Adventures in HomeLearning

I'VE MOVED

2008-04-24T16:47:00.000-07:00

Come visit my new homeschooling blog over at Wordpress.

Einstein's views on education

2008-04-23T16:30:00.000-07:00

Our library sells donated books and paperbacks to raise funds. I recently found a hardcover copy of Carl Sagan's Broca's Brain: reflections on the romance of science for $2. I have several of Sagan's books and was happy to add this to my collection. There's a chapter about Albert Einstein with a brief biography, describing Einstein's poor experiences with schooling, his teachers declaring him a failure who would never amount to anything. Einstein had this to say about school:

It is little short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not already completely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry, because what this delicate little plant needs most, apart from initial stimulation, is freedom; without that it is surely destroyed...

Sagan agrees, at least when it comes to scientific education, which was a cause dear to his heart. He writes:

I wonder how many potential Einsteins have been permanently discouraged through competitive examinations and the forced feeding of curricula.

So the next time someone wonders how your child is going to succeed without formal schooling, consider that Einstein published four seminal papers in the leading Physics journal of his day while working as a patent clerk, and with no post-secondary degrees to his name.

Does reading have to be taught?

2008-04-06T18:08:00.000-07:00

As part of the online conversation I referred to earlier, one of the commenters said that "not teaching a child to read and write does them a great disservice".

Besides her obvious misunderstanding of what unschooling is all about, there is a subtle assumption in the statement which I find very interesting.

What does it mean to "teach a child to read"? I think most people imagine a teacher or parent sitting down and "explaining" reading to a child. We all remember the Hooked on Phonics craze, and products like LeapFrog perpetuate the idea that reading is something children need to be taught how to do.

But nobody thinks of learning to speak in the same way. You would not tell someone they need to send their infant to school in order to learn the spoken language. Children learn how to speak simply by being around other people who speak. Nobody has to "teach" them. So why is it that society assumes children have to be taught how to read and write, but we don't believe infants need to be taught language in the same way?

Can you imagine someone suggesting you should send your 1 year old to a school to learn how to speak English? Your reaction might be something like "He doesn't have to go to school to learn that. He'll just learn it, all babies do. They just need to hear people speaking about anything, just daily life, and they will learn."

And yet when it comes to reading and writing we don't believe the above. Well, I do. I would give the same reply above to someone who said I needed to send my daughter to school to learn reading. In fact, I will go so far as to suggest that all children, barring a learning disability, can learn to read all on their own provided they are exposed to people reading books out loud. Has this experiment been done? It would be difficult given that most children are sent to school right around the age at which many of them will start learning to read on their own. We'd need to look at a random sampling of totally unschooled children, and we all know that study ain't going to be funded any time soon! The statistics on this page are almost certainly gathered from school children, so saying that "20% - 30% of children learn to read relatively easily after exposure to formal education" does not prove that the formal education is what got them reading. I'd be very curious to know where they got their control group.

Another thing that bothers me is this idea of children being "behind" if they can't read at a certain age. Most parents seem to equate reading with intelligence and a successful life (we could argue about their definition of successful, but that's for another post). In fact, if you were to suggest to a group of school parents that it's okay for an unschooled child to not be reading by age 8 they would likely think you a terribly neglectful parent who is putting your child's future at risk. Just because early reading is correlated with various "successful outcomes" in life does not prove a causative relationship. I believe this misunderstanding of the difference between correlation and causation lies behind the near-hysterical obsession our society has with children's learning in general, and with reading in particular.

As a biostatistics geek I find this attitude to be nonsensical. Let's assume that the distribution of ages where reading begins is Gaussian, or Normal (i.e. your standard bell-shaped curve). The peak of the curve is the Average Age, and the bell forms mirror images on either side of that average. Thus, a child who reads 2 years earlier than the average is at the same Standard Deviation from the Mean as a child who reads two years LATER than the average (standard deviations, represented by the greek letter sigma, are a measure of distance from the mean and, in normal distributions, are equal on either side of the mean). But in our society we treat the child on the left side of the distribution as a genius while the child on the right side of the distribution is "behind" and needs help. It just doesn't make sense since both children represent the same deviation from average. I believe schools expect kids to be doing some reading by grade one, so let's assume the average age to be 6. So a child who reads at age 3 (like I did, and like my daughter did) is three points away from average. Well, so is a child who doesn't read until they are 9. We celebrate the 3 year old and send the 9 year old off to Sylvan or some other tutoring service.

I think we've become so used to the whole concept of School that most folks in society just don't even question their assumptions anymore: kids need to be taught reading and writing because that is what happens at school. We've lost our faith in the innate ability of children to learn, and in their innate, instinctual drive to learn.

My daughter walked up to me the other day and handed me this:

I have never asked her to write: she does it the same way she draws and colours, which is to say spontaneously and with interest. I didn't bother to correct her with red pen marks. She knows how to spell "frog" but she made a mistake by writing and E instead of an R. And you can see her "J" is backwards. Our Learning Consultant said this is totally normal and I suspect there is an explanation for this based on neurological development. If I looked at reading as something I need to teach her, than I might be concerned about her mistakes. Instead I see her backwards "J" the same way I saw her brother when he was trying to walk: they'll get there eventually.

Anyways, I realize that my daughter happens to be particularly skilled in this area and not all children learn to read and write at such an early age, but I don't believe that it makes her any more normal than a child who doesn't start reading until they are 7 or 8. And while it's true that some kids will not find it fun nor interesting to write out words and rhymes, they will get to some point in the pursuit of their own interests where reading and writing are an asset, and at that point I'm convinced that most could learn with little difficulty (in fact, anecdotal stories lead me to believe they would learn in a couple of weeks what the early readers took a year or two to develop). If only we could be more patient with our children and let Nature take its course...what wonderful things would we, as a society, come to learn about them?

What I was trying to say below, only much nicer

2008-04-06T10:18:00.000-07:00

Here is Miranda's take on the whole "kids and the Real World" thing...

The Real World

The outside world is a depressing place sometimes

2008-04-03T19:48:00.000-07:00

Warning: this is a rant. If your kids are in school, or going there, and you tend to take things personally, skip this post. I'm not anti-school. But I am anti-ignorant-sheep who do things just because "that's the way we do it", who spew rhetoric without thinking about what they are saying, and then judge anybody who dares to question why we do things the way we do...

I've created a wonderful community of like minded mamas around me. Whether through attachment parenting, La Leche League, or the local homelearner groups in my area the people around me are very much living the way I live, and get what I'm doing.

Every now and then I venture out into the mainstream world of parenting. It's a frightening place. It's a cold-water-in-the-face reminder that the way I live my life is totally foreign to most people. I wouldn't mind so much if people weren't so damn judgemental and ignorant. Recently I stumbled upon a thread written by a mainstream parent about Unschooling. Apparently she had just "discovered" unschooling by reading about it on wikipedia. Of course she thought it was bizarre, and many people who wrote comments passed some pretty harsh judgements about how bad it was for the kids, and how permissive and neglectful it was on behalf of the parents while at the same time admitting they'd never heard about it until now.

I tried to give as brief a synopsis as possible about what unschooling really is. And I wrote back one more time to address a few questions, and many comments that were just so Wrong in their assumptions that it was all I could do not to lose my temper and write something harsh. I ended up having to literally fight myself not to go back. Having been active on Internet discussion boards for well over 10 years now I recognize the signs: I get drawn into situations that make me so upset that I get anxious and irritated and literally fret about it for days. I'm fairly proud of myself for making the decision to leave the discussion where I did and let the rest of them pronounce their judgements and basically act like a bunch of ignorant bigots.

It did make me think, however, about how...brainwashed our society is about school. I have to wonder how many parents actually stop and think...no...*question*...whether or not school is all the things they think it is.

For example, we've all heard the tired old "socialization" argument and it came up in more detail in this discussion. Many people made statements suggesting that school is where kids go to learn how to "fit in to society" and to learn social behaviour. Many, many comments referred to children having to learn what life is like in the "real world" such as not being able to do "only what interests and stimulates you". Apparently school is the only place to do this.

It amazes me that nobody stops to ask themselves how school actually models the Real World. Where in the real world do you find people segregated by birth year? Do you have to wait for a bell to ring at work before you switch from your economic analysis spreadsheet to the coding project you're doing for the engineering team? Where in real life do you find children outnumbering adults 30 to 1?

Real life is what happens outside the school grounds. It's the mailman doing his route. It's the marketing people working in the grocery store aisles, checking product placement and competitive pricing. It's the old folks taking walking tours of the neighbourhood. It's mothers out with their babies and toddlers. It's the guys building a highrise, or fixing a storm sewer pipe. It's the delivery trucks bringing fresh produce to the corner market. What it is NOT is lining up in orderly fashion whenever you have to move from one location to the next. It is not having to ask permission to go to the bathroom. It is not being separated from anybody born in a year that wasn't your own, save for the one or two adults in charge.

And as for social development, I really think there are parents out there who believe that classroom structure is designed specifically to provide an optimal environment for social development. Like a bunch of school execs sat around and said "how best can we teach kids social skills?" and then came up with age-segregation and ultra-low adult:child ratios.

Uh, no. The reason kids are segregated by age is it makes it easier to manage them and it makes public education run more efficiently. When you have hundreds or even thousands of kids that you have to move through the system combined with a shoestring budget you cannot afford to vary the pace or style of learning to suit an individual child's needs. You can't afford to have many paid adults around so you group as many kids as can be reasonably managed into a class and head it up with one overworked and underpaid teacher.

The true optimal environment for social development is the evolutionary context in which humans evolved, which is to say small tribes of about 150 or so individuals. Children left their constant vigil at the parents' side when they weaned, joined in playing with all the other children, and by the time they hit puberty they were adults. You would never find a situation where a child had 20 agemates to play with. Instead there was one group of kids ranging from about 3 to about 12-14. And they weren't isolated from all the adults and elders in their community by being placed in an institution all day long.

The simple truth is that kids learn social behaviour from those who've already mastered it, not from kids who are the same age and therefore equally ignorant. And we wonder why we have such bizarre situations as cliques, bullying, peer orientation and peer culture.

Okay, I'm going to end my rant now. I'm going to stay away from that outside world for a while and allow myself to wallow comfortably in a world where I'm not a freak out to ruin my children, and the people I know - whether they send their kids to school or not - question everything and make their decisions accordingly. God bless 'em.

Getting involved in the Community

2008-03-30T17:46:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago our local news channel did a two-part bit on homeschooling. Overall I was quite disappointed; the editors made sure to reinforce every stereotype out there for homeschoolers while paying lip service to research that dispels these myths.

They also had a school principal (or head of the teacher's union, can't remember now) to give "the other side" (like it isn't represented in every facet of daily life)...and one comment she said just made me want to tear my hair out. She noted that schools have diverse backgrounds of kids, from poor to wealthy, of all abilities and races, etc...she suggested that, in this way, school provides kids with a taste of what society is like. She implied that, because of this, schooled children are somehow "involved" with society.

Besides the obvious criticisms one can level at this claim, such as where in society one finds adults segregated by age, there is also the fact that school kids simply don't have the time to truly involve themselves in the real world. Oh sure, they'll take a field trip to an old folks' home. But such involvements really seem artificial to me. Going on a field trip, with a group of 30 kids all your age and only a handful of adults, is nothing like being involved as an individual.

Then Miranda over at Nurtured By Love posted this story about her family's involvement at the local community garden. She points out that all the kids attending were homeschoolers, and that this was the case for many community events they attended.

My kids haven't yet reached a level of maturity where they can be taken to such places, but you can bet that when they can we'll be getting involved with our community. Volunteering in park cleanups, invasive plant removal programs, food banks, etc are all open to us. I think Miranda was right that the school kids really don't have the time. But I also think that school kids are removed and isolated from the real world, and so perhaps can't feel their place within it as homeschooled kids do. It's hard to participate in something when you don't feel any ownership of it.

It just seems strange to me that we consider school kids part of society, and yet we remove them from it for most of their lives. Add in homework and busy commuting parents and it's no wonder that few of us have a true sense of community involvement. As a homeschooling family, we look forward to building a connection to our community as part of our daily life experiences.

Reading Level Tools

2008-03-09T10:03:00.000-07:00

DD's learning consultant told me about some neat links you can go to in order to determine at what level your child is reading. DD has been reading with increasing confidence lately; some of the things she can read surprises me. I was curious to know how her reading skills compared with grade level expectations.

Last week she read several pages of The Berenstain Bears and the Bad Habit (I can't stand this book, but that's another story). The LC showed me that Amazon now has a new feature whereby you can find out the reading level of a particular book. If you click on the link for the book, scroll down the page to the "Inside this Book" section and look for "Concordance". Click on that, scroll down to "text stats" and under "readability" you'll see the Flesch-Kincaid Index Score. This tries to relate the book to US Grade Levels. Apparently, this book reads at about a Grade 4 - 5 level. I dunno, seems a bit high to me.

There's another cool feature over at the Literacy Trust called the SMOG test (Simplified Measure of Gobbledygook). It allows you to type in a minimum of 30 words from any text and it will calculate the reading level. The scores are a bit confusing to me, however. I think they are based on adult literacy. Everything from 0-6 is considered "low literate" and apparently an example of this level is Soap Opera Weekly (!). Level 7 is "junior high" and 9 is "some high school".

Neat idea, but I'm not sure how useful it is. For example, I typed in this back page synopsis from one of DD's books called A Sticker Book of Dinosaurs. She read it to me the other day, for the first time (we picked it up at a swap recently):

"Do you like Dinosaurs? Then get set for ages of fun as you answer the riddles, find the stickers, and complete the colourful scenes in this sticker book all about dinosaurs."

I even left out the words "complete" and "scenes" because DD stumbled over them. Still it came back as Level 9.7, somewhere between Readers Digest and Newsweek.

Whatever grade level DD is reading I honestly don't care. She's enjoying herself, all her reading is spontaneous and self-driven, and she's improving every week. To me, that is all the progress I need to hear. But I confess, I'm only human. I tend to get defensive about homeschooling with some members of my family and it's nice to have that little tidbit in my back pocket "Oh well, DD is already reading at a grade school level". It keeps them happy and off my back.

In a related note: DS will be 3.5 next month and he just read his first two words to me "Yes" and "No". They were printed on the side of our recycling box and he read them while waiting to get into the car in our garage. I know how it is he came to know these words: he plays a lot of Wii games (specifically Super Mario Galaxy) and you often have to select between Yes and No. Who says video games can't be educational?

Teens skipping school

2008-03-06T17:48:00.000-08:00

I heard a report on the radio today about teens in Cape Breton skipping school. The focus of the story, and this article on the same subject, seems to be finding ways to force kids back into their seats.

Articles like this truly leave me stunned at how brainwashed our society is when it comes to schooling. First of all, not a single person has suggested that the reason kids don't want to go to school is because they hate it. Survey any class of grade-schoolers and ask them if they had a choice would they go to school and you'll find most say "no". Ever notice the collective joy on 1) the last day of school, 2) a snow day, and 3) a teachers' strike?

But no, instead of trying to fix our education system so that all kids can feel challenged, stimulated, included, and in some control over their own learning we'd rather come up with punishments and consequences. Have these people never heard the expression "You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink."? Apparently forcing somebody's ass into a desk chair = educating them. Are they actually learning if they don't want to be there but are being forced to? I think not.

But nobody asks that. Nobody asks whether counting the number of bums in seats is an accurate indicator of how many are being "educated". The principle of one Cape Breton school calls this "the biggest thorn in his side". Huh, I don't suppose that has to do with the fact that your Ministry of Education funds students (i.e. gives money to the school) based on attendance...?

I feel truly sorry for these teens. They are in the prime of their lives and they are forced to live the sort of 9-5 hell that many working adults get stuck in without realizing it until it's too late. Life is too short to be doing that from cradle to grave.

The rhetoric coming out in this story is just tragic. It's all "this is for your own good, like it or not" and "life is hard and you can't just not show up for work" etc. Nobody cares that the kids hate school. What are we doing to our youth? How many of us, in our middle years, look back on wasted time and regrets. These poor kids are pissing half their lives away in a classroom that provides nothing for them. And our society is forcing them back in there rather than listening to anything they might have to say about why they don't want to go. We don't care. We've already decided it's for their own good and we assume they are too immature and unmotivated to have an opinion.

Thank God my teens will not have to deal with that.

Will wonders never cease

2008-02-29T09:07:00.001-08:00

The more my daughter grows the more amazed I am at how much society takes it for granted that there are things kids will never learn on their own if they aren't forced into it. I recently heard a program on the radio responding to the fact that 1/3 of Grade 3 students recently failed a Math comprehension test, which of course prompted a whole bunch of "back to basics" comments by people who felt kids needed to be drilled in their times tables and "too bad" if it's boring because that's Life, don't you know, and sometimes in Life you just have to do stuff that is hard work and sucks. Apparently the best way to brace yourself for that is to make sure that the hard, sucky stuff is forced upon you as early as possible. Not, instead, that you grow to be so confident and secure in yourself and your abilities that tackling hard tasks isn't sucky after all...but I digress.

When trying to explain to MIL and SIL what unschooling is, and how DD's program works, MIL expressed concern that children who were allowed to learn "only what they want to learn" will miss out on all those "Basics". Sad, sad, sad isn't it? How we just assume that kids have no curiosity, no drive, no work ethic...The one example that MIL brought up was writing. She asked what child was going to willingly sit down and write out worksheets full of letters all on her own accord. MIL felt that drilling kids in handwriting was one of those "not fun" tasks that just "had to be done".

Well, isn't the point of those worksheets merely to provide repitition? It's not something magic in the sheets themselves, it's the fact that the kids get practice. Well then why, I ask, does the practice have to be on the teacher's terms and in the form of something with no inherent interest to the child? I give you Exhibit A:

DD whipped this up one day while I was working on my computer. Nobody told her to do it; I have never once suggested that she practice her writing. She worked at it because she felt like it, and because she enjoyed it. She's been writing alot lately. As kids tend to do, she gets focussed on a task for a while and right now, writing is it. She writes cards for me and other family members. She makes lists of things, or signs to put around the house. She's constantly calling out to me "Mama! How do you spell...?". She spends a few minutes at a time, not every day, but often enough that I've noticed an improvement in her penmanship.

In fact I can't imagine a child who wouldn't ever write of their own accord, unless of course someone has made an issue out of it, subjecting the child to the suggestion that writing should be done on someone else's schedule, when they think it should be done, and to the degree to which they think it should be done. I believe it was John Holt who said that as soon as it becomes someone else's agenda the child is robbed of an opportunity to learn naturally. Now I realize that not all five year olds are as interested in writing as DD is right now, but I'd be willing to bet that children who grow up with total freedom in their learning will all, at some point, develop enough of an interest in it to want to learn. Emotionally healthy children want to be a part of society, and society writes! We'll see what DS does as he grows - at age 3 he is still struggling to control the pen in his hand - and they say that boys tend to struggle with writing. I'll be interested to see how it develops with him, but fortunately for my little guy I could care less at what age he starts developing that interest.

Sometimes it feels like unschooling is this wonderful experiment where the results just continually delight me, and make me want to shout out to the rest of the world "Wake Up! Education should be like *this*! Look at what these kids can do!"

Why I love my DL program

2008-02-27T15:56:00.000-08:00

We are very fortunate to be homeschooling in a rather liberal part of the world. We're in a wonderful program called Self Design, which is classified by the Ministry of Education as a "Distributed Learning Program", albeit an Independent one (all the others are Public). Technically, my daughter and all the other kids in the program are enrolled in school. But it is unlike any school out there.

As a novel, innovative, and ground-breaking program we are subject to excessive scrutiny by the Ministry. The founder of the Self Design movement is Brent Cameron and he has been working tirelessly for the last 25 years to change government attitudes towards "free learning". The SD program is in its sixth year, having grown from just 100 families in the first couple of years to almost 700 families this year.

Every now and then the Ministry dumps these Notices on our executive team, rules and regulations that we are expected to comply with in order to continue to receive funding and recognition (learners in the SD program receive $500 per child for K and $1000 per grade-school level child each year). I'm new to the SD program this year, and am only just beginning to appreciate the amount of effort and negotiating that the SD exec team has undergone to bring us this wonderful program. Recently, the Ministry has added a new expectation - that of quantifying learner achievements in a way that generates data that can then be processed by the Minstry to demonstrate....something. It's hard to apply our program to such requirements given we don't have courses and we don't assign grades. Still, the exec team has managed to figure out a way to keep the Ministry happy while sticking to the goals and philosophies of the SD program.

In a recent posting on one of the discussion forums at the SD Online Community (a place that parents and learners and all members of the community can gather to discuss all sorts of issues - a major plus to being in this program) our leader Brent Cameron wrote the following. I found his words so inspirational, and it made me feel so proud to be a part of this program, I just had to share:

Learning is a sacred right of every living being. Learning is a very special kind of thinking. Freedom of thought is a fundamental right of everyone and especially children as they are growing into a sense of what it is to be human. We want our children to feel free to discover their full potential. If they are spending all their time meeting the expectations of others they will not discover much about their own abilities and potential. Learning in freedom brings forth the essential nature of individuals - allows for authentic development of human potential....Given the climate of control, demands and expectations in education today - I think our program is astounding...There are hundreds of statements in the Learning Outcomes written by the Ministry for every subject which state - "It is expected that a student will ...." Every 4 to 5 learning outcomes are prefaced with the will of the student controlled by the expectations of authority ... Many years ago we changed that line to ... "It is an opportunity for a learner to ....". We are a program that nurtures learning - not demands it. And good for us all.

Don't you just wanna kiss the guy?

Let's Get Physical

2008-02-04T22:01:00.000-08:00

We spent the last three days at a ski resort a few hours outside of town. It was the first time we'd done this with the children; I myself haven't been on skis for eight years. It was a learning experience for everybody - my kids learned about some snow sports and I learned a bit about my kids.

DD does not show much interest in sports. She enjoyed gymnastics classes for about 2 years but recently decided to quit because she'd "learned everything there was to know about that". Over the years she's seen kids skating, but when I've asked her if that's something she'd like to do she immediately and quite vehemently says No. Same with skiing.

However, on a recent trip up to the top of a local mountain where there is an outdoor rink, she saw kids using those walker-things to balance themselves and with a sigh of resignation she said "okay, mama, I guess I'll give it a try" (without me asking, I might add). They both took a few steps and decided they didn't like it and wanted off the ice. I was very proud of DD for trying, but sad that she was so easily discouraged. I blamed myself, thinking if I hadn't had both kids to care for on the ice I might have done a better job of making them feel secure on their skates.

Well, on our ski trip this past weekend I managed to convince her to try a 2 hour ski lesson. Her two friends, who we were vacationing with, were also in the class and none of them had ever been on skis before. According to the instructor she did very well, and I was able to catch a few glimpses of her while tending to DS in another ski area (he refused to even put them on, insisting that he didn't like the boots). At the end of the class she said she'd had a good time, but that she didn't want to ski again. When I asked her later why she said that, she replied "all we did was go up and down the same place all the time".

