Archive for the ‘Brave Writer Philosophy’ Category

Extra-ordinary kids!

DSCN1199.JPG Caitrin and best friend Sarah with handmade lanterns for their Japanese tea party.

Have you read the book about the homeschooled kids who built a canoe in the basement, whittling the wood from felled trees? Or what about the teens who figured out how to cross breed fish in their creek, or built eco-friendly low-cost dwellings in their backyard as practice for working with Habitat for Humanity?

I remember reading about a kid who played with blocks as a child but then went on to write symphonies in college, after mastering the violin, and learning to conduct a symphony. Somehow these were related.

Then there are the kids who’ve read all of the classics and have taught themselves Latin and/or Greek. Others have performed on a Broadway stage, joined a prestigious ballet company, or have tried out to be Olympic athletes. All homeschooled.

Other impressive homeschoolers got into Harvard, or wrote best selling fiction (The Inheritance Series, anyone?), or worked as interns at the state government house!

Meanwhile, you’ve got runny noses, a daughter whose handwriting resembles scrawl, and a son whose main ambition seems to be punching pixels on a screen by thumping a button on a controller. You can’t imagine that your kids, your garden variety kids, will ever be so extraordinary. You feel mildly guilty about that. (I know I did.)

Perhaps your homeschooled children seem “extra” “ordinary” – as in “more ordinary than usual” – to you!

I found myself inspired and discouraged at the same time when I’d read about successful older homeschooled kids. I couldn’t see how my brood would ever get there.

First of all, we were appallingly bad at science (so scratch cross-breeding and habitat building). We had so many kids, I couldn’t imagine being able to afford supporting a lifetime habit of acting or ballet or singing or violin or lacrosse or gymnastics, let alone accommodating all those rehearsal/practice schedules!

And as far as boat-building in basements—I was lucky if we could find the basement floor, let alone make space to build in it.

Yet I plugged away with our books and our homeschool parties, our math pages and our co-op, committed to what I could do—how I could make my home a place where creativity had a chance to flourish, and where ambitions were accommodated as best as we could.

I couldn’t see the seeds being planted. I couldn’t know how they’d take root.

I wasn’t privy to how my children processed our experiences together, and how these memories became anchors of insight that led my kids to aspire to and achieve some of the amazing things they’ve now done. I never saw most of it coming. Truly.

On this side of homeschooling, I want to encourage you not to worry about the outcomes. The smallest acts of enthusiasm, support, and opportunity lead to big choices down the road. Your job isn’t to think of the great things your kids can do or should be doing some day.

Your job is to make sure that today, they have something interesting:

to read,
think about,
observe,
and enjoy.

Or as Charlotte Mason says, ” “Something to love, something to do, and something to think about.”

Find that sweet spot each day, no matter how briefly visited. These collect into a childhood of impressions that shape how they will choose to spend their teen years and eventually, their adulthood. They don’t have to “change the world” or impress anyone. All they need is the freedom to keep making choices that enhance their enthusiasm for being contributing people—human beings who want to share who they are with others using their unique constellation of gifts and passions.

That’s it.

You can do that.

You already are.

Posted in Brave Writer Lifestyle, Brave Writer Philosophy, Family Notes, Homeschool Advice | 3 Comments »

The Snare of Perfectionism

The Snare of PerfectionismTrends happen for a reason. The sudden spate of books and conferences exposing the myth of “the perfect mother” is a cultural admission that women feel a lot of pressure to both be mothers (you are less of a woman if you choose not to be a mother), and then to do that task “perfectly” however that is defined.

When women admit that being “a perfect mother” is not possible, a collective sigh of relief follows. Moms make mistakes and have legitimate worries:

  • forget doctors’ appointments,
  • don’t wash their children’s hair often enough,
  • feed the children sugary treats to stop the crying,
  • yell when they are frustrated,
  • are especially anxious when one of their children throws a punch or steals a toy.

Children become an extension of the mother’s body and identity—
a beyond-my-control extension of me that tells me (and others) about me.

