Mom Is Teaching

For April Fool’s day Dana invited us to share a bit of home education that made us feel like a fool. Because Home Education Week isn’t all sunshine and kittens, as Dana’s post clearly showed.

I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to feeling foolish at least daily. My boys make a pretty good effort to keep my ego in check with this parenting business. They make sure that I know that I certainly don’t have all the answers, or even one answer some days. Here’s a little tidbit of that from a few weeks ago during spring break.

Every Wednesday, when the weather is good, there’s a few groups that get together at a big park in the next town over. They usually hang out all morning, have a picnic lunch, and then go home. The group is made up of a couple foster moms with several kids, a small local day care, and a few other families if they can make it. The first time we went it was by accident. We had headed over to drop off recycling and do a little shopping, and since the boys were tired of being stuck in the car we swung into the park. We got there just a little before everyone left, but some great playing time was had and a little conversation. I was asked if they boys were in any daycare of if my oldest was in school yet and I replied that no, I stayed home with them and was home educating them.

The next week we went back and the group was much smaller, mostly younger kids not yet in school or only in half day school. One of the moms remembered me as “the one not sending her kids to school”. Here I am, feeling like I have to be some poster child for home education, and my oldest pulls out the shy card. Not just talking quiet, but full on standing behind my legs refusing to talk to any other kids shy. Oh yeah, I’m looking like the crazy lady who locks her kids in the basement all day and never lets them socialize.

Of course the next day he was fine again, chatting it up with the people in the grocery store and trying to convince the neighbors to sneak him some bubble gum over the back fence. Weather and commitments haven’t been aligned for us to return to the park, which I’m sure lends to the idea that we’re freaks hiding from people. Oh joy.

home education, family, socialization, kids, life, shyness

What is it like to be home educated in my house? Dana asks a tough question today for Home Education Week.

There really is no “normal” here. Not in the typical sense of the word. There is no schedule etched in stone, no lesson plan strictly followed, and no check list to mark off. Maybe that will change as mine get older, and if so we will change with them. But for now to be home educated in this house means:

When you ask “Why?” or “What is that?” mom does her best to find an answer.

Books are free range and story time is whenever we need one.

Flowers blooming after a midday rain shower are best experienced inches away.

Being silly is a requirement.

Bare feet makes work go easier, for toddlers that would also include bare bottoms.

There’s no holiday too little to not be celebrated. Find A Rainbow day? Bring it on!

And mom’s laptop is a much loved member of the family.

So, what’s home education like in your house? Care to share what is normal for you? Go on, I dare you.

home education, home school, homeschooling, family, life

Gatto’s book Dumbing Us Down was one of the first books I read when I made the decision to home school my kids, and many of the ideas in there are still very present in my view of education. I think that he was a teacher himself and saying the things that I had secretly felt but never examined was what made the book even more powerful to me.

I wasn’t the only one influenced by him of course. But it seems that besides urging new moms such as myself to want something different Dumbing Us Down also influenced a group of high school students to demand something different. After all, they are the ones having to deal with the dumbing down of their educational system. Check out this video I found online called Dumbing Us Down: The American Tragedy. It is inspiring in that some students are looking at the failing school system they are stuck in and asking questions, and also a little horrifying when you see the results on the screen. Teens who know who Paris Hilton is immediately but have little to no clue who Mahatma Gandhi is or why he is famous. The video is a couple years old, but still worth thinking about today.

Here is the video itself, I would love to hear (read) your thoughts on this.

If you are unfamiliar with Gatto I cannot recommend enough that you start with reading his “The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher“ and watch this short documentary from the early 90’s called Classrooms Of The Heart.

education, schools, Dumbing Us Down, John Taylor Gatto, video

For Home Education Week Dana is having a week long series of writing prompts for people to join in. Today is the first day of the fun and for it Dana has reflected back to life before she became a home educator. Feel free to jump in and celebrate home Education Week too!

I feel like I became a home educator the minute my kids were born, but before that what was I?

I was certainly nothing like I am now, and yet exactly. If that makes any sense. I was a bit of a free spirit, probably what people called flaky. When my roommate and I didn’t get along I just packed up and moved, when my boss and I didn’t get along I just quit and found a new job, when living in Missouri wasn’t working anymore I hopped on a bus with less than half of my possessions and rode down to the Gulf of Mexico. I hated being tied down, stuck, I felt like a caged animal just pacing the floor.