But what finally made something "click" in my head was when we went tubing. You get in these large inner-tube like things with a handle attached. A hook rope pulls you up in your tube and then you slide down these very long, rather steep runs. Both of my children had a blast, and went up and down without any hesitation even on their first try. We went tubing again on our last day and DD was going up and down all by herself, even asking the attendants to give her a good spin as she went down. I realized that my children are not afraid of speed, or of steep hills. They may have their issues, but fear of hurtling down a steep hill while cradled in a rubber tube is not one of them. I pondered this as I thought about what DD's issue might be with skiing or skating.

My theory is that she doesn't like the latter two activities because you can't just do them well right away. You have to work at it and practice at it and I'm beginning to wonder if my daughter isn't a bit of a perfectionist. Tubing she could do right away. But perhaps she felt with skiing and skating that if she couldn't do it right away it wasn't worth doing. I am still not 100% sure this is the case. Perhaps she just preferred tubing because she felt steady and secure lying in that tube, compared to the wobbly-ness of skates, or the unusual feel of wearing skis for the first time. I wish I could figure it out, if for no other reason than to understand what makes her tick.

Math Time

2008-01-16T19:17:00.000-08:00

When I try to explain to people that DD learns what she wants to learn, that there is no curriculum, that she pursues only that which interests her, I'm often met with skepticism. The usual response is something like "But what about Math?". There's this assumption that kids inherently hate Math, that it couldn't possibly be considered an "interest" of more than the most bookish child, and that therefore it needs to be forced upon children for their own good.

What they seem to miss is that even their attitude recognizes that Math is useful. Indeed, they consider it a Life Skill. And yet it doesn't occur to them that, since it is a much used skill, it will crop up in a variety of interests be they knitting, building, or even drawing. Sooner or later, every child will get to a point in their subject of interest where understanding numbers will become necessary to move up to the next level.

For DD an interest in Math has been revealing itself slowly over the last few month, gradually building to the point where it's safe to say she's interested in Math itself although she doesn't yet understand that Math is a subject unto itself. I think for her, numbers are just another one of those interesting things in her world and she is naturally curious about them.

It started with addition and then moved to fractions and negative numbers. DD helped me make cookies one day and by getting the appropriate measuring cup and pouring the contents into the mixing bowl. To do so she had to learn how to read 1/2, 1/3, and 1/4. I explained that the number on the bottom represented how many of those scoops added up to the big scoop (1 cup). Easy peasy.

I can thank the Nintendo Wii (specifically the game Big Brain Academy) for the rest. There's a challenge in the game whereby balloons appear on screen with numbers on them and you have to pop the balloons in order from smallest to largest number (this is complicated by the fact that the balloons are of varied sizes that do not relate to their number). At the easy levels all balloons contain positive integers, but as you work your way up to harder levels they introduce negative numbers and then fractions. So it was with no surprise that DD approached me one day and asked what "those lines are in front of the numbers". So we sat down and I drew out a number line. It took no time at all for her to grasp the relationship between negative and positive and she was able to progress in her game. I later heard her explaining the number line to DS, confirming that she indeed understood what I had shown her. I also included fractions in the number line to show her how they fit in with whole numbers.

Her interest in numbers continues to grow. Last night while we were snuggling in bed DD asked me "What's the biggest number?" and I told her there wasn't one. So we had a brief talk about infinity, and I promised I'd illustrate on paper the next day. So today we sat down and I drew out parts of a number table. I used different marker colours for ones, tens, and hundreds. She correctly surmised that following 999 the next number would contain 4 digits. And so I explained that the reason there is no number that is the "biggest" is because you can always add more digits to a number. By this point her attention span was coming to an end and she offered to start drawing a picture of DS's favorite stuffed toy, Pinky Bear.

We have an old hand-me-down copy of Family Math, and we've played a couple of games from the book. Most of it is still above her understanding but that doesn't seem to stop her. The other day she insisted I explain multiplication to her so she could play a particular game in that book. I'm afraid I committed a homelearning sin and told her that it was too complicated and she'd have to learn more about addition first (I was tired!). But she insisted and so I gave it my best shot, but she soon admitted that it was beyond her right now. I should have kept my mouth shut and let her come to the conclusion all on her own. I learned a lesson that day!

As for the money issue, I have been formulating an allowance plan so that she can learn a bit about managing money. She was intrigued by the idea that she could have money of her own to spend (more or less) as she wished, but pointed out that I would have to teach her how to count the money first! No problem, my sweet girl.

yet another thing we don't need to Teach (reading!)

2007-12-23T08:40:00.000-08:00

For some time now, I've known that DD can read a wide variety of words. But if you were to ask her, she'd insist that she can't read. She was reluctant to read out loud to anybody, and when reading her own books she preferred making the stories up as she went along, using a few key words to build upon. Or she would merely recite books that she had memorized - this kid had committed the entire story of "Green Eggs and Ham" to memory well before she was 2 years old.

She's enjoyed books since she was about 3 months old. It was apparent from around the age of 3 that she could read numerous words but for the next year and a half she showed an apparent reluctance to admit what she was doing, even to herself. Discussions about reading were met with resistance so I just backed off the subject entirely and let her continue her love affair with books. After all, it was her relationship with the written word, and I have never had any doubts that she would eventually read (nor did I care at what age that skill emerged).

But her attitude puzzled me. Was it an issue of perfectionism? Was it lack of confidence? Or merely lack of interest? I don't know. But whatever it was, she seems to have moved past it because she is now "officially" a reader: about two weeks ago she invited her brother to come into bed with her so she could read him a book. I was putting laundry away in the room when this happened, and I was stunned when I realized that she was actually reading the words out loud, pausing to sound out some in her head, or to check the context of the word. It was a book she was familiar with, but hadn't memorized. And besides, I could tell by the way she was speaking that she was reading the words, rather than reciting from memory.

I decided not to say anything to her right then as I didn't want to disturb the moment. But that evening while we were reading bedtime stories she offered to read parts of the book, and I took that opportunity to inform her that she was reading. Her eyes went wide open and she smiled a big smile. Now she is proud of the fact that she can read. When my mother was over here the other day Emily brought out book after book and read them to her.

I'm really pleased with how we've handled reading in this family. I started reading at age 3, but my father worked intensively with me so that, by the time I was 5, I could read literally anything that was put in front of me including textbooks and newspaper articles. I decided not to push DD's reading in any way, preferring instead to let her go at her own pace and come to it in her own time. The excitement and pride she feels in this accomplishment is all the reward I need.

Struggling with the Schooled Ones

2007-12-12T15:51:00.000-08:00

I'm pretty passionate about homeschooling. But I try to remind myself all the time that it isn't for everybody (thank you, AnnaB, for your words of wisdom on that subject). Not all family environments are of the sort you'd want a child to be exposed to for most of their waking hours. And I know that different families have different needs and it's not my place to say what others should choose for themselves.

Over the last few months some of my friends have decided to send their kids to school after entertaining the idea of homeschooling by coming to our dropins and other activities. On the surface I totally respect their ability to make choices for themselves and their family. I am trying really hard to be supportive of those choices. But I'm finding that there's this little tiny part of me that is...I dunno what to call it. But it doesn't feel respectful, and I feel I may need to stomp some zealousness out of my homeschooling passion.

Most of these mothers admitted that it was an issue of feeling exhausted and overwhelmed by the needs of their other small children, and a need for "a life of my own", more time, etc. I can totally understand why they feel that way, although I think they are misguided. It's so hard to see what life is like with older children when you're in the thick of the baby/toddler/preschooler set. Even if you homeschool, you are going to have way more time and freedom as your kids get older and need you less. My homeschooling mama friend says she barely sees her 8 year old some weeks. But when a SAHM of little ones imagines homeschooling she sees "more of the same, for the next 12 years". No wonder it's daunting just thinking about it. And at a deeper level it angers me: society sets us up to fail by making parenting such a lonely task, and then offers up the institution of school to take all these kids off our hands. It just ain't right that legions of parents complain about having to actually spend time with their kids over the summer holidays, and rejoice when September rolls around again.

I wonder sometimes if what I'm feeling is a tinge of jealousy. In my case, sending my daughter to school would be nothing short of cruel. Not only would it shatter her love of learning, but she's not the sort of child who quickly grasps social behaviour expectations. She has a hard time dealing with kids sometimes, and she is also rather unconventional in her appearance and tastes. Frankly, she would be chewed up and spat out on the Playground of Life in no short order and I can't bear to think of her spirit crushed by the meanness that results when young kids are left to learn social behaviour from those who are equally immature and ignorant. So while I sometimes stare longingly at a friend who will, in only a couple more years, have five days a week to devote to her own persuits...that option isn't open to me, because my child is simply not suited to school at all (and 99% of the time I'm so okay with that!).

These mothers also had to deal with kids who were *begging* to go to school. Their kids are soically adept and place great value on hanging out with others (my DD could really take or leave social groups for the most part). And here is where I have another issue.

Kindergarten should really be called the Sucker Year. Kids think "wow, this is going to be so great! we'll paint and play and have circle time...". I don't know a single kid who doesn't think preschool and Kindy are fun (assuming they are independent enough to want to be away from home that often). But in a couple of years these kids are going to have a rude awakening. It's isn't all crafts and fun time now, kids. You have to learn A, B, and C and you have to learn it at specific times of day, and in a specific amount of time. You have to, whether you want to or not. You'll get in trouble if you indicate in any way that you don't want to learn that subject, or sit in a desk, at that particular time. You'll be graded and compared to some mythical Average Student. Your parents will gloat over your "performs better than average" scores and worry themselves into tutors and an early grave over any hint that you are somehow behind the crowd. You'll spend your day with a group of people you didn't get to choose, many of whom you won't like, and many of whom will make your life miserable. You may discover the cruelty of being ostracized, ridiculed, and picked on. Or you may find that your once-compassionate self has turned into a bully purely because self-preservation required it of you. Oh, and did I mention the homework? And trying to squeeze everything you DO want to do into your evenings and weekends?

Of course part of my disappointment is wanting my friends to be in my world. But...and I hate to admit this because it sounds so shallow and pathetic...there is a part of me that is judgemental too. I admire these women, they are great mothers and great people. And yet part of me is saying "You're taking the easy way out, and you're kidding yourself if you think your children aren't going to suffer for it."

I want that part of me to shrivel up and die. I hate it.

A Good Laugh, a Sad Truth

2007-11-11T15:46:00.000-08:00

This post was so funny I just had to copy it from Cheryl's post in Free Range Learning:

The Bitter Homeschooler's Wish List:

(From Secular Homeschooling Magazine, Issue #1)

1 Please stop asking us if it's legal. If it is — and it is — it's insulting to imply that we're criminals. And if we were criminals, would we admit it?

2 Learn what the words "socialize" and "socialization" mean, and use the one you really mean instead of mixing them up the way you do now. Socializing means hanging out with other people for fun. Socialization means having acquired the skills necessary to do so successfully and pleasantly. If you're talking to me and my kids, that means that we do in fact go outside now and then to visit the other human beings on the planet, and you can safely assume that we've got a decent grasp of both concepts.

3 Quit interrupting my kid at her dance lesson, scout meeting, choir practice, baseball game, art class, field trip, park day, music class, 4H club, or soccer lesson to ask her if as a homeschooler she ever gets to socialize.

4 Don't assume that every homeschooler you meet is homeschooling for the same reasons and in the same way as that one homeschooler you know.

5 If that homeschooler you know is actually someone you saw on TV, either on the news or on a "reality" show, the above goes double.

6 Please stop telling us horror stories about the homeschoolers you know, know of, or think you might know who ruined their lives by homeschooling. You're probably the same little bluebird of happiness whose hobby is running up to pregnant women and inducing premature labor by telling them every ghastly birth story you've ever heard. We all hate you, so please go away.

7 We don't look horrified and start quizzing your kids when we hear they're in public school. Please stop drilling our children like potential oil fields to see if we're doing what you consider an adequate job of homeschooling.

8 Stop assuming all homeschoolers are religious.

9 Stop assuming that if we're religious, we must be homeschooling for religious reasons.

10 We didn't go through all the reading, learning, thinking, weighing of options, experimenting, and worrying that goes into homeschooling just to annoy you. Really. This was a deeply personal decision, tailored to the specifics of our family. Stop taking the bare fact of our being homeschoolers as either an affront or a judgment about your own educational decisions.

11 Please stop questioning my competency and demanding to see my credentials. I didn't have to complete a course in catering to successfully cook dinner for my family; I don't need a degree in teaching to educate my children. If spending at least twelve years in the kind of chew-it-up-and-spit-it-out educational facility we call public school left me with so little information in my memory banks that I can't teach the basics of an elementary education to my nearest and dearest, maybe there's a reason I'm so reluctant to send my child to school.

12 If my kid's only six and you ask me with a straight face how I can possibly teach him what he'd learn in school, please understand that you're calling me an idiot. Don't act shocked if I decide to respond in kind.

13 Stop assuming that because the word "home" is right there in "homeschool," we never leave the house. We're the ones who go to the amusement parks, museums, and zoos in the middle of the week and in the off-season and laugh at you because you have to go on weekends and holidays when it's crowded and icky.

14 Stop assuming that because the word "school" is right there in homeschool, we must sit around at a desk for six or eight hours every day, just like your kid does. Even if we're into the "school" side of education — and many of us prefer a more organic approach — we can burn through a lot of material a lot more efficiently, because we don't have to gear our lessons to the lowest common denominator.

15 Stop asking, "But what about the Prom?" Even if the idea that my kid might not be able to indulge in a night of over-hyped, over-priced revelry was enough to break my heart, plenty of kids who do go to school don't get to go to the Prom. For all you know, I'm one of them. I might still be bitter about it. So go be shallow somewhere else.

16 Don't ask my kid if she wouldn't rather go to school unless you don't mind if I ask your kid if he wouldn't rather stay home and get some sleep now and then.

17 Stop saying, "Oh, I could never homeschool!" Even if you think it's some kind of compliment, it sounds more like you're horrified. One of these days, I won't bother disagreeing with you any more.

18 If you can remember anything from chemistry or calculus class, you're allowed to ask how we'll teach these subjects to our kids. If you can't, thank you for the reassurance that we couldn't possibly do a worse job than your teachers did, and might even do a better one.

19 Stop asking about how hard it must be to be my child's teacher as well as her parent. I don't see much difference between bossing my kid around academically and bossing him around the way I do about everything else.

20 Stop saying that my kid is shy, outgoing, aggressive, anxious, quiet, boisterous, argumentative, pouty, fidgety, chatty, whiny, or loud because he's homeschooled. It's not fair that all the kids who go to school can be as annoying as they want to without being branded as representative of anything but childhood.

21 Quit assuming that my kid must be some kind of prodigy because she's homeschooled.

22 Quit assuming that I must be some kind of prodigy because I homeschool my kids.

23 Quit assuming that I must be some kind of saint because I homeschool my kids.

24 Stop talking about all the great childhood memories my kids won't get because they don't go to school, unless you want me to start asking about all the not-so-great childhood memories you have because you went to school.

25 Here's a thought: If you can't say something nice about homeschooling, shut up!

Field Journal

2007-11-11T07:38:00.000-08:00

It's funny how, just when I think we've had an uneventful week and I'm wondering what I'll record in my Observing for Learning form (a twice-monthly reporting tool for the SelfDesign program), something fun comes up out of the blue.

Yesterday all the pieces were in place to finally act on a suggestion made by DD's Learning Consultant a while back: DD started a Field Journal. Those of you familiar with Dora the Explorer and her animal rescuer cousin Diego may know of the concept of a field journal from the latter character's shows and online games (the Dinosaur Adventure shown here is, predictably, DD's favorite). My kids are fans of Diego and so the concept of a field journal was met with immediate enthusiasm from DD.

I got a notebook with pages that are half-lined so there is room to draw and write. Yesterday morning I had to clean the kitchen floors and DD wanted to hang out with me so I sat her down at the kitchen table with iPhoto on my laptop, a set of coloured pens and her new journal, and two reference books. I put photos of our recent finds on the screen and she drew pictures of them and then copied out their names (both scientific name and common name) on the lines below. This activity was great - she got to practice writing (hers is getting neater all the time), drawing, and her powers of observation were stimulated by having to copy details from a photograph to paper, and also by having to identify the critter in her books.

As an example, we had this photo from last month's mushroom hunt. Our new mushroom book, All the Rain Promises, arrived the other day so we pulled it out to identify this specimen. Eventually we decided it must be a deer mushroom (more on mushrooming in a future post), so DD drew a mushroom and wrote "Pluteus cervinus, Deer Mushroom".

She then found a photo of a stinkbug we'd previously identified as Uhler's Stink Bug. But when I had her leaf through Insects of the Pacific Northwest she came across Say's Stink Bug (top photo below ), which looked a lot like ours (bottom photo below). Even I wasn't sure which was which (note: the book uses a different photo of Say's, one that looked alot more like our photo of Uhler's). So the two of us went bit by bit through the identifying information in the book. The pronotum and abdomen are described as "edged with white to pale yellow" for Uhler's and "edged with light yellow and white" for Say's. The book describes Say's as having "three distinct, white spots anteriorly" on the scutellum, but the photo of Uhler's in the book also showed three distinct white spots. Our photo doesn't, but perhaps it was a resolution issue.
Both stink bugs have a bright yellow spot where the brown (wingstips?) are. What finally clinched it for us was the fact that Say's wingtips were much less visible then Uhler's in the book photos. 'Course now that I see the above photo of Say's that might not be a distinguising characteristic after all! Anyways, we're pretty confident that ours is an Uhler's, but the process of identification is a good one for honing DD's observation skills.

DD spent some time with her field journal that morning, going through the photo collection. She had such a good time that she didn't stop with flora and fauna, but decided to put in some inanimate objects as well. Thus her field journal has a page documenting her recent creative art projects, including the picture frame, treasure chest, and playdoh planets!

Getting Creative

2007-10-28T17:00:00.001-07:00

Last week our local homelearner's drop-in started up again after a two month delay due to a civic strike (we use a community centre space). It was great to see our old friends again in this playful setting. DD got to work right away painting. She loves painting, but I confess I don't like the mess (particularly a concern when DS gets involved). It started off several days worth of creative artwork.

The next day was another homelearner's activity group, put on by a group not far from us (we're so fortunate to have three active homelearner's groups in our immediate area). Held twice a month, this is an incredibly well-organized event: they rent a room in a hall and fill it with tables piled with activities. There are all sorts of crafts, board games, areas for babies and toddlers, a warcraft table for the older kids, and lots of other fun things. Some activities are always there, but others vary. This time they had Halloween cupcake decorating, complete with cupcakes and dozens of candy items. There was also a table loaded with small wooden items such as toy chests, lighthouses, frames, etc. made of unfinished wood, with lots of acrylic paint and supplies. DD picked out this chest and painted it (with, of course, a dinosaur theme).

On the last occasion DH had taken the kids and DD made a mosaic picture frame. This week we grouted it. The finished product is shown here.

While I was uploading the camera images for this post, DD - who had been sitting at the dining table doing I-didn't-know-what, called me over to see her solar system. Although she had gotten some of the planets out of order she did have all of them, and added Earth's moon as well. Here they are after we'd rearranged them in order:

Fraser Institute Report on Homeschooling

2007-10-25T15:22:00.000-07:00

The Fraser Institute is often referred to around here as "a right wing think-tank". Every year they publish a "report on BC schools" that ranks all the schools here based on numerous categories that experts spend the rest of the year arguing about. I had no idea, therefore, that they also produced a report on homeschooling in North America back in 2001. And that, according to the second edition of this article, just released this month, their 2001 homeschooling report was one of the most downloaded files in their website's history.

The report, which basically is a review of all the published studies out there regarding homeschooling, is very pro-homeschooling in it's findings. Among the findings that didn't surprise me is that the average homeschooled child is one grade level ahead of his schooled peers in early elementary school, reaching 4 grade levels ahead by high school. It also didn't surprise me that homeschooled kids are more involved in their communities, watch far less TV than their schooled peers, and demonstrate less problem behaviours in social settings.

What interested me was the finding that it didn't matter whether either parent was a teacher, in terms of the benefits of homeschooling. It makes sense since, despite popular misconceptions, homeschooling parents generally don't "teach" their kids the way teachers in school do. Rather they serve as guides and a route to resources. I was surprised to learn that socioeconomic status did not affect the outcomes of homeschooling either. While the academic performance of schooled children is highly correlated with socioeconomic status, that correlation does not hold up for homeschooled children. I always assumed that parents with higher education and higher socioeconomic status would be more inclined to homeschool. And yet it seems that it actually would be better if more low socioeconomic class families homeschooled - it is apparently an impressive way to gain your child advantages that they will likely never get in public or private school.

From the Executive Summary section of the report:

• Many studies, Canadian, American, and international,
have found that home schooled students
outperform students in both public and independent
(private) schools. One US study found that
home and private school students perform comparably
well, and that both maintain a strong advantage
over public school students.

• Home educated children enjoy no significant advantage
if one or both parents are certified teachers.

• Surprisingly, several studies have found that home
education may help eliminate the potential negative
effects of certain socio-economic factors.
Though children whose parents have university
degrees score higher on tests of academic achievement
than other home schooled children, home
education appears to mitigate the harmful effect of
low parental education levels. That is, public
schools seem to educate children of poorly educated
parents worse than do the poorly educated
parents themselves. One study found that students
taught at home by mothers who had never finished
high school scored a full 55 percentile points
higher than public school students from families
with comparable education levels.

• Despite a widespread belief that home educated
students are not adequately socialized, the preponderance
of research suggests otherwise. The average
Canadian home schooled student is regularly
involved in eight social activities outside the
home. Canadian home schoolers watch much less
television than other children, and one researcher
found that they displayed significantly fewer problems
than public school children when observed in
free play.

• Though the long-term effects of home schooling
are less well studied, both Canadian and American
findings on previously home schooled adults are
encouraging. Canadian home-schooled students
report a life satisfaction score well above their public
school peers. American studies have found indications
of a wide range of non-academic benefits
from home schooling.

A full copy of the report can be found here.

A life of their own

2007-10-24T21:32:00.000-07:00

Kids in school strike me as having their own life. Actually, I think kids in daycare already have their own lives - a whole day's worth of experiences that the parent is not present for, most of which they won't hear about. The child has a myriad of little mundane experiences that one might struggle to frame into a sentence that sounds remotely interesting, and yet these are all such a huge part of the child's development.

But even without daycare, kids eventually go to Kindergarten and then in Grade 1 they start their full-time days - five days a week, six hours a day. That's almost a full time job. By this age at the latest it is safe to say that the child has their own life, one the parents are no longer really a part of in terms of the experiences that make up those days. Find blogs written by mothers of kindergarteners and you will read all of them coming to grips with the fact that their little kids are growing up and venturing out into the world without them.

I can't shake the feeling that there is something very wrong about a 5 year old having "a life of their own".

Every day at around 3 pm a river of adolescents and teenagers flows past my house as the local high school and elementary school disgorge their charges. I watch these kids and I wonder about the things that happened during the day, what they learned (and I mean Life learning, not whatever was dictated to them in Social Studies that morning), and how much of that day the parents will never hear about. I look at the smaller ones and think that they just seem so young to be so fully occupied in an activity that takes them away from the rest of their family, out of the daily workings of their community, and isolated with a bunch of kids whose only shared characteristic is that they were born within a year of each other.

