate with them as they learn.

Those moments are what brings me back to it even when its hard and those are the moments this blog will be about. These moments and all the messy, beautiful, hard times in between without the censorship of a photo-op.