ThadenPierce School

Winging this Science Saturday was still enjoyable. First Law of Motion. I was able to state my goal for these get-togethers beyond elaborate play dates. “Concepts in Context.” I’m not sure how the other kids learn, but I know for my kids, they get the ideas much more quickly when they can connect them to things they have to do with their bodies.

To discuss the principles of inertia, I first invited a child to sit in a laundry basket. Most were very skeptical, but Mo knows a basket ride when she sees one, so she happily volunteered. We talked about how we were going to get Mo moving. C said, “use some force!” I had given him a bit of a preview, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t discuss the idea of force at all, so I don’t know where he picked that one up. Anyway, I applied some force to the basket and started swinging Mo all around. The kids all lit up at the display, and the parents sitting on the couch close at hand were laughing at the kids’ delight. There were no shortage of volunteers for basket rides after that. Even the little siblings under the recommended age were good to have a go in the basket. Bennett received his first basket ride today, by the way.

From basket rides, we moved to a little game of four-on-one catch. I tossed beanbags to the older kids, and they tossed them back. All at the same time. While we were tossing back and forth, I tried to reinforce the ideas of objects at rest and in motion working the act of throwing and catching specifically as the forces at work getting the beanbags to start and stop.

This took us to the kitchen table where we made domino chains. Everybody had a grand old time, but this was just another way to show the kids the conversion from rest to motion and back again.

The grand finale wasn’t as yummy as ice cream, but it was still highly entertaining.

I took the kids to the back yard and showed them a bucket full of water. I poured a little water out to show them what happens when you move the water and let it flow out with the help of gravity. “What happens when I tip the bucket?” “Water comes out!” So, with that firmly established in their heads, I asked them what would happen if I was able to move the bucket and keep the water still inside of it. What would happen if I turned the bucket upside down? Challenging them to think like scientists, I asked them what they thought the outcome of my little experiment would be. Six out of six kids agreed that if I turned the bucket upside down over my head, I would get wet. So I stepped a few feet away and spun the bucket around in a great circle over my head (perpendicular to the earth, by the way, not parallel). The kids were all shocked that I had, in fact, moved the bucket but kept the water completely still. Some mouths dropped open. Everyone was silent, watching. When I was done, Christopher believed I hadn’t done it right. I should have gotten all wet. So I did it again, and I remained dry. All were convinced and suitably impressed.

So, yeah. Concepts in context. I think the kids had fun.

Monday – arts:
Discovering Great Artists
Complete Book of Arts & Crafts
binder list (Out of Sync Child has Fun)
Annotated Mona Lisa
art history books

Tuesday – music & dance:
piano books
various cds/stuff in iTunes
Moira’s ballet DVD
Complete Book of Arts & Crafts music section
binder list (Out of Sync Child has Fun)

Wednesday – spanish:
workbook
classroom aids (calendar, time, etc)
Rosetta Stone

Thursday – sensory:
Out of Sync Child has Fun
binder list

Friday – social studies:
Learn at Home Grade K & 1
DK Atlas of the World
DK Geography

Saturday – science:
Learn at Home Grade K & 1
DK Science Encyclopedia
Janice Van Cleave Science books
Science Experiments you can Eat
Kitchen Science
52 Science Experiments cards
binder list

Saturday – PE:
binder list
Out of Sync Child

EDIT: We’ve dropped Spanish and Learn at Home K, we’re now doing Story of the World, waiting on Spanish, and we moved some stuff around. But this was what we planned to do, before we actually started.

We have no semblance of a schedule around here. No alarm clock, no set time we have to be anywhere except doctor visits (which are thankfully much more rare these days.) Therapists for Bennett come to us (and it would be good if I could manage to remember those) and in the fall Mo & Bennett will both have therapy elsewhere… so I guess our lives are scheduled around therapy and doctor visits. I’m strangely okay with that.

So here’s a rough outline of our life, Monday through Friday:

Kit gets up with the older three kids, makes breakfast, they get dressed, he cleans up. If Emy & I are sleeping in he starts lessons. I get up when Emy pokes me in the eye and we stumble out and I check email while staring at the laptop and blinking a lot. Kit reminds me gently that he has a job and should probably go there sometime. So we shower, get dressed, have family prayer and the long good-bye process and he leaves for work (while Bennett sobs at the window. It’s very sad.)

We’ve started the policy of the tv gets unplugged at 7am – Christopher can watch Zoboomafoo (animal show) at 6:30am but afterwards he unplugs it. If all his work is done he can plug it back in at 4:30pm for his Cyberchase (math PBS show) & Ruff Ruffman (which can pass for educational.)