My kids are 3 and 5 and they want mama. If you ask them to do any activity and offer the possibility of me being there with them they will jump at the chance. It won't always be that way, and I plan to savour it and indulge it for as long as it lasts. One day they really will have their own lives, having attained them by choosing their paths and being allowed to mature slowly, and gradually adjust to more time away from home and family. They will be allowed to venture out a ways, but will have open arms waiting for them when they suddenly feel the need to pull back a bit and snuggle closer to home.

I feel sorry for today's kids, given a life on their own from the time they are still so very young. What is the rush? Why do we push them so? I'm so very grateful that my kids aren't caught up in all of that. A life of their own? Not now, thank you. My kids still need me, and thankfully I can be here for them.

Bug Hunters

2007-10-11T18:43:00.001-07:00

I finally found the charger for my camera battery, so today when we went to the park we brought it with us. We found several interesting insects and took photos of them. Later at home DD looked through her Insects of the Pacific Northwest book and we sought to identify them.

This little fellow was so small that it was hard to photograph well. It was the first one DD found in her book - its a Long-horned beetle called Brachysomida californicus. I confess I was a bit doubtful at first, but after thumbing through the tome with her it was concluded that she was spot on. Other candidates (based on the irridescent green colour of the carapace) were the Green Ostamid beetle (but the head was too large and ours did not have noticeable jaws), and the Lamellicorn beetle Dichelonyx spp. whose short antennae did not resemble our bug. Later on I privately changed my mind and now think that we found a Green Dock Beetle - the photo in the book made it hard to compare, but I considered the reported sizes (5 mm versus 11 mm for B. californicus); you compare the bug to DD's thumbnail and see what you think. Regardless, the process of comparing features of these similar-looking species with the bug in our photo was, I feel, what DD got most out of the exercise (without realizing it, lol).

The next bug was immediately recognizable by DD as a Stinkbug, but she already knows from experience that we have several varieties around here. Once again it was she who found the identity of our rather large green model in her book. It's an Uhler's Stink Bug which grows up to 14 mm in length. It looks very similar to the Western Red-Shouldered Stink Bug, but on further discussion DD was quite convinced that our bug lacked the characteristic red band across the shoulder seen in the latter species, and instead was a picture-perfect example of the former: "pronotum and abdomen edged with white to pale yellow".

This final photo is of my personal favorite right now. I first found one on the balcony of our old apartment when I last visited to move out the few remaining items we had left there. It was so large and beautiful, with it's surprising number of variations on brown. I wished DD had been there to see it. But I've since found a couple more on our balcony and today we managed to get a good photo of the creature, though it still doesn't do justice to the depth of colour variation. I ended up identifying it - my eagerness and enthusiasm beating out DD in this case (and I confess we are closely matched). It's a Western Conifer Seed Bug, a member of the Squash Bug family. According to the book they are not seen often as they spend much of their life in the tree canopy, but apparently they are not immune to falling out of those trees, one or two of which are within close reach of our balcony (though the same can't be said of our apartment balcony - still, we discovered that they fly very well).

This type of activity is a perfect example of the joys of homelearning. I seem to have the same mental setup as DD - we love to identify and classify! It's an activity that I would never take the time to do if not for her lead, but I'm truly enjoying myself. I have to sometimes restrain myself from taking over; I want to let her lead the way. But then again I don't think it's so bad to teach her to "share" the learning experience as well!

...and the best part about homeschooling

2007-10-06T11:45:00.000-07:00

As a complement to my last post I thought I'd write about one of the best things about being a homeschooler - the thing that most people think about least, IME, but which I think makes the hugest difference between us and "the rest of society".

My friends whose kids go to school (most of them are just starting Kindy this year) are finding themselves joining the rat race. They get up early, whether they want to or not, whether they had a good night's sleep or whether a little one kept them up in the wee dark hours of the morning. They are on a schedule and absolutely MUST be out the door by a certain time - a concept which is completely lost on most of the five-and-under crowd. They rush, they cajole, they fret...and then they're off! They commute through traffic getting kids to school and/or daycare (and since we age-segregate they are likely in different places) and then either go to work themselves or try to fit whatever errands they need done into the next couple of hours.

Then they rush to pick up their kids, since you can't be late for that. If you are one of the working crowd your kid probably goes to some "after school care" program. If your kids aren't in an after school care program you are now probably driving them to various activities (you know, the stuff they *really* want to do). If you're lucky, you all get home around 5 pm and then somehow you have to magically conjure up a healthy, home-cooked meal. By the time you eat, clean up the kitchen, prepare for the next day (packing lunches, making sure clean clothes are to be had for all, etc) it is probably time to get the kids to bed.

I know people whose 9 year olds have over an hour of homework a night. I know people whose kids participate in at least 3 or more after-school "extracurricular" activities a week. I honestly do NOT know how any of these people do this and still manage to spend some meaningful time with their children. I do know that many of these people are constantly under a state of mild stress from Monday to Friday. Even if you feel content with your lot, it is stressful to be on a strict timeline all day. I do know that these folks' weekends are usually chock full of activities while they try to spend some quality time with their kids, not to mention run all their errands and houseclean.

Well me and my family....we don't live in that world. We get up whenever we feel like it - early if we've had a good rest, and we sleep in if we haven't. I almost always cook breakfast: homemade pancakes, homemade waffles, french toast (usually with homemade bread), or on a lazy day I make soft-boiled or fried eggs. The kids sometimes watch cartoons in the morning, or get started with a game while I do a few things around the house (like painting a wall, or vaccuuming, or whichever of my many projects I'm currently working on). Then we get ready to head out for our day, the planning of which happens on the fly and generally revolves around the weather. Yesterday, for example, despite a grim forecast we awoke to a gorgeous fall day with not a cloud in the sky. So we headed out for a walk in the forest. As usual, there was plenty of parking and we had the place virtually to ourselves.

We are usually home by 3 o'clock, before the gaggle of school kids pour out of their institutions and begin the part of the day that really interests them - off to clubs and sports practices and rec centre classes. Meanwhile I'm getting started on a slow sauce for dinner, or prepping veggies, or perhaps reading a book with the kids or playing a game. While others are trying to fit "everything else" into the precious 2 hours between school and dinner, our day has ended and we are relaxing. DH comes home and plays with the kids while I finish up dinner and serve it, then he cleans up while I play with the kids. Then he and I can generally sneak in about 30 to 60 minutes of computer time (or reading or knitting or whatever) while the kids wind down before bed. Usually by 9:30 they are asleep and he and I are getting ready for bed ourselves.

We don't usually do anything on the weekends. We avoid the crowds and the rush. I do my shopping and errands during the week. We have long, slow lazy mornings playing video games and doing household projects (or out in the yard when the weather is nice).

I love this lifestyle, and I truly feel sorry for all the people who are caught up in the rat race. Life is short, and to spend 5 out of every 7 days running around trying to meet deadlines and pickup times, fighting traffic, and if you are lucky you might get to spend a half hour or even a full hour with your kids just playing and hanging out....well it is just tragic, really. I think most people don't question that this is just the way it is. But then you meet homelearning families like myself, like all the families before me who inspired me, and you realize that we all make choices in our lives. And those people complaining about having no time with their kids have made that choice, too.

The unpleasant side of being a homelearner

2007-10-01T17:11:00.001-07:00

Yesterday we had a visit from MIL and SIL. I mentioned that DD was in the SelfDesign program this year and tried to describe it. I was met with the usual slew of questions and doubts. I confess I gave a rather lengthy speech (which my husband said sounded like proselytizing) about the philosophy of self-directed learning, which I think led to some uncomfortableness all around.

SIL didn't say much - her DD is in a private Catholic school because SIL thinks this is the best education around (and cheaper than regular private school), not because she wants a Catholic upbringing for her daughter. MIL expressed her disbelief that children can be relied upon to learn all they "need to know" on their own accord. She, like virtually everybody else who has been brainwashed by our education system, believes that there are things kids need to learn for their own good that they would never want to do on their own, such as practising handwriting or performing calculus. My attempts to address these concerns were met barely concealed eye-rolling and that look people give you when they think you are crazy.

Overall it was a very unpleasant experience and I confess I am truly fed up with all of it. Schoolers never have to justify sending their child to school. Nobody questions how kids are learning, what they are learning, or even why when they are sent off to these institutions. It seems that the curricula set by our school boards are treated as an Absolute Truth. Most people appear to just blindly assume that at any particular grade level the things they are required to learn are for Good Reason, and nobody ever seems to question it. But as a homelearner I am constantly bombarded with questions and skepticism. Not that any of the people challenging me have ever read a single article or book about homelearning, nor do any of them appreciate the evidence-based nature of Natural Learning. It's like they think I just made it all up myself!

I know part of this is my own fault. I am passionate about Natural Learning and, as a very verbal person, I tend to go on and on at length about it. I can't stand the thought that somebody has misrepresented in their mind what I'm doing, and so feel compelled to correct their presumptions. Unfortunately I am feeling more and more like I'm doing so at my own expense. I'm tired and frustrated with these conversations and wish everybody would just leave us alone. But that means I basically can't talk about it with them. The only person who is excited and supportive of this is my father, which is something considering that throughout my childhood he was the strongest proponent of my own education and my achieving academic success (sometimes to a fault). I need to just be content with the knowledge that most people think I'm nuts and ruining my children, and let time supply evidence to the contrary.

I feel I've been down this road so many times before: cosleeping, attachment parenting, extended nursing, gentle discipline...all things that have gone against the grain, against the mainstream beliefs about how children grow and learn and develop, what they need, and how best to deliver it. And what I also find in common between my parenting choices and my education choices is that the opposing, mainstream views are based on a negative view of children that vastly underestimates and shortchanges their natural abilities and proclivities. MIL and those like her believe that kids need to be forced to learn things "for their own good" and that we have an obligation as parents to be taskmasters and dictators, pushing them against their will and breaking them to our authority to do so. Frankly, mainstream parenting and education sucks all the joy out of being a parent.

Somehow I have to learn to let go, stop trying to convince everybody around us that we are doing a good and wonderful thing, and just carry on content in our choices and our life. Based on my personality it is a very difficult thing to do. But if my experiences yesterday taught me anything, it's that this is a much better objective to hold than trying to convince ignorant people of something that is obviously way too far outside their comfort zone. It takes strength and courage to question the mainstream way of doing things, and I suppose most people are happier hiding their heads in the sand. Fine, let them stay buried.

Our new program

2007-09-17T20:33:00.000-07:00

We've officially begun our new homeschooling program. Although, officially, we're not actually homeschoolers. The program is a registered independent "Distributed Learning" school, so DD is registered as a Kindergartener. However, the Ministry of Education is watching the program closely, and with interest, recognizing that it represents a very unique model for education.

As part of our requirements I have to complete an "Observation for Learning" form every other week. This is supposed to be a description of the things we've done with an emphasis on how DD felt about the activities, what her emotional state was and her energy level. Our Learning Consultant then translates this into "education-ese", or "ministry-speak", for the purposes of reassuring the government that we are actually "doing something". Since I enjoy writing, this is not a burden to me, and the record of reports provides a personal journal of our learning experiences.

I also have to complete a "Weekly Hours" form, to document how many hours we spend on each type of activity. Being a very unschooling friendly program, our LC reminds us that this is really the equivalent of "attendance" for the Ministry, and is not meant to be incredibly accurate. After all, learning happens in bits and pieces throughout the day, and one experience (say, a trip to the local Bird Sanctuary) can involve various subjects, such as Ecology, spirituality (connecting with nature), logical thought (how to dole out the birdseed to maximize enjoyment), etc. But I'm finding that it actually isn't hard to do the form - as a K student DD is only required to log 12.5 hours of learning per week. Between classes at the Ecology Centre, gym class, and various day trips it doesn't appear to be hard to make up those hours. Many parents just consider it the price of being in this funded program, and getting our preloaded Visa cards with which we can purchase learning materials.

I'm already finding that being in this mindset is helping me get organized with our learning in terms of my time management. For example, today DD and I leafed through a magazine full of craft and decorating ideas for fall. I suggested we go to an art supply store and do a craft from the magazine. Normally this idea would sit in the back of my mind for weeks until an opportunity happened to present itself. But now I see a chance to log some "creative arts" time. So I sat down with my planner and have set aside some time this Thursday to do it. This is the sort of motivation I need to put our ideas into action, prioritize activities, and also try to vary DD's exposure to various subjects. It's easy to get completely wrapped up in her passion for science and nature and not make an effort to introduce her to other things.

A new project to get excited about!

2007-09-05T22:53:00.000-07:00

I posted about this on my regular blog, but since it has definite value as a learning opportunity I thought I'd post about it here, too.

I've been thinking about getting a pet (AnnaB spoke my mind). I'm not ready for the commitment of a dog (and the landlords need to be convinced that Basement Suite Dude won't run out and get one and have it penned up inside for 12 hours a day, saying "if they get one, I want one too!"). I find rodents boring (except rats, which are way cool, but only live for 2 years - too many funerals in my child's lifetime). I had a cat and they are okay but frankly, I'm just not a cat person. Bunnies are cute but...what do you do with them, exactly? DD wants a lizard. I could do a gecko, but again what do you do with them? After a while it's just another mouth to feed and another creature's poop to deal with.

Then I stumbled across THIS and realized that not only would they be great pets but I could have my very own free range organic eggs as a bonus! I saw a video called Urban Chicken (scroll to the bottom of the page for the movie link) and they look like they would be fun. Not to mention they eat bugs that could get in your garden, they eat kitchen scraps, and their poop makes for good compost. Win-win situation, I say!

And of course the kids would get experience in caring for animals, as well as learning a valuable lesson about food and where it comes from.

Now I just need to figure out if I can get one, if I can convince the landlords to let me have one, if the city will let me have them, and if I can save up enough $$ for one. They are pricey, but oh so nice-looking. And when I consider what myself or any member of my immediate family would come up with given a hammer, nails, and a trip to Home Depot it puts the expenditure in a whole new light (think ugly chicken-shack that will rain-rot, fall apart, and allow local wildlife to dine on my hens!).

We're in!

2007-09-02T19:29:00.001-07:00

When the Silverdale program went all "ministry of education" on us there was a mass exodus of unschooling families to the SelfDesign program at Wondertree and I missed a spot before I'd even made up my mind to join. I found out today that they opened up some more spaces for registration this year. I've just completed the application and am very excited! So many of my homelearning friends are in this program and I am excited to have an excuse to start DD's portfolio. Yes, I get off on that sort of thing. Sad, but true!

In other discoveries, yesterday I found out that the area we're moving to has its own homelearner's group that, by all reports, is fairly well organized. Some of my city-dwelling friends go to their meetings and events (our new suburb is very close to downtown), and we can still stay involved with our current homelearner's group as well. There's alot of overlap between the local groups. I'm excited about having a new community to visit without abandoning my ties with the city homelearners I've come to know and love. Most of them are in SelfDesign anyways, so we'll also encounter one another in the "online village" that SelfDesign maintains.

I know I need this sort of structure to really optimize our time. I'm finding it too easy to get distracted by my own responsibilities and projects. And I'm really excited about sitting down with DD and creating a Learning Plan (see here for a great example).

I did it! I rewrote the script!!

2007-08-29T17:25:00.001-07:00

I am SOOOOO sick of answering the "so, is your daughter starting Kindergarten this year?" question. 'Cuz you just know where it's going. You know the script by heart:

"actually we homeschool"
"oh?" (pause) "what about [insert stereotype here: socialization, math, you name it]"

I end up launching into a lengthy discourse, trying to dispel all their preconceived notions...see here for example. It's tiring and goes on way too long. I've recognized for a while now that I need to come up with a simpler answer.

And today it hit me: the problem is that as soon as the word "homeschooling" leaves my lips (and nobody gets what homelearning is or unschooling so ultimately I can't help but say that word) I'm swimming uphill. Because the second they hear that word their mind is filled with their idea of what homeschooling is, and I spend all my energy trying to get them past their preconceived notions so I can then fill their minds back up again with the facts.

So, what if I just started from a blank, where they would have no idea what I'm talking about and then I can just fill it all in? Here's what I mean:

"So, is your daughter starting school this year?"
"No, she isn't going to school"....stop.
"Oh, uh...well then, what are you doing?"
"We do something called Free Learning. It's where the kids decide what they want to learn about and I lead them to the resources they need to fully explore that subject."

I'm not going to use the H-word at all. Hopefully by the time they figure out it's basically a form of homeschooling, they'll have heard enough not to bother asking me "well, what about math?".

This is it, folks. This is what homelearning is all about.

2007-08-28T07:31:00.000-07:00

I'm going to take a few moments to write in praise of the most inspirational unschooling blog I know. It's called Nurtured By Love (there's a link in my sidebar) and the writer is mum Miranda. This blog has been a wonderful unschooling resource on so many levels.

She provides numerous links in detailed posts of what her kids are up to in terms of projects and activities, leading me to resources I might not have been aware of or thought about before. It was this blog that inspired me to sign up with Zip.ca (in the US it's Netflix) to get regular science and documentary type movies for myself and the kids. She has many links to math and science programs, good books, and all sorts of other things that would enrich any family's learning environment.

In addition, her talented family is the "poster child" for unschooling. All four of her children are musically gifted (as Mum herself is) and in other academic persuits they perform well above average. Even little Fiona, at age 3, was experimenting with watercolour techniques that produced artwork I'd hang in my own living room. It can be hard sometimes not to feel woefully inadequate, and this is one "complaint" about the blog. But that was my issue, and I got over it pretty quickly because of all the benefits it provides.

But truly the greatest benefit of this blog is how you SEE homelearning in action, on a day by day, month by month, year by year basis. AND...she's not part of the diaper and preschool set! I know that many of my homeschooling-wannabe mama friends stumble on this one part of the equation - feeling that, by making the commitment to homeschool, they are sentencing themselves to 15 more years of SAHM-hood. They only know the demanding, exhausting, emotionally draining (yet infinitely rewarding) aspects of raising very young children who are intensely needy of both our time and our energy. We crash into bed at night and wonder when we'll ever find a life for ourselves again. But kids grow, and become more independent, and slowly we carve out a place for ourselves again. Homeschooling older kids is a totally different ballgame and here is where Miranda's blog stands as a shining beacon of hope. It does get better, ladies!

I also like that I share the same parenting ideals as Miranda does. She does not punish her children, she gives them plenty of opportunity to practice responsibility, and her children are wonderful examples of the rewards of this type of parenting. There are too many posts to link to in this example, but read the blog for a while and you'll see. On my bad mama days I turn to her blog for inspiration, and a reminder that I won't be raising spoiled, indulgent, useless children by not enforcing every little behaviour that society tells us "good" children should exhibit.

I'm going to close this with a link to one post in particular that represents just how inspiring I find this blog to be. Here is the report of her son's learning plan for the year to come (those of her other children are scattered before and after it). When I read these plans I feel so incredibly inspired and in awe of the power of giving children ownership of their education. Note in particular how Noah recognizes he needs help managing his computer time, and is coming up with solutions on how to do that. He doesn't need his mother to stand over him with a stopwatch threatening to ground him or withdraw privileges (or simply take his computer away). Noah and his siblings have had a say in their lives from virtually the beginning and the value of that just shines through in this post. If only every parent could read this blog before making the decision to school their child! If only every parent knew that this was at least an *option*. I would never have to listen to the standard "what about math?" line of questioning ever again.

Preparing for Fall: random updates

2007-08-23T17:13:00.001-07:00

Our schedule: we've signed up for weekly gym classes, Ecology Centre classes, we've got a weekly homelearner's dropin and a biweekly one. I'm teaching 6 lectures this month, so have child care for those days. Otherwise I am really looking forward to starting up a regular routine.

Big news: we're moving to a house! read all about it here. This will really improve our ability to do outdoor projects like messy art, gardening, birdhouse-building (and subsequent birdwatching), and other fun stuff. Yay!

What we're not missing: the insanity that is "Back to School". We'll be hanging low, avoiding the stressed out masses, and waiting for our homeschooling group's "Not Back to School Picnic" where we relax under the shade of large oak trees in what is usually the nicest month of the year (September) watching crazed families on their way to the University (where there are also several daycare centres and a high school).

Lazy Summer

2007-08-08T16:28:00.000-07:00

We've been doing a fair amount of travelling lately, and there are still a few more trips before summer is over. We're not attending any classes, and we've been avoiding our weekly homelearner's group get-together because the park we're meeting at is not "DS friendly" (I spend all my time there chasing him around, and I'm feeling lazy these days). So when we're not travelling, we're staying pretty close to home. This has led to some freak-out moments on my part where I worry that my kids are wasting their days away in front of the TV. So I have to remind myself that the trips we're taking are educational and stimulating (DD has learned to fish; she can bait a hook and cast her line quite well). And remind myself that it's nice to have some "down time" days in between the stress and excitement of travelling.

So while I try not to worry about these days when nothing much *seems* to be going on (and of course, when pressed to come up with something I don't seem to have much trouble listing off what we've been learning lately), I'm also recognizing that I am a person who can benefit from some structure to my days. When I don't have plans I tend to fritter the day away on the computer. I have all these great ideas, but then don't implement them. And I'm the sort who needs structure imposed on me, so I'm finding myself looking forward to the fall.

I've just hired a new sitter who will be coming two mornings and one afternoon a week while I teach a lecture series at the University. I've signed DD up for gym class and we'll also be doing weekly classes at the Ecology Centre (this time I'm planning on bringing DS along and we'll see how well he holds up in the classroom; last year I had Mum watching him while I went in the class with DD). There's also the homelearner's dropin which will be starting up in our indoor venue come September. Between that and the sitter doing crafts and other fun activities with the kids it should be a good balance for everybody.

I'd also really like to start scheduling some time to work on specific projects. For example, I've been thinking about doing some simple experiments with magnets and electricity. A couple weeks ago we read a Magic School Bus book about electricity and DD learned that electricity is caused by electrons "running through the wire" (we even drew pictures). Frankly, I'm finding it interesting myself and would like to pursue this, as well as introducing the concept of the Scientific Method. But when I don't plan times to do this, the idea just sits in my head. I'm hoping that with the sitter around more often I can be more organized, getting art and craft supplies and other things we need to do these activities (DS is at the age where taking him into stores is rather tortuous).

But for now, I'm trying to relax and just enjoy these lazy days of summer!

Homeschooling: the "rural vs. urban" debate

2007-07-20T16:13:00.000-07:00

The debate about which is the best environment for homeschooled children - rural or urban - has come up on the homeschooling forum at MDC. I like perusing the blogs of homeschooling families and I'd have to say that many of them, particularly among the unschooling crowd, hail from rural areas. I just assumed that the desire to unschool goes along with other crunchy tastes like growing one's own veggies, living off the grid, sustainable living, etc. But I've come to appreciate that unschooled kids spend much more time at home than schooled children (notwithstanding the usual socialization questions posed by the ignorant masses). So perhaps their home environment matters more, in that sense.

On the MDC debate there does not seem to be a consensus. But I wonder: does the fact that one is homeschooling add any further weight to the issue beyond personal preference? I believe it does, but not in the way one might think.