Perfection, as it is defined for women, often includes non-motherly tasks as well, like being well coiffed, or keeping an organized and tidy home. Mothering doesn’t depend on either of these, though. Perhaps the “perfection” label is more about trying to be a woman who matches culturally-assigned stereotypes of female married+children adulthood.

Reading these discussions has left me a little cold. While I’ve had my share of guilt about motherly missteps (lecturing a child rather than hearing her, switching curriculum too swiftly without proper preparation, letting one child’s vocal needs drown out another child’s quieter ones) I don’t think I ever worried about having the right haircut while my children were young. Getting to go for a haircut once in a while was treat enough!

And even though stepping on a cluster of Legos in the middle of the night with a baby in my tired arms drove me to the brink of swearing on more than one occasion, I didn’t feel a lot of pressure to keep a perfectly neat home, nor did I feel particularly embarrassed by evidence of children strewn throughout the living spaces.

The pressure I felt (and still feel!) had less to do with my external presentation (how I appeared as a woman, mother, wife) and more to do with significance:

  • Am I mattering?
  • Am I making the ultimate difference?
  • Am I doing the right things to ensure the right results?

The pressure in mothering as a home educator is even more insidious. Not only do you feel it matters that your children eat healthy lunches (that are hot, predictable, and require clean-up midday), but you must also make “healthy” curriculum choices and adopt the “right-est” educational philosophy. You scour the Internet for the Magic List of principles and practices that ensure your children will be well-socialized, well-educated, and well-behaved people.

The danger of perfectionism kicks in not because you are
trying to convey an image of success.

You actually want to be successful.

Measuring success is a huge part of our culture—and that measurement is usually exacted by others who are in the same soup, trying to get to the same place. When we feel “measured against a criteria” (in other words, “judged”), that’s when we move ourselves toward the impossible standard of perfectionism. We double down and try harder to apply the methods and madnesses of a system. We stop hearing our own voices inside and we lose perspective.

What frees us isn’t simply agreeing that none of us is perfect (oh well) so let’s just do the best we can and hope for the best. Hey, let’s be kinder to each other and share our stories of all the mistakes we make every day. And let’s laugh about it (ha ha). Certainly there is some therapy to be had in those exchanges. For sure!

But for me, comic relief never freed me. I had high expectations for my family and my efforts. I wasn’t about to give those up just because of the snare of perfectionism or the judgment of others. And occasionally, some of the examples of what passed for mere imperfection appeared to be important flaws to notice and address.

What’s helped? Here’s my short list. It’s not meant to be a new standard, but I hope it inspires some of you to share what’s helping you, right now.

Breaking rules. The temptation is so strong to do what the rule-makers say to the letter, believing that it means I am protected from failure. When I apply the rules, I stop listening to my children and to my life. I put my faith in practices ahead of relationships. For instance, I breastfed my kids. A false nipple equaled heresy. The day I discovered that a pacifier helped my son sleep was a day of liberation. We happily breastfed for nearly 3 years, but knowing he could nap without me saved my sanity and made me a better mother. Breaking a rule, based on my son’s needs (and mine) was good for us.

Paying attention. I sometimes became distracted by principles and missed the really cool thing happening under my nose. For instance, I had read that starting school work right after breakfast every day led to a quiet expectation that “school” would happen and we would avoid power struggles. But the day I woke up and saw sheet forts and kids in dress up clothes and apples cut into tiny pieces for food told me that “school” was already happening. I didn’t apply the principle, that day.

Experimenting. I used to say to my friends that I would unschool my children to find out if it worked so they wouldn’t have to. I thought of unschooling as a risk and as something to embrace or explore, but I chose not to see it as the defining story of my family. That attitude, by the way, is not often welcome in unschooling settings. And that discovery unsettled me for a time. Then I realized: this is my unique family story and I’m writing it with my kids and their dad. I am not defined by someone else’s vision, even if their ideas can contribute good things to us.