After Kit leaves we try to do “circle time” because Bennett loves it. If I remember, it includes:

welcome song
days of the week/discussion of date/calendar
weather observation (gee, it’s hot and sunny)
practice personal info – names, address, parents’ names, phone number, safety stuff
ABC song and read an ABC book (for Bennett, soon I hope C or M can read the book to him)
show & tell sometimes (they LOVE that) with audience asking questions
scripture/recite article of faith (for family home evening we’re studying them and then practicing each night during scripture & prayer) and even Mo is getting them
Christopher practices reciting his poems from “First Language Lessons” (and by this point Bennett has wandered off to play)
Good-bye song (because they like the closure)

Christopher is pretty independent at this point – he writes his spelling list each day and/or we practice them aloud, he writes out his addition sets (he’s on +5s right now) and we do those aloud. Once a week we do a “test” for spelling and math and time him. Sometimes if he’s writing fast I have him practice writing something just for the handwriting – have him slow down and focus. But we do no formal handwriting work, I just keep an eye on how he’s doing with it. The spelling words are sight words – he’s done pronouns, numbers zero through twenty, colors, and he’s now doing the “w” words – who, what, where, when, why. He can sound out most words but the sight words I know he has to just memorize since they follow no rules. So spelling/handwriting & math are in his composition book so we can see how he’s progressed and know at a glance what we’ve covered. After that he can go play. Sometimes he asks for the Starfall website or spelling time.

While Christopher is working I’m usually nursing Emy down for a nap, then I lay her down and work with Moira. She’s doing handwriting, basic math but with manipulatives – I don’t expect her to write out the problems yet. She has worksheets for math in page protectors she does with dry erase markers. Mostly we’re focusing on her handwriting at this point.

Then we do a snack and play some more. I often let them watch Sesame Street while I get lunch ready and have them clean up toys. Emy’s up by this point and eats with us. After lunch I try to read with the kids – Christopher can read a few books of his own, Mo can do the Bob books or sound out words in books I read to her. Kit comes home and has lunch and puts Bennett down for a nap (though lately Ben’s been crashing early.)

While Bennett is asleep I let the kids do projects like the rice box or messy crafts. Christopher practices piano (preferably while both babies are asleep – it’s a keyboard so we have volume control.) Emy sometimes takes an afternoon nap – she’s transitioning from two to one so it’s tricky. Mo sometimes naps, too. On Mondays we leave for our craft co-op and Kit stays home while Ben naps.

After naps I try to get the kids outside – take a walk to mailbox, go to library or park, play in backyard. We run errands or finish up any work from the morning, I prep dinner and Kit tries to get work done. Bennett has therapy some afternoons at home and the older kids are allowed to do games on the laptop during therapy. In the fall Mo will have horseback riding Thursday afternoons.

In fall the schedule will change a bit – Tuesdays Mo will have therapy for a couple hours and I’ll do lessons with Christopher while she’s gone (and not worry about lessons for her that day.) On Wednesdays Bennett will have horseback riding in the morning so Kit will go to work later. Doctors visits are usually in the morning and Ben’s vision so on those days we do lessons into the afternoon.

Some days Kit needs to go back into the office after lunch and then comes home right before dinner. Those days the kids spend a LOT of time in the yard.

So dinner, clean up, then it’s familytime. We do games, read stories, go for walks, bake things, etc. Around 6:30 or 7pm, depending on how cranky they are, we do quiet time. Baths, pajamas, bedtime snacks. Monday we have family home evening (lesson, songs, announcements for week, prayer) and the rest of the week we do scriptures & family prayer. Then they race to bed after we brush teeth and we read to them from a chapter book. Songs, kisses, hugs, bed. They’re normally all asleep by 8pm, though I have to nurse Emy down still. Some evenings I have various meetings or moms’ nights out and I either take Emy or nurse her down and leave her with Kit.

Then it’s our time. Sundays we write in the kids’ journals or work on family movies. The rest of the week Kit works evenings while I get stuff done around the house and on the weekends we try to have a “date” and do something together – rent a movie, get food, work on projects together or lay on the floor exhausted and just talk. But those few hours after the kids are asleep are wonderful, I love having that down time with Kit.

Mondays we have vision therapy in the morning and craft group in the afternoons.
Tuesdays will be Mo’s speech & OT therapy in the morning, we do a new piano lesson with Christopher and try to do some music or dance with all the kids in the afternoon.
Wednesdays will be Ben’s horseback riding in the morning & sometimes library storytime. There’s also a possible spanish class in the afternoon for the older two kids.
Thursdays will be Mo’s horseback riding in the afternoon and we try to do a sensory activity for all the kids after naps.
Friday is Ben’s speech therapy and we’ll do social studies activities in the fall.
Saturday is our science projects, PE activities & library day.
Sunday we focus on family stuff & church, journals, family history, etc.

Wow, that feels like a lot. During the day with lessons I just try to remember – math, language, special subject. If I can get those three things in then we’re good.