Those of you who read my other blog will know that our family has been trying to decide where to live in order to provide ourselves and our homeschooled children with a lifestyle that suits our needs. Our 950 sq ft downtown apartment in a dense, yet green, urban neighbourhood has served us well for the past 3 years. But my kids need more space now, both inside and out. They don't really need access to homeschooling programs because they are still young. They also don't need much socialization due to temperament and behaviour issues. So a rural house seems a good choice for us.

But in just two years I will have 5 and 7 year old. What will they need? And what about when they are teenagers? What programs will they want to pursue, what resources will they need, and how readily will those resources be available if we are living in a rural area? Whereas schooled kids' needs don't really change from K to grade 12, those of homeschooled children do (from what I can tell so far).

So I think that the "rural vs. urban" debate depends not just on a family's general preference, but also on the age and stage of the children. And of course, their temperament. Some kids thrive on social interactions with their peers, are "friend-oriented", and get lonely and bored without other companions. Other kids, like my daughter, enjoy solitary play and are not overly concerned with "hanging with friends". Additionally, what are the children's interests? My daughter is totally into nature and natural science, so obviously a place where she can explore the outdoors is optimal. Other kids may be more into role-playing or organized sports - their need to be closer to urban centres may be greater. My son seems to be very kinesthetic in his energy expenditures. That's fancy talk for "he's destroying our apartment". The child needs a yard. But my friend's boys can handle a day indoors without mayhem.

The point of this post is that, for homeschooled kids, these needs have to be met more in the home environment than for schooled kids whose needs are met in the classroom (or not, as the case often is with school). Thus our considerations are a bit different, and I think it ends up being more than whether you consider yourself a City Mouse or a Country Mouse.

Hooked on Workbooks

2007-07-14T20:49:00.001-07:00

DD has shown an interest in worksheets and workbooks. She particularly enjoys Word Search puzzles. The other day I was browsing through Costco (the Canadian equivalent of Sam's Club) and came across this book. It is filled with all sorts of word games and puzzles you can play with a pen, and I wondered if DD might find it interesting. She is crazy about it.

An unexpected result of having this book is that I discovered DD can read. I mean, really read. I know she can read many words, but she so far has refused to read a book to me, or out loud to herself (although she has memorized many of her books and will read those ones aloud). When I've asked her if she can read a book to me she says no. But with this workbook she needed to read some words out loud and then there were some short stories, etc. And what do you know, she read them!

And then last night, while we were in bed reading stories, she actually asked to read certain parts of the book, and then she offered to read the whole book! She does know the story fairly well, but there were parts where I could see and hear her sounding out the words. It was very cool!

Workbooks can be a contentious issue among unschoolers, but if the child has a genuine interest in them and enjoys them, then the child should have them. That is what unschooling is all about, IMHO. Besides, I well recall enjoying doing workbooks when I was a child. Before I started "having" to do them in school, that is.

How Math Happens

2007-07-13T22:33:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago I was sipping my morning cup o' tea and checking my email when DD approached me. She said "mama, what does 5 and 3 make?" while she held up five fingers on one hand, and three on the other. I told her to count the fingers, which she did. Her face lit up with that beautiful expression of pride and wonder as she realized she could figure this out just by counting...recognizing a learning opportunity when I saw it, we went and got a peice of paper.

"Here", I said, "let me show you something". I told her than one way to add numbers was to draw the number of objects on the paper and then count them. So to add 3 and 2, first you can draw 3 little circles, then 2 little circles, then count them together to get 5. I also showed her how we write this as 3 + 2 = 5.

She was delighted and proceeded to do a number of equations using small circles to add, and with me helping her to write the corresponding equations. She focussed on this task for a solid 20 minutes or so before moving on to drawing pictures.

It was one of those perfect homelearning moments...

Bug Hunting

2007-06-25T19:21:00.001-07:00

For the last few weeks, as DD and I walk around the neighbourhood, she's been finding these little bugs on trees. She thinks they are adorable and tries to carry them around for as long as possible before they make a leap for freedom (or perish in the grip of her overenthusiastic fingers). We tried to search the Internet for its identity, but it's not as easy as one might think to narrow descriptors down to a set that will produce a reasonable number of hits.

Today, we received a much anticipated Amazon.ca order containing Insects of the Pacific Northwest. Within about 10 minutes of perusing the pages we were able to identify our mystery bug. It was, as I suspected, the larval stage of an insect - turns out to be the Asian Lady Beetle. We see these around here all the time; they are a favorite of both kids. DD was very excited to find out that her favorite little black tree insect was actually a baby ladybug!

But there was more to be learned from leafing through this book. We also found the identity of a mysterious "leaf pimple" we'd been noticing. On regular green, maple-shaped leaves we'd see these raised, egg-shaped red bumps that seemed to be formed out of the leaf's very own tissue. I thought it might be some parasite, except that it didn't appear to be a separate entity. Well now we know that these are maple bladder galls, made by the maple bladder mite. They are abnormal growths of the leaf tissue itself, but inside these hollow protuberances are nurseries filled with baby mites. Next time we find a leaf with galls on it, we're going to try and dissect it (these ones in particular are about the size of a small grain of rice).

Finally, we were able to identify the species of snail that DD keeps finding and wanting to bring home (yes, it's an insect book but they did have a few snails in it). A few weeks ago we went so far as to buy a container in which to keep a snail she managed to hang on to all the way home, but it eventually died; we didn't know what to feed it and the cage wasn't cleaned (it was out on the balcony) so eventually the food scraps we threw in there rotted. Again a search of the Internet returned far too many hits with far too few photos, making identification difficult. But it only took a few seconds to find the snail in our book: it's a pacific sidebanded snail, and it eats herbaceous plants. Maybe the next one will fare better with a steady supply of fresh leaves (turns out they don't eat mushy fruit!).

All in all it was a rather exciting and informative day. We'll certainly be carrying our "bug book" around with us for future insect identification. This is one of the wonderful benefits of homeschooling - we get to learn along with our children. I probably never would have taken the time to figure out what the leaf galls were if not for DD's interest (in fact, I may never have noticed them in the first place). She not only stimulates me to stop and smell the flowers, she gives me an excuse to go find out what we can about each one.

Just say no to Adolescence?

2007-06-20T22:16:00.000-07:00

My head is still spinning from reading this wonderful post by Miranda over at Nurtured By Love. I couldn't help but consider the advantages that homeschooling, and particularly unschooling, give when it comes to allowing our children to experience adulthood when they are ready, not when the school system says they are (see the post below). I'll expand on the topic later when I've had more time to digest it (and when I've ordered the book from Amazon, lol).

why was this girl in school?

2007-06-20T18:58:00.001-07:00

Last night I watched a lovely speech by a 19 year old "scientific prodigy". In her speech, she talks about a family trip to the Grand Canyon she took with her family when she was nine years old. Never an avid reader, her attention was drawn to a book about the Ebola virus epidemic. She became enthralled with the book and decided that she wanted to do research in neuroscience one day. From that time on she read every book on the subject she could get her hands on. By the time she was 14 she was begging for the opportunity to work in a research laboratory, and within a couple of years was designing her own experiments and making important contributions to her field.

It was apparent listening to this young woman that she had amazing powers of perception and critical thinking. In science, you need to ask the right questions. Being able to do so requires an appreciation of "the big picture". You also need to be able to design experiments that test that specific question. Most of us require years of specialized training in research to reach the point where we're able to tackle difficult subjects, but this girl is already doing what many PhD's are still trying to do, and she's only just starting University.

Several things struck me about her story:

her interest was sparked by picking up a book while on vacation: this was not something that was introduced to her through school as "required reading" or as part of any curriculum
she took the initiative to go out and find books relating to the subject that interested her; you can best believe that these books were not the ones she was being given to read in school
note that she needed no coercion to do this; it was not part of any mandatory education scheme; she had an interest and she pursued it on her own
by age 14 she was ready to go work in a laboratory and do productive science; she doesn't elaborate on whether this was part-time work or a summer job, but presumably the time she spent in the lab was limited by the requirement that she attend high school for the next 4 years

I had to ask myself: what was the point of this young woman ever attending school? Everything she learned to get to the career she wanted for herself was done on her own merit, with her own motivation and self-direction. School could not provide her with the level of stimulation and information she was ready for. And while she didn't elaborate on where she got her powers of critical thinking (other than to note that her grandmother was a scientist), it's a safe bet to say that she didn't learn those skills at school.

I know - I was a product of the school system, too. It took me several years to "get" how scientific research is done. I see student after student come through my lectures, I mark their exams, and I see how little they understand critical thinking. And these students are the "cream of the cream". They were A students just to get accepted into university, and then doubly A students to get accepted into our program. These are kids with 98% averages, and most of them are completely stumped when I pose an exam question requiring more than just regurgitating notes they took in class. I could write a whole 'nother post on that subject (and I probably will), but suffice it to say that schools utterly fail at teaching the kind of critical thinking that this woman was naturally gifted in

Though I doubt most other people even noticed this aspect of her speech, what I got from it was a shining example of what children can and will accomplish when they are motivated, inspired, and driven to pursue that which interests them and which stimulates their natural curiosity. Her story demonstrates the sheer uselessness of school, because there was nothing in her formal education that led to her success. Had she been a homeschooled kid she likely would have been working in labs at an even earlier age and making important discoveries even sooner, since she wouldn't have had to waste 75% of her time going to high school. Not that she isn't young enough already to be achieving so much; my point is simply that school was not just "not helpful", it was a hindrance.

Watch the video. When she speaks, she radiates the kind of raw enthusiasm, passion, and the sort of excitement that moves scientists everywhere to seek, to ask, and to explore. I know what she is feeling, and it is truly wonderful. That is the sort of passion that drives, and it is sadly absent in most classrooms.

college isn't for everybody, and shouldn't be

2007-06-17T20:47:00.000-07:00

I spent 12 years at university and came away with three degrees. I loved my years at university; it was a time of total freedom and opportunity and I savoured all of it. I was able to work in a field that I found stimulating, interesting, and rewarding.

But university (or "college", as it's collectively called in the US) is not for everybody, and I don't believe it should be. Nowadays post-secondary education is held up as THE goal for every caring and concerned parent who wants the "best" for their child. This post over at Open Path Learners is what inspired me to write today. It's just one example of many showing how pervasive this attitude is throughout our society. And yet nobody stops to ask the obvious questions...

If everybody goes to college, what value does that place on a college education? Not too many years before I went to university, you could get a nice research scientist position at a big pharmaceutical company with just a Master's degree. But by the time I was doing my M.Sc you needed a PhD for such a position. Not because the job got any more difficult, but because there were so many applicants with Master's degrees that having a PhD made you stand out. By the time I was doing my PhD, you needed a post-doctoral fellowship to land the same position. Again, not because the job got any tougher, but because PhD's were being churned out by the thousands. The more candidates there are with the minimum requirements, the higher the bar gets raised. These days, a Bachelor's degree is almost useless. I can't think of any science-related positions that you can get with just a B.Sc. You'll end up washing dishes in a laboratory, or typing memos in a research institution, or schlepping free samples of the latest antihypertensive agent around to doctors' offices as a pharmaceutical sales rep.

If everybody goes to college, how are they all going to get jobs? As far as academia goes, there are only so many research institutions and so much grant money to go around. And the tech industries, while growing, certainly can't supply jobs for every college graduate if more and more of them are graduating each year (and let's not forget that places like India and China are churning out a few more hundred thousand college-degree holding job applicants each year as well).

Is college the only (or even the surest) route to success? I don't think so. First it depends on how you define success (money? healthy, mutually satisfying relationships? job satisfaction? quality of life?). Second, the world is rife with stories about those who have succeeded without college degrees. These folks are usually held up as some sort of anomaly. But I fear that our total emphasis on college education as the only path to success robs young people of the opportunities to pursue other, equally satisfying pathways: they don't hear about these other choices, and those choices are not held up as worthwhile endeavours relative to the goal of going to college.

It's ridiculous that we hold a university degree up as the goal all parents should have for their children. As a homeschoolers, one of the most frequent questions I get (second to the socialization myth) is "what about college?". Instead of considering college as ONE option for kids whose talents would benefit from such an experience, we treat it as the only goal worth shooting for. Immediately we are doing two things. 1) we are setting up a whole host of kids for failure, and 2) we are depriving ourselves of the talents of millions of kids who would be better served by following alternate paths to education.

Case in point: the local construction scene. When I was growing up, being a plumber or an electrician was considered "blue collar". And construction workers? They were the building-site equivalent of janitors. Then we had a real estate boom, a construction boom, and a home renovation boom. Plumbers, electricians, and other so-called "skilled labourers" are bringing in six-figure salaries and have more work than they can handle. Construction sites will hire anybody with four limbs and a hard hat, and if you prove capable and reliable you will have no shortage of well-paid work.

I feel sorry for people who get sucked into this, and even more sorry for their kids. For the lucky few whose talents and learning style fit the mainstream educational system it will be fine. But what about all those kids who don't want to go to college - who will support and encourage them? And will they recognize that this doesn't make them any less capable, or potentially successful than their university-bound peers? And will the parents recognize that there is more to life than getting a degree before they have permanently damaged the relationship between themselves and their children?

I'll end with a link to a marvellous speech by Sir Ken Robinson entitled "Do Schools Kill Creativity?". In it, he talks about the college issue. The clip is about 15 minutes, but I promise you it's well worth the time.

but wait, it does get even more lame!

2007-06-15T11:42:00.000-07:00

In a recent post I linked to a site that is a prime example of how ridiculous our society's attitudes are regarding school and its importance. Caps and gowns for preschool graduation?! You gotta be kidding me - what exactly is there to celebrate? What exactly did these kids do that is cause to applaud them?

I'm reminded of a line from The Incredibles: Mrs. Incredible is harping on Mr. Incredible for not being more involved with the family; case in point: her son's "graduation". Mr. Incredible replies:

It's not graduation! He's moving from the 4th grade to the 5th grade. It's psychotic - they keep creating new ways to celebrate mediocrity!

I experienced this "celebration of mediocrity" firsthand last night. I attended my best friend's son's high school graduation. My first shock came when the emcee welcomed us to their "School-Leaving Ceremony". Huh??

It seems that the kids aren't done with their exams yet, and so nobody has officially graduated. Why not wait until they know they passed? Well, that might leave out the ones who didn't. And one may presume from the title of the ceremony that those who don't graduate won't be doing their repeat year at this school (apparently that would be a social death sentence). So instead of celebrating graduation, the entire evening was celebrating the fact that they are leaving high school. In fact, when the kids walked up to receive their diplomas, what they got instead was a "School Leaving Certificate".

I shit you not.

This was a pretty fancy shindig. It was held in The Orpheum, an ornately decorated and beautiful theatre in downtown Vancouver (pictured here). There were representatives from the School Board, and of course the friends and families of over 200 graduates (my entire high school had just over 200 kids!). There were florid speeches about "going out into the world" from the principal and cheesy songs from the senior choir. The speakers used words like "dedication", "accomplishments", "perserverance", etc....

All this to describe the fact that they are leaving high school???

And you know, even if we are talking about getting one's diploma, really - what exactly are we celebrating? As the principal said, the kids "have met the requirements for education as established by the BC Ministry of Education"...blah, blah, blah. It all sounded so institutionalized.

These kids did nothing more than what they were told to do and what was expected of them. It's pretty safe to say that none of these kids chose to be in school, none of them had any say in what they learned, how they learned it, or when they learned it. The measure of their learning is a subjective one at best, and those who scored highest on the tests are not necessarily those who will meet end up happiest or most successful.

There were academic awards handed out, and I found myself wondering about the kids who received them. How many of those kids felt intense pressure to maintain high scores so that they could meet their parents' (and society's) expectations that they go to college or university? What was the attitude of the parents - were high marks rewarded and anything short of an A punished? What were the kids' lives like in terms of finding a balance between striving for academic excellence and just being a kid? How many of those achievers were motivated by their own inner dreams and aspirations, rather than those that others imposed upon them?

As I sat watching the ceremony I felt as though I were at the end of some giant assembly line, applauding as yet another package of product was wheeled out the factory door. This featureless crowd of 200 faces appears on stage every year, getting the same cliche-riddden speeches and the same vague acknowledgements. It seemed all laid out for us there, for those who choose to question what they're watching, rather than accepting it as the immense rite of passage our society makes it out to be. I think only those who contemplate a life for their kids where the children lead their education, create their own successes, and have the freedom to truly revel in their own accomplishments can appreciate the irony of last night's pageantry. The cogs and wheels of planned, institutionalized education grind on, spitting out those who are lucky enough to navigate the system and discarding those who do not.

But not without awarding them a "School Leaving Certificate".

Hilarious homeschooling comics

2007-06-12T16:08:00.000-07:00

Check it out:

www.inflatablestudios.com/

Could it get any more lame than this?

2007-06-12T15:31:00.000-07:00

http://www.rhymeuniversity.com/deluxe_package.asp

Oh how hard we work to convince our children that this is something truly valuable...

What we're missing out on...

2007-06-07T15:18:00.000-07:00

When we visit the local PS playground and the kids come out for recess or lunch break, I am continually saddened by what I see. There are about 50 kids running around with only 1 or 2 adults in supervision. They are there for the major incidents, but the myriad little travesties occurring all around them go unnoticed.

First there were 3 girls, around age 8 or 9. Two were up top of a play structure, informing the third girl that she was not allowed to come up right now. Apparently, this girl really wanted to join the other two, and followed them around the whole time. The other two would make her perform tasks, saying things like "you can come up with us but first you have to climb up the slide to pass the test". Basically this one girl really wanted to be part of their small group and the other two were not interested, but taking advantage of her desire by abusing her and playing power trips on her.

In another scene, a group of girls age 9 were on a see-saw. DS wanted to play and one of them came over and said they'd make room for him. They were sweet girls and very kind to DS. A boy ran screaming past and said "shutup" to one of the girls when she said hello to him. She turned to me and said "he hates me, but I don't mind".

While we were on the see-saw an overweight girl, probably the same age, came over and started talking to the girl at the end of the see-saw. I didn't hear exactly what she said but her body language was disturbing. She had that Jerry Springer thing going, with the wiggling head, hip thrust to the side, and finger pointing attitude. She was laying into this other girl, who seemed to be doing her best to ignore it. I could see how this large girl was exerting a lot of power over the other one, and from the perspective of a 9 year old this girl must have seemed very intimidating. I didn't hate on the girl - her weight for starters, combined with who-knows-what sort of emotional issues, were obviously warping her ability to relate to others in an empathetic way. But tell that to the victims of her agression.

I saw boys being bullied by other boys. I saw kids being taunted and teased. To an unwary eye, it might be easy to dismiss this as "normal kids stuff". The nature of the teasing is so childish to an adult that its easy to forget how much it hurts when you are, in fact, a child.

It's true that many of these kids come from immigrant families who have recently experienced war (many Bosnians and Serbs). It's true that many of these families are poor. There is a large after-school care program, a testament to how few hours these kids get to spend with their families each day. But I don't think anything I see on that playground is different from any school in the country, with a few very minor exceptions.

It frustrates me that so much lip service is being given to "anti-bullying" campaigns in the schools, with nobody recognizing that the very structure of school creates the unnatural social dynamics that lead to peer culture, bullying, and cliques.

Of all the reasons not to send my kids to school, these factor high on my list.

getting comfortable with "doing nothing"

2007-05-31T20:24:00.000-07:00

Despite how confident I am in unschooling as a choice for my kids' education, there are certainly days when I have my insecurities. Today I was thinking that we hadn't done much this week except "play around". No matter how many times I ponder this I still find myself succumbing to this notion that I'm supposed to be "doing something". Three things dispensed me of that notion today.

The first was recognizing that Summer Vacation is about to begin. School kids are out for the summer now, so they won't be doing any "schooling stuff" either. I decided to consider this our summer vacation, too, relieving myself of the pressure to organize activities and order the children's learning somehow. Phew! I'm off the hook!

The second was reminding myself, for the millionth time, that my kids are young. DD is not quite five yet, and I honestly believe that there is nothing a child of five needs to know that they can't pick up by just being a kid and playing in the way that kids that age want to play. As I've documented here before, this naturally includes all sorts of learning experiences, thus also relieving me of the pressure to make sure they do stuff that "teaches something".

The final realization came today. It was a gorgeous day, but I didn't feel like being out in the sun, so I decided to take the kids to our nearby Massive Urban Park for a walk around Beaver Lake. It's actually within walking distance of our apartment, but it's a bit of a walk for the children and I wanted to go strollerless today. It would take you about five minutes to drive there, perhaps less than that with no traffic.

In our short walk along one side of the lake we saw: a group of bumblebees busily gathering nectar from some flowers that looked a bit like daffodils (growing right out of the lake), dragonflies of various sizes, a butterfly that wasn't white (as most of them around the city are), hoverflies, red-winged blackbirds, mallards, a turtle sunning itself on a log, and a frog. The frog swam quite close to us and hung out next to a lily pad while I took photos. There were also numerous chickadees flying about which we knew from previous experience would eat right out of your hand should you offer it.

We talked about the various creatures we saw, what they were doing and how. DD asked what the "purpose" of Canada Geese is; most would say "to be really annoying and poop everywhere", but she was asking because she is starting to understand that creatures are all interconnected. We had just talked about what would happen if there were no bees, so it was neat to see her applying this idea to other creatures.

I marvelled for the umpteenth time how lucky we were to have such bounteous natural beauty right in the heart of the city. It's hard to imagine looking at this photo of the kids staring across a very plant-dense lake that we are mere minutes from the downtown core.

But the ultimate lesson that was driven home to me that day was that Learning Happens. On "beach days" when we end up going through tidepools and looking for crabs, on "woods walk" days when we see all sorts of creatures, even when we end up at the water park and the kids play with how water moves when it's coming out of a hose, a pipe, or a spout in the ground (and how, when you block one spray, the others get more intense - water pressure)...all these things we just "do for fun" are educational. THIS is learning. So even though I feel like we're not "doing anything" with respect to schooling, we are.

One of these days I won't have to keep being reminded of it. But then again, it's nice to experience the joy of discovery over and over again, lol.

The inherent value of Obsessiveness

2007-05-29T09:06:00.001-07:00

Unschooling is based on the premise that children are programmed to learn, and that by letting go and letting them "do their thing", they can and will gain an education about the world around them. And they'll do this using innate, instinctual behaviours rather than having to be "taught" how to learn.

I've found that one of the ways young children learn is by being obsessive. When DD is on to some topic of interest, she immerses herself in it. When she's interested in ladybugs, she picks out books from the library on them, draws them, plays at being them, and makes them out of clay or crafting supplies or even food! It's "All Ladybugs, All the time" for a while. Then it's on to the next obsession. She may cycle through a group of three topics of obsession for some time, with new ones coming up to replace older ones every so often.

Kids in school don't usually get to obsess this way; they are generally not allowed to focus on just one topic and explore that through different mediums. Rather they are thrown a series of topics that someone else has decided they need to know, they are taught these in ways that someone else has decided is the best way to learn it, and they are not given any say in how long, or how much time per day, is devoted to that topic. When I look at learning in this context, it really hits home for me how traditional schooling goes so much against our Nature, and how nature has programmed us to learn and accumulate useful information. It's no wonder there are so many kids who don't "do well" in school, or are diagnosed as "learning disabled".