Getting help. Maybe it’s my Malibu upbringing, but I’m a big-believer in therapy and support groups. Perspective doesn’t often come online to the degree we need it. The community you develop with friends across the miles via the Internet is legitimately supportive, loving, and often insightful. But those friends don’t know your kids. They haven’t been in your home. They aren’t aware of your marriage dynamic, or your family of origin. They don’t even really know what you’re like—they can’t hear your tone of voice or see how you use your hands or how long you talk before you let the other person get a word in edgewise. When you hit a wall emotionally at home, where you feel like you’re failing, and you can’t see your own neuroses, get in-person help. You want a safe space to think about the particularity of your family and life. You want to get away from systems that dictate their terms to you and tempt you to slavish devotion. You want gentle, kind, reflective space to consider a slew of options, not just the ones sanctioned “by the group.”

The bottom line is this:

My connection to my kids matters the most.

When we are connected, no matter how we’ve arrived at that space, I know we’re okay.

And that feels perfectly fine to me.

My connection to my kids matters the most.

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, Homeschool Advice, Julie's Life | 1 Comment »

3 Spectacular Strategies for Success

The expression, “Go big or go home!” might apply here (though for our purposes, “Go big AT home” would be more appropriate). However, one of the 3 Spectacular Strategies is about going really really small, as in tiny, as in minisculilio (perhaps the reframe might be: “Go so small it’s like this HUGE commitment to staying in the confines of ‘going really really tiny’—maybe like “Going Big INTO Small!”).

Let me set the context. Sometimes we homeschooling parents assemble all these Reasonable Goals for the school year. We believe in plodding along, managing our children’s progress, assessing their growth and making incremental, prudent adjustments. We divvy up the workbook into its perfectly apportioned pages-to-be-done-each-day for the 180 day school year and then, carefully, carry out the plan one-painstaking-day-at-a-time, requiring compliance from the students (our beloved cherubs), at times deviating from the Sacred Plan into a Cul-de-sac of Guilt when we unwillingly take a day off…

Then we ramp up the familiar and try again. And again. And… a… gain.

Then we hit the wall of resistance, or poor performance, or tedium, and we wonder how we can get back on track.

Sound familiar? Sound exhausting? Sound crazy-making?

Break the cycle.

Ditch the plan… for these 3 strategies.

1. Go BIG!!

You want to study the Gold Rush? BUILD your own gold mining sluice from scratch for the next week. Or next two weeks. Get the wood, find a design, order some fool’s gold from an online store, grab a hammer and nails, saw and saw horses, and put the thing together. For the whole two weeks. No grammar lessons. No math pages. No phonics. Just pure bigtime indulgence throwing educational caution (and the nagging voice of the Ghost-of-Public-School-Past) to the wind!

Don’t worry if you fail at sluice-building (half the time you go big, you will). So much learning happens in the process of a failed sluice project! You can always shift gears and bury the fool’s gold in your sandbox. Add water and use pie tins to swish the gold into view.

Invite friends to help find gold. Sing “O Susanna.” Eat sugared beans with hot dogs. Make sarsaparilla from scratch. Wear Levi’s and flannel shirts. Pin the gold nugget on a map of Sutter’s Creek!

Ditch the plodding text book study. Stop the labor of daily grind learning. Instead when you come across a worthy topic, Go Big!

Other examples of Going Big (all at once, all hands on deck, all in, no other competing subjects):

  • Colonial Times: Dye fabric with beets, onion skins, and paprika. Dip candles. Make cardboard stocks and pose in them. Sing “Yankee Doodle.” Assemble colored paper flags and stick a circle of silver or white stars to represent the colonies on the flag. Write letters on parchment with fountain pens and seal them with sealing wax.

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  • Birds: Observe them. Get a field guide and binoculars; identify them. Go to places where birds are (nature centers, woods, beaches, the zoo). Take a birding walk with a local birding group. Name the birds that come to your backyard. Feed them. Draw them. Photograph them. Get a raw chicken and observe and name all the parts as you manipulate the body. Identify where the feathers attached themselves. Show the innards. Discuss. Dissect an owl pellet. Collect feathers. Watch Youtube videos of eggs hatching. Watch “Winged Migration” (the film).

