As I last posted in mid-August, I was hoping to write something before September ended and I would have missed an entire calendar page. The truth is that my life is very full, and writing this is currently a luxury afforded by not being able to sleep.
We are only three months into our homeschool journey with my first-grader, but the deeper I get into it, the more I feel it is the right place for us to be right now.
We are about a third of the way through the first-grade math curriculum I bought, and my first-grader is really growing in her skills, not only of addition and subtraction, but of geometry, learning to count money and tell time, understanding calendars, measurements of length and volume, and skills which will ultimately lead to multiplication and division. She is learning things which are practical in every way and will make her a well-rounded mathematician, regardless of how far she goes in math.
Phonics is the other first-grade skill that I think is super important, and we've done a tiny bit, but too much book work isn't our cup of tea, so that's mostly on hold until we finish our math in a few months. We have the flexibility to work deeply on one subject at a time if we need to. I have a feeling that once we delve into phonics deeply and daily, she is going to become a real and fantastic reader, which I know she will LOVE.
We are reading, reading, reading together. Some of it we are reading together on the sofa. Some of it is read to us on the CD player carried, from room to room in the house, or built into the car stereo. My first-grader really connects with stories, and she is hearing (mostly) fictional stories, mostly written for children older than herself. Behind the scenes they are teaching her about big feelings and emotional regulation; strong, independent girls with passionate interests; how people just like her live in other times and places; how some Native cultures live in harmony with their surrounding ecology, and how those cultures and colonial cultures have clashed; how some brave children walked across fight lines to integrate American schools... These are all things my six-year-old is thinking about from reading. Her vocabulary is growing as is her cultural and historical literacy. There are so many delicious things to talk about. Can I tell you how much we appreciate the public library?
We are also finding some great videos at the library. Lately the elder two have been watching a documentary about Mr. Rogers, the kindest man we have ever "met," as well as about sea horses - their biology, as well as joint efforts between conservationists and fishermen at protecting them.
There are drawing lessons with my mom - lessons which teach the eyes to observe reality closely and analyze it to understand its constituent parts. Excellent skills for growing in the areas of science and philosophy, as my mom has pointed out. Nevermind that we live several states away; video conferencing is amazing. Somewhere down the road, I hear there is also an excellent geography course based on this more foundational drawing course. It is art, but it is so much more.
There are now double bass lessons with a wonderful young man who has never taught a kid before. Anne loves him and is excited to practice his assignments. Her mother, because of her many years of teaching experience, is able to translate this wonderful teacher's rambling piles of brand new information into concrete practice lists. This young fellow will NEVER know how much grief he is saving our family. It is so good for my child to have a music teacher who plays an instrument her parents don't, and who is the boss when it comes to what she should practice. I think he might have saved our family relationships. You think I'm kidding, but I'm not.
She also plays in two of our weekly group classes and participates in the adjoining Dalcroze half-hour. One is on Monday at home, and one is on Tuesday in Gig Harbor. Teamwork and careful listening skills are growing.
There is a weekly Bible club in the neighborhood which involves memorizing Bible verses to earn badges (not a huge fan of the rewards set-up, but anyway...) and large-body activities with big groups of kids, which is quite popular with my child.
There is the possibility for interesting projects. My child thinks up many of her own - she has lately been trying to figure out how to start a dog-walking business, earn money babysitting her siblings, trying to discover if there is any way she can get her own dog, sewn clothes for her Barbies, started ghost-writing a book about babysitting, tried to imagine what it would be like to break a leg, drawn series of pictures depicting various stages of human pregnancy, taught her brother music lessons... Those are all things she has done of her own volition in the last week. She has a fertile mind which needs space and time to create and grow, which it has when she isn't confined to the industrial walls of the wonderful school down the street, where the caring teachers must spend so much effort maintaining order in the group and teaching to improve test scores. (None of which is to say that wonderful school might not be exactly the right fit for our family in the future.)
I have a project of my own inspiration which we are going to do in the next week or so (fit in around the rest of my life... ha.) Along with my mother in Texas, I am very interested in ecology, and realize that native plants support native insects which support native birds and other wildlife... Whole ecosystems are delicately balanced and when we humans tinker too much, the whole thing collapses needlessly, at our loss and the rest of creation's loss. At my mother's suggestion I joined a group on facebook called Plant Identification. Today I took photos of about ten different plant species growing in the "lawn" of our yard and sent them off for the plant nerds to identify. Anne and I are going to take clippings from these plants and press them. Then we will mount each on its own page and add the Latin and common names to them, and find out their range and habitats and whether they are native or invasive here. I plan to hang this catalogue in our house for us to study so we know who we are living in the middle of. I feel like we inhabit such a strange cultural space where most of us have no idea who our natural neighbors in the creation are and feel that we have no relationship to them other than to use them.
As I mentioned at some point before, in June I joined another facebook group called Christian Gentle Parenting, which, frankly, has been amazing. There are so many resources listed, with more popping up all the time, including books, articles, videos, podcasts, specific strategies, advice for specific situations, etc. to help parents develop positive life-long relationships with their children while raising them to be responsible, kind, thoughtful, and honest without the use of manipulation, force, punishment, or shaming, all of which are SO deeply imbedded in our culture. They just added a whole new unit on dealing with racism, which I am excited to study when I catch up with the material I am currently working through. I read bits of things from this group almost every day, and I feel that I am becoming a much better parent/human-being-in-relationship-with-others for it, while also realizing *how much* more growing I have to do. I am so grateful for this group. It, like Anne's bass teacher, is truly a life-line. God has been very good to me.
Homeschooling is wonderful, and I am *almost* in over my head.