An example of "learning by obsessiveness" is being played out as I type this. DH has subscribed us to a number of wonderful podcasts, such as the Ask an Astronomer series. When the kids sit down to watch these short episodes (of which we currently have five) they play them over, and over, and over again (which they are doing right now). It's funny to see just how many times they can view them without getting sick of them. And even then, when they've watched them a dozen times or more, give it a day or so and they'll be back watching the same five episodes over and over.

It seems so obvious to me that their desire for repitition is part of their innate learning instinct. For what better way to learn something than to experience it over and over again.

These video podcasts are great, by the way. We are also enjoying the DiveFilm series, and the National Geographic ones as well. I'm sure there are video podcasts out there for any subject of interest, and having them stored on your computer (or, as in our case, your AppleTV) is a great way to allow your child to "obsess", too!

And as for DS...

2007-05-24T20:50:00.001-07:00

He apparently, needs nothing other than Dora the Explorer to facilitate his learning.

My little speech-delayed genius is counting to ten in Spanish, refers to a backpack as "mochila", and says "por favor" when asking for more milk.

He also bit off one corner of a triangular tortilla chip yesterday and announced that it was a Manta Ray. Damn if it didn't look like one, too.

(the rest is the sound of my heart swelling with pride)

Learning Days

2007-05-24T20:29:00.000-07:00

We went to the library yesterday and actually got some books that weren't about dinosaurs or the history of the earth or even deep ocean biology. We got a book called "Did a dinosaur drink this water?". Okay, there is that word in there. And I'll admit it's what got DD to yank it off the shelf - "Look mama, a dinosaur book we haven't read before!". But actually, I figured out from the title that it was a book about the Water Cycle. We also got another book called "A Drop of Water". It is, on the surface, a photography book with lovely shots of water dripping and splashing, bubbles frozen in time, and amazing photos of snowflakes. It was these images that captured DD's interests but when we started reading it I discovered it was all about water - surface tension, the various phases of water, etc.

We sat and read them last night which prompted a discussion of the water cycle and the ice, liquid, vapour cycle. We'd talked about the phases of water before, so this was just building on that nicely. I was also pleased to hear her say, when we got to a page about hydroelectricity, that it was "just like that Magic School Bus book we bought" (at a kids fair for 50 cents, gotta love it). That book, about electricity, featured a coal-burning electricity plant. So I was able to explain that what turns the turbines can vary. In some places they burn coal. Here on the Wet Coast we use hydroelectricity. DD asked if the sun made electricity too, and I explained that via solar panels, it can. Wind, too. It was one of those discussions you wish you could have on tape to show people...THIS is learning, THIS is how it happens, Right. Here.

Earlier that day at the playground DD found a long stick and discovered that the sandy footing had just the right amount of moisture that day to make it perfect for drawing on. It took me a while to realize the significance of what I was seeing when she drew her name, while facing me, so that the words were upright to ME. Yes, she wrote her name upside down.

And that night, perhaps inspired by the learning of the day, I came up with some wonderful experiments we can do together. Putting a drop of food colouring in a glass of water at room temperature and measuring how much time it takes for the moving water molecules to mix the colour in; timing it again in hot water. Boiling water with salt and without.

I thought about how simple it is to make a circuit with a battery, some wire, a light and a switch. Thanks again to Magic School Bus DD is learning about flowing electrons. We can use this simple circuit and then break it at one point to introduce different substances and see how well they can conduct electricity. Like all good scientists we'll keep notes of our observations. I get off on this shit and I'm excited that, if she continues along the path she's showing, she will too.

This is what made me realize that I don't need no stinking program. I can do this. We can do this. And it is going to be more and more fun as the kids get older and better able to focus. In the meantime, we'll relax and enjoy this free time of life when there isn't (shouldn't be) pressure to "start learning" (as if they haven't been doing so since they popped out of the womb) and I won't be Mom's Taxi shuttling kids between activities.

More of the Same

2007-05-24T20:14:00.000-07:00

As I wrote in my last post, with our planned homelearning program now out of the question I've been thinking about which other such program will substitute, and I've decided we are going to do none of them.

I've thought about what sort of classes to do with her, but the truth is I am not sure she really needs to do much, even though this is the "kindergarten year", the year everybody seems to think that school really begins (even though it's just a way to suck the kids into thinking school really is Fun, just like they said on Blue's Clues).

DD is not the type to sit through a class and be lectured to for very long. She doesn't actually find that interesting. DD does not like to be taught, she likes to teach herself and then play at teaching others. One of her favorite games is to read to people (or stuffed animals) by holding the book in her lap facing outwards, librarian style. She also likes to make museum displays and invite people to come for her "tour". And she likes to play "teacher" and lecture her students about the dinosaurs and other things.

I'm sure as she gets older she will want to persue her interests more fully and deeply, and we'll find courses and camps and day programs that will do just that. But for now, it's not really what turns her crank. I keep reminding myself that she is only 5, and that even if she gets "behind" in some things over the next year or 2, when she's ready for whatever those subjects are she will eat them up and master them quickly, because she'll be driven and ready to do so.

She enjoyed the classes at the local Ecology Centre last fall and winter. We'll likely do those again and hope that DS has matured enough by then to be present without being a distraction. We'll keep up with gym class because she loves it and the exercise is good for her. That is the only class she takes without me present and unless she specifically asks to go to another such class I can't see it happening any time soon. So anything that me and DS can't be at with her isn't going to be an option. Which doesn't mean there is nothing, because there certainly are things we can all do together (DS's maturity-level notwithstanding).

In short, I don't see any need to start anything, other than to pacify the family members who will be concerned that she will now officially be "behind" because every other five year old is "in school" (yeah, right) and she's not. Insert major eye roll here. We'll just keep doing what we're doing until DS is at the age where he can come too and not be a whirlwind tasmanian devil to contend with, and until DD is at the point where her desire to participate in a class will win over her belief that she can't do it without me there. I will, however, attempt to keep a portfolio, because I think it's good for all of us to be able to visualize our progress. And yes, I confess, it gives something to show the doubting masses.

Flying Free

2007-05-23T19:44:00.000-07:00

I've talked before about the program that DD will be starting this fall, make that was supposed to be starting. Seems things are going to be changing there, and it no longer holds appeal for me.

As it is right now, parents keep portfolios to document their children's learning through their interests, projects, writings, photos, etc. Teachers evaluate the portfolios three times per year. If you do this through to Grade 12 you will get your high school diploma. It seemed a pretty good compromise for unschooling-minded parents who needed some money (the program provides generous cash allowances for learning resources), wanted access to programs geared for homelearners, and wanted the outside push to generate the portfolios regularly. There were some conflicts between what teachers considered "evidence of learning" and what unschooling parents think about that, but for the most part those who were blazing this trail ahead of me (the program is fairly new) seemed to be doing alright with it.

Well, the buzz is that the program was subjected to an audit by the provincial school board and deemed "problematic". Apparently there will be an announcement any day now that the teachers will make the portfolios based on assignments that the children must complete every two weeks. Needless to say, that's all most of us needed to hear to say "thanks, but no thanks!".

I suppose if they are going to hand out diplomas it has to seem "fair" to those poor schleps stuck in school for most of their lives. To the outsider, unschooling seems equivalent to "not doing anything except have fun" (which, of course, is entirely the point). I can see why the powers that be feel the way they do - they don't get unschooling, they don't believe that children can be trusted to learn without being coerced into doing so, and they don't believe that parents can recognize when their children are learning. They absolutely don't know how to deal with individuality. The child who expresses her knowledge through art and poetry, whose mother submits her portfolio as a high quality DVD videography, doesn't fit into the mold. Neither does the child who takes out books from the library each week and devours them, the same books over and over again, but who has no desire to regurgitate what she's learned in writing for no other purpose than to convince someone else that they have, in fact, learned from reading said books.

What it really boils down to is how do you quantify Learning? Well, you can't, really. Each child is so different in their learning style; perhaps you can quantify it within one subject, but comparing thousands of six year olds to determine who is "behind", who is "ahead", and who is "average"...? I don't think it works.

So anyways, I'm not fuming about this. I'm not raging with indignation or determined to write to my MLA and protest this decision. I'm not interested in becoming an unschooling activist. Our province still allows for homeschooling of all kinds, I do not need to even register my child, and nothing I'm doing is considered illegal. Instead, I'm going to "vote with my feet" and not bother enrolling in that program after all.

What we will do, I'm not entirely sure, but fortunately there is a great homeschooling community here with loads of information and resources. There are actually several other sources of programs geared towards homelearning families, and I'm sure we'll find many ways to fill our days. I'm sort of excited about it, actually, because I think that all along I've wanted to just go full out and unschool all on our own, but maybe was a bit timid. Now here's our opportunity to fly free.

What we're up to these days

2007-04-30T19:01:00.000-07:00

DS is obsessed with the alphabet, has been for months now. He recently moved on to numbers - he can count to twenty, although 13 through 18 gets garbled a bit, and has begun counting objects. He just turned 2.5 on April 8, so is he a genius or what? Now he's singing songs. I did "Twinkle, Twinkle" with him last night and he beat me to the "world so high" part - I didn't even know he knew the song. At our homelearner dropin today he discovered the table with action figures and castles. I am not up on toys for kids, so I don't know what they were called, but it was sort of like Playmobil on steroids - chunky figurines of pirates and knights that squatted about 3 or 4 inches off the ground. DS was using the figures and making them walk, perform tasks, etc. It was fun to watch him getting into this imaginative play. He just started it recently when we got a hand-me-down plastic dollhouse. It has furniture but no dolls, so the kids use a couple of Playmobil guys who lost their hair ages ago, and some Lucky Trolls (my childhood collection).

DD is still obsessed with dinosaurs. I thought she knew everything about them but I guess there is lots to know. Her latest thing is to set up all her "squishy dinosaurs" (cheap, rubber models about 2 inches tall that we get at the dollar store) and make a "museum" where she then gives tours to paying customers (she charges only 1 dollar, lol). The tour includes the order in which animals appeared on earth (that's according to Darwin, not Genesis, though the two do overlap, don't they?), why dinosaurs became extinct, etc. She's reading more words but I have yet to see her sit down and read a book to herself. She prefers to get books for older kids, usually textbook type stuff from the library, and she doesn't usually want me to read those to her, but rather she will read them to us. She makes up most of it as she goes along, but speaks in the tone of a lecturer which is rather amusing. I'm constantly amazed at how much she learns without openly asking questions. She doesn't often ask me questions directly, it's like she absorbs information by osmosis. I recall reading on a website describing what differentiates gifted children from "bright" kids is that the latter ask questions but the former "just know". Now I don't think DD counts as gifted, but I have noticed that she does appear to work this way.

I am getting tired of reading Dr. Seuss at bedtime and am looking forward to doing some chapter books. So far when we try this we'll read the first chapter one night, but when I go to read the second chapter the next night she freaks out and insists that I have to start at the beginning. I have to control my frustration: she's not ready yet and she will be one day so chill, mama!

I'm already tired of having this discussion

2007-04-28T08:35:00.000-07:00

Last night DH and I were on a company dinner cruise. We sat at a table with his two good workmates and their wives. We were talking about our plans to buy an acreage outside of town and spend half the week there and half the week in town. One couple, N and H, have school-aged kids and live in the suburbs. H remembered that we are homeschooling and said this to me: "Oh yes, you say you aren't going to send the kids to school, but when they do go to school you won't be able to go back and forth like that".

Excuse me? You are so sure that, despite our best intentions, we will "see the light" and put our kids in school eventually?

Okay, so maybe she didn't mean it that way. But the comments just kept coming. The socialization stuff. Puh-LEASE. I am so sick of that. Then N says he coaches soccer and there are two homeschooled kids on his team and its so obvious that they just don't socialize well with the other kids at all...

Oh, so you mean they aren't sucky little conformists who've had all the uniqueness bullied out of them? You mean their lives don't revolve around discussions of video games and the latest TV series and how much school SUCKS?

I mean, even if you take what this guy is saying at face value, it's pretty damned rude. I sure wouldn't say "yeah, we go to the playground at our local public school and those school kids are little hooligans!" to somebody whose kids I know go to school.

There were other comments, like if one kid wanted to go to school but a sibling didn't how "awful" that would be. As if the homeschooled kid is being totally deprived of a life by being homeschooled while the other child enjoys everything childhood has to offer. Yeah, right.

I guess what pisses me off the most is that most people you run across have NO CLUE what homeschooling is. And yet they are so certain it's substandard, or not for them, or whatever, and they are so ready to hand you their opinions of homeschooling. H and N's boys are 8 and 5. Give the older one another year or two and I'm betting his enthusiasm for school will be all but annihilated. Then again, it was obvious from the conversation that these parents have the usual mainstream ideas about kids. How the older one is "self motivated" but wouldn't do anything with mama around; how the younger one is clingy and insecure and needed school to show him that he could "do it on his own", etc.

The whole conversation left me with a really bad taste in my mouth. And I know that this is just one of many, many such conversations I'm going to have to endure for the next decade or so. I'm starting to think about the typical comments I get and formulate some responses. It seems I'm going to have to have a repertoire of answers ready, lest I shoot off at the mouth and have to shove my foot in it. I know some people can just shrug their shoulders and say nothing, and they are probably right that there is no point: I'm not trying to convince schoolers that they should homeschool and what do I care what strangers think of me? But I do feel like I want to defend myself. It pisses me off to no end that people hear I am homeschooling and imagine me sitting in my living room making my kids do worksheets and depriving them of the company of their peers.

And I guess there's also a part of me that wants to let people know that homeschooling is not just for fringe lunatics, but for educated parents who want the best for their children. Last week at the school playground I ran into a lady I know whose son went to school with my neice. He started at the middle school this year and when I asked her if he was liking it she paused and said "Well, he has no choice".

Nice.

Learning as a separate activity

2007-04-26T17:33:00.000-07:00

Many of the mamas in our homelearning group have enrolled their children in the Silverdale program, which DD will be starting this fall. Portfolios are submitted three times a year and evaluated by a teacher. Most of us are unschoolers and readily admit to "pimping" ourselves out for the cash incentives (you get cash and internet connection paid for, as well as some free software like Rosetta Stone). For me it's more about needing a personal kick in the pants to keep up a portfolio, as well as access to lots of homeschooling-oriented programs (from arts to sciences to sports). Most of the moms I know who are doing Silverdale take the teacher comments with a big grain of salt and don't share them with their kids. All agree, however, that doing the portfolios is actually fun and provides a nice record of progress and what's been done.

So this one mama, J, was telling me that her evaluator is pressing for more writing from her 7 year old son. She had included a letter he'd worked painstakingly at writing, as thanks to the coordinator of the theatre program he'd completed: he loved every minute of it and asked his mother to help him write and mail the letter. But the teacher didn't pay much mind to it and instead suggested he write about the things he learned and discuss what was most interesting to him, etc. (we all suspect that this is an attempt to show "proof" that are kids are actually learning something; the teachers don't seem to have much faith that learning can take place without some Busywork being required at the end of it).

J pointed out to me that it seemed so contrived to ask her son to write about "what he learned" and that, if she asked her son, he probably wouldn't really get the question at first. Unschoolers learn by Living Life. The kids ask the questions, follow their interests, but they don't really think of these moments as "learning". Learning in school is a distinct activity. You go to school to Learn. Learning occurs during the hours of classroom time, and takes a break for recess and lunch. School kids understand that they are there to Learn and nothing else (no chit-chatting, no game playing, etc). But for unschoolers there is no distinct activity that is Learning. It happens all the time, throughout the day, in bits and peices. The child perceives no difference between watching a movie, colouring pictures, and reading a book about Natural History. These are all just fun things that they do. They are just how the day goes.

J didn't want her son to start considering Learning as a distinct activity, to start separating parts of the day into "learning" and "not learning". I agree.

It's all Fun and Games

2007-04-20T10:16:00.000-07:00

Last night DS went to bed early (he hadn't napped) and DH joined him (had an early morning flight to San Fran today), which left me and DD the chance to play a board game together. She chose her favorite, "Vancouveropoly", which is a variation on Monopoly using local places.

We had an excellent game, and this time she seemed open to the idea of losing money as well as gaining it. I charged her for properties and then showed her how to use the different denominations of money to pay for things. She grasped the concept immediately. I could tell her "this costs two hundred dollars" and she would hand me two $100 bills. She also learned what "change" is, and how you can use bigger bills to pay for things and then get money back (not getting that the net transaction results in a loss of money, she was quite excited with this). We actually got to the point where we were each able to buy houses for our properties, and she got that the house price had to be distributed among three properties (eg. three houses at $100 each cost $300 and that gives you one house for each of the three spots).

Rolling the dice was also instructive. She used to ask me to tell her what the two numbers added up to, but now insists on counting them herself. And while I know she's far and away from understanding probability, she did seem to get that rolling doubles was something special, and the more often she rolled them the more special it was (the kid was on a serious doubles streak last night; I should take her to Vegas).

We made it fairly far into the game before things started to deteriorate (and it was bedtime), and I enjoyed myself and enjoyed watching her learning while not realizing she was learning. Seeing how easy it is to incorporate mathematical concepts into play makes me marvel at how efficiently schools manage to suck the joy out of math and reduce it to a mind-numbing chore.

Hurry up and wait

2007-03-23T09:15:00.000-07:00

I'm a firm believer in not rushing children to acheive certain milestones. As a society, we seem to all understand that you can't teach a child to crawl or walk, and that there isn't much you can do to speed up the process. We all seem to have faith that babies figure this out on their own, and all they need is time and some space to move.

When it comes to "academic" acheivements, all that faith goes out the window. Being in a School culture, with it's curricula and standardized tests and grade levels, one would think that any child not reading by Grade 1 is some sort of aberration. When you consider the Normal Distribution, there should be some dispersion about the mean; yet when it comes to education, the classic bell shape gets squeezed into a pointed dagger, with the mean at its sharp tip and anybody not within 0.12 of a standard deviation diagnosed as a deviant.

Fortunately for us unschoolers, this isn't an issue. I do have faith that my kids will read and write on their own terms, at a time that is right for them. Inspired by many other unschooling families who have gone before me, I know it will happen.

But there is one area where I do feel the pressure to start rushing in, albeit for different reasons. There are so many cool programs out there and I am so eager to get started. From Silbury* to Silverdale, from the Young Naturalists Club to Science Camps - there is just so much learning out there available to children who are self-motivated, eager, and excited about it all (i.e. anyone who hasn't been in school, ).

DD will be starting Silverdale this fall. You might ask why an unschooler would register with a homeschooling program that involves curricula, portfolio submission, and evaluation by a public school teacher. Well, for most of the unschooling moms I know who are doing this, the answer is simple: for the money. Not only are the programs free, but you get cash from the government that would otherwise be spent on educating your child in a school, and you get your Internet connection paid for. The teacher evaluations have no effect on your child's standing and don't even need to be shared with the children. But as I can honestly say that we are not doing it for the money, why do I want to do this?

I think it's because I'm an organizational nut. I like forms and spreadsheets and having visual evidence of my progress and my direction. Silverdale provides this for me by requiring me to maintain a portfolio and submit it three times per year. It will make me feel like I'm doing something. It gives me something to tell others, instead of "...we just Are...we just Live..." and watching the thinly veiled looks of horror from the grandparents.

I know none of these are valid reasons when it comes to the success of unschooling my children - they will do just fine without such a program. We could keep doing what we've been doing all along - a gym class here, an Ecology Centre class there, a playdate here and a trip to the Aquarium there - and it would all be Good. She won't be missing out on anything, because I really feel that until she is about 7 or 8 there is no point in any "formal" education (like day programs at the local University, for example) because she really isn't mature enough to sit and focus for that long.

But when she is, oh the things she will learn! I just wish I had more faith and patience. I wish I could get away from this feeling of wanting to "do" something and trust that what we are doing now IS unschooling, not "waiting to unschool". I'm going to give Silverdale a try because I figure I have nothing to lose. But I admit I wish I were stronger in my convictions. I wish I could dispell this nagging notion that I am providing "nothing" for my child in terms of education right now(when really, what is Kindergarten providing except part-time daycare?).

*I find their website to be very un-navigable; simply put they are a school for the gifted that also runs "daytime enrichment programs" that homeschooled children can attend

Creating a "work ethic" in unschooled children

2007-03-21T09:41:00.000-07:00

An excellent post on the subject, by Moominmama.

Losing friends to school

2007-03-08T18:32:00.000-08:00

There is a group of mamas and kids I've been hanging with for a couple of years now, since we moved back here from the US. I'm quite fond of many of them and DD has formed some nice friendships. One of them is with a boy, A., whom she has known since she was 2. Her mama is my friend, K, and we had our second kids within two days of each other. That first summer when the boys were babies and DD and A were not enrolled in any programs, we spent many days together. We live only 4 blocks apart and would go to the beach, the playground, the Aquarium, all over town. Then as DD and A got older and into programs we often took classes together. K and I pulled the older ones out of preschool within a few weeks of each other and made the decision to homeschool around the same time. We get together often and all enjoy ourselves.

The family prepurchased a condo last year on the other side of town and will be moving there in early '08. And A just got a spot in wonderful kindergarten that is close to their new home. Between the move and A's new schedule I'm wondering how much of them we'll see next year. I wonder if they'll still want to come to the Homelearner's activities since they won't be homeschooling now (and A won't be available for the first half of the day). And then it hit me that the following year he'll be in Grade 1 and essentially gone all day, every day.

I'm feeling rather sad about all this, although the school he's going to is excellent and a good fit for him. An era is coming to an end. I mean, up until around age 3 there is no difference between schoolers and homeschoolers. But now we are beginning to go our separate ways and follow our separate paths. I'm hoping that K and I can stay friends - we've only known each other 2 years but I really like her and her family. She does have the younger boy who both my kids adore, and is expecting a girl this fall. So hopefully we may see her still with the younger two. But I'm kind of sad for DD because I don't think her and A will see much of each other. I think she will really miss him.

I suppose this is where the decision to homeschool starts to really feel..."real". When we are truly doing things differently than others, and when our schedules and lifestyles become far less compatible. Fortunately there are a few homeschooling families that I really like and am working on getting closer to. I hope we can form the kinds of bonds that we've formed with K and her family. It won't change our decision to homeschool, but it will make it more enjoyable.

My little calendar girl

2007-03-07T19:12:00.000-08:00

I have to give credit to Moominmama, whose recent post about ordinal numbers reminded me that I had intended to give DD a calendar of her own. We put it up on a wall in the kids' room the other day and each morning we go to the calendar and she crosses off "yesterday" and reads today's date. Despite the fact that I don't think she can recite the days of the week, so far she has successfully read Sunday through Wednesday (and that's a tough one!) on her own.

A simple idea, yet it's full of learning. She's learning about days of the week, ordinal numbers, the names of the months and the number of days that constitute a month, and also the fact that years are numbered. Not bad for a 4.5 year old!

Reading with DS

2007-02-17T20:16:00.000-08:00

My little boy didn't show the same interest in books as his sister did. For the longest time he wouldn't sit still to be read to, thus shattering my happy mental images of snuggling with my two kids at night reading them stories (though I know it will happen one day!). Last summer he took to Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and Dr. Suess' ABCs. The alphabet theme is apparent; he is obsessed with it.