    •  

  • Cursive handwriting: Make a bug using your cursive handwriting. Take a white sheet of paper, fold it lengthwise in half, turn it sideways so the middle of the page is the line you write on. Handwrite (in soft pencil led) your first name (use italics for letters that ordinarily go below the line in cursive). Fold the page back together and rub until the mirror impression shows on the flip side. Open the page. Trace over the mirrored impression of the name so it stands out. Color the “name” to look like a bug! Try other words and make more bugs. Cut them out and mount them on the kitchen windows. (See photos for the process.)

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2. Go Really Really Small

The temptation is to do more, better, and different all the time. But what if you flip the script? Choose deliberately to do only one tiny part of the lesson today. Call this event: “The Mini Lesson.” It could become a “thing” you go to when kids are exhausted and you need to change the tone of the home. You might yell: “Time for a Mini Lesson!”

For instance, what if you choose to require the barest minimum-est amount of the required “thing”? What if you told your kids:

“You only have to do one math problem today, but I want to see you get the right answer. You can spend as much or as little time as you need. Just be sure you get the answer right. If you do, there’s a surprise for you. Yes, you can ask me for help or to check as you go and I’ll hint at the errors for you to fix.”

Then offer your child one problem that uses the math concepts you want to emphasize. For instance, if you are working with addition and subtraction, create a problem that uses both: (7+6) — (5+1) = ? You can certainly make the problem more or less complex depending on the skill you want to teach. It might be a perfect time to do ONE word problem.

Create a meaningful really little reward:

    a pack of gum,
    a tin of mints,
    a row of stickers,
    a rub-on tattoo,
    a new pencil,
    lip balm,
    two cookies,
    a bouncy ball,
    a mini Slinky.

Naturally, you can use the same really really small lesson with handwriting: One letter, one time (perfect, beautiful, clear, proportioned, accurate). Or one word, or one sentence. Give full attention to perfectly shaped letters. Expect accurate copying, correct letter-to-letter correspondence. Keep the selection short. Admire it when it’s complete.

Apply the really really small lesson to a household practice:
Set the timer for one minute. Pick up toys on the floor for a single minute, in a race, to get as many off the ground as possible. Do it twice that day… Once in the morning and once in the afternoon. You can yell “Ready set go!” and “Ding! You’re done.” Make it a community challenge: “If the whole floor gets cleared, we all get gum!”

A really really small lesson can be a single sentence that needs editing (a mini mini version of the Reverse Dictation practice in the Arrow, Boomerang, and The Writer’s Jungle).

A really really small lesson could be one logic puzzle, or one fact memorized, or one page of a book read aloud. Pick the item you are worried about, pick one short requirement, and use this mini lesson format to give it square, deep, brief attention.

3. Collaborate

Why go it alone? Put your kids together in pairs. Have the older teach the younger. Capitalize on the elder children’s maturity and advanced skills. The principle that applies: “You learn more when you teach!”

If one child needs to drill multiplication tables, send the one who knows them outdoors with the one learning them. Give them a frisbee and tell the older one to call out “3 times 4,” and the other will toss it back: 12!

Have a younger child read aloud to an older child as she learns to read.

Ask a younger and older child to bake together. Empower an older sibling to teach a younger sibling to:

    use the washing machine,
    tie shoes,
    tell time,
    hopscotch,
    find the main idea in a paragraph,
    identify the hero and the villain in a movie,
    put together a puzzle,
    work a page of sentences in Winston Grammar,
    create a list of homonyms,
    memorize a nursery rhyme or small poem…

The point is—have your kids do stuff together, with the bigger kids in the role of teacher or leader.

