En Garde!

So, let me tell you what I've learned this week.  There is a perfectly acceptable (and LEGAL) way to attach your child to a leash and plug him or her into an electrical source.  For anyone who doubts me, well check this out... (she's the one on the right with the pink socks)

Marisa is real new to fencing but loves it ...and what's not to love?  She gets to use a weapon and no one yells at her for pointing it at another person. 

What is really cool about this though?  Well, if Marisa wasn't homeschooling there would be no way we could commit the time to this.  She was finding it difficult, almost impossible actually, to get all her homework done after a full day of school.  We would also have a tutor come once or twice a week and were going to baton (which is also a weapon of sorts) lessons on one school night already.

Her frustration level was so high from school itself and the homework was so laborious, that it seemed like we had virtually no time between the end of schoolwork and winding down before bed.  There was just no way she would have been able to  fit in two nights a week of fencing in addition to twirling on a physical or emotional level.

Now, although we have a lot to do and are involved in a number of things, there is far more flexibility.  Since I'm working with her one on one, as is her tutor, we get more accomplished in a shorter amount of time and with far less pain. Because she's less stressed,  I'm finally starting to see some results.  She's reading with a little more fluency (and willingness).   I have her working on large grid graph paper for math and it seems to help her stay organized.  She's trying hard to be very neat.

But truly, the best thing is that her confidence level is way up.  Marisa, who wouldn't walk into a store and ask a clerk anything, now will (very politely I might add) asks for what she needs.  She doesn't hesitate or shy away or have to be coerced to do it.  She comes across as very grown up (Marisa???) and articulate.

She is becoming a stronger twirler. I watch her practice and the frustration that was there in the first half of the year is gone- it's like she's found her stride and she's keeping pace with it. She wants to join travel team next year and I think we can fit it in.

She's completely comfortable fencing. Marisa is moving with purpose, listening and slowing herself down. Most amazing is that she's able to wear the facemask which not too long ago would have just been impossible.

The other night we were driving back from twirling and I told her I was very proud of her;  that she seemed to really be coming into "her own."  I asked her why she thought this was happening.

She said, "Homeschooling."

Nuff said. 

Status Check- No Psych Ward Yet

Just a quick status check from over here at our little home school...

My biggest fear when knocking around the idea of homeschooling was that in short order I would be remanded to some underfunded state psychiatric facility.  The truth is,  24x7 Marisa has never been easy. This is the child who hung my car keys in the Christmas tree when she was four because they were shiny- forcing me to search for three hours. In the third grade she perfected the ability to play 'Ode to Joy' on her recorder...with her left nostril. Then last summer she informed me that on my birthday in 2010 the widest tongue AND the longest nose was recorded by the nice folks at Guinness World Book.  She asked if I was a contender.... 


Well, here's an update. So far, so good.  Sure she gives me push back on certain tasks and doesn't want  to wake up in the morning, but, oh yeah... she's 10. Overall though, she pretty good about getting the job done.  She has realized that if she stays on task, we get finished earlier and she does like that.

We switch things out and kind of ebb and flow-one day we may be math heavy, the other may be consumed with ELA. I've gotten over thinking we need to do every subject every day.  Today she has a cold and her attention isn't all that great so we chose a smorgasboard of short worksheets and a Lewis and Clark documentary.  We still get work done and she doesn't get frustrated.  

Other than that?  Well, I keep an open reservation at the funny farm.  There are days that eating with rubber forks and making necklaces out of painted pasta shapes sounds like a nice change of pace, but we aren't there quite yet.

Have a wonderful day!  Holly


 

I Heart New Things

I just love that Marisa loves new things.  She had a great time at fencing and I think it will be a good sport for her.  It might force her to slow down a bit and be more deliberate in her actions. We shall see.

So for now we have fencing Tuesday and Thursday, twirling Wednesday, Homeschool bowling Thursday and district bowling Sundays.  Also, more classes at Cold Spring Harbor DNA Learning Center  are coming up, it looks like we have created an art class 2x a month with friends who homeschool and I've been pulling together a fencing class for the homeschool community. Oh yeah, we need to do research on, and come up with a costume for an historical costume ball that will be held in May- (I do believe Marisa has settled on being Belle Boyd, a Confederate spy- because spies are cool and she wears a really fancy dress) and we're working on a Doodle for Google entry. And she's made a really nice friend.

Where did I ever get the idea that homeschooled kids sit around all day interacting with no one with no opportunities to do anything? 

Jeesh!

I need a nap. :)

Instant Gratification

 Hi and welcome to my rant for the day! Quickly- hurry up....here we go.