Lately he has expanded his repertoire. I bought him a set of Dora and Blue's Clues books I got from Costco. They are paperbacks with simple words and, being a big fan of both the coloured dog and the latino girl, they are big hits. He carries them around sometimes and often asks to have them read to him. Over and over again!

Seems my little fella is taking an interest in books himself. Nice to see, and not for any fears of him not reading at a certain age, but because of the joy of reading itself.

She's definitely reading

2007-02-13T17:01:00.000-08:00

DD started reading simple words some time ago, like a year ago. I know she had learned many words, but wasn't sure what was reading and what was memorization of the story words. If I ask her she says she can't read, but I've been paying close attention lately and it's apparent she can read fairly well.

In the store I thought I'd try some of that fruit juice with veggies that SunRype makes. Asked her if she wanted "juice" and she said yes. A few seconds after I put it in the cart she says "Mama, why does this say "vegetables"? lol. So much for deception, lol.

She's also reading book titles of books we've never seen before etc. Rather exciting!

Diagnosis: Gifted?

2007-02-01T22:37:00.000-08:00

I wrote in my main blog recently about how a friend brought to my attention the fact that DD might be Gifted. I confess I've been hesitant to persue this with much vigor, and I think it's because I worry that my kid might not be so, and I'll somehow end up disappointed. The best way to describe it is if you never knew a Whatchamacallit existed then you wouldn't feel bad about not having one, but if someone pointed it out to you and you start to read about it you may decide you do want one but then find out you don't qualify to own one...I have never thought of DD as being Gifted, though I certainly know she is advanced in certain areas, but just chalked it up to those being her areas of interest.

Anyways, now that I've read about some signs of being Gifted I'm starting to see more and more of them in her. Perhaps this is a case of "when you have a Hammer, everything looks like a Nail". But still, I find it interesting. For example, it said that "smart" children ask questions, but "gifted" children "just know". I noticed in our Ecology Centre class Monday that DD didn't ask any questions: she never does. Yet a few days later she said something that we had learned in class, so she's obviously paying attention.

Another quality of Gifted children is their phenomenal memories. I know DD can memorize well, but yesterday she announced out-of-the-blue that she wished she still had her "sheep shirt". This is a T-shirt she had almost 2 years ago from New Zealand with one black sheep among a flock of white sheep, a description she accurately recalled to me when I asked her what it had looked like.

Another quality was that Gifted kids are often perfectionists with high standards for themselves and can be very self-critical. DD often says things like "well, I can't do that". The other day I asked her if she could read a very simple book to DS (3 word sentence-type book) and she said "no, I can't read" in a very self-depracating tone. And yet the next day we were at the playground and there was a diagram of the solar system on one of the play structures. The planets were not "in order" and they were not too distinctive looking, yet she named every one. The only conclusion I can make is that she can read their names (or enough to guess). She also told me the name of her favorite story on a story DVD we got from the library - there are no words in this short film, and the only way she could know what it was called is by reading the title. I *think*...and it's really a theory at this point, that she can read fairly well but for some reason feels she isn't "good enough" at it and so won't read out loud from books. Either that, or she has just memorized dozens of words and can tell them by sight.

As I noted in the other post, the fact that we are homeschooling means most of the issues faced by parents of gifted children don't apply to us. But it could be interesting in terms of getting to understand DD. My worry is that I will start to pigeonhole her, see behaviours I want to see, or make what I'm seeing "fit" the description. DH is totally opposed to the very idea of labelling her. While some of her social issues are challenging, I sometimes wonder how much I'm projecting onto her: feeling bad that she isn't playing with the children of my friends, when she isn't feeling bad about it. So I'm a bit leery of all this. But if it can help me figure out different approaches it would be good. And maybe introduce me to some activities that are right up her alley.

We have a playdate next week with the friend who introduced this idea to me. It will be interesting to see how her very gifted DD interacts with my DD, as they seem to have a lot in common. It would be neat to see DD get excited about someone sharing her interests.

I like Thursdays

2007-02-01T22:28:00.000-08:00

Today we had a great day. We went to our Homelearner's DropIn and DD actually got along quite well with the other kids, with only 1 or 2 minor tear-causing incidents. Importantly, she and her nemesis made peace with each other and he won her heart when he sat while she read him a story about dinosaurs (she made up the story as she flipped through the pages but it was impressive, nevertheless). DS also joined in with a group of boys - suddenly he's into boys! I think it's because he's into wrestling and only a 5 year old boy can appreciate his full-on head-butting maneuver! The two of them were quite active.

It's becoming a bit of a tradition that after dropin a bunch of us go to Science World. DS actually stuck with the group of us for a couple of hours before performing his escape maneuvers so I got to rest and enjoy myself for a bit. The mamas are great and I love hanging out with them. And DD was alot more involved with the kids, even playing hide-and-seek with them for some time. I can't explain why things seemed easier for her today, socially, but maybe these regular get-togethers are helping.

The kids ran themselves ragged, but unfortunately DS fell asleep practically before we left the parking lot. DD was almost asleep when we got home. Just enough of a refuelling to guarantee they'll both be up past midnight. And no, I'm not exagerrating. A 1 am bedtime is not unusual around here these days. So I'm now paying for my fun day. Still, I don't regret it - the kids had a blast! It's nice to have a whole day just for them to play.

DD's starting to notice

2007-01-25T20:07:00.000-08:00

Today we went to Science World to join up with the Homelearning families we missed that morning because we slept in...as we walked from the parking lot to the entrance we passed two small school buses unloading kids.

DD: "Mama, why do all those kids go to school?"
Me: "Probably because they have to. Their parents make them."
DD: "Don't they want to be homelearners?"
Me: "I doubt most of them even know what a homelearner is."
DD: "Well, I'm sure glad I don't have to go to school."

It's already starting to sink in to DD and will likely become even more evident to her as people her age enter Kindergarten. Already strangers chatting her up ask about school and don't seem to take her seriously when she says she doesn't go. One tried to convince her that she will learn to love school, until I stepped in and said actually, she really *isn't* ever going to school.

Hanging out with the homelearning mamas today was fun. They are a really neat bunch of women. I stopped feeling that "school envy" I wrote about in my last post, and was reminded of why *I* am the one to envy. Me and my daughter. Because she really does NOT want to go to school and I can't imagine how difficult it would be for her if I had to make her go.

Once again I was struck at how different she is, socially. There were about 12 kids in our group and pretty much all of them were playing together at one point, or broken down into smaller groups. DD never joined in. She wandered around doing her own thing. When I asked her if she wanted to play with the other kids (thinking maybe she just didn't know how to ask) she quite emphatically said "no". Even DS wasn't joining in too much, but then he is still so young and really into the "parallel play" thing. I wonder what he'll be like when he gets to noticing other kids and wanting to join in. But DD is definitely not interested in "running with the crowd". I think that's kind of neat in a way. She's definitely her own person and she quite enjoys being around adults. I see her as maybe being one of those precocious kids who finds the company of adults more enjoyable. Which isn't to say she doesn't have friends. She very much enjoys playing one-on-one with her two friends A and C. And yesterday my friend A came over with her son N who DD sees only sporadically and likely didn't remember. They played together and today DD said that N was her new best friend, lol. Anyways, the point is that this just isn't a child who "fits" in a school setting. And if it weren't for us choosing homelearning she would be forced into it. How very sad that would be!

School Mom Envy

2007-01-24T21:18:00.000-08:00

Lately I've been suffering from a wee bit of envy for those whose children are entering the school system. I was in the grocery store the other day, usually a difficult task with two kids in tow, listening to a lady chatting up the clerk about how her youngest started Kindergarten this year and it's so nice to do all her errands while they are in school, including grocery shopping. As my own daughter approaches age 5 I'm hearing more talk from parents in our various classes about their kids starting school this fall. And when I do I must confess that I feel twangs of envy in me that these women are "almost done". They've put in their five years of stay-at-home-mom-grind and now they are about to be Free. In no time they'll have several hours a day, each day, to do with as they wish, whereas I feel like I'll be struggling and clawing every ounce of free time I can get from my days forever.

I asked a mom I know, E, who has a 6 year old and is a dedicated homelearning mom (and one of the moms who inspired me to do it) whether she feels this way. Oh yes, she said. She is expecting her third child next month and probably feels it more than I do, lol. It really helped so much to hear that it was normal and it didn't mean I was betraying the Faith, so to speak. But then she pointed out that, as the kids get older, we will have it easier too.

In fact, when I stop to think about it, how I'm feeling doesn't make much sense. For one thing, Kindergarten is only 2 or 3 hours a day. I know from our past experience with preschool that by the time you drop them off and leave to pick them up it doesn't leave time for much, and is a special pain if you have little ones to lug in and out of carseats, infants who might be napping at the wrong time, etc. And then there's the fact that, even though the idea of having that time with one less child sounds appealing, the truth is I don't want to be apart from DD for that much time.

Then we fast forward to when all the kids are in grade school. Talk about driving around all day - at least we homelearners do our "extra curricular activities" during the day and by 3 or 4 o'clock our day is done and we can relax at home and spend time together as a family. The school kids are just starting their second jobs when the school bell rings at 3:30. First it's off to skating or ballet or karate or soccer practice and that means driving all over the place when everybody else is doing the same. After the games and classes Mum somehow has to put dinner together then the kids will have homework or music practice or whatever. And in the morning the rush starts all over again. That is so not the life I want to have with my children.

And when my kids are school aged they'll be involved in clubs and activities and such that won't require me to be there. AND since they aren't age-segregated they can do stuff together which means less running around and more opportunities for some "kid-free" time. But not too much of it. Not more than I want.

And I'll actually get to do some of this stuff with them. I want to do the Young Naturalists Club with them and volunteer with them for Habitat For Humanity and all sorts of other cool stuff.

So when I think this all out rationally there isn't anything to be envious about. Still, I feel those pangs whenever I hear talk of the pending "free time" and "boy this time has gone by fast" and the new Life that awaits for the SAHM who is inches away from release back to something more closely resembling her former life...I have a feeling, however, that once it all starts and we are really Kindergarteners who Aren't, then we will be able to make an accurate comparison. I'm confident that I will be the one to be envied, lol.

Friends going to Kindergarten

2007-01-24T20:58:00.000-08:00

My friend K was all set to homeschool her kids, but as her eldest approaches kindergarten age she has changed her mind. She is expecting baby #3 this summer and worries about burnout. She worries that homeschooling is going to mean endless driving around town, going to different classes at different locations. But mostly, her son is begging to go. He is a very social boy, has been since I met him at age 2. He gets to a playground or anywhere kids are and immediately wants to join in the fun. He loves being with friends and will happily go off with a friend and friend's mama to hang for a while without the rest of his family. He complains alot about not seeing his friends often enough. And it's not like K is dumping him in any ol' school. We are blessed to have a number of independent schools here and the two she is considering are as close to homeschooling as you can get: child-led curricula, attendance not mandatory, no homework, respectful non-punitive environments, etc. While I'm bummed that her schedule will now be more rigid, making playdates and outings less feasible, I can see quite clearly that her son would probably not be happy doing the homeschooling thing, and will undoubtedly love going to school.

I have another friend, A, who was really interested in homeschooling and trying to convince her DH to give it a go. She just told me yesterday that her DS will be going to their local Catholic school Kindergarten this fall. She was almost apologetic about it. But her son, like K's, is also a very sociable boy. He also has 3 older cousins (triplets) whom he spends tons of time with and worships and they go to this school. He was asked what he'd like to do this fall and he vehemently insisted that he wanted to go to school. For a dozen other reasons I think it would be hard for A to homeschool and I can totally see how this choice really fits for their situation and lifestyle (and they are Catholic, of course).

I've written before about how I don't think homeschooling is for everybody. I don't feel bad for these families the way I feel bad when someone decides that breastfeeding "just wasn't working for us". In fact in some ways I envy them and the free time this gives them. But the truth is, even if I weren't convinced of all the benefits of homelearning, my DD is nowhere near ready for school. She is not a social girl and is totally not interested in running with any crowd. She is just happy to read her books and learn about dinosaurs and go to gym class. She bristles at any mention of school and adamently insists she is never, ever going to go. She is simply nowhere near ready for that kind of separation and she isn't the slightest bit interested in it, either.

And this is when I feel so grateful that I discovered this option. This is what I wish for all people - that they knew the option existed. At least K and A know that if their kids decide they hate school there are options. In the meantime, it's going to be very interesting to see how it all pans out.

The games we play

2007-01-06T10:25:00.000-08:00

I read a recent post in m00minfamily's new blog about board games. I swear, that woman's family and their homeschooling life seems so perfect as to be almost discouraging, lol. But I read because she is a great source of information and resources, and because I delight in seeing it all working the way it should. Her youngest, besides being advanced in reading and language, and a violin virtuoso, is now apparently a gifted artist as well. Sigh. But hey, how lucky she is to be in a family where she'll be charting her own course, educationally.

Anyways, she wrote recently about "family game night" and I got some good ideas for board games. We aren't quite ready for that yet - DD plays Vancouveropoly (we have the original 80's version for which I can't find an image link; the one I chose is the modern incarnation of the game) and gets rather distresssed if she can't buy whatever she lands on (regardless of her financial situation), or if someone else buys one of her favorite peices of real estate (the Aquarium is untouchable by anybody but her!), or if she has to pay anyone rent. Since I'm one of those anal types who doesn't enjoy myself unless the rules are upheld, we don't do it often. But I see progress - we played a bit the other day and made it through about 20 minutes of regulation play before she had to change the rules, lol.

I'm really looking forward to when the kids are old enough that we can sit down as a family and play board games. M00minmama has some excellent suggestions in the game night post, and I was particularly interested in the non-competitive ones. We're having issues these days with DD wanting to "win" everything, and turning everything into a contest. I know this is normal for her age, but I thought if I could introduce some games that require teamwork, and that focus more on fun rather than on winning, that she could get some other ideas to think about instead of just "being first". This one sounds good - I'll have to look into where best to buy them (or order it online).

New Year, New Start

2007-01-06T09:50:00.000-08:00

I haven't been writing much in this blog lately, as it feels as though we haven't been doing much in the way of Homelearning activities. But, of course, children learn despite our best attempts to teach them, lol. DD continues to impress with her reading skills, which reveal themselves in fun and interesting ways. I'll use a shorthand title for something, only to have her inform me that the printed words don't mesh with what I've just said. Or she'll exclaim in delight in the middle of a story "that says WATER!". I love that she takes joy in figuring out words. She recently chose a book from the library called Scranimals that is a rhyming story about fictitional animals combined with other creatures. Beasts such as the "cardinalbacore" (part bird, part tuna), "toucanenome" (part toucan, part sea anenome), and the "bananaconda" (part fruit, part snake) lurk here. DD seems to really enjoy the plays on the words, and trying to wrap her mouth around the long names.

For Christmas, we gave her a telescope/microscope set. The telescope has been set up in the living room in front of the sliding glass doors, where it looks aesthetically pleasing and allows for views of the mountains or the moon. Being an inexpensive, child's model it does not allow for fine examinations, but we have been able to clearly see the moon, with the craters and "seas" clearly visible. DD has enjoyed it, and I'm looking forward to warmer weather when we can venture outdoors in the evenings to places where the city lights don't obscure so many of the stars. We haven't done much with the microscope yet, and I hope to devote some time to getting her familiar with the concept soon.

The kids also received subscriptions to Chickadee and Chirp. We sat down, the three of us, and had a good time with them when the first issues arrived. I was surprised at how much focussed time we got with them, especially with DS. It was a lovely, thoughtful gift from Nana and we look forward to next month's issues.

DS' language skills are improving with dramatic progress seemingly every day. I'll write in more detail about this soon, in my other blog. Recently he has started reciting letters. He can say A through F and a few other ones. Last night while reading one of his two favorite books, Chicka Chicka Boom Boom (the other is Dr. Seuss's ABC's), he started pointing to letters and naming them. Huge, huge strides for a child who, two months ago, said only one word and never used it in context.

Next week we start our activities. Gym class for each child (Wednesday and Friday), homelearner's dropin (Thursday) and maybe something else. I'm trying to find a dance class for DS that will fit into our schedule, as he seems to have a fondness for moving to music. Mind you, he has speech therapy this Friday and I'm not sure how often he'll have to go. I don't want to overschedule ourselves, but admit to being a bit cabin-feverish of late.

Psyched about next year

2006-11-30T18:38:00.000-08:00

Today I was able to attend our homelearner's preschool drop-in event. Usually my Mother's Helper comes on Thursdays so I can work, but she is off this week. We had a good time, even though DD had several "crises" that needed dealing with. She doesn't do well with big groups of kids, and so there were several social interaction issues that came up. She had been doing much better this summer but lately we haven't been socializing with larger groups and it was as though she were "out of practice". After the dropin session a bunch of us headed off to Science World, and there she seemed to get along with the other kids much better.

I really like the group of moms at the HL group. They have all been very inspirational for me. Some of them brought their portfolio books today for the Silverdale program. It is run by a local school district. From their website it sounds very technical but actually it is very unschooling friendly. You get $500/year for K and $1000/year for Gr. 1 - 12, and all the classes are free (arts, science, French, etc. arranged through local organizations and designed for homelearners). You submit a portfolio three times during the school year.

Some hardcore unschoolers argue that this is still "too schoolish" for them, but in talking with the moms doing it, it really isn't. None of them are doing anything more than they would be anyways, since so many of Life's day-to-day activities can be counted in certain categories. Grocery shopping is Math. Building snowmen is Interacting with the Environment, etc. And I have to say that the idea of a portfolio has always appealed to me, as a way to guage our progress, and a reminder that we are *doing* something, even though there are times when I panic briefly and worry that I'm not doing "enough" with them.

And, I'm one of those spreadsheet geeks who LOVE organizing stuff in charts and binders, etc. So the portfolios really turned me on. The moms had incorporated photos, artwork, stories, etc into them. Heck, it's basically Scrapbooking for Homelearners, lol.

It was good to go today. This week I'd been feeling guilty about my kids not being in enough activities. Now I know that next year we'll be doing more stuff and I should just enjoy the free time we have while I can! Seriously though, as DD gets older there are more and more COOL things we can do together. Even DS is starting gymnastics class this January. So today was a big dose of inspiration and motivation and excitement about what lies ahead.

I'm going to ask D if she could work for me on Wednesdays instead of Thursdays so we can keep going to the dropin.

Winter Fun

2006-11-28T16:00:00.000-08:00

It doesn't usually snow much here in the city, though in the surrounding mountains it does. So it's a real treat when it does. Today we went for a walk to a nearby park in the hopes of building a snowman. But the snow wasn't very sticky and I couldn't get much of a snowball started. Instead we made a pile of snow which was shaped like a cone and DD decided it was a "snow volcano". She noted some leaves at the bottom of the pile and said that was the lava that had flowed down the volcano. So we added some more leaves to complete the lava flow. Does that count as science? :-)

Last week we went to the library and got more dinosaur books as well as a book of home experiments. DD isn't quite interested in doing them yet, and I think most of them would be lost on her, but she saw the word "science" and decided she must have it. Still, it gives me great ideas for when the kids are a bit older.

One of the dinosaur books we got was a new one, DK's Dinosaur Encyclopedia. Most dinosaur books seem to be pretty much the same, featuring the same cast of popular beasts, but this one has been interesting. They have photos of 3D models which really bring the animals to life, and for each one a scale image next to a human. For example, I didn't realize that Pterygotus, an ancient sea scorpion that predated fish, was about 7 feet long! I always imagined it about the size of a lobster. Dunkleosteus was one of the first fish, so-called bony fish since skeletons hadn't evolved yet and they were covered with armor; it was over 16 feet long!! Again, I'd seen pictures of this kind of animal before, but always assumed it was the size of a salmon. One of DD's favorites is Cothurnocystis, a soft-bodied creature with a "notochord" - the evolutionary debut of what would become vertebrates. Anyways, the book is so good that I think we'll be ordering our own copy soon.

Finally, we started on some Math with DD. We were playing with markers and I was drawing letters and numbers for DS. Out of boredom I started writing small equations. DD has seen them before and knows they are "math" but hasn't yet really grasped the concept of addition. So I wrote "1 + 2 = " and asked her what the answer was. I told her to first take one marker from the pile, then take 2 markers. Then I asked her how many she had in her hand. Three! From there we went on to do a few more small equations. And I also showed her that different groups can add up to the same amount. Like 1 + 4 and 2 + 3 both equal 5. She still hasn't quite got it, but it was apparent that being able to manipulate objects was getting the point across much better than drawing it out or explaining it with fingers, etc. I've always suspected that Math could be much better taught in general, and I think using "manipulatives" is an excellent way to go. I think we'll look into getting some Miquon Math or whichever one is the "manipulatives" program.

Space Crafts

2006-11-15T16:22:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was a good homelearning day. The house was pretty organized, so we were out the door running errands and back by noon. We stopped at the Looney Store (Canada's equivalent to the Dollar Store) and picked up a bunch of craft items. Looney stores are generally full of a lot of cheap, useless landfill crap but for craft stuff it's a good deal. We got a ton of stuff for $30. The idea in my head was Christmas stuff, but when we got home and looked at our loot, DD decided that the styrofoam balls would make good planets. So we set out to make a solar system.
DD knows all the planets, and their order from the sun, as well as their relative sizes but we were limited by the size of the paper "sky", and the fact that we had only 3 sizes of styrofoam balls. Thus, Jupiter is the same size as the Sun, lol. And we decided not to bother putting them in the right order of distance, again for space reasons (pardon the pun, lol). We talked about each planet and what colour it looks like, etc. while we were crafting. We noted that Earth is the only planet with Life on it (that we know of) so DD decided to decorate it with lizards (we have a stamp that cuts lizard-shaped bits out of paper).

I'm quite proud of our crafting centre. DS is still more of a destructive influence, which is a bit of a drag - he ended up watching DVD's most of the time while DD and I crafted. His one contribution was to spill the bowl of water for the paints!

After crafting we did some reading and I played with DS and his wooden train set. I felt really good about the amount of "floor time" I had with the kids today. Also, my Dad has instituted a weekly reading date, which happened yesterday. He stops by on the way home from work and reads to the kids for about half an hour. After he got over the notion that he was actually going to have a say in what books were read, it went okay. He had visions of reading Winnie the Pooh stories (which he's really good at since he has just the right accent) but instead DD wanted him to read her Science book, and then partway through it decided she was going to read him a story from her Space book. She makes them up as she goes along, but it's amazing to hear what she knows. How many 4 year olds know that Black Holes have such a strong gravitational force that they pull anything that comes close to them down into the centre and "never lets them go"? Of course, I think any 4 year old could know this, I just get a kick out of the fact that DD is so into this stuff.

Next time, check the tide charts!

