I knew this would happen

Just as I predicted--I had about a month's worth of blog material, and now I've petered out. Actually, I just can't seem to stay up after the kids go to bed. As a lifelong insomniac, when I'm sleeping well, I take full advantage.

I think the stars must be aligned, things are going along so smoothly. My husband hasn't had much work and we've actually had a lovely week of making dinners together, something we used to really enjoy doing. He usually works evenings, so it is usually me and the kids for dinner, and we eat a LOT of baked potatoes or quesadillas or quiche with smoothies. Grandma O came over for dinner last night and it was such a pleasure to have a yummy but simple meal with all four of us and my always enjoyable mother-in-law. 

Other pluses: the weather has been beautiful, the bathroom remodel is done (!!), and at work we're getting really good feedback from experts on the review we just completed. Everyone in our circle of awareness is healthy and well, and the bills are paid. OK, we may be stuck in a dreadful, unwinnable war, our health care system is in a total shambles, glaciers are melting at alarming rates, and corporate greed is controlling our domestic and foreign policy. But hey, isn't it still OK to feel some contentment with my small little corner of the world? I'll try to get out and fight the fight tomorrow.

Building Big

We've been doing some really cool activities based on the PBS series Building Big with our homeschool group. The images above are of a skyscraper made of only two pieces of newspaper (the straws were added later and aren't necessary to keep it standing up) made by M and me, and a suspension bridge made by A which really and truly is a suspension bridge. The blue construction paper towers are the top aren't the support towers, the backs of the chairs are the support towers. Unfortunately the road part is made of construction paper, so it isn't very stiff or heavy and won't pull the cables all that tight. But I'm excited that she really got how the cables are anchored, and go up and over a tall strong tower, and then other cables go down to the part that people go across. Everyone around here is jazzed up about building things now, and I think we're going to have to build the geodesic dome from newspaper for science club sometime soon--it looks like an extremely cool project.

Darn, I wish I could figure out how to intersperse text and pictures. All the pictures wound up at the top and I couldn't move them.

Tonight at gymnastics M discovered that he and his favorite buddy there have the same favorite movie: Singing in the Rain! What were the chances of that?? Two 1st-grade Donald O'Connor wannabes. We've got to set up a playdate with this kid! Or at least a matinee musical and popcorn...

The Summer Day

Just a quickie today. I read a wonderful poem I have to share by Mary Oliver titled The Summer Day. It fits my current homeschooling mood. Read it here.

Chaucer

There is a great scene in The Music Man where the mayor's wife dresses down the librarian for encouraging the teenagers of the town to read "smutty books", like those by Chaucer, Balzac, and Revale. I don't know who the last two are, but I did read Chaucer in high school and I certainly didn't remember anything remotely "smutty", so I thought it was a big joke. Well, we just read a retelling of some of Canterbury Tales for kids and I'm sure the mayor's wife would not be pleased! Talk about potty humor! Bare bottoms, farts, visitors sneaking into teenage daughter's beds at night to "snuggle," high humor to my kids.

Isn't it rather funny that I didn't notice any of this when I read it? I thought I really did read it at the time, but apparently I didn't actually understand that Old English. And, you'd think I would have caught the clue that there might be something juicy. The summer before we were supposed to read it for school, my friend and I saw that the movie Canterbury Tales was playing so we decided to go see it. When we got to the box office, however, they wouldn't sell us tickets because it was rated X. You'd think this would aroused my curiosity about the book, but apparently not, because I didn't remember a thing about it beyond the first 10 lines that I had to memorize.

Makes me want to check out Balzac and Revale, whoever they are.

To Each His (and Her) Own

I began working on reading with M last year, when he was five. He was not especially interested in reading, and I didn't think I was feeling impatient to work on reading, but somehow one of us came up with the idea of me tickling him if he'd read to me, which he absolutely loved. We just did simple, phonetic, mostly 3-letter words, and he made steady progress. A year later, he's made definite progress, but reading is hard and he would still be considered a beginning reader. Somewhere along the way the tickling dropped off, and then we hit a low point last week. 

He was supposed to be reading aloud to me while I was making dinner, a simple book designed for beginning readers, but nevertheless a little harder than what he was ready for. After a few minutes of reading, with lots of struggling, he was quiet. I looked over after a minute or so and saw his head bowed, hands covering his face, crying quietly. I sat down next to him and he just cried and cried. He was so deeply discouraged it absolutely broke my heart. Poor little guy, he is so bright and happy and capable, and his steady progress shows me that reading is something he will learn in his own time without special intervention. I know he'll ask for the help he needs, when he wants it. I just can't see anything helpful right now in pushing him to read any more than he naturally wants to. I'm so glad he doesn't go to school and has to be faced with this kind of discouragement and pressure five days per week. I can just see it crushing the love and life out of this sweet little guy. There is so much to be learned without reading, and he embraces it all with enthusiasm and with no need for me to push anything on him.

On the other hand, almost-11-year-old A spent this evening exploring with me the possibility of doing some full-on rigorous academic schoolwork. She said she want to be pushed more, to use her brain more. She wants to have hours of work that she is supposed to do every day. She wants to write essays and do grammar and harder math. I showed her my notebook on a Charlotte Mason-based curriculum that I got from Ambleside Online and she was so excited at the prospect of doing a spoken foreign language and latin and all the other language arts stuff. "But this says history once a week? That can't be right. And mom, maybe you could buy a few different math programs and I could do them all and see which one I like best, and then we can stick to that one next year". 

I love that she feels such ownership of her education. This was my first reason for homeschooling, and it is working! She wants to do more writing, and she has been networking with her friends (and having me network with her friend's mother) to get a writing group started back up that she used to be involved in. She is thinking about what she did and didn't like in the Ambleside curriculum when we were doing more of it this fall, and how she thinks we should do it this time around. A's schoolwork isn't just drudgery that she's doing for someone else, but it's what she wants to be doing; it's work that is meaningful for her. It is truly wonderful to see things like this fall into place.

I'm not expecting that she'll really want to do hours of schoolwork indefinitely. It seems very natural for a person to want to challenge herself in one way for a while, then grow in other ways at other times. When you can follow your natural inclinations, you can make the very most of what you do. You can learn a ton in a short time if you're truly interested in what you are doing.  For however long it lasts, it will be great to see the focus on academics. When she's ready to use her brain in a different way, her brain will be different because of this period of focused academic work. I really believe that whatever she moves on to will surely be just the thing she needs, to keep her academic, emotional, and social needs in balance.