Have you noticed that we're raising a whole generation of kids that have no idea how to wait for anything?  They live in an instantaneous world and know nothing else. They’ve teethed on instant oatmeal, rice and hot cocoa. They eat microwaved foods.  There’s an instant queue on Netflix, instant replay in sports and let’s not forget instant messaging.  Instant communication via cellphone, instant information on computers and instant banking are now the norm.

No wonder they all seem to be on overload, have teeny tiny attention spans and don’t understand that good things come to those who wait.

This week Marisa and I took a field trip to the Long Island Children’s Museum in Garden City.  We went with new friends we found through homeschooling.  I’m happy that Marisa found Briana and it’s a bonus that I like her mother. We had a lot of fun.

The highlights of the trip were the television studio and the radio room.  The girls created their own news show and reported the weather before a green screen.  They had to figure out where to stand and read from scripts and Teleprompters.  In the radio room we collaborated and created a show complete with guests and commercials. 

In the museum there was an area that had big black desk phones with rotary dials-you know, the really old ones that I grew up with.  They were beautiful. I was brought back in time to a bygone era when there was no speed dial and every call was made by turning that large metal dial with the big white numbers around and around, again and again.  Oh, it made me wax nostalgic for a princess cradle phone, ivory colored with gold tone accents.

But I digress (sigh)

The girls dialed the phones to talk to each other, but before they could connect, they got frustrated, hung up  and stated that ‘they weren’t working’.  We told them to wait- but they were off and running to the next exhibit- to find something that moved faster or immersed them more quickly.

Most people have joked about our need for instant gratification at one time or another but it isn’t a joke anymore.  It’s a living breathing entity that as a society we have created.  There’s no way to stuff the beast in a bag and make believe it isn’t here- so we need to coexist with it, but it changes the face of our culture and in my opinion, not necessarily all for the better. Let’s take my personal pet peeve as one example.

Letter writing.

The art of writing a letter is almost dead.  Sending a handwritten Thank You card by mail seems to have gone by the wayside- heck even the skill set of handwriting itself is no longer deemed essential in today’s technologically advanced world

.

Schools feel it’s not necessary, that we need to move forward and that it takes too much time

. 

Look, I understand there are tradeoffs.  I recognize this is the world that we live in and technology is great.  I’m certainly not looking to go backwards- but I do think that we as parents, should show some restraint. I am a techno freak myself and am intravenously attached to gadgets, but I also know how to live without them.  It’s sort of like teaching kids to use a calculator without learning math, or type on a keybard without learning how to write. Shortcuts are quick, but quick does not necessarily mean 'best'.

 Kids get too much too fast and the basics are thrown by the wayside.  Sometimes I fear that we immerse them in so much that we are creating an anxious neurotic generation.  Does an eight year old really need a cellphone, an iPod Touch and a laptop?  Do they need a constant stream of instant input, information and stimulation?

I’ve been a mother for a really long time.  Joe is thirty, Marisa’s ten so it doesn’t take a calculator (unless you never learned the basics) to do the math. I have seen a lot come and go in my years of parenting and I can say without any reservation that children now seem more stressed  than when Joe and Rob were young. 

We try to give them the best but maybe in all of that shuffling from one activity to another, they really just need downtime. Time to be alone with a book or a sketchpad or a skateboard. To not have their whole day scheduled and doled out and apportioned. Time without an electronic device.

Maybe they just need some time to stop.

And wait.

And who knows...It just might be the best lesson they ever learn. 

Of Mutant Fruit Flies and Such

Marisa attended a class at the Cold Spring Harbor DNA Learning Center this week.  It was set up by one of the homeschooling e-groups that I belong to. It was well run and so interesting!  The program was geared to their level (4^th-6^th grade) and the instructor was great.

The kids worked in pairs extracting DNA from e-coli bacteria  (It seems there is a non-harmful version of it thank goodness!) using soap ( it breaks down the lipids in the cell wall) and rubbing alcohol. 

Under the stereo microscopes they also got to view fruit flies-many of them mutant.  

Marisa loved the class. Science is her thing.  I enjoyed it also and I now know the following:

1.      A fruit fly can indeed have a leg grow out of it’s head

2.      All blond haired people have the same singular ancestor

3.      A single strand of DNA is six feet long and 1,000,000 times thinner than a strand of hair. (I knew that but had forgotten it, so in my advanced dotage, it was a lot like learning it over again!)

4.      Albino turtles have a very short lifespan, not because they are colorless per se, but because they stand out from the rest and are therefore easier for predators to pick off. 

So what activity can we do next that can possibly beat mutant fruit flies? 

Well, if you can believe it, Marisa is going to a unicycling class!  For anyone who doesn’t know, I was a darned good unicyclist when I was much (about 33 years ago) younger and even brought it to college as a mode of transportation. I'm thinking I might have to totally mortify my daughter and give the unicycle a shot myself. (I consider it payback for labor)

Anyway, now the big question is, 'Does Marisa have it in her DNA to unicycle as well as mom?' Hmmmm, I wonder if we extracted a bit whether we’d be able to tell…. 

Shipwrecked On Dingo Island

Marisa loves science and all strange things that are real.  The 'Guinness World Records' book was written for her. She knows that a man in the UK clipped 160 clothespins to his face (no I didn't let her try it) and that there is a lady in New Zealand who holds the record for the fastest 100 meter hurdles while wearing swim fins. If it can be seen under a microscope or grow in the back of our refrigerator on some long forgotten leftover, she's in her glory. 

My daughter struggles to read on grade level, but eats that kind of stuff up.  She'll work hard for the words because she enjoys it.  If however, you ask her to read a fictional story or write anything longer than a sentence long on any topic, she will look through you and begin to speak in tongues.  Go figure.

Well, check this out.  In the reading textbook we are using, we came upon an exercise to write a fictional story about a wild animal using some of the vocabulary words that had been introduced in the lesson.  She tried to barter her way out of the assignment (look mom, I'll clean the bathroom's if you just look the other way and forget that little blurb at the bottom of the page ever existed ok?)  There was frustration and she was almost in tears.  We talked about it.  Turns out she was so afraid of doing it "wrong" that she didn't even want to try.  I then reminded her that it was just the two of us.  She could make mistakes, take her time, that the story was hers to create.  She then proceeded to  (slowly- it took a while), write 181 words.

Okay, so it's not exactly 'War and Peace', but for Marisa, this is huge.

While she was writing it, she commented that it was "the best thing she'd ever written" and "Look, I've covered almost a full page!  Mom, isn't this the best?  Do you want me to read it to you?" It's titled 'Shipwrecked on Dingo Island'

Then she said, "I think this homeschooling thing is really working mom.  I could never have done this in school."

It's a baby step because she still has so very far to go, but it is an important and  incredible step because she knows now she can do it. She was happy and confident, a condition that unfortunately has been far too rare for her when it comes to learning.

So, I'll ask myself again if I think I can do this.

Yeah.  If she can...I can.

I think I can, I think I can. Like the litle red train...choo choo.....

Unplanned Isn't Just For Pregnancy Anymore

Hi there and welcome to the Accidental Homeschooler!

For those of you who don’t know, I am now home schooling my daughter.  The reasons are important, but this isn’t the forum for it. Suffice it to say that our district has an unconventional middle school configuration that Marisa isn’t learning well in, so after reviewing all the options, this was what we decided on as the best course of action.

I will pause now for 30 seconds so anyone who has ever heard my tirades about homeschooling can laugh. Get it out of your system. Done?  Okay.   Back to our regularly scheduled programming.

I thoroughly believe that the universe screws with me just for fun.   I swore I’d never be a Girl Scout Leader…but I did it for a year.  The jury was out on same sex marriage in my book, until of course, my son announced he was gay.  Homeschooler's?  Hell, they are all nuts!  Does any parent really want to spend all that time with their children? What makes them think they can teach better than teachers and heck, how will those kids deal with society when they finally have to?

I'm finding that occasionally I'm wrong.  Yeah, it happens.

We are only into our second week, so a lot remains to be seen, but so far,it's proving to be a great experience.  I did purchase a curriculum because I want to make sure she stays on track, but we are throwing some 'unschooling' in there to mix it up a bit. We have field trips planned. I’m learning a lot.  I had forgotten all about independent clauses and where to put the comma.  I learned what the decimal equivalent of Asia's land mass is to total earthly land mass.  I have an excuse to sit and do calligraphy or draw with my daughter and not feel like I should be doing something else because art is a required course.  Ditto for hanging out and playing a little classical guitar. 

Day two of our homeschool adventure Marisa was reading curled up in a rocking barrel chair next to the wood stove. She was warm, relaxed, unstressed.  She looked up from the book and said "Mom, thank you so much for homeschooling me.  I don't feel like I am going to be rushed and I can think."

Changes are already starting to be seen.  She's less anxious and is actively self correcting some behaviors.  She knows she has some control over what we do in a day, or at least, the order that we do it in.  The tough stuff comes in the morning, but she has the choice...math first?  Social Studies or reading? She loves science- that's the brass ring. 

So, now to the question of the day... Is Holly Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?"

Well, I’m not so sure that I am but so far I’m managing to be one chapter ahead of Marisa. 

As long as I can keep the pace, well, what she doesn't know, won't hurt her!