Abstract Thinking

    The mornings are chilly and bright, giving way to afternoons of short sleeved, shoeless, mossy grass toe-wiggling. 

    The air is full of many things. The sound of buzzing bees and zipping hummingbirds. The scent of dandelions. Soon, too soon, the pines will begin producing more pollen than my allergies deal well with historically and I will have to spend a good deal of time indoors until they calm down. 

    This morning, however, it's raining and Jellybean, age 13, realized she was down to one last school subject. I informed her, as I had the others (in front of her so this wasn't exactly coming out of left field) when they got down to their last subject, that it would be wise to start doubling up since she had a bit longer to go on English than the rest of the family. 

    Believing I was trying to heavy her load rather than free up her time, she began to cry. She thought I didn't want her to ever get a spring break so I kept loading her down with more and more! She had trouble understanding abstract concepts and she doesn't do well when unexpected things happen, especially if she sees them as adding to her workload. I relate to the last part so much, but I've never had trouble with the abstract, making it difficult for me sometimes to figure out how to explain things to a teenager who does struggle with it. 

    The Lord gave me the inspiration to get the quarter jar to show her what I meant. I said she has 19 lessons of English left, but we are supposed to start break after 9 school days. I had her get out 19 quarters to represent the 19 lessons remaining and line them up on her desk. I drew 9 big circles on a scrap paper to represent the days, including today, until the end of the school year for us, and asked her to put 1 quarter in each day. I explained that the quarterpillar off to the side was the number of days she would have to do school after her siblings were finished for the year. 

    Then I asked her, "What happens if you double up?" She put a second quarter in each circle and I saw understanding dawn on her face as she exclaimed she would only have one extra lesson this way. Without prompting, she immediately assigned the extra quarter to today by putting it into the first circle. 

    Having absorbed the concept, she continued to apply it as I silently watched. She rearranged the quarters to 3 per day and glowed with happiness at the sight of the days early she might be done instead of late! We discussed how many she would like me to put on her assignment list per day from here on out and she concluded she would do as many lessons as she can today and then decide based on how hard it was, how much time it took, and how many she ultimately wound up finishing in a day. 

    Someone's sitting there reading this and judging. How stupid to not have explained this to the child before! She's a teenager now and it ought have been explained sooner! I assure you've I've explained it many times over many years with many kinds of props. Why it stuck so easily this time was because the Lord readied her to hear it and me to teach it today. 

    Or You do know that curriculum wasn't designed to be 100% finished, right? Why can't you just give the poor child a break? Why do you try to hold to some arbitrary schedule or lesson planning? Homeschooling is about flexibility! You're not a public school! True, and I apply these concepts when and where it is best for my children to do so. However I am their mother and I also know that for some children it's better to be predictable and strict about finishing certain things. For this child, this is something she needs to do all the way to the end. There are multiple reasons but the fact that she fights against this subject the hardest should be enough to tell you that she needs the neural connection of a self-motived planning, executing, and subsequent psychological satisfaction of completing of it. I won't raise my children based on the public school's methods that were designed for crowd-control, nor will I raise them based on "because you're not a public school..." (implied: "you can't do anything that looks even remotely like the public schools"). I will take each situation as it comes and, by the grace of God, I will raise them the best I can even if those methods do or don't please others. 

    

Homeschooling: Preschoolers don't count?

People keep asking if we're "going to" start homeschooling. This year everyone's been pretty nice about it when I say we already are, but when my oldest was 3 I got some pretty rude things said and things that weren't really rude but were said in a rude way, KWIM? All were said to me BY HOMESCHOOLING MOMS. Pretty much in a nutshell they were insinuating that if my kid is only 3 years old it's not REAL homeschooling and that if I WAS doing "real" homeschool with a poor little 3 year old then that's tantamount to child abuse, so either way I shouldn't try to associate with homeschoolers as though I was really a homeschooler. This originally came about when my 3 year old's favorite game of choice was to write lines and lines of random letters and then show me that she'd written "words! She asked (more like begged, hounded, harassed...) me constantly to teach her to read. I subsequently bought 100 Easy Lessons and decided to putter through it at her own pace and join the local homeschool group to start getting to know other parents and get my nerve up and curriculum ideas for whenever she was mature enough to start more subjects and/or a more regular schedule of schooling. After a very rude UNwelcome, I stopped talking about homeschooling to other homeschooling parents I knew, and I changed my mind about joining the local group, possibly until she was the apparently locally acceptable age 7 (isn't that something that depends on the kid? Are all kids exactly the same that some can't possibly be ready before or even after the magical age of 7?), and possibly permanently. I just thought it was a shame that the newbie homeschooling parents are in need of the support and everywhere I turned I was all but laughed at for calling myself a homeschooler when my oldest was only 3.

