Books

September

~ shelli ~ Leave a comment

When I was a little girl, my favorite children’s book was Wacky Wednesday. I read it over and over and over again. It was about a boy who woke up on Wednesday, and everything about the world was wacky. Shoes stuck to the ceiling and planes flew backwards. As he went through his day, the world got more and more wacky, and he was the only one who could see that everything was not quite right. Finally, the day ended, and when he woke up the next morning, everything was back to normal. What a relief!

As a child, this story was funny but also cathartic. Things go wrong! Not everything is perfect. However, if we wait long enough, we’ll come out the other side.

I think we can all relate, can’t we? We might have a wacky day or a wacky year. Yep, the world is pretty wacky right now, but I’m not counting on waking up one morning and everything being back to normal. I think what we can count on, however, is our ability to adapt, grow and change when necessary, which makes it much easier to deal with the wacky world, which, actually, has always been wonkers. Some of us have a harder time with change, which makes life so much harder for them. These people can make life more difficult for others too. :/

If I’ve learned anything from this wacky time, I think it’s that whatever a person chooses to listen to, i.e. what media they read/trust, says a lot more about that person than whatever the Truth is. No media outlet, reporter, book, opinion shouter, has the whole Truth. It’s always more complicated. We think we’re so connected and that we have all the answers at our fingertips, but I think it’s even harder now to cut through the endless hype. Hmm. Less media and more meditation might help. Ha ha.

Okay, I will stop while I’m ahead.

We had a good August, and my boys are a year older! Again! Yikes. And now I’m homeschooling 5th grade again, and whoa….8th grade! It’s the last year before high school. Wow. Wow. I can’t believe we’re at this point. Every year has gone by faster than the one before it.

I’m excited about our upcoming year. Despite the pandemic, I think it’ll be a great year. The boys have a lot of activities they are involved in (all remotely). Maybe it’ll be a better year because we’re going to be home together everyday. With time moving as fast as it is, I know my boys will be growing up and living away from this house before I know it. So I’m always going to appreciate this extra bit of closeness we had together.

Still, I hope hope hope that later this year we’ll have some kind of relief, and it’ll be safer to resume in-person lessons and meet-ups. Fingers crossed. If not, we’ll deal with it, right?

At some point I’ll write about our plans for 5th and 8th grade, but I can’t promise when. I’ll probably pepper my monthly updates with tidbits, but I may wait until the end of the year to give a comprehensive overview of our curriculum because I always end up tweaking my plans and letting some things slide. This is also the year my husband and I will be doing some serious thought about high school for our eldest son. It’s so exciting! But we have a lot to consider and research. I’m thankful that my husband is big on research, and this is one area he seems to like researching.

We took a couple weeks off in August, and most of the summer we were on a lighter schedule. It was good to keep a little structure in our days, but we also played a lot of games, read lots of books, and enjoyed many movies and documentaries. Here are some of our favorites:

Exploding Kittens — Our new favorite card game. It has a big giggle quotient. 🙂

The Wrinkle in Time Quintet — My younger son is really enjoying this classic book series right now, although I don’t own this particular boxed set. We had some old copies and also used our Kindle to get the whole series. My eldest son really enjoyed A Wrinkle in Time when I read it to him many moons ago, and it was my favorite book when I was in the 4th grade. I even wrote a letter to Madeline L’Engle, and she wrote me back!

Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church — I read this book for myself, and I can’t recommend it enough. I first heard about it during an interview with the author on NPR’s Fresh Air last year, and listening to her speak about her upbringing, the realizations she made in her late twenties, and the love that she still has for her family, I wanted to read her book. If I find the time, I may write a longer review of it, but I do highly recommend it. I like it because this is not a vengeful exposé. It’s a thoughtful retelling of her experiences and the events and thought processes in realizing her family’s and church’s mistakes. And it’s a good testament that yelling, spewing insults, and arguing do not change people’s minds. What changes minds is building relationships in kind and gentle ways. Something the whole world could learn from right now!