As a collaborating family, you can create a slew of ideas together to make history come to life, for example. Each child contributes an idea and then you all do them as a family, one at a time, until they are completed. For instance, if you study a country like Japan, you might have several ideas created by the kids:

  • Craft tissue paper cherry blossoms
  • Make a felt Japanese flag
  • Eat tempura with chopsticks
  • Sit on the floor with cushions to eat the meal at a coffee table
  • Draw a map of Japan
  • Learn Japanese greetings, including how to bow
  • Watch anime!
  • Perform a Japanese tea ceremony

Not all ideas have to come from you! On the contrary, kids love knowing that they made a meaningful contribution to the project. Don’t rule out the weird ideas—”I want to see a Komodo Dragon!” Find out where one lives (at a zoo?) and go to it. Or at the least, find a documentary to watch together to learn about the creature. Giving each person something to contribute helps the whole team to feel invested. Learning will happen for each person in a grade appropriate way, according to their skills. That’s what you want!

Lastly, you can add families to your projects any time you feel lonely. Two families creating a henna party to celebrate “1001 Arabian Nights” is much more fun than one! Studying tide pools with your best friends at the beach for a picnic is better than going alone. You get the idea.

To review:
Go Big!
Go really really small…
~Collaborate~

Tell me how it goes (or has gone, if you already live this way).

Posted in Brave Writer Lifestyle, Brave Writer Philosophy, General, Homeschool Advice, Unschooling | 2 Comments »

Podcast: Englishes

Brave Writer Podcast: Englishes

What is the relationship between speech and writing?

For those of you who are long-term Brave Writer fans, you’ll know that I refer to Dr. Peter Elbow as “my mentor.” His vision for writing has long guided how I teach.

[This post contains Amazon affiliate links. When you click on those links to make purchases, Brave Writer receives compensation at no extra cost to you. Thank you!]

When Peter Elbow’s new book Vernacular Eloquence hit the stores, it was thrilling to realize that Brave Writer has already captured and honed these very insights, but in the most practical way. We urge the kind of linguistic development Dr. Elbow examines in his research in this volume.

He and I have since dialogued about the way Brave Writer has evolved and explored that relationship through the most unique, yet effective context for writing growth: the parent-child editor-writer relationship.

Englishes podcast by Julie Bogart

The podcast today is about how to foster the various voices/registers needed for the variety of writing tasks our kids will face. How do we help them move between what Elbow calls “Edited Written English” (EWE) and the spoken language they use orally and in writing (online, in casual correspondence, when writing for popular audiences)?

Elbow says that EWE is “Shorthand: [for] ‘no mistakes.” This need to avoid mistakes is the key source of paralysis in the writing endeavor as many of you well know. Our aim to free the original writing impulse to come forth without undue pressure is what makes Brave Writer’s approach to writing different than other writing strategies.

Elbow goes on:

Students are constantly warned not to confuse their everyday speech with ‘serious’ writing. EWE or standardized written English is a dialect or language that differs in grammar and register from everyday speech.

He continues:

When students and others follow traditional advice and try for correctness at every moment, their language is often stiff, awkward, and unclear. Their attempts sometimes even lead them to the kind of peculiar mistakes people make when they try to use a language they don’t know well. Because of this, many people try to play it safe and stick to relatively simple sentences. When teachers look at student texts with this kind of simplified or plodding language, they sometimes blame speech—when really is was fear of speech that impoverished the syntax. When people let themselves genuinely speak onto the page, their language is more flexible and complex and sometimes eloquent.

Join Noah and me for a discussion of how these various “Englishes” manifest in the homeschool and what you can do to help support fluency in all of them.

Julie

Would you please post a review on Apple Podcasts for us?
Help a homeschooler like you find more joy in the journey. Thanks!

Posted in Brave Writer Philosophy, Podcasts | 3 Comments »

5 Ways to Encourage Reading

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Sometimes you love to read, your kids love to hear you read, and the whole family walks around with a nose in a book or up against the screen of a Kindle. But maybe your family has a kid or two or three who finds the work of reading a deterrent to actually doing it. They love stories—books on CD, movies, cartoons. They may enjoy comic books. But the sustained effort to read a novel is challenging. And being the conscientious wonderful parent that you are, you are now worried. What to do!

I have a few tips today to offer you. Feel free to add more in the comments.

1) Create a cozy reading space.
Hidey-holes are particularly popular. