on homeschooling

The hardest part of homeschooling, for me, at least, is that you have to be both the parent and the teacher. I know that parents are always teachers. You are, of course, your child's first and best teacher. But when you homeschool, you have to be the person that teaches the mom kind of things and the person who teaches where to move the decimal point in addition versus multiplication and when to use a preposition kind of things. And that, that combination, that can be hard. Not always, but sometimes, some days it is the hardest thing in the world.

It seems like that wouldn't be that difficult, doesn't it? After all, I was a teacher, I know how to teach those things. But when you are mom and teacher, the line get blurred and patience is tested, because the relationship is pushed in ways that it normally isn't between parent and child. It's something that I struggle with.

I had great hopes, at the start of this year, that homeschooling Briton would help me hold onto him just a little bit longer, that it would pull us together in a way that wouldn't be possible if I sent him off to school everyday. I wanted to create an extraordinary year for him, an environment where he would flourish, where he would learn to love the subjects that he generally didn't. Where we would be partners in crime, taking on this town.

In some ways, I think we have accomplished that. We have seen a lot. We have done a lot. I've watched his excel in writing and reading and art instead of being stifled by a curriculum that didn't quite match his needs. But given the chance to start again, I'm not sure I would choose to go the homeschooling route. Academically, it's a good fit for Briton, socially it isn't, family dynamics wise, well, it's a toss up.

When we first came here, first jumped into the local homeschooling community, I was amazed at the sense of welcome, the sense of understanding. Everybody homeschools differently, and everybody understands that. I got a few odd looks, a few disparaging comments, about having one child in school and one not, but mostly people seemed to simply shrug their shoulders and move on. But the longer I am here, the more I see that there can also be an inflexibility amongst homeschoolers. It's hard to discuss the difficulties of homeschooling for one year because, just as most "traditional" schooling families would never dream of homeschooling, most homeschooling families recoil at the thought of sending their child to school. So I fall somewhere in no man's land, not quite a homeschooler, not quite a regular old parent of a school aged child. With no one really to go to on those days when I flounder.

The end of the year is coming up fast, and I'm still undecided over whether this year has been a good thing or a bad thing for Briton, for all of us. Some days it's incredibly fun, wonderfully gratifying. Some days I want to rip my eyeballs out and lock myself in a padded room. And I know that that's parenting. That's life. But somehow adding homschooling to the mix seems to amplify these feelings, forcing them into extremes.

Questions come from all sides right now.

Will you keep homeschooling? No. Maybe. I don't know. It depends where we will be next year.

Have you liked homeschooling? Has Briton? Yes. No. Maybe. I don't know. Ask us tomorrow, because you'll get a different answer.

Would you do it again? No. Yes. Maybe. I don't know.

Where are you going? I don't know.

What are you doing? I don't know.

How do you like New York? I don't know. The coffee really sucks but on the other hand, in the past three days I've seen a bad ass play, eaten a lox and wasabi sandwich that knocked my socks off and took my kids to the Statue of Liberty. And people ask me for directions all the time, so I must at least look like I know what I'm doing, right?

fatterpillers

First, thanks for the suggestions yesterday, and I'm glad to know I'm not the only one who gets the book lump! I'm well dug into the first Mrs. Tim book and I love it! It reminds me of Henrietta's War (and has an almost identical cover to it, I had to check twice that it wasn't the same author) and is just what I needed. D.E. Stevenson! Where have you been all my life!
In other news, we have some new friends visiting at our house. Five new caterpillar friends who arrived last Monday as teeny tiny little just hatched things and have been steadily growing ever since. I used to have a book of children's poetry (which must be in storage because I can't find it anywhere and I doubt I would have gotten rid of it) that had a poem where the caterpillar started out small and then ate and ate and became a fatterpiller, which is just what ours have done.
It was supposed to be Briton's new science project and he has dutifully collected new leaves and measured them daily like a good little scientist. Evelyn, however, is in love. She rushes in to see them when she gets home from school, writes them notes, colors pictures of them and spends a good amount of her afternoon cooing to them. They are pretty darn cute, I must admit.
I imagine the chrysalis building is about to begin, they seem to be practicing hanging from the roof of the butterfly cage quite a bit today, looking like little "J's" with wiggly arms. Fingers crossed they all make it to butterflyhood.

mondays

Oh, there is nothing quite so rotten as the Monday morning after a weeks break. Heads burrowed under covered grumbling that it can not possibly be time to get up. We are too sleepy. We want just one more day to play. Sometimes it is the hardest thing for me to wake a snuggly, sleep baby, because when they are awake they don't want to be babies, but as long as they are alseep, curled up, soft and quiet, they are little still.
Alas, it's back to school for all of us.