Connected — A Netflix original, and a truly great documentary that shows how our world is much smaller than we think it is. Watch the trailer at the link. (And remember: I try to post all the educational programs we watch on Pinterest.)

So please tell me: how are you feeling right now? Are you managing okay through this wacky time? What plans do you have for this upcoming school year?

March Madness & Silver Linings

~ shelli ~ 1 Comment

I wrote my monthly post for March on the 5th, but so much in the world has changed since then that I thought another March post might be warranted. Whew. How are you doing? I hope your family is healthy and you are coping with the self-isolation that is so important for all of us right now. We have a high risk person living in this house, and there are many elderly people we know and love who are high risk too not just because of their age but because of their health too. Everyone has the right to live as long as they possibly can, so we’re taking this very seriously.

We are okay right now. As you know, we homeschool and work from home, so not much changes for us on a daily basis. However, it’s spring, and this is the time of year we love to go on day trips with the boys. It’s sad we can’t do that, yet we want to stay safe, and we want to keep others safe. So, we’re willing to do what must be done.

All of our outside lessons have been either cancelled or changed to a remote online (Skype, Zoom, FaceTime etc.) format. Last week was the first time trying that, and it went well. All of my son’s piano events, except for the state competition, have been cancelled. That’s a shame after all the hard work he’s done. The state competition was postponed, and now we’re working on a video to submit for the regional auditions. We’re grateful they are finding a way for the competition to continue, but it’s been a bit deflating as well. We’ve had to find ways to keep our spirits up and make the best of the situation.

For me, that has meant getting outside whenever possible. We’re starting to get spring-like weather, so I’ve been taking long walks and working in the yard a little too. I haven’t had much time these past few years to work on our yard, and I’ve missed it, so that’s a silver lining! As the weeks tick by (and I’m sure they will as this is going to last longer than we think), I’m hoping to find time for some baking, extra lesson planning, and maybe more art projects with the boys. We’ll see. Or, we’ll just stay as busy as we ever were because as I said, not too much changes in our daily routine!

For my 13-year-old, we bought him some new music, which always cheers him up. Now is a perfect time for him to move on to new pieces despite the competition. For my 10-year-old, and for all of us, we’ve been paying more attention to the birds outside and using our binoculars more. The boys are also taking occasional walks or runs with us around the neighborhood too.

Since it’s nearing the end of the year, and we’ve all felt pretty distracted, I’ve instructed my 7th grader to just focus on his priorities now: science, literature and math. He’s done a lot of writing this year already, so we’re slowing down on that, and other workbooks and things can wait awhile. I’ve surprised myself by giving the 4th grader more work to do on his own this year, and he just started using a similar rotation system that my 7th grader is using in order to pace himself and schedule his lessons each day. I say I’m surprised because I wasn’t planning on doing that with him this year, but sometimes things just progress naturally and it feels right to introduce him to stuff. This is the best part of homeschooling — kids usually show you when they are ready for something. That is, if you let them.

Another homeschool surprise that I wasn’t planning for this year: We started watching A History of the United States, 2nd Edition, on the Great Courses Plus, and both my boys kind of like it! (Though I have to explain a lot to the 10-year-old.) It’s really long, so I don’t know if we’ll finish it, and I’m also a little leery that it’s taught by three white guys, but we’re watching it with a critical eye and will be supplementing quite a bit over the coming years! Luckily my husband is a historian, so he’s good at supplementing our study of history, and he prefers focusing on social history more than political history.

Other than this, the 10-year-old and I finishedThe Yearling, and he’s also finished reading all the books in the Shiloh series by himself. He loved those. (Thanks to my sister for giving him the first book in that series!) Now we’re reading The Inquisitor’s Tale: Or, The Three Magical Children and Their Holy Dog by Adam Gidwitz together (thanks to my boys’ cousins for gifting us this book!), and he started the first book about some warrior cats: Warriors #1: Into the Wild by himself, and he says he likes it so far.

I’m still reading the James Herriot book that I mentioned in my last March post, and as for my 13-year-old, he’s still plowing through the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Although this is a very difficult time for many people, I hope that after it’s over, there will be many silver linings, such as:

  • people will value their community more and keeping using these new ways of communicating as well as meeting face-to-face
  • working from home will become more standard, especially for those with families
  • online learning will become a more viable option for those who need it and benefit from it
  • people might learn that slowing down is a good thing
  • certain professions will become more highly respected, such as teachers, grocery store clerks, garbage pick up, truckers — all those people who keep our society running smoothly (not to mention our doctors and nurses!)
  • perhaps some families will decide to keep homeschooling because they realize it’s working better for them?
  • and finally….people will learn how to wash their hands properly! (I credit my mom for teaching me to wash my hands every time I return home from somewhere.)

What are your silver linings during this pandemic?

March

~ shelli ~ 3 Comments

February came and went, and I had every intention of writing a blog post last month, but I was never able to finish anything I started.

February is usually the coldest month in Georgia, and this year was no exception. It even snowed one day, and it was beautiful for a few hours. Mostly it’s been raining and dreary, and now at the beginning of March, we’re getting more rain. But we’re also seeing a few blooms and signs of spring, so that offers hope.

We’ve begun what I fondly call “competition season.” That is, my young pianist will be in the state competition and another one, and we’ve also got a big project we’re working on. We usually hunker down at home this time of year so that we can concentrate on this work and homeschooling. We try to stay healthy and focused, but no matter how we schedule our time, there never seems to be enough time to do everything we need to do. That’s okay. At the end of the summer when I look back over our year, I’m usually impressed with everything we do.

I’ve been reading disconcerting news, following elections, and hoping for the best outcomes. I don’t want to use my blog as a place to complain or whine about things I can’t change. All I will say is: try to read as widely as you can about all the issues. Don’t rely on one news source for all your information. And when you can, Go Vote. And let’s remember that we’re all in this together. What impacts one person impacts another. Words matter. Intentions matter. It can’t be said enough: be kind. When you are angry, breathe. When you are happy, breathe.

If you follow my blog regularly, you’ll know that my family and I love nature, and we like to spend time outdoors when we can. Even when we can’t get outdoors, we watch a lot of nature documentaries and enjoy the views from our windows. We feed our bird friends and get excited whenever a new visitor comes to our yard. We also love books about nature….

I read The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings to my ten-year-old. It’s a classic that was originally published in March 1938. It was a best selling book at that time, and it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1939. Later it was made into a movie. I never saw the movie, and I never read the book until now, but I’m so glad I was able to read it to my son. It’s going on my shelf as one of my favorite books ever. One of the reasons is that when you read this book, you feel like you’re spending time in nature. It’s about a young boy named Jody and his parents who live in Florida in the 1870s. Not only are they surrounded by nature and have many animal encounters, they are part of nature themselves. It’s a story of Jody growing up and learning difficult lessons, but it was a beautiful, beautiful book.

Granted, having been written in the 1930s, it contains some sentiments of the 1930s that would not be appropriate today, but unlike some old books I’ve read, this one is mild. However, if you have a problem with hunting, you may not like it. The book offered opportunities to talk to my son about attitudes that change over time. In addition, Rawlings wrote the dialogue in the vernacular of the people at this time and place, and this will make the book difficult for young people to read on their own. Since I read it out loud to my son, I was able to explain the language to my son, and after awhile, it was easier for him to understand.

If you haven’t read it yet, I recommend that you do! Also on my bookshelf is James Herriot’s All Things Bright and Beautiful, which is the second in this series my husband bought me a few years ago. I’ve been saving them for when I need something light and uplifting to read, and during this busy time, it’s just what I needed.

Since we’ve been hibernating, there isn’t much more to report. And it looks like I finally finished a post! Thanks for reading. 🙂

Have you read any good books lately? Please stay healthy and happy. 

Homeschooling 3rd Grade Language Arts

~ shelli ~ 4 Comments

Some of this comes from my larger post about our 3rd grade schedule and curriculum, but it goes more in depth on how we did language arts this year. I’m going to try to do at least one post each year on math and language arts because I know focusing on one subject can be helpful to some people, and it helps me think about how I want to move ahead in these areas.

***

My eldest son began to read well when he was eight-years-old. I can’t tell you how happy I am that we are homeschooling. If he were in school, he would have been pressured to read much earlier, and to be honest, I was trying to teach him to read since he was five. He knew the alphabet and all the sounds before he turned two-years-old, so I thought learning to read would be easy for him. I was wrong.

I probably pushed him to read too early, but I didn’t put nearly as much pressure on him as traditional school would have. As I made my way through trying (and failing) to teach him to read and then discovering that voila! he just knew how to read one day, I learned that this is typical of many boys. Of course, it’s not typical of all boys, and it can happen to girls too, but in general, boys can be slower to learn to read. It has to do with how their brains develop.

So I was glad that even though I made a few mistakes, I didn’t make reading torture for him or make him hate reading. By homeschooling, I was able to make our reading lessons short and less stressful, and I spent more time reading to him. I believe if a child is read to often and in a loving way, then he’ll eventually see the beauty of books.

Even though my son is reading on his own now, my goal this year was to read a lot of literature to him. And I did. And I’m happy about this. Briefly, here is some of what we’ve read:

  • At the beginning of the year, we finished The Complete Tales and Poems of Winnie-the-Pooh, which was a big book and took up most of last year!
  • My Father’s Dragon
  • Charlotte’s Web
  • The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
  • The Story of Dr. Doolittle
  • On the Shores of Silver Lake (part of the Little House books)
  • The Long Winter (part of the Little House books)
  • several books about the Lewis and Clark Expedition
  • Only the Names Remain (regarding the Cherokee Indians and Trail of Tears)
  • Alice in Wonderland (We read most of this but didn’t finish it, and that’s my fault. I hated it and just couldn’t swallow anymore.)

Right now I’m reading Little Town on the Prairie and Old Yeller to him.

(Note: My younger son listens along to some of these too, although they’re more at my nine-year-old’s level, so he can get bored. He still loves storybooks, so I read a lot of those to him.)

I know homeschoolers whose reading lists are so much longer than ours, but that’s okay. Neither I nor my boys are the kind of people who want to spend long periods of time reading. We’re too restless. (Maybe I’m a boy in an alternate universe? Come to think of it, I hate shopping too! Okay, I digress…) I still love reading, but I read very slowly, and I think that’s okay.

My goal was to bring back our morning read-a-louds this year, and I did that! Yay!  **Patting myself on the back**

My son doesn’t seek out books to read silently to himself on a regular basis (frankly, there’s not much time in our busy day for it), but he does love to read and re-read the three big volumes of Calvin and Hobbes that we own. They sit on the kitchen table with our newspapers, and he reads them throughout the day. Aside from this, he’s been reading the Battle Bugs series, which he seems to enjoy too, but when he reads those, it’s usually because I set time aside during lesson time and not because he felt like reading on his own.

As for other language arts nitty-gritty:

We finished All About Spelling Level 1! Can’t say my son loved it, but I thought it was a great program, and it showed us both that he can spell, if he thinks about it.

For handwriting, we switched from Handwriting Without Tears to a calligraphy set. My son still loathes writing with a utensil, but it became a little more bearable with a calligraphy pen. I let him pick a sentence of his choice to write in calligraphy. Later in the year, he did less calligraphy, and we went back to writing with a good ‘ol pencil.

This summer, I stumbled on a wonderful app that combines both spelling and handwriting. It’s the 3rd grade 24×7 Digital Teach Me app. With this app, he is learning to spell 3rd grade level words, and he writes with his finger. And he doesn’t seem to mind this! In fact, he likes it! ***Jumping for joy!!*** He seems excited that he’s learning to spell words like “beautiful” and “almost.” The app is quite sophisticated and requires him to write the letters correctly in order to get it marked as a right answer. I can’t tell you how happy I am to have found this app! (My younger son uses the 1st grade version.)

Finally, I went over some grammar and parts of speech with my son this year with a test prep book and some posters I have because I knew these would be part of the test he had to take. I can’t imagine a worse way to foster a love of writing (unless a child likes it) than teaching kids the parts of speech at this age, and for the life of me, I don’t know why he needs to know this right now. (I am more in line with Patricia Zaballos’ method of teaching writing.) I really hated having to teach it, and I hated having to test him. (But grateful we are homeschooling considering the ridiculous testing they do in schools these days!) Anyway, we got through it, and I’m going to be doing some research on materials to teach this stuff in a more palatable way.

So, please tell me, what are your favorite resources for teaching language arts and parts of speech and all that fun stuff? (That is, fun for us English majors.)

Schools on Trial

~ shelli ~ 1 Comment

schools-on-trial-goyalNote: This column was published in the Barrow Journal on March 23, 2016.

If you’re a parent with a child in public school, you may want to read Schools on Trial: How Freedom and Creativity Can Fix Our Educational Malpractice by Nikhil Goyal. Nikhil Goyal is an accomplished twenty-year-old journalist (he’s one of Forbes’ 30 under 30) who wants to change our public school system for the better. Seeking real solutions, he traveled the country visiting several alternative and democratic schools to see what he could learn from them.

You may not agree with Goyal on every point he makes. In the first few chapters, he’s very critical of the current public education system, though there are many who agree with him, at least partially. You only need look at all the parents and teachers protesting against the Common Core, excessive testing, and even homework for the younger grades. Homeschooling, as well, is becoming more mainstream, but this is still a small percentage of the U.S. student population.

The best part of Goyal’s book is his in-depth look at democratic schools. A democratic school is a private school where the students have significant control over their education, and some schools even give them voting rights when administrative or disciplinary issues come up in the school. Goyal believes that public schools should give kids more control over their education as well.

As I was reading this book, I kept thinking, “Goyal, you’re preaching to the choir.” I’m a homeschooling parent because I believe kids should have a more individualized education, and I think they should have a say in what they’re learning. It should be common knowledge that we learn more when we’re interested in what we’re learning.

Still, I’m not as democratic as some of these schools. I make my boys work on reading, math and some other subjects. But unlike public school, I work with my boys to find curriculum and resources that they like, and I don’t rush them. If they need more time with the material, I give it to them. Most of our day is spent pursuing interests we love, and that does make a huge difference.

As Sir Ken Robinson says in his famous Ted Talk, I think schools are killing kids’ creativity, but I also know it’s very hard to cater to individual students when you have 20~30 students to teach at once. I have always wondered how schools could give kids more autonomy and make learning more relevant to their lives and interests. The schools Goyal writes about in his book offer hope.

He writes, “After visiting many democratic and free schools around the country, I have concluded that I had never met more articulate, unorthodox, curious, and happy children before. The students at these schools have a purpose. They are lifelong learners. They love reading books and playing and learning. They can go on for hours about their interests and passions. They can communicate better than most adults can.”

I would like to see more research done on the graduates of these schools, especially those that are working to foster a diverse student body and admit lower income families. I think any kind of school is hard-pressed to help a child who doesn’t have a supportive, loving family at home. While the research and anecdotal evidence is showing that kids who attend these schools benefit, most of them do not come from a disadvantaged background, as Goyal notes in the book. (By the way, there are two democratic schools in Atlanta.)

Goyal knows how hard it is to make changes in our education system. He knows that the majority does not agree with the proposals he is making in the book, yet as he also writes, many parents and teachers are fed up with the system as we know it, and this is promising. If enough parents and teachers stand up, perhaps eventually there will be more positive changes in public schools. But first we must become more educated and aware of the alternatives. Goyal’s book is a good place to start.