My parents didn't send me to preschool- I was basically home-preschooled by my Nana, then I went to public K, and then my mom pulled me out and homeschooled me through graduation, so despite having never done it myself I have been on the receiving end of this type of education so I have a pretty good grasp of the basics. Despite having this advantage going into it, I still felt very nervous and inadequate and it would have been nice to have local support from the beginning.
I've been thinking about that and the experience has had the positive effect on me that I now make it a point to go out of my way to encourage those parents of toddlers who are home-preschooling. I always feel like telling them, and the parents who say they could never homeschool their kids because they wouldn't be a good teacher, that they already ARE! They taught their kids how to walk and talk and use the bathroom and sing and say please and a million more things already. Just because it's not in a textbook doesn't mean it's not taught, right? Just because I'm humoring my (then) 3 year old's request to learn to read by allowing her to repeat the first 3 of the 100 Easy Lessons once a month or so does that mean I'm damaging her? Just because someone isn't using a texbook to teach their 3 or 5 or 8+ year old does that also mean that it doesn't count as homeschooling? I don't think so. I think that homeschooling is alot more of a mindset of discipleship, and an environment of constant learning opportunities, than it is a set of rules to be followed. I believe that children are very much individuals and that if you're going at the pace they need to keep learning, and they are not becoming turned-off of schooling or frustrated, then the textbook or lack thereof is irrelevant. They are not little cookies all cut from the same cookie cutter. One child might be walking at 7 months but not verbally adept until 3 years, or vice versa. Likewise some kids may be ready for books early, and some may be ready for some but not others. Some might be mathematically inclined at 3 but unable to have reading lessons really "click" until they are 9 years old. Some like my daughter might not be ready for math but are ready (and begging) to begin working on simple reading skills as toddlers.

How about you? Do you other homeschool moms make it a point to encourage the newbie homeschoolers, even if their kids are still quite little? It could mean the difference between someone giving up in discouragement/chickening out, or giving them the confidence to not give in to the pressures of whatever is the popular way to school at the time (pushing academics early or likewise in the opposite extreme hold back kids regardless of readiness signs) and just going with how their own individual kids learn best. If I had not experienced the rudeness myself then I would probably not have really ever thought about this and could have unconciously someday been laughing (good naturedly on my part and hurtfully on hers) at the young mom of preschoolers for how stressed she seemed to be over something that really is so simple hahaha and forgotten how overwhelming it seemed when I was walking in those shoes and how far a little positive encouragement would have gone. We need to remember to be gracious not only to those who don't homeschool and don't understand why we do, but also to those who are hoping to and starting to homeschool and want the encouragement and mentorship that those who have homeschooled longer can provide. If they are laughed at or mocked by those they aspire to be, how easy to want to quit and become one of the (thankfully rare) moms I have met who used to homeschool and are now bitter toward homeschooling and/or homeschoolers in general. Lets remember our words can build up or tear down and focus on building others up!

Pennies

This week for homeschool with my 3 year old we played with pennies. :) We count them. I quiz her on how many pennies is a nickel, dollar, etc worth. We arrange them to form pictures and then act out stories with the pennies as people. We played bank with an empty wipes box and were making withdrawals and deposits, counting how many we took out and put in. We counted how many would fit in between our toes and then tried to walk without dropping any. It's been quite fun inventing games to play with my Chicklet. :) The hard part is keeping the pennies put up when my 1 year old is roaming. ;) He would put them in his mouth and that is just nasty.
Do you have any ideas for learning games to play with pennies with a preschooler?

Come back Tuesday for Toddler Tales! I have something great to share about Bug! ;)