And yet here I am, “stuck” with two young children. Tied down to being a housewife and home educating mom. Except, it doesn’t feel like a cage. OK, yes sometimes it does. But not as much as being trapped by the school’s schedule would. Being told when I could go and when I had to be back, that wouldn’t cut it for me at all. I need freedom or I start to rot.

Though I do miss 3 AM Denny’s runs and sleeping till 10 in the morning.

life, home educating, family

Week 2 (for me) of the Green Hour Challenge. This week we went outside and took some time to quietly pay attention to the nature around us. Getting my boys to be quiet outside is tricky enough, but we did manage to have some moments listening and looking around us.

When we were out part of the challenge was to ask them to describe some of the things they saw, heard, and felt. There was also an optional nature journal, though my oldest wasn’t interested at all. But I did record his answers to the questions for this week.

• One word to describe something they heard - tweeting
• Two words for something they saw - flying birds
• Three words for something they felt - soft, warm wind

This week’s reading was page 15 and pages 23 and 24 of the Handbook Of Nature Study. Page 15 has a short part of the field excursion as part of the nature study. This section notes that you do not need a long period of time set aside to study nature, it can be done in short 15 to 30 minute trips.

It is a mistake to think that a half day is necessary for a field lesson, since a very efficient field trip may be made during the ten or fifteen minutes at recess, If it is well planned. Certain questions and lines of investigation should be given the pupils before starting and given in such a manner as to make them thoroughly interested in discovering the facts.

Pages 23 and 24 covers more on how to use this book. The Handbook Of Nature Study, though thick with information, was not meant to be a field guide. The books is more useful as a guide for parents and teachers to help their children learn more about nature. One thing to use the book for is to help inspire your kids to learn more about what they see and hear in nature, but not to make it tedious work.

If the questions do not inspire the child to investigate, they are useless. To grind out answers to questions about any natural object is not nature-study, it is simply “grind,” a form of mental activity which is of much greater use when applied to spelling or the multiplication table than to the study of nature.

As more things are blooming and more animals are coming out I’m looking forward to taking an active interest in noticing them and learning more. We also have a small garden growing which brings a lot of nature to study right to us. Right now it’s just bugs and worms, but soon it will be butterflies and small animals. And of course the vegetables growing themselves.

nature, nature study, home education, homeschool, home school

If you haven’t heard yet next week Dana will be celebrating Home Education Week. If you would like to join the fun head over to her site where she has daily prompts for anyone who wants to write on.

Looking Back Sunday, March 30

Share your personal history…before you were a home educator. What was life like? Think about things you miss and things you and your family have gained.

Profiling Home Educators Monday, March 31

Describe yourself, your family or one of your children. What is it like to be home educated in your family? What is “normal” for you?

April Fool’s! Tuesday, April 1

And we have likely all felt the fool in one way or another. Share your greatest challenge. Or one of those terrible, horrible no good, very bad days where the only thing there is to do seems to involve moving to Australia.

Recipe for Success Wednesday, April 2

It is also National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day! So share a recipe…figuratively, as in two parts love, one part creativity, or literally, as in a super quick, nutritious meal your kids scarf up. Think about what you do in the day, what helps keep it organized and you sane (or how you got past that need for organization and saneness!), and curriculum materials you find effective.

Show and Tell Thursday, April 3

Show off those talents. Share a story, a special moment, a piece of artwork. Any accomplishment, great or small, is fair game.

In Their Own Words Friday, April 4

Share your children’s home education experience in their own words. What have they said about their education? What are their likes and dislikes? Share some stories, some quotes, or turn your blog over to your children for the day.

Looking Forward Saturday, April 5

What are your goals for home education? What do you hope to instill in your children? Are you planning any changes to how you educate your children?

home school, homeschool, home education, home education week

One of the common points against home education is that kids are removed from the positive and negative aspects of schools. “But how will they learn to deal with bullies?” is a line too often repeated, often under the assumption that there are no bullies outside of the classroom environment for which children to learn from. This assumption is of course both false and absurd. For starters if the only place to learn how to adapt to bullies is in the school setting then perhaps learning to deal with them is not a useful thing to learn, one that is not really needed in the world. However we know that bullies can be found everywhere and that the chance to be bullied occurs far too often in everyone’s day. You don’t need to go to a special building to find it.

I recently read two articles on bullying. The first dealt with bullying in the schools, this wonderful experience that children not in schools are missing out on. Billy Wolfe, a 15 year old boy, was repeatedly bullied and tortured in school by his classmates. They physically hit him, emotionally tortured him, and humiliated him endlessly with no consequences. After all, kids just need to learn how to deal with bullies, right?

Not long after, a boy on the school bus pummeled Billy, but somehow Billy was the one suspended, despite his pleas that the bus’s security camera would prove his innocence. Days later, Ms. Wolfe recalls, the principal summoned her, presented a box of tissues, and played the bus video that clearly showed Billy was telling the truth.

Though this did not stop the bullying, or erase the torture that had already been inflicted upon Billy. And the lesson was already taught well to the other students who laughed as Billy was suspended and the bullies walked free with bragging rights. Suddenly I have an urge to reread Lord of The Flies.

Of course this type of bullying continues unchecked into adulthood. The second article I read dealt with the adult bullies we so often face in the workplace. The typical bullies, the “cool kids” of school who gain more power by holding down those that they see as lesser than grow into the bosses that torture their employees. Adult bullies learn to adapt their tactics into what will fit better into the adult world. They realize that many of the ways they can torture people as children themselves will not work as adults, so they change tactics. Yet it is still bullying just the same.

This month, researchers at the University of Manitoba reported that the emotional toll of workplace bullying is more severe than that of sexual harassment.

Some may read this and feel that it is a perfect reason to keep kids in school. After all if bullies are so prevalent in the workplace than surely kids need to learn how to deal with them in other controlled settings such as school. Many home schooling families would be quick to point out that bullying also occurs are the park, the play group, the club, and even in the home giving home schooling children many chances to learn how to handle bullies.

For my family we have a different idea. I don’t want to teach my sons how to deal with bullies. In schools students who are bullied have limited options. Too often adults look the other way, bullies continue with what they are doing. Years through middle and high school teach students two things. 1) The bullies will get away with it and rarely punished, 2) those bullied will be punished. Learning to deal with bullies often means sinking to their level and becoming a bully as well or learning to turn away and pretend it is not there. Those values exist into adulthood.

I don’t want to teach my sons to deal with bullies. I want to teach them that this behavior is unacceptable, that hurting others in any way does not make them “cool”, that they don’t have to fit into the crowd and that standing out does not have to be painful, and that they do not have to become the kind of adults that use words that hurt as much as fists. They can be better. If that means keeping them out of the bully-rich environment until they have a solid foundation built up and a strong enough personal base to stand up to those who use power-over, then good. They will be strong er for it in the long run.

For a good discussion on bullies both in schools and in the workplace read both the post The bullying epidemic and the comments that follow.

bullies, bullying

If you haven’t checked it out yet the 117# Carnival of Homeschooling is up over at PHAT Mommy. This week’s theme is the “S” word. Go check out all the S things she connected to for the carnival.

blog carnival, carnival of homeschooling, blogging

If you are doing the Green Hour Challenge like me or just enjoying taking your kids outside to enjoy nature you might be thinking about carrying a notebook or sketch book with you to keep track of things. Jotting down notes of what you’ve found, sketches of animal tracks or interesting birds, or even just saving some flowers to investigate later are all helpful with a good notebook to use.

So for today’s Works For Me Wednesday I’m pointing you over to Kim at Relaxed Homeskool who wrote about some great little notebooks she just got called Field Notes. These beautifully simple books are a step back from the constant flow of technology we have today, and that’s what makes them great. Imagine, writing instead of typing! They have a great deal going on right now too. Their Three Pack includes 3 of the notebooks, a pencil and pen set, and extra “goodies” for only $9.95.

Of course if you would rather you can make your own books to use. Scroll to the bottom of this post on making picture books for a video tutorial on making your own hardbound book. You can use this to make a nice blank book with a thick spine to carry with you and send the kids out with. The process is easy enough that you can include the kids in the book making fun, let them decorate their books anyway that they want.

This is my tip for this week’s Works For Me Wednesday, click the link to see what other great tips people are giving.

books, book making, notebooks, writing, nature, Works For Me Wednesday

Hat tip to Alasandra for pointing out this great article in the Washington post “Home Is Where the School Is“. This article by Gregory J. Millman, a home schooling father himself, is just what needs to be said in the mainstream media after the flurry on California and abuse. A serious article in a respected newspaper that says “Hey, we’re not all freaks!”.

OK, so some of us are freaks. But we’re the fun kind, I swear!

I especially loved that he set the record straight about homeschooling being the result of over-religious zealots looking to brainwash their children. Not to mention that he mentions Holt, one of my idols. So I’m already quite pleased.

And contrary to most popular belief, home-schooling isn’t the brainchild of religious fanatics. It actually got started in the counterculture of the 1960s. In his landmark 1964 book, “How Children Fail,” teacher and education reformer John Holt accused schools themselves of causing students to fail; eventually, he came to advocate a sort of “underground railroad” out of compulsory schooling. It wasn’t until the end of the 1970s and into the 1980s that the movement spread through communities that believed public schools were threatening their moral values.

The boundaries between the counterculture and Christian home-school traditions blurred through the 1990s and 2000s, as home-schoolers from various backgrounds came to discover how much they actually have in common. Today, a well-established and widespread infrastructure of home-schooling groups, Web sites and networks has made home-schooling accessible to a broader population, people who wouldn’t consider themselves either particularly countercultural or particularly religious. People like my family.

His description of homeschooling is exactly what most people never imagine, kids joining debate teams and robotic teams and performing Shakespeare. None of which involves sitting at the kitchen table for 8 hours being shielded for the horrors of the real world. Millman even mentions his own son who did not read until he was 8 but whom jumped into books passionately in his own time. In school that would have been unacceptable, and I am sure many people read it and are shocked that the boy wasn’t forced to learn to read even if it meant destroying the love of doing so. But letting him bloom in his own time, late here in the US yet perfectly acceptable in countries such as Finland, worked for him. A one size fits all education would have been too tight and restricting.

Conventional schools are like the nation’s Rust Belt companies, designed in the 19th century but struggling to meet the standards of international competition today. School boards and administrators should be concentrating on ways to make schools more like home-schooling — not on ways to force home-schooled children to go back to schools. People who are free to think for themselves usually get together and find solutions that are better than what bureaucrats can devise.

Millman has a book of his own due out this August titled Homeschooling: A Family’s Journey. Based on this article so far it is a book I am excited to read.

It’s Spring! Which means crazy weather as the warmth and cold mix and mingle. Here in Oklahoma that means tornado season starts picking up. I thought I would put together a few links and ideas about tornadoes if anyone was interested in doing a unit study on them. Tornadoes really are amazing, hypnotic acts of nature. That is, when you’re not in the line of sight of one.

• Tornado guide from the U.S. DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Weather Service A great guide on what tornadoes are, what causes them, and some safety guidelines.
• The Tornado Project - A little bit of everything, worth check out for images and videos.
• National Geographic has Tornado lesson plans for kinds in K-2, 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12 grades.
• Make A Tornado - A fun project for younger children (K-5) to make their own little tornado in a bottle.
• Tornado! - Lesson plans for older kids (grades 6-8) from Discovery.
• Tornadoes Lesson plan - Short lesson for Junior High and High School aged kids, teaches them to predict tornadoes and includes an online quiz at the end.
• The Fujita Scale of Tornado Intensity - Explains how tornadoes are rated and what puts the “F” in an F4.

A few good tornado books to look for would be

• Under the Whirlwind: Everything You Need to Know About Tornadoes But Didn’t Know Who to Ask - Jerrine Verkaik
• Tornadoes - H. Michael Mogil
• Storm Chaser: In Pursuit of Untamed Skies - Warren Faidley
• Do Tornadoes Really Twist? - Melvin Berger, Gilda Berger
• Tornadoes - Jean Allen
• The Weather Book: An Easy-to-Understand Guide to the USA’s Weather - Jack Williams

If you don’t live somewhere that tornadoes are a hazard, or just want to check them out from the safety of your couch, just search for tornado footage on YouTube. There are several videos online of real tornadoes in action, such as this video that will put your heart in your chest a couple times as they record a tornado ripping right next to them. You can also watch live footage of the recent tornado that ripped through Atlanta.

tornado, tornadoes, weather, lesson plans

O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;

Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, 1594

If you haven’t read it yet Dana took apart yet another anti-homeschooler’s irrational claims that homeschooling is what it isn’t. A good tip would be to actually spend time researching a subject before attacking it, it helps avoid those embarrassing moments of misinformation.