2006-11-13T22:18:00.000-08:00

On Friday the heavy rain we've been having all week had finally let up, so the kids and I planned a Field Trip, homelearner style. We were going to the beach to search the tide pools for neato animals and take photos of them. Back home we'd identify them, print the pix, and make a book of our finds. DD wanted to call it "The Big Book of Creatures". So with camera in hand we headed off. Unfortunately, as you can see from the photo, we got there only to discover that the tide was in. There were no real tide pools to see, and we couldn't find anything under the rocks we overturned - no crabs, hermit crabs, or little fish. All we came away with were some barnacles and seaweed (the photos of which turned out blurry). In the end, we spent most of our time there wandering along the seawall, with the kids jumping in all the puddles they could find. At first I was disappointed that we weren't doing any "learning", then I had to remind myself that Life is Learning. Jumping in puddles is learning. And just being out with my kids is what it's really all about.

We love our maps

2006-11-05T18:15:00.000-08:00

DD has been interested in maps for a long time now. At the tender age of 3 one of her favorite books to cart around was the Historical Atlas of Europe. I don't think she understands that you can use maps to help you get around, but she loves the symbols and the demarcation of various regions. Give her any sort of map and she'll be entertained for hours.

DH returned from a business trip to Korea with this gift for her: a 3D puzzle of the world. We've been having a lot of fun putting it together, and it really helps me with my geography. I am very poor in geography, much to my well-travelled mother's dismay. Just goes to show you "they don't teach you nothin' in school", lol. And just another reason why I'm so happy to be homelearning - I get to learn stuff too!

Who says homelearners can't get diplomas?

2006-11-02T18:45:00.000-08:00

The latest course we took at the Ecology Centre was about slugs. I found it just as interesting as DD did. That is one of the fun things about homelearning, is that I often learn right along with them. The diploma reads:

Diploma of Slugology, This diploma is awarded to Emily who has successfully
completed the Understanding Gastropod Habitats program (UGH).

It is signed by Dr. Slugman.

It's not for everybody, but I'm glad it's for me!

2006-10-24T11:23:00.000-07:00

There are many choices I've made in my parenting career that I think are "right for everybody". I think every mother should breastfeed. Those who don't have been let down in some way, by society or by the medical profession, or by the simple fact that we don't have sufficient milk banks to serve those who need them. I think every child should be raised without violence and emotional abuse, and I think corporal punishment should be outlawed. I think attachment parenting provides the best and most natural start to a child's life and I honestly think the world would be a better place if every parent practiced it. It can be difficult, when you are very passionate about the reasons behind a decision, to sincerely respect those who choose differently or don't hold to your reasons. I strugggle with this, trying to be less judgemental, more respectful, and to "lead by example".

But there are some choices that I readily appreciate aren't for everybody. Homeschooling is one of them. I do think that unschooling is the most natural, effective way for a child to learn. But it requires more than just keeping them out of school. The parents are a critical ingredient in the recipe for homelearning success, and not all parents are able to provide what is needed or may even have the inclination to do so. My blog friend, AnnaB, wrote an excellent post on this very subject. To quote:

I think anyone who is willing to work at it CAN homeschool, but not everyone should. The idea that we need to eradicate public schooling is ridiculous and pulls a large safety net out from under a lot of kids.

Certainly there are a million ways to homeschool. Unschooling is not even a method so much as lifestyle. And for us, it's the lifestyle that best fits our personalities and our values. There are children, like myself, who fared just fine in the school system. For some families, it just isn't realistic for them to homeschool and I think for alot of them it will be okay. For me, however, now that I know about this option, I can't imagine doing anything else. Instead of feeling better than those who school, mostly I am just incredibly grateful that we found out about it and that we are doing it. I am so excited about the future, so happy for myself and my children, and feel so blessed that I'll have so much time with my children before they are grown. I know that our lifestyle is not for everybody, but I am so happy that it is for us!

Mahvellous Mushrooms

2006-10-22T20:06:00.000-07:00

Today we went to our local botanical garden for the Mushroom Show. I had read about it in the paper and told DD who was very excited, given her recent interest in all things fungi. It was put on by members of the local Mycological Society. As DH put it, "long before there were computers, there were geeks". However, my 4 year old DD counts herself among them these days so I guess we should be more reverent, lol.

There were two long tables, one of which is shown in this photo, with specimen trays full of interesting mushroom varieties. The red ones in the foreground are Amanita muscaria, or "Fly Agaric" mushrooms. They are pretty, but poisonous.

As we walked from tray to tray DD would ask me to look up each type in her Mushroom Book (which, of course, we brought to the show) and see which representative species we could find in there. It was interesting to see that the photos in her book didn't always look much like the real thing, which might explain why we'd had such a hard time identifying them on our mushroom walk. All in all we stayed in there for about half an hour (while DH chased DS around outside), and DD remained quite interested the whole time. After we were done in there we went outside and took a lovely walk through the gardens, which were quite spectacular with their fall colours. Another day of enjoyable, effortless learning. Gotta love it.

Snow Geese

2006-10-19T20:27:00.000-07:00

This past Tuesday we visited a Pumpkin Farm to get some jack o' lantern subjects. I wrote about it in my other blog. Afterwards, we went to the Reifel Bird Sanctuary for a picnic lunch, followed by a walk through the reserve. We were delighted to witness a large flock of Snow Geese circle around in the sky and eventually land in a nearby field. They constitute the long white patch behind DD's head in the photo here. These birds spend summer on Wrangel Island in arctic Siberia, then in the fall some of them migrate along the Pacific Flyway, where many of them setttle in our very own Fraser River valley to ride out the winter. Apparently, there are still many more geese to come, and we are planning to come back next month to see them - they say that when the population reaches its peak it looks as though the field is covered in snow. The kids were as amazed as we were with the sight of so many birds in flight, and then at the contrast between their white feathers and the green grass of the field after they landed. We talked about migration and how far these birds had flown. It was a lovely day all around, a unique experience to witness the birds, and an educational experience for all of us.

As we headed back to the city I thought to myself how incredibly lucky we were as homelearners to have this as our classroom. This wasn't a field trip (which, when I was in school, everybody always looked forward to for the main reason that it meant no class that day), this was just everyday life for us and the homelearning families we went with. I felt so incredibly fortunate to be where I am today, and to have met the families who inspired us to choose homelearning, and with whom we will surely spend many more such wonderful adventures. I am so glad that we are on the path we are on. One of the families that came to the pumpkin patch with us had to leave there early, missing out on the picnic and bird sanctuary visit. The older son had to get back to town for his afternoon kindergarten class. As she rushed her two boys and her newborn off to pay for their pumpkins, I wondered to myself if that boy was going to learn anything more, or in any better way, than he would have learned had they stuck with us for the rest of the day. Well, I guess I don't really wonder - I already know the answer, lol.

Defending the universe is a family affair

2006-10-19T19:34:00.000-07:00

Yes, my kids play video games. And I don't mind.

A few years ago DH bought a used Nintendo 64 for us to play with. DD was not much past the age of 2 when she started showing an interest in it. Before long she was able to use the joystick. Over the next several months she showed an aptitude for "virtual world" games that was quite impressive. She started with Banjo Kazooie, a game where you go through several levels, solving puzzles and beating the bad guys (very cartoonish in this case, and not scary or overwhelming). You also learn new moves along the way, so that towards the end you are dealing with at least half a dozen different key combinations. DD deftly maneouvered her character, memorizing all the moves effortlessly and also showing a great mental map aptitude - she could find her way around the fairly complex virtual world without any trouble. From that game she moved on to Banjo Tooie, and then Zelda and the Ocarina of Time. The latter was interesting because the characters spoke in text. Thus, she needed an adult to play with her. However, in the game you have to learn 12 songs and play them using four keys on the controller to perform various magical feats. She had no problem learning the songs, and showed a remarkable ability to remember them even after not playing for a while.

A few months ago, we upgraded to a Nintendo Game Cube. DD and DH conquered Zelda, Legend of the WindWaker. This game had more puzzles than the previous Zelda game we played, and once again we were impressed with DD's ability to solve these puzzles. Sometimes she figured them out before we did!

Video games have a bad rap, and I'm sure that me and my kids are going to Waldorf Hell for indulging ourselves. But I have no problem with them playing Nintendo. We have not had any issues with our kids wanting to play them to the exclusion of any other activity, and it is not something that is played with on even a daily basis. I've been impressed watching DD play and feel pride in her ability to succeed at them. I fail to see any reason why this shouldn't be treated as anything other than just one of a number of kinds of activities that my kids (and the adults, I should add) enjoy doing every now and then. Besides, in our family video games are rarely played in solitary. Instead, two or more of us tend to gather round and cheer each other on. DS has been showing an interest in the games for a while now, although I wonder sometimes if he thinks it's just another cartoon. Clearly he understands that the person holding the controller is interacting, however. He likes to hold an inactive controller, and has started experimenting with the toggles and buttons. I'm sure it won't be long before he starts playing as well. In the meantime, he's happy to watch his sister defending the Universe. The two of them set those chairs up themselves, and I just couldn't resist taking their picture.

Mushrooms!

2006-10-10T16:45:00.000-07:00

This past weekend DH took the kids for an outing and ended up at a bookstore where DD fell in love with the Audobon Society's Pocket Reference Guide to Mushrooms of North America. Today, with a totally open slate and a gorgeous fall day, we headed off to Pacific Spirit Park, an amazing 1000 hectares of forested trails, to hunt for Mushrooms. Like all true ecologists-at-heart we had no intention of picking them (even before we saw the signs prohibiting mushroom picking), but instead came armed with our book and a notebook and pen for recording what we found. I'm still kicking myself for not recharging the camera battery last night - I could have posted some lovely photos (but we will do this again and will bring the camera next time). The picture at left is one I found on the Web. It was taken in the same park, and in the same area of forest that we were in (being such a large park, there are several forest types), just on a different trail. We found a huge variety of mushrooms on our relatively short walk. We didn't go too far because I had a 2 year old on foot and a 4 year old with a hacking cough (she desperately wanted to go, has no fever, and had boundless energy this morning, so I'm not a horrid mother, thankyouverymuch, lol). I'd say almost half of them we were unable to identify. The book is not exhaustive; next time we'll take photos and then look them up on the Web. But we were "pretty darned sure" that we found the following: the Jack O' Lantern, the Gem-Studded Puffball, the Pigskin Poison Puffball, the Chicken Mushroom, and some Sulfur Tufts. We had a lovely time, and decided that next time we go, we'll use our photos to put together a little book about the kinds of mushrooms we can find in our part of the world. I find great peace and a lifting of my spirit when walking through the forest. I'm so happy to be sharing it with my own children now, and plan to make this a regular activity.

My DD the marine biologist

2006-10-01T19:33:00.000-07:00

This past Wednesday I took the kids to the Aquarium. In one area is a desk where there are often staff members who bring out a variety of neat objects and specimens to show visitors. On that day, the display included whale baleen, a shark's jaw, some salmon eggs in various stages of development, and a collection of dried krill. DD stopped there with a few other kids while DS ran up and down the adjacent ramp that led down to the dolphin viewing area. I was able to keep an eye on both of them and DD stayed there for some time until the other kids had gone. I then noticed the lady going over to a cupboard and bringing out some more items to show DD. When I went over to see what they were doing, they were obviously having a lengthy and interesting discussion about marine life. I want to say that I was very proud of DD, but when I think about it, I suppose that's a bit silly. She's not better than anybody else just because she happens to love Nature owns the Blue Planet series. Being a big fan of the movie Finding Nemo also helps. I suppose pride is not the appropriate description, perhaps it's more that I was just thrilled to see DD engaged in a learning opportunity that she was truly enjoying, and how her enthusiasm and knowledge was making it equally enjoyable for the lady who was working at the table.

The lady told me that she was impressed with how much DD knew. DD had correctly identified a sperm whale, a humpback, and an orca from a chart. DD knew that some whales ate krill, while other whales ate meat. At one point the lady brought out a little jar of dried husks - she called them "deep sea shrimp" but the label on the jar said "copepods". I told DD what the label said and she was immediately very excited. DD is a big fan of copepods, having seen them many times in her Blue Planet DVD's. It was very cute hearing a 4 year old say "I love copepods!". Another fun part was when the lady brought out the salmon egg display. The stage where you can see the eyes of the salmon embryos looked just like a creature we'd seen in one of the movies, and DD said with excitement "Look mama, an ostracod!". The lady at the desk seemed confused, so I explained that we'd seen one in the Blue Planet episode "The Deep", the largest known ostracod, Gigantocyprus, which did look alot like the salmon eggs in the display. The lady had not heard of an ostracod, so it was quite funny. Anyways, eventually we headed off for lunch. DD had had a wonderful time, and told the lady when we were leaving that one day she wanted to take a ride down to the deep ocean. I have no doubt that one day, she will.

What we're up to these days

2006-09-25T20:42:00.000-07:00

DD had her third gym class of the term today and the non-parent participation thing is going swimmingly! She gets a real workout there and I definitely consider it part of the Homelearning schtick - it's Physical Education! I love watching her bouncing around and playing games and just following along without needing me to be in there with her (you can read about our trials with that here). I'm so proud of her!

I also registered us today for a series of programs run by a local Ecology Centre. We are so blessed here to have such amazing parks and wilderness areas, and wonderful programs to boot. I'm very excited about the programs because it's a lovely park and really nice to visit even in the rain! I just hope DS isn't too much of a disruption. I may end up having Mum babysit him while we go (the classes are only 1 hour). It sucks because I feel bad about dumping him off and he will be upset to not be with me and his big sister but that's life with a toddler in tow. I've been waiting so long to do stuff with DD. It makes me sad that I end up torn between my two kids. But at least with homelearning I know that it won't be for long. If they were in school they'd be doing separate activities for the next 12 years!

A Very Cool Site

2006-09-18T20:27:00.000-07:00

I spent hours with the kids yesterday surfing this site and playing all the cool games. It's educational, fun, and has a neat "World Beat" vibe to it.

www.uptoten.com

Thanks to my friend, ArtParent, for the recommendation (it only took me about 3 months to finally check it out).

Dad is on board

2006-09-14T19:25:00.000-07:00

I had coffee with my Dad today. Dad was always the driving force behind our academic persuits (mine and my brother's). He is very enthusiastic about education. Fortunately, he also has an open mind and a high regard for our parenting choices. Today I told him that we'd made the decision to homeschool. He started out with the usual misconceptions - saying it would be hard on me, and then saying that since he did a term of distance learning at University a thousand years ago he has some familiarity with homelearning. Yeeeeah. Anyways, I gave him the speech about self-directed learning, me not being a teacher but a resource finder, the children retaining their natural desire for learning, and avoiding all the social pitfalls of school society. By the end of the conversation he was positively giddy about it all. Yay Dad!

Now, to break the news to Mum. Actually, I don't think she'll freak out too much. She has talked about homeschooling with other people, and one of her friends is a school principle who took a one year sabbatical and happily homeschooled his kids through it. But my guess is that he is of the variety who sets up a mini classroom in his home. Still, with his endorsement Mum opened her mind. Then one day while she was watching my kids at the playground as I went off for a two hour lineup at the passport office, she encounterd a young boy and girl who, as it turned out, were homeschooled. She didn't know this at first, and was delighted at the boy's ability to hold a conversation with her and take an interest in her as a person. When I showed up she was gushing about what a nice young brother and sister they were, and I could see that the notion of homeschooling was becoming more acceptable to her. I think she might balk at the idea of them *never* going to school, but I can deal with that by just mumbling something along the lines of "well, we'll start with elementary school and see how that goes". Not like I have the slightest notion of sending them to high school, but it should keep Mum from worrying too much. By the time the kids get to be that age I'm sure she will be on board, just as has happened with every other parenting decision I've made.

Collecting

2006-09-13T21:34:00.000-07:00

This is just a small sample of DD's bottle cap collection. She and my mother counted them last night and she has 181 so far. I have to fight my maternal sensibilities when she starts digging them up from the ground, but she really enjoys categorizing so this kind of hobby is right up her alley. It's quite humerous to take her into the liquor store and have her identifying all the brews by their caps. Yes, my child can tell a Granville Island Brewery from a Sleemans.

Our new baby

2006-09-13T21:32:00.000-07:00

I'm experimenting with adding photos. This is our new electronic piano. It's sitting on our antique chinese writing desk, because it seemed more stable than putting it on the stand, where the kids can easily topple it over. The chair isn't really the right height for it, however, so this is just a temporary solution.

God bless the BBC

2006-09-13T20:46:00.000-07:00

I haven't had much time to play on our new piano lately. I did master Jingle Bells with two hands, but I confess I'm finding it a bit daunting to read music on two lines at the same time and work with two hands at the same time. It isn't enough to memorize fingers with notes because the fingers you use to play any given key changes depending on where your hands are. This makes it seemingly much more complicated than violin. I suspect I will soon tire of learning to play the piano properly, and instead resort to just rote memorization of songs I enjoy playing. Oh well!

We recently purchased the complete set of Blue Planet DVD's from BBC and the Discovery Channel. DD is completely hooked on The Deep episode (admittedly my favorite). The creatures that live in the deep ocean are amazingly weird and wonderful. DD's favorite is the Gulper Eel, a creature whose mouth takes up a quarter of its body size. I like the hairy anglerfish. I also give props to the usual kind of anglerfish for Coolest Mating strategy. The male is tiny compared to the female and lacks the glowing lures and cool shiny spots of the female. His job in life is to find a female, bite her on a special part of her body, and become permenantly attached to her. Their circulatory systems actually become joined. He stays there for the rest of his life, providing a steady supply of sperm. Very cool. Though I'm glad we humans went with a different reproductive plan!

DD now says when she grows up she wants to be a scientist who goes down in special submarines to explore the deep ocean. How cool is that? Anyways, as with many homeschooled kids she seems to get obsessive over a subject and this one has even surpassed the dinosaur obsession for now. I heard her telling my mother last night that you can't dive in the deep because you'll get squished. We'd been talking about pressure and how the air presses us all the time but we are used to it, but deep down the weight of the water is so great it would squish us. My mother actually used to belong to the Hong Kong Underwater Club back in the '50's and so DD was thrilled to talk to her about all the sea creatures she'd seen, like a manta ray, though DD was a bit disappointed to hear that Mum hadn't tried to take a ride on it.

This evening DH downloaded an episode of another BBC program, Planet Earth, about caves. It was stunning and the three of us watched in awe. DD was fascinated by the glowworms of New Zealand's caves and even more surprised when I told her I had actually seen them myself, when I went Blackwater Rafting (that link is the actual tour we did) many years ago with my brother and cousins - an experience that was undoubtedly one of the most amazing of my life. It's wonderful to share my fascination of Nature with her. And one of the wonderful benefits of homeschooling is getting the opportunity to learn new things myself, things that I might not bother taking the time to seek out for myself. I'll Google things for her ("let's look it up" is one of her fave sayings) when I would normally be too lazy to do it for myself. The whole family learns together and that, my friends, is why we do what we do!

Cue the Music!

2006-09-09T17:23:00.000-07:00

Today we purchased an electronic piano!

I have to give full props to the real source of my inspiration on this - m00minmama. Reading about her musically talented gang of homeschoolers really got me thinking about bringing music into my kids' lives and making it available for them. DH is also really into music and it was his idea to head off to the music store today and buy one (there was a sale).

I started violin at age 3 and went through a few years of Suzuki, continuing on until I was about 17. To be honest, there was a lot of pressure from my Dad to play. Personally, I never felt very comfortable with the violin. I always wanted to play piano (typical "not wanting to be different" kid stuff). But I did learn to read music and know basic music theory. I used to teach myself songs on the piano whenever I had access to one. Today I bought a book of simple tunes for adult beginners. I also bought DD a book for kids learning to play. So now what? Well, this is where I feel we really begin with unschooling (okay, okay I know learning has been going on since the day they were born, but humour me)...

I am not planning on getting lessons for either child any time soon. Frankly, there isn't much they need to know right now that DH, myself, or the books can't teach them. Second, there's nothing that seems to stomp the fun right out of playing music like beginning lessons, with the homework and practices and endless drilling of scales...bleck! Instead, it's there, in the living room, where we spend most of our time and where everybody has easy access to it. The kids are free to play it any time they want. With DS that means just pounding on the keys, but since it's electronic he can't really break it or put it out of tune, so he's free to bang away. DD is also banging away but its a bit more goal-oriented. She loves the piano. Today we played together "C,D,E,C,D,E..." using the correct fingers on our right hands. We put a little sticker on Middle C so we could find it easily. It lasted only a couple of minutes before she got tired of that and went back to silly pounding. She sang along with herself in the sort of whiny "nanny, nanny, pooh-pooh" voice that only a 4 year old can perfect.

Now, here's the interesting part. The little nagging voice in my head was annoyed. The banging was annoying, the whiny nyah-nyah was driving me a bit crazy. But I stopped myself, and changed my perspective. Because one of the things I was reminded of by reading these unschooling blogs is how unschoolers see the learning in everything around them. Suddenly, I realized that while DD was using a whiny tone, she was actually singing on-key. She was matching the pitch of her voice to each key she hit. And I also saw that banging away on it was all part of gaining a familiarity with the instrument. She was exploring it the way a child her age will. She does seem genuinely interested in it, in the music book, and she did well playing along with me those first few minutes. I am confident that if we just let her be to go at her own pace, and in her own way, that she will ask for more as she wants to learn more. As she gets older she will probably want to challenge herself a bit. And, if one day she decides she's ready to do it more seriously then she can have lessons if that is what she wants.

I'm really proud of us today. Proud that I was able to almost immediately squelch that nagging little voice in my head and embrace the learning that was happening right there in front of me. I'm proud that we are giving the kids (and ourselves I might add) the opportunity to bring music into our lives in a new way. Hey, I learned how to play jingle bells today (with 2 hands!)

Oh, and I've also been inspired by all the violinists in m00minmama's family to pick up some strings again. But this time I want to try the viola. It's deep, rich tones appeal to me more than the violin. Then we can play duets!

New inspirations

2006-09-09T08:53:00.000-07:00

I just discovered a plethora of Unschooling blogs. I have begun reading them and it has simply reaffirmed my suspicions that I want not just to homeschool, but unschool. I believe I already have the most important quality required to successfully unschool: faith. Faith in my children's ability and desire to learn everything they will need to know to achieve success - success as defined on their terms, and as measured by their inner peace and happiness.

I get inspired by these blogs, too. They are full of great ideas for enriching my kids' environment. For one thing, I really need to get us a tape player and find some audio books. I think DD would enjoy them, and I think I would too. Many of the families I'm reading about have school-aged children and I find it exciting to read about what they are doing and, in this way, get a peek into what lies ahead for us. I admit I am envious reading about it. I'm trying to stay relaxed and enjoy these preschool years, but I confess I am eager to start doing activities that will be more interesting for me. I look forward to when I can settle down in the evening with the kids in their own room and read them a chapter book. I'm looking forward to doing crafts with the kids that don't involve DS gluing himself to various peices of furniture, or ending with me trying to unglue sprinkles from the TV screen. I realize a mess is part of the creative process but a 2 year old is still way too into the mess side for my comfort level. I'm also looking forward to playing board games with my kids and not having to deal with them changing the rules every five minutes to suit their whims.