At least there are tulips. How bad can it be when there are tulips?

project bio-sphere

Thursdays are usually field trip days. By Thursday we've had enough time to get most of the academic things out of the way, we've had soccer and some socialization time and are generally getting a little antsy to go out and DO and so we do. We go.
This week I had plans to take Briton to the Abigail Adams house but when I mentioned my idea of building a closed eco-system to him last week he asked (begged) that we get on it. Like right now mom. Or at least on Thursday. I mean, Abigail Adams or Bio-sphere? Easy question.

Right, I mean, he is nine.

The basic instructions for this come from this blog, which I found on Pinterest, but we switched out seeds for already sprouting catnip so that we could get everything we needed at Petco (we had the bottles and tape). It was a good afternoon project, lots of discussions about what might happen (could the guppies have babies? What if they run out of room? Ahhhh - the circle of life, I see) and only one foul up when I realized that the bottles I got (water bottles, since buying three bottles of any soda would just lead me down the I love Coke train which I've worked hard to get off of) had longer necks than bodies and so we had to dissect a fourth bottle to make the spacer higher, but in the end, it worked. Might not be pretty, but oh well.
Briton is lobbying hard for the guppies to be in the ecosystem only temporarily and then moved to a tank in his room. Where in his room I don't know, but he has plans. They are very pretty little fish. The orange one is hyperactive I think, he whizzes around the bottle at top speed while the yellow one and the snail hang back and watch.

And so will we. Sit back and watch. And see what happens (I hope they live!)

snippits of the week

This morning it is wet and rainy in New York. The sidewalks are shiny and slick and crowded with umbrellas. I'm always surprised to see that, in a city where winter outerwear is almost exclusively black, black and more black, umbrellas and rain boots are almost obnoxiously colorful. Polka dots and leopard prints and rainbow hues.
We've had every sort of weather this week. Saturday's snow is long gone, one day it was warm enough to go out in just light sweater.

It was frigidly cold and ferociously windy, but today is just a typical rainy day.

Soup weather. (I'm in love with this cookbook currently. Winter veggies. Yumm. This soup is the Ribolita and it was delicious!) I like typical rainy days, even when I've accidentally word my pants that are just a leeeeetle too long and are only a micro-inch off the ground. Which isn't a problem except when it rains and the water seeps up my ankles.
Because the weather has been...variable...this week, we've spent a lot of time inside playing.
And making stop-motion movies. Between the box of Will's old transformers that arrived this week from his mom and their newly established rolls as director and assistant director, the post-homework/pre-dinner hour have resulted in many, many, many films.
In case you're wondering what happens when you let a nine and five year old loose with stop-motion software and a built in isight here you go.



I picked the music :)

Briton and I spent yesterday exploring the Brooklyn Museum. We're going through a serious Rick Riordan phase here, with one of the Egypt books being read and the other being listened to (over and over and over) on an ipod, so the Egyptian Wing over in Brooklyn has been high on his list of things to do.
Smaller than the exhibit at the Met, it was a nice, manageable amount of things to see. And other than a class that wandered through for a few minutes, we were just about the only people in that part of the museum which meant that Briton could hop from statue to canopic jar to papyrus scroll and I could actually read the signs without wondering if he was in someones way.

The other part of the museum that we loved was the visible storage. I remember seeing this kind of museum storage when we were puttering around one of the museums in Dublin and I find it fascinating. The Brooklyn Museum had mounted ipads scattered around the room so that you could find out more about the objects but we really just wandered. And I found my next bike.
Today is library day. We have picked up our old Charlottesville habit of hitting a cupcake shop and then the library after school every Friday. It's not quite the same, mostly because neither the cupcake shop owners nor the librarians are particularly friendly, but it's a good tradition. This is not our library. In fact, the library we go to is a shabby 1950's building that has been under construction since we moved here. But this building is a block away from it and we pass it on our way to the bus each week and I love it. It's prompted many discussions between Briton and I about what a privilege a library system is.

Have a warm and cozy weekend!

field trip: new york historical society

Shame on me. No, seriously, shame on me. Here I am, a history major, and not just a history major but someone who reads history for fun, living in New York for eight months now, totally avoiding the Historical Society.
As much as I love history, Historical Societies can be a little...dry. I'm good with wandering around halls reading plaques and looking at aged and ancient things big and small, but my children, and, ok, my husband too, they don't really love it. It's really not fun being the one who wants to read all those little plaques when everyone grows more and more bored and more and more impatient. And also, we visited the Museum of the City of New York in the fall and, to be honest, it was kind of a dud. Mostly because about 80% of it was under construction, but still.
The New York Historical Society, however, is one humdinger of a museum. It might be my new favorite museum here, although my old favorite, the Jewish Museum, is pretty awesome, hard to decide.
Briton and I spent the morning there. We're currently making the transition in our history studies from the Post Revolutionary Era (Continental Congresses and new monetary systems and the War of 1812 oh my) to 1800's New York and it seemed like a good place to go. The history highlight of the trip was seeing the original Stamp Act and looking at the various coins issued by the new states after the war. They also had a great exhibit on how the Haitian, French and American Revolutions were tied together, an excellent children's history museum and children's history library in the basement and an outstanding movie about the history of the city. I took notes for the rest of our history year.

So if you're in the city, and you happen to be bumming around the west side, go. It's not your average dry old Historical Society. It's worth it to see the movie alone but is also just the right size for an easy afternoon of museuming.

field trip:MoMA

Last week, for our first post-holiday field trip, Briton and I spent the afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art. I have to confess that I didn't think I'd like it. I'd waited to go because, well, first of all, I don't know that much about art, and I know nothing about modern art. I love going to the Met, much of the "art" is also history, which is more my speed. And the art that is ART tends to be more recognizable from my limited art education.
But I loved it. And so did Briton. I was surprised, really, really surprised at the insights he had on the pieces we looked at. And I was almost as equally surprised at how much of the "modern" art was familiar to me.
We wandered though the furniture and technology exhibits and watched some very strange videos and stood in front of the most enormous Monet I've ever seen, checking out the how different it looked when you stood very close versus far away.
And I let Briton just talk.

And talk.

Most of the time, especially during our "school day" talking is a back and forth thing, and I often have to try to limit his constant flow of conversation a bit. Otherwise we would never get anything done. But that day, I just let him talk.
It really was fascinating. Exhausting, yes, but fascinating. He commented on the curves carved into a building and how a Smart Car really was kind of like Art and how almost everything could be designed. He told me about his plans to build a Lego tram in his room (currently underway) and about all the Legos he NEEDS and maybe some K'NEX too and wouldn't it be cool if he could get up on the roof and start his tram there and maybe make it big enough to ride it down to the park.

We looked at Mondrian and Warhol and Hopper and Pollack (he didn't care for Pollack and thought Warhol was a little weird) and lots of artists I'd never heard of and he had surprisingly thoughtful insights on what made them all Modern Artists.

I get swept up, sometimes, by guilt with homeschooling. Guilt about if I'm covering enough or if I'm doing what's best for him at all. Guilt over decidedly more laid back days than he would be having in school. Guilt is, I know, part and parcel to parenting, but I've experienced more than my normal share this year over homeschool, I suspect it comes from my teaching days. But on days like this, when we stand in a museum and I see exactly how much he has grown this year, how much more mature he is, the guilt melts away and I realize that this, this is a good thing. All around.

Of course, our entire trip home was taken up by a conversation that centered around the fact that women smell like perfume and men "stink like arm pit" and that that is why our dog doesn't like strange men petting her. Because they stink. Like arm pit.

Did I say mature? Ahem. Well, he's getting there.

field trip

Yesterday, Briton and I (and a whole group of homeschoolers) visited MFTA or Materials for the Arts which might be the coolest thing I've seen in New York. I love that the city sees the wisdom in supporting artists by providing a warehouse full of stuff for them to use and from a recycling standpoint, what a great way for companies to re purpose their leftovers, scraps and odds and ends. Fantastic.

As part of the tour, the kids got to "shop" for items to create a marble maze and spend a few hours putting them together. The folks that work there were incredible about supporting the kids in their creations, offering just the right amount of guidance while letting them do their own things. Briton was only about a third of the way done when our time was up so they suggested that he fill up a bag with double sided tape, linoleum samples, plastic scraps and corks from the table to take home. The rest of the afternoon and evening were spent doing more gluing, taping and testing.
I wish every town had a place like this. So freaking cool.

sick days

Homeschooling is a funny beast. There are things that I was positive would be problematic (keeping Briton's attention all day, not going stark raving mad at having no break) that have turned out to be, well, not a problem at all. And then there are things that I thought would be easy, or didn't think of at all, that have turned out to be something of a pain. Like trying to balance field trips around the city with getting back in time to pick Evelyn up (we cannot get to Brooklyn and back in time, as we found out not long ago, oops) or the Homeschool Office loosing all of our paperwork and then getting all huffy about why they don't have it (hello! If I hadn't sent it in you wouldn't know I was homeschooling!). Or sick days. Not kid sick days, that's obvious. Mom sick days. I'm about four days into a nasty bronchial cold that makes me want to sleep all day. In fact you'll have to forgive me if this seems a bit more rambling than normal, my head is pretty fuzzy. But what do you do when the teacher is sick and you can't just call a sub?

The answer, so far, has been all about muddling through. Yesterday Evie had a short day at school so for the few hours of "school" that Briton had we watched a documentary on Revolutionary New York. And then I slept while the kids played for the rest of the day. Today Will took over for a few hours and now that he's off to school we limping along with things that are more independent and less mommy based. It's not ideal, but it's not long term, so it will work.

So off I go to prop my head up at the table while Briton runs through French and then onto art and independent reading. I'll be back when I can string a sentence together without falling asleep midway through.

snippits of the week

Sign of the week. Found downtown outside a pub. This version is a bit more direct than the "Please Curb Your Dog" signs we have up here. We're such pansies uptown.
Also, "Canyons of Wall Street." I totally get that now.
Over the weekend, the kids and I took a train (or two, actually) down to the Nordic Center, otherwise known as Scandinavia House.

My mom and I found this place when we came for a girls weekend a few years ago and ate the most wonderful dinner there and I've been wanting to go back ever since and their Scandinavian Folk Story Time seemed the perfect excuse. The plan was to stay for a snack but by the time it was over Briton was feeling lousy so home we went.
But not before we dropped a quarter in the very first Salvation Army bucket of the season and spent a few minutes staring at the ceiling of Grand Central Station.
Briton and I are studying the Revolutionary War and what parts of it happened here in New York right now, so the two of us headed downtown and went on a hunt for Revolutionary New York. We walked along Wall Street and saw the spot where Washington was sworn in as the first president. Wandered through Trinity Church and Bowling Green and the old Common.
We did a few rubbings on some of the graves from the time period. Lots of history. Lots of fun. (we also went to The Strand Bookstore which reminded me so much of Powell's Books in Portland! It even smelled like Powell's. I could have stayed all day...)
We also went to St. Paul's which, besides surviving the Revolutionary War, Hosting Washington's Inaugural prayer Service and making it through the great fire of 1776, was right next to the World Trade Center. I've seen it from the memorial side and it's hard to imagine how it survived the towers falling, but it did. And inside there are still pews that have scuff-marks from the boots of the first responders when they had to rest and signs that people posted, looking for lost loved ones, and strings and strings of cranes, folded by people around the world in memory. Although Briton understands what happened and continues to ask, often, about that day, the display inside St. Paul's was a little beyond him. But it was wonderful, and so very sad, for me.
Have a lovely weekend all.

about the art

So I am not really an art person. Crafts, yes, those I can do, but art is a different kettle of fish. One that I am, frankly, terrible at. I would like to be good at something art-like, I'd love to, for instance, be able to paint an awesome watercolor, but what my head wants and what my hands do are wildly different, and not in the artistic license kind of way. And yes, I know that things like sewing and knitting are arts, I do, but I'm talking the classic arts - sculpture, painting, that kind of thing.
This means that art, along with science (for totally different reasons - it's mostly just the gathering of materials thing that holds me back there) is a subject that I am not as confident in teaching. Art museums we have a-plenty. Yesterday I got to stand in a room with about five Monets, a Matisse and a few Van Goghs, so in the looking at art department, we're set. But as my Aunt (who is a rock start art teacher and an amazing artist) pointed out last week, looking is not enough.
When I started planning for our homschool year I emailed her with lots of questions about resources, and my favorite has been Deep Space Sparkle. I bought one of their watercolor lessons a few weeks ago and Briton and I have been working through it with pretty darn good success. Looking at his painting in it's almost finished state, I actually look like I know what I'm talking about. It helps that Briton has inherited more of his dad's art genes than mine, but I'll take a little of the credit. It also helps that the lesson has multiple levels which means that Evie can pop in and do a kindergarten version while Briton is adding a new layer to his work.

The interesting thing about teaching this art lesson to him has been that I've learned a lot of techniques that I didn't know. I'm not actually sure I ever had an art class at school outside the basic projects we did in class. I don't remember my elementary school having an art teacher other than a session with an artist in residence when I was in first grade where we made batik banners. And by the time I hit middle school where I could choose to take art, my heart had been lost to the theatre, so I've never actually learned much about art. It makes me want to take a grown up class. Or just work my way though the Deep Space Sparkle lessons myself.
I'm actually finding that a lot of homeschooling is like that. That I'm learning as much as I'm teaching. Parenthood can be like that sometimes and with homeschooling, it seems to be intensified since you focus so much of your day one what you need to show them. I wonder if other homeschoolers feel this way. Often the homeschoolers I meet seem, almost passe, about what they do. They've been doing it for a while, so maybe it's a little bit of burnout. Maybe by the time your third child is working through New York history it's not really that exciting to stand in Battery Park and try to imagine how it looked when it was the whole of New Amsterdam. But it's still exciting to me. Perhaps it's because I know it's short term, in the same way that I can continue to go-go-go with getting as much as possible out of the city because I know our time is limited, but I love that every day I get to wake up and find out something new with my boy. Corney, yes?
We'll be putting the final touches on his watercolor tomorrow morning and then I have to pick a new project to start on, I'm thinking maybe pastels. I've always wanted to mess around with pastels.

homeschool update

We are now about a month in to homeschooling in earnest and I think, are pretty settled into our routine. In the beginning, I wanted to keep the kind of schedule that you might see in a regular classroom, with all, or at least most, subjects covered each day. But as with many things homeschooling, I've realized that I have to throw out some of my preconceived notions.
Because we really don't need to follow that kind of schedule. We do not have to be in the lunchroom at 12:03 or the music room at 2:15 with our bags and coats because after that it's time to get on the bus. The only real schedule item we have to stick to between the hours of 8 and 2:30 is picking Evelyn up from school. I've also found that we get more done working on one subject for a longer period of time, so after the first few days we slipped into more of a block schedule system. And it's working, at least for now. Homeschooling is nothing if not flexible, so if things need to change, they can.
Although math and science are Briton's favorite subjects (or perhaps because reading and writing are not his favorite subjects) I've really been focusing a lot of our time on Language Arts. Every day starts with a little free reading for him while I get things organized for the day. He is still heavily into graphic novels but is, miraculously, whipping through them like wildfire. He actually asked me to steer him home from the subway the other day so that he could read while he walked (reading and walking, by the way, is a family habit from my side - Auntie Amy, you know I'm talking to you ;)- but I never thought I'd see my "I hate to read" son carrying on the tradition. Yay!)

I don't feel like I can take credit for his new interest in reading, much as I'd like to. I think instead that it is a perfect storm of circumstance. A jump in his reading level + finding graphic novels + having more freedom to read what he wants + a little maturity and poof, I have a reader. Now I'm facing the issue of him reading late into the night. I LOVE that he is reading at night. I get it. I did it. I DO it. And I have a really hard time saying "Stop reading Briton" after so many years of practically begging him to read. But at some point I'm going to have to lay down the law and make him turn off the lights at a decent hour. Not yet, though. I don't have the heart.
On top of "free reading" we are reading the first Harry Potter and, as part of our history, are starting one of the "My Name is America" journals. We are reading this one since we just finished our studies of the Lanape Indians (the tribe that famously sold Manhattan for $24 - except, it turns out they didn't, but you'd have to read Briton's essay to find out what really happened) and are now discussing the early colonists.

Writing is another area where he seems to be blossoming, which, can I tell you, is so freaking exciting to his mama. We are still loving this book and this week I pulled out Writer's Express, which was a book I used when I taught fourth grade. Also awesome. Rip the Page has produced some really fun writing projects for us. I wish I had had it as a kid and a lot of the time we both do the writing prompts and then read them to each other. Ok, I'm a dork, I know. Cant help it :)

Will does a big math block with him once a week while I head off to the library for some writing time, but I also add a little math here and there through the day. Math is easy to work on when we are on the go, so our subway trips tend to include multiplication war, decimal to fraction games and math drills.

Science, is I'll admit, the hardest for me to teach, I'm mostly using the many classes available in the city to cover our science, which gets me off the hook and lets him have some social time.
And speaking of social time,
Wayfinders. Have you ever heard of it?
I hadn't either. It's a sort of giant capture the flag game played on teams with foam swords, theatrical dying when you are tagged and strategy sessions. Oh yes. 9 year old boy heaven. One afternoon a week of Wayfinders plus Wednesday soccer, plus Saturday soccer, plus the occasional Monday soccer keeps us social and active.

There are other things of course, French courtesy of Rosetta Stone, Art via the plethora of Museums - tomorrow we hit the Met - Manner and Etiquette, little bits of this and that fitted neatly into our week, at least most of the time.

I think the most surprising thing about homeschooling is that I'm not going crazy. I really thought I would. I hoped it wouldn't, but I feared that spending all day together would be a bad thing. Instead, it's the opposite. Instead, I have my partner in crime once again. Happy day.