It’s actually not this post that I wanted to mention, but the post previous where she first mentions the person’s arguement. A great conversation breaks out in the comments over the word (or words) homeschool and whether this term creates the limited image some people see homeschoolers with. One commenter Julie says

But, I have stumbled upon the word homeschool too. Oh, I use it because then everyone knows what I am talking about and it is the agreed upon word to describe Marissa’s school experience, but it is far too narrow to describe what I see as my role.I know it is silly, but I would even prefer that we all wrote it as two words. You know home school, with “home” an adjective modifying the noun school (like public school instead of publicschool, private school instead of privateschool). How legalistic is that? Frankly, if all I planned to do was to teach reasoning, communication and math in my home, it wouldn’t be worth staying home to do.

If I remember correctly the correct way is home school, but so many of us put them together into one word that it has become an accepted use of the term. I know I’m guilty of it myself. Does the “school” part of the word encourage people to assume children are sitting in little desks all day while mom reads to them from outdated books? Does the “home” part add to the belief that we keep the kids locked up in the house all day? What happens when we put them together?

A similar problem sometimes occurs with unschooling as a learning style. People see the “un” and jump to conclusions about what it means to them. Does that mean those who practice unschooling should use a different, less controversial term, or work to educate others on what unschooling really means. The answer depends on who you ask.

Homeschool, or home school, is such an umbrella term for what we do. That alone can make it difficult to grasp. The family using a stack of workbooks and teacher’s manuals are home schoolers just the same as those letting their kids flitter to the subject and books of their choosing. When the stereotypes only cover one small portion of all the possible styles a great number of families are overlooked. Those who are in the daily grind know how amazingly diverse home schooling can be, but those on the outside seem to be hung up on that one image.

So do you call your child a homeschooler? A home schooler? Are you a home educator, a home schooling parent, just a parent? Does the terms that you use change how others look at you?

homeschool, home school, names, stereotypes

Oak Meadow has an annual Spring Sale on their curriculum packages and on enrollment in there program. If you are thinking abut using them for your children the sale has begun today and lasts until June 30th.

The following items are 20% off
Pre-K through 8th grade curricula (printed & online)
K-8 teacher manuals

The following items are 10% off
Enrollments
High school Curriculum
K - 8 craft kits

home school, curriculum, sale, Spring

I mentioned on Monday that I was joining (late) the Green Hour Challenge. They are technically on week 5 right now, but I’m starting at the beginning instead. The first assignment was to read pages 1-8 of the Handbook of Nature Study, which you can buy in most online book stores or download the (huge) pdf version for free. I found a lot of great quotes in those first few pages. Though the book was written for public school teachers it is a great resource for anyone. I was a bit shocked that a few of the complaints in this book, first written in 1911, are still relevant today.

The second part of the study was to spend 10-15 minutes outside, to let the kids find something that catches their eye and have a discussion and investigation about it. This part was easy enough as the warm weather has us outside every day, and I’m always asked to identify and explain every little bug, flower, and rock they see. Having a good book to refer to is certainly a life saver. For our first week’s post here are a few pictures and some of the quotes that struck me the most.
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For today’s Works For Me Wednesday I wanted to share a tip that’s not very homeschooly. but that homeschooling moms could use anyway. Those of you who are already a little techie might already know about this, but for those who don’t pay attention to all the gadgets and widgets and such online this could be something new.

It’s a site called Twitter. Yes that’s a weird name but it’s still worth visiting. You see Twitter is the online version of the office water cooler. Or for stay at home moms it’s the online version of the back fence. You can chat and share snippits of your thoughts with your friends for free all day long. Unlike instant messenger services where you are only chatting with one person, using Twitter you are chatting with everyone at once. Whatever you say is seen by all of your followers at once.

I’ve been actively using Twitter for a bit now and fell madly in love with it. I never thought I would like the service, now I’m addicted. You’re only allowed a small 140 character sound bite to say what you want, but it is broadcast to all of your friends. Everyone can chat, share, ask questions, and get some adult conversation in between the house and the kids. You can update friends and family if you’re running late or if you need something, ask for tips or suggestions, or share something you found online with everyone. It’s become one of my favorite tools for chatting and sharing with friends.

You can update what you’re up to online from the site or from your mobile phone. If you use iGoogle you can add Twitter to your page here. I use Twhirl, a desktop client that I can keep running in the background on my computer. I can check what my friends are doing, update, and even reply without needed to go to the site or even open a web browser.

If you take the plunge or you’re already a fan you can check out my profile and send me a quick hi when you’re on.

Twitter, Works For Me Wednesday