We’ve written before about our ward and the wonderful church family that it provides. In many ways I think I’ve taken that for granted because all my life, moving every year or two, I knew we had that network of friends and support to fall back on – anywhere in the world we moved, we had the same classes, same lessons, same activities. It’s a built in community and I didn’t realize how unique it was until I became an adult. ESPECIALLY the Relief Society – a women’s organization (the world’s largest) that has weekly Sunday meetings, an annual church-wide conference, twice a year stake (sort of city-wide) conferences plus quarterly “Enrichment” meetings for the ward PLUS “Interest Groups” that meet weekly or monthly or whenever (book clubs, park days, scrapbooking, exercise, cooking, career development, etc) and visit teaching (two women are assigned a number of other sisters to meet with monthly and share a message and serve in whatever way is needed and to let leadership know if there are needs the ward can help with.) One of my dearest friends in the whole world is someone that was my visiting teacher – that’s how we met, and for 3 years she was there to check on me and cry with me and laugh with me and celebrate with me. When I went into labor with Bennett, it was my visiting teacher that raced to the hospital to pick up Christopher so Kit could focus on Bennett and me. After she moved to another state, my visiting teacher still calls just because she felt a need to check on me – so obviously we’ve moved way beyond that role and she’s now my sister and friend.

I had no idea how unique this organization is and I have taken for granted that it’s there, always helping and serving and so much a part of our life. When a new baby is born, the Relief Society sets up meals or helps with childcare, if there is a funeral the Relief Society helps. (Not that the men’s organization is off the hook, we keep them busy in other ways serving and they have the monthly home teaching thing, too.)

So, tangent, back to topic… oh. The ward family really is a family “village” of sorts. A group that ideally loves and supports and teaches and serves and encourages each other. And we’ve been blessed with incredible wards (we’ve lived in five since we’ve been married, each ward is based on geographic area so if you move, you move wards.)

There are not a lot of families in our ward that homeschool, though we do have close friends in another ward that homeschool. And I want our kids to have friends that are learning along with them during the day and I hoped and prayed we could find a community network for them of homeschooling friends. We have found it, and it is amazing. We meet weekly and there are 10 families (and a LOT of little ones) with kids ranging from babies to 7 in this group. We’ve been meeting about 6 months and we have the co-op rotating homes weekly for story, craft & snack, monthly pool dates, monthly “Mothers’ Time Out” and a twice a month bible study time for the mothers… well, then various playdates and activities when we meet up at the library or shopping or whatever.

My kids LOVE these kids, and I love these families. I love that the children respond to all the parents – if we make a request, it doesn’t matter which parent asked – the kids cooperate. I don’t know, maybe we just have an unusual group of kids, maybe it’s the fact that they see us so often, maybe it’s parenting styles, I don’t know. Or as we discussed today when I went into the room and said, “Clean up time!” and they all started cleaning up – perhaps they obey someone beside their own parent better?? But this is a GREAT group of kids.

I love that my children are learning from other adults and learning to respect and interact with them. I love that the big kids watch out for the younger kids, even when it’s not their sibling. I love that when Bennett kept tossing his glasses, the kids would start searching for them and bring them to me unasked! I love that other parents are watching out for my kids and that my kids feel safe with them. I love seeing another mother cuddle my baby and know that they truly care for my children, and my children care for them. I love that after we hosted, the sweet little kids came up to tell me thank you and give me hugs. I appreciate that this brings such blessings into my life, to have these other parents learning and growing with me and sharing ideas and resources and encouragement. To know that we’re not alone in this adventure of homeschooling, that we can help each other through. I love that the silly issue of “socializing” that homeschoolers get asked about all the time is now a joke – schools don’t socialize children in any way I would want my child to be socialized. But this network, this community of respect, how the children are learning to share and cooperate and show kindness and compassion, how the parents are setting boundaries and helping each other enforce them, this sense of belonging and this chance to build this village? This is what I want for my children, this is how I want them to be “socialized” and this is how they learn to serve and help and teach and learn.

I’m grateful for these “villages” we are a part of, how our children are being surrounded by such love and learning. In society today there’s this sense of disconnect and isolation and I want a greater sense of community for my children. We’ve talked about that before, too, our great little town.

As much as we try to protect them from some aspects of society, in many ways we need and want them to have an awareness and relationship with the world and to seek ways to serve and change the bad and embrace the good. When it’s time, when they can, when it’s appropriate. I’m just feeling very thankful today – that our children are able to have this connection to the world around them in a loving and safe way.

Edit – Just when you thought I could not possibly ramble anymore, I add more… I finished this post and picked up The Disciplined Mind and read this:

“Create a Community that Cares. The most important message in a school community is that the adults in a child’s life care – fully, even irrationally – about that child. Nowadays everyone mouths the cliches ‘Every child can learn’ and ‘It takes a village to raise a child.’ But only those milieus that go beyond the catchphrases, that provide support and love for each child, unconditionally, succeed in the long run in developing youngsters who care about learning and about one another.” (p. 233, it’s by Howard Gardner.)

The kids enjoyed a special summer program at the library today, learning about sea creatures and seeing examples. Here are some pictures:

(My favorite, the puffer fish.)

(Big brothers are handy to hide behind when you are scared of the puffer fish.)

The last is Moira assembling her “sea creature” glasses she earned through the summer reading program.

It was fun, though I was honestly surprised to hear from the Creature Teacher that she has NEVER SEEN “FINDING NEMO” – hello?? The kids knew all the creatures by Nemo name – “Mr. Ray!” and so on… I told her she really needs to check out that movie.

For each of these special programs they attend they get a keychain to hang on their lanyard – after the dairy presentation (complete with us witnessing a cow being milked) they got cowboy boots and hats. This time it was flashing fish keychains.

Kit mentioned we’re in the migratory path of monarch butterflies – I didn’t know butterflies migrate but we have quite a collection living on our front tree so we went to count them. The kids found over ten:

In that last one I had just told them Aunt Jenny was coming to visit this weekend and they burst into cheers. But the butterflies were cool, too.

We’re still working with Christopher on getting the basic addition facts memorized, he knows all of them but I want it to be second nature for him to say, “3+8=11″ and so on. He was saying them aloud for me (we have him write out the entire problem sometimes, others we practice orally) and he started answering like this: 5 + 2 is s-e-v-e-n. 6 + 3 is n-i-n-e” I guess answering with the number wasn’t challenging enough so he combined his spelling and math assignments. That’s actually a great way to liven things up, I thought!

A comment at church yesterday got me thinking. I believe children are sent to us and we have the chance to help raise them but this is a stewardship we are being entrusted with and we will be accountable for how we treated them and the choice we made in raising them. Maybe I’m just bad at delegating, maybe I’m too much of a control freak, but I think we have to be exceptionally careful about delegating our child’s learning experiences. If we carefully choose a teacher to help in educating our child, that’s one thing – and we will gratefully allow other adults into our children’s life to help in teaching them. But I’m uncomfortable with the idea of passing off my children’s education to strangers simply because they’ve been certified by the state to “teach” – I have friends that are teachers, I know how much goes into that certifying thing. And I know that being certified and being a teacher are two dramatically different things. Even at church, there have been times Kit or me are uncomfortable (for whatever reason, maybe silly) with leaving our children in the care of a teacher for their class. So I don’t. That may raise some eyebrows, that we don’t leave our kids in class because after all, it’s their teacher – what’s our problem? But sometimes as their parent I’m going to go with my gut and make the call, however awkward that may be.

I want my children to trust and respect the people they learn from – not that it’s impossible to find that in other school situations, but I’m not willing to roll that dice with my kids. Consider how much effort we put these days into choosing the doctors we allow to treat our kids. We are trusting them to make the best recommendations for ensuring our child’s health and in many cases, we’ve literally trusted them with keeping our children alive. It’s not a decision we’ve made lightly and without prayer (though I know many people do just randomly choose a doctor and assume they are trustworthy and competent.) And even when it’s someone we trust, we don’t just take their word for it. We then go home and do our own research and gather information and opinions from other parents and we discuss it as a couple. If we feel something is off we don’t proceed. I want our children to feel safe with their doctors and teachers, and I think they need to have that sense of safety to grow and be happy and just be a kid. It’s our job, as their parents, to make sure they have that – so they can be kids, and not worry about these things.

Gavin de Becker says you need to be very careful about the adults you allow into your child’s life. We are very careful about that. Maybe it’s the years on the rape crisis team talking, or the years working in the domestic abuse shelter, or those horrible graduate courses in sexual abuse and crime. (They were great courses, just horrible to learn about.) Maybe I am abnormally paranoid about my children and the adults I allow access to them. Our motivation for homeschooling is not just keeping our children physically safe, though. (But after what I’ve witnessed in my years of work, you can bet that played into this decision.)

I want our children to be surrounded by a network of loving, attentive, intelligent, fun adults that treat them with dignity and respect and are firm in the boundaries and expectations of behavior. I want our kids to learn from others and to be disciplined by others, when appropriate, and to respect those adults enough to take advice and guidance from them (especially when our kids may ignore the same counsel from us as their parents.)

But knowing I am accountable for how I raise these kid, I am very careful about the adults I allow to be part of our lives. And I am grateful beyond words for each adult that has come into their lives and filled that role – family, friends, adopted family, community members, church friends, homeschool group parents. It brings tears to my eyes to realize how blessed we are to be surrounded by this loving network of amazing families that love our kids.