The other upside to reading these blogs is that I'm also feeling a lifting of spirits in the parenting department (I've been in a rut lately; you can read about it here). I'm recognizing that unschooling is more than just an educational style, it's a lifestyle that heavily relates to parenting. After all, part of wanting to homeschool is wanting to be with your kids (I got more comments today from near-strangers about how nice it would be for me if they were in school - what is it with our society and parents not wanting to be around their kids??). So I think I'm going to try and take my newfound exuberance for the Unschooling philosophy and tie that into my parenting. I'm hoping this will bring an influx of positive energy and motivation to my parenting. I am really, really in a rut of scolding and yelling and even getting physical with DD and I really really really need it to stop. Reading my parenting books often helps, but lately I feel like they just point out how badly I'm failing. Reading about unschooling, OTOH, seems to be more motivating. Maybe it's because I haven't failed at that yet!

New conversations

2006-09-07T10:27:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I taught my first lecture of the year. While wandering around my department I chit-chatted with people, and one of them asked about the kids. Specifically, they asked if DD was going to preschool this year. I replied "no", wishing to simply leave it at that. The conversation then proceeded as follows:

Her: Oh, so you're going to wait until kindergarten?
Me: Uh no, we're not sending our kids to school.
Her: Not at all?
Me: No, we're homeschooling.
Her: Oh wow! You mean you are going to teach them yourself?
Me: Uh, well, sort of. I mean, I don't need to be the teacher, there are lots of programs out there they can take if they are interested.
Her: Programs? What kind of programs?
Me: Oh lots of things. Arts classes, dance, science, etc.
Her: Oh that sounds nice. So instead of going to school they take classes......But what about academics?

By this point I am really tiring of this. It would take me far too long to explain, and when one is starting from such gross misconceptions about what homeschooling is, it would take a novel to explain it. So I try to cut the conversation short, but then she starts in with how patient and dedicated I am, and how she could never do it. Says she'd go crazy if her kids weren't in school all day, and then how she isn't smart enough to teach them stuff but of course I am because I have a PhD blah blah blah....

As I walked away from this I realized that this is only the beginning. As my kids get older, more and more people will ask if they are in school, or what grade they are in, etc. I'm not going to lie, but if I say "we homeschool" am I going to then have to educate every single person who asks? I mean, most of these people are just making polite conversation. The checkout girl at Capers asked DD if she started school this week, and DD just said no. But she's young enough that it doesn't elicit too much surprise. Wait until she is older and says "no, I don't go to school".

I really need to come up with some short and sweet answers that aren't going to have me wasting my time trying to educate people who really don't care and whose opinions of what we do don't matter. I'm thinking something along the lines of "You know, it's really not like that at all, but it would take me a long time to explain it. Suffice it to say we're confident they'll get an excellent education, which is why we decided to homeschool in the first place". End of story.

I dunno, it needs work. :)

New plans

2006-09-07T10:26:00.000-07:00

Last year after I pulled DD out of preschool I was eager to get her into a less socially volatile program. I found one that I really liked that was geared towards homelearning families, but they weren't taking 3 year olds, so I had to wait. As soon as I could I went to sign her up, but then they announced they'd changed the program and were looking for 5 and 6 year olds. I pestered the teacher throughout the summer until she finally agreed to let us in. Well, it was due to start next week and now we've decided not to go.

Our decision to homeschool was a big part of it. Suddenly it didn't seem so important that she be in some sort of program *now*. And I wondered what the point was given that I wasn't intending to continue with any other sort of program once this one was through. And since getting more involved with the homelearning community, there were programs and events that were going to conflict with DD's schedule.

There was also the pleasantly surprising realization that I was going to miss her. It was six hours a day, twice a week. As the time drew nearer, I found myself thinking it was an awfully long time to be away from her, and her away from me. And while I could be there with her the whole time if I wanted to, it then raised issues with childcare. DS is too active to be there without causing trouble, so it was either miss DD and be with DS, or the other way 'round. And while the plan was to have her be okay with me leaving her there after a while, it's a total unknown as to how long that would take. The bottom line is that I would really miss her and I realized quite suddenly and surprisingly that I don't want to be away from her for that long. It is actually a nice feeling.

But the biggest reason turned out to be money. Because DD is not yet kindergarten age, she does not qualify for government funding. The full fees were quoted to me as $400/month. This seemed reasonable back when getting her into the "best program possible" was of paramount importance to me. It seemed less so after deciding she is never going to school. Then last week the teacher told me that the fees were actually $450/month and that is when DH put his foot down. I'm glad he did, because I was just going to accept it. We talked about it and he put it this way: for 10 months of school it will cost $4500. That's almost five grand for a year of education for a FOUR YEAR OLD. Pretty insane. I mean, what is the cost if she doesn't go? Is she going to be hopelessly behind? Disadvantaged? I don't think so. And if we really want her to do this program, she can go next year for almost half the cost.

So we decided to pull her out. I had a hard time telling the teacher because I really suck at stuff like that. I feel like I owe people, like I have obligations not to disappoint them. It's not like DD took someone's place (there are still spaces available) and it's not like the program will be shut down b/c she isn't there. I feel like an idiot for bugging the teacher so hard to let her in and then jamming out at the last minute, but she is actually a really cool person and didn't make me feel at all rotten for doing so.

Now that the decision has been made, I am really happy about it. I don't think I realized how much I would miss her until we made this decision. And I'm happy that I can do some things with DS! We'll do some programs together, and DD can go into a few more (she's already doing gym class) if she wants. And we can hang out more with the other homelearning families.

Bored Choir Member

2006-09-01T03:24:00.000-07:00

You know that expression "preaching to the choir"? It means that you are trying to convince people who already agree with you. Not only is it a waste of time for the preacher, but I'm sure the choir finds it rather uninteresting.

I'm experiencing a disappointing aspect of my decision to homeschool: I'm already convinced. When I stumbled upon Attachment Parenting, for example, I bought several books on the subject and gobbled them up. But I can't seem to find much interest in the homeschooling sites and resources thus far. To be fair, I've only checked out the 'Net and some book titles recommended in various homelearning discussions. But still, seems I'm already way on board. It's all telling me stuff I agree with 100%. And that is somewhat disappointing because I always enjoy the obsessive phase of any new interest, lol.

I know I want to unschool, so reading up on all the homeschooling curricula available bores me. I don't need to read articles about how useless homework is, or how school is such a waste of time, or the benefits of homelearning. I don't need to be convinced that my kids will learn all they need to know without following anybody else's idea of what they should learn but their own. As an unschooler, I know that all there is to "do" is keep doing what we are doing: living, loving, and learning as we go along. So there are no "how to" manuals I can peruse.

I do need ideas for certain activities or subjects for when they come up, but we're not quite at the age yet where that involves much more than a trip to the library or drawing some pictures. I have some great resources in place already for when we are ready, including my local homelearner's Yahoo group (for stuff in my city and area), and a few very inspiring blogs where the writers link to cool programs, books, or materials they have found.

So what's an obsessive, newly decided homelearner to do? I guess I should just be happy that I already have the Faith, and grateful to all the mamas who helped me develop it. Meanwhile, I'll find some other subject to get obsessive about (like homebuying, which might be a possibility for us soon).

Changing Perspective

2006-08-30T17:06:00.000-07:00

All my life I associated cribs with babies. In fact, I couldn't imagine a baby without one. They are such a ubiquitous part of our baby-raising culture that they practically symbolize the concept of "baby". When I discovered the practice of cosleeping, studied the science behind it, and decided to cosleep with my (then not yet born) baby it seemed like the most desirable thing to do. Cosleeping has been amazingly successful for us. It is such a natural, normal part of our home and life that I now find the concept of crib-sleeping rather bizarre, as though I were a visitor from a foreign culture who has just stumbled upon the idea of placing tiny babies to sleep in a little cage, separated from Mama and Daddy and any other warm, loving, human body. Of course I recognize that crib-sleeping is by far the norm in our society, but that doesn't change the fact that my perspective is now completely different than it was before. What once was taken for granted without any thought now seems rather strange to me.

And so it has become with homelearning. The idea of segregating children by age and lumping them together in large groups with only one or two adults to guide them seems a completely unnatural and bizarre concept. I grew up in our system of age-segregation. I never gave it a second thought in all the 12 years I was in that system, nor did I when I became a parent. It was, however, one of the first things I learned about when starting down the information path that eventually led us to choose homelearning.

You often hear people say about a child "They need to be with children their own age". But why? I honestly believe that most people have never thought past that statement. What possible reason could their be for kids to "need" to be around other kids who are just as immature and inexperienced as they are? Looking back on human history, from the tribes of early humans that lived 100,000 years ago, right up until the turn of this century, where would you ever have found such a system? In what evolutionary context can one declare that children have a developmental need to be around other children who vary in age only within a 12 month range?

And yet surely these people have not missed the nature of older/younger child interactions: how little girls look up to and idolize and mimic the older girls, how older girls love to "adopt" younger boys and girls, take them under their wing, and behave in an almost motherly way towards them. How many have not witnessed the look of hero-worship that younger boys direct towards those several years older than themselves? And yet the significance of this dynamic seems entirely lost on our society: children have evolved in the social context of small tribal or societal groups where there are unlikely to be enough children to segregate by age. Instead, when a child was weaned (naturally occurring around age 2 or 3), the child joined in with the group of all the other kids, who ranged in age from newly weaned to pre-pubescent. And what do you get when you have older children who are naturally protective towards the younger ones, and younger ones who look up to and model the older children?: a natural model whereby young ones learn social skills from those who are older and more experienced, and where older children protect the younger ones.

Compare that to modern society where children are packed together with groups of their peers. It's the blind leading the blind. There is nobody to model proper social behaviour, problem solving skills, etc. because everybody is equally ignorant. Instead, what develops is a "Lord of the Flies" dynamic whereby children break off into groups as defined by various criteria such as the kind of music they listen to, what they wear, what their interests are (sports vs. science), and so on. When listening to a radio program about anti-bullying campaigns one day I became very frustrated when nobody, not one of the so-called "experts", stopped to question whether or not the very nature of age-segregation was, in fact, creating the problem of bullying. I mean, they all admitted it was "ubiquitous" in schools, clubs, sports teams, etc. and yet not one of them put two and two together to see that what all these things had in common was that they segregate by age. The experts admitted that despite being aware of bullying for some time now (I'd say it really hit the public's attention after the Columbine Massacre), and despite having put several varieties of anti-bullying programs into play, they haven't met with such success. As a scientist, I'm offended on an intellectual level by the fact that none of them have stopped to check the assumptions inherent in their programs, the largest, unspoken one being that age-segregation is a normal and natural thing and thus any issue with bullying must be due to some other factor or factors, such as a lack of empathy (so they bring babies into the classroom), or a lack of emotional fitness (so they teach anger-management lessons) or a lack of awareness (so they teach kids to "tell a teacher" when they witness bullying). It's simply bad science.

And so now I find myself in the unusual (yet also exciting) position of viewing so many things I took for granted before as strange. I hear parents talking about homework like it's a good thing and I wonder, doesn't anybody question why 7 hours of school a day, 5 days a week, is still not enough time to teach an 8 year old what they need to know? I hear kids everywhere talk about how much they hate school, even the media reflect this! (I heard on CBC kids today, of all places, a song about Autumn that included lyrics along the lines of how it sucks that our fun days are over and now we have to spend the day in school), and I wonder "hasn't anybody stopped to ask why school has to SUCK so bad that pretty much every kid hates it??". I mean, would THEY stay in a job that they hated for 12 years? (okay yes, some of them would, but is that the kind of person we wish our kids to be?).

Yes, it is a strange feeling being on this other side of the fence. But MAN, I am SO happy to be here!

the Zealot phase

2006-08-26T23:19:00.000-07:00

When I first discovered Attachment Parenting I was so excited about finding something that meshed with my general view of Life, the Universe, and Everything. I was thrilled to find I could be passionate about the subject of parenting (I was pregnant with my first), since it was something I was going to be involved in for some time. Anyways, as a "new Disciple" I was rather fervent about it all and, looking back, I admit I probably had moments where I sounded extreme and judgemental.

And I recall one day reading a thread that spoke about the "judgementalness" (I'm sure that's a madeup word!) and competitiveness that some felt the board was plagued with, and a woman wrote a very eloquent post about the Zealot phase, and how exciting it can be to find something that is just so powerful you want to share it with everybody. I shuddered to hear this feeling compared to Jesus Freaks (aka: rabid christians) but I'd known enough of the "newly converted" to recognize the big, fat grain of truth in her words. Seems whether it's salvation for your soul, or your baby, the zeal of the new Disciple is universal.

Now that I'm on board with homelearning, I'm finding myself feeling the same energy and passion and drive. Right now on my MDC forum there is (yet another) discussion about homelearning. Most of us on the board are doing it. One mom of 3 who battles depression wrote about how she wants to do it, how she feels it would be best for her eldest son (school age), but she is afraid it will be too much for her. She said there is this thing in the "Depression community" where being with your kids is considered to be a huge contributing factor to depresssion. In that context, homelearning is looked upon as some kind of psychological death wish. It really irks me that the parent-child bond is treated as some sort of pathology, but at the same time I'm not surprised since that attitude still permeates our society in subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle ways. I'm guessing that what is really meant by it is that stress brings on depression and looking after children is a bloody tough job that you are usually on for 24/7. The answer isn't "send your kids away", but anyways, I digress...

So this mama is getting lots of sage advice from the other homelearning mamas, and of course I couldn't help but pipe in. Frankly, schools are really little more than daycare in disguise, given that the kids really don't learn shit, or at least nothing they couldn't have learned faster, and with more enthusiasm, on their own given access to the right resources. Whenever there is a strike around here what is the number one complaint? Parents who don't know what to do with their kids. Not "they aren't learning anything!". And the kids? They are almost universally thrilled to be out of school, unless of course they are in Grade 12 and worried about jumping through the hoops of graduation and university requirements. So let's just be honest and admit that we, as a society, need somewhere to put our kids so we can get mama back to work, and so we have school.

The point of my rambling is this: if mama wants a break, instead of school, why not just hire a babysitter once a week, or a Mother's Helper? And let's not forget that the kids grow up pretty quickly. Once they are five or six many are ready to go off to the planetarium with another homelearning family, or attend a program without mama there. And voila, free time!

There was talk on the boards of moving the homelearning discussions to a separate thread, lest we make the few schooling families "feel bad". The schooling families all said no, we love the discussion. And we are a pretty great group (I think the fact that we all meet up IRL is a bit part of that). And I realized that I had been in danger of viewing the schooling mamas as being either "unenlightened", or just unfortunate because for whatever reason (jobs, etc) it just wasn't an option they could make work. Or at least, of coming across that way in my posts. Luckily, I have caught myself from falling into that trap again. Because being excited and passionate about something is great, but not if it means making other people feel as though you don't respect their choices, too.

What's in a name?

2006-08-19T19:26:00.000-07:00

I recently came across a wonderful post in a homelearner's blog about the use of terms like "homeschooling", "unschooling", and "homelearning". Unfortunately, the blog seems to be gone so I can't link to it, but I've taken the liberty of quoting some of it here (from a cached page) because it was really helpful to me in trying to figure out where I stand among all the terms and definitions. These are taken from a post by APKimberMama on her blog Holistic Learning:

"I like to think that there are really only 2 things going on out there - schooling or unschooling. Homeschooling as a term is ambiguous at best. If you are doing "school at home" then you still buy into the educational philosophy of schooling. If you choose something else, something alternative that takes away the structure and rules of school and school-based learning, then you are unschooling. Or call it home learning, life learning, holistic learning...the point is that we aren't schooling. We may use the term "homeschooling" so that other people understand what we mean, but for most of us home is not school. We aren't ringing the bell at 8 a.m., saying the Pledge of Allegiance, and then spending 30-45 minutes per subject, breaking for lunch, and finishing at 2:00 p.m. Yes there are people out there doing that, but it is schooling, and the fact that it is at home probably doesn't mean much."

Being fairly new to the commitment of homelearning I am perusing boards and forums and am surprised at how many homelearners follow what I consider to be a fairly strict schedule of "doing lessons" whether scheduled by time of day, length of lesson, or a list of subjects to be covered. I wondered what the point was of doing it this way, but of course there is so much more to homelearning than just the learning part. In fact, it was the social benefits that first attracted me to the philosophy - the belief that the social dynamics arising from peer-segregated, mass-educated institutions are abnormal and serve as the fundamental "disease" that spawns the "symptoms" of bullying, cliques, peer-orientation, etc. rather than such institutions being a benign "host" to the "viruses" of said issues. Based on that belief alone, there is much benefit to be had in choosing to "do school" at home. So I suppose I shouldn't be so surprised that many people do just that.

But it makes me feel that I fall in the more "radical" camp of homelearners because I buy so fully into the unschooling idea. And the irony of that isn't lost on me: I have 3 university degrees, including a Ph.D. I spent a total of 12 years at university and believe it was a wonderful way to have spent that time of my life. You'd think I'd be all for "schooling". I still think post-secondary education is a extremely valuable, but I no longer think that holds true for everybody. I don't believe that post-secondary education should be considered a critical component of any concerned parent's plans for their children. It is not true that one requires a university degree to be "successful". Indeed, in seeking a definition for "success" I've come to appreciate that being fulfilled and content in what you do is more important that what it is you actually do. Thus, surprisingly to some perhaps, I'm not really concerned about whether or not my children go to post-secondary institutions. I'm willing to bet that DD will end up there because she is already showing the same penchant for, and keen interest in, science that I had as a child. But if she doesn't that is okay with me, too. What matters is that my children find something that drives them, fulfills them, ignites their passions and that they follow the path that enables them to persue that thing. If it involves college, great. If not, that's fine too.

So, lest there is any doubt, I fall into the "unschooling" category. Which isn't to say that, if one of my kids wants to try Singapore Math or Five in a Row that I'm going to say "no honey, we don't do that". The key is that it is child-led, and suited to that child's learning style. But honestly, I have no desire to "teach" my children or to schedule lessons or construct curricula for them. I'm not that way inclined to start with, and I have total faith that they will lead the way. I'm not sure if that means I fit into the "strict" definition of an unschooler, and I'm not sure I want to restrict myself by thinking I need to adhere to what others decide "unschooling" means. So I use the term "homelearner" hoping it doesn't squish me too tightly into any one pigeonhole.

And....we're off!

2006-08-17T09:32:00.000-07:00

I only recently realized that homelearning was the only real option for our family. I had already embraced the philosophies of homeschooling and unschooling, but looking back I realize that I was still too afraid to take that plunge and say "yes, this is what we are doing". Since DD is only just 4 there was no pressure to make a decision yet, but I did so nevertheless after realizing one day that I'd already made the decision, I just hadn't known it yet.

I started perusing the Homelearning Forum of my fave parenting board, hosted by Mothering magazine. There was a thread asking people to describe one thing your child does that you wouldn't expect them to be doing if they were in school, and one thing they would be considered "behind" in not doing. In writing my response to that thread I realized that we have already begun homelearning. Indeed, if you follow the unschooling philosophy, it began the day my first child was born. After all, think of all the things your child learns between the ages of birth to 3 years (when many start preschool). Why is that not considered an education?

I am lucky to be surrounded by a wonderful community of homelearning families, a group I had already integrated myself into long before the issue of schooling even came up. We came together through MDC, united by our philosophies on parenting: attachment parenting, gentle discipline, natural living and so on. Through these families, both online and IRL, I learned what homeschooling was not (i.e. it's not creating a miniature classroom in your living room) and what homelearning could be for us. So I am blessed with access to resources I might never have found on my own, and ideas that have stood the test of time in other families. One idea that I loved right away was keeping a record of our homelearning days. This is especially helpful for unschoolers, who try to avoid setting curricula and meeting goals that other people have set for their children, and who generally tend towards an unstructured, child-led approach to learning.

My DD has recently come through a phase of being obsessed with ladybugs. We go to our local library almost every week, and during that time it was all books about ladybugs. She learned what a ladybug larvae looks like (I'd seen them before, but never knew what they were) and that ladybugs love to eat aphids. She pointed out an aphid to DH one day on a walk when he hadn't been able to identify the insect. At the time I hadn't thought of it as "schooling", and hadn't thought of us as being a homelearning family. Now I realize that I could have used that interest in a variety of ways, such as painting rocks to look like ladybugs, or bringing home one of my mother's aphid-infested houseplants and treating it with a box of ladybugs (you can buy them at a nursery - release the ladybugs and when the feast is over they'll fly away). We could have put together ladybug costumes, and written a play about a ladybug. And we could have collected a few ladybugs and made notes about their size and shape and colour, etc. Of course, this would all have depended on whether or not DD was interested in such things, but I never even suggested them. Now don't get me wrong: I'm not beating myself up about this and I don't consider this a lost opportunity. My point is simply that learning is happening NOW for us. I thought homelearning was something we'd "begin" at some defined point. But now I see that the opportunities for me to turn interests into learning are happening already and there is no need to wait. Right now she is really into dinosaurs, so I'm going to try and incorporate the above ideas into that subject and I'll let you know what we come up with.

So, I hope you will stick with us as we begin this amazing journey. And, if you are homelearning yourself or just considering it, I hope you will find it useful for the links, ideas, and resources I will pass on as they have been passed to me. And perhaps it will serve as an inspiration, too, the way so many homelearning mamas and blogs have been for me. I am truly excited about what lies ahead for us!

Adventures in HomeLearning

I'VE MOVED

Einstein's views on education

Does reading have to be taught?

What I was trying to say below, only much nicer

The outside world is a depressing place sometimes

Getting involved in the Community

Reading Level Tools

Teens skipping school

Will wonders never cease

Why I love my DL program

Let's Get Physical

Math Time

yet another thing we don't need to Teach (reading!)

Struggling with the Schooled Ones

A Good Laugh, a Sad Truth

Field Journal

Getting Creative

Fraser Institute Report on Homeschooling

A life of their own

Bug Hunters

...and the best part about homeschooling

The unpleasant side of being a homelearner

Our new program

A new project to get excited about!

We're in!

I did it! I rewrote the script!!

This is it, folks. This is what homelearning is all about.

Preparing for Fall: random updates

Lazy Summer

Homeschooling: the "rural vs. urban" debate

Hooked on Workbooks

How Math Happens

Bug Hunting

Just say no to Adolescence?

why was this girl in school?

college isn't for everybody, and shouldn't be

but wait, it *does* get even more lame!

Hilarious homeschooling comics

Could it get any more lame than this?

What we're missing out on...

getting comfortable with "doing nothing"

The inherent value of Obsessiveness

And as for DS...

Learning Days

More of the Same

Flying Free

What we're up to these days

I'm already tired of having this discussion

Learning as a separate activity

It's all Fun and Games

Hurry up and wait

Creating a "work ethic" in unschooled children

Losing friends to school

My little calendar girl

Reading with DS

She's definitely reading

Diagnosis: Gifted?

I like Thursdays

DD's starting to notice

School Mom Envy

Friends going to Kindergarten

The games we play

New Year, New Start

Psyched about next year

Winter Fun

Space Crafts

Next time, check the tide charts!

We love our maps

Who says homelearners can't get diplomas?

It's not for everybody, but I'm glad it's for me!

Mahvellous Mushrooms

Snow Geese

Defending the universe is a family affair

Mushrooms!

My DD the marine biologist

What we're up to these days

A Very Cool Site

Dad is on board

Collecting

but wait, it does get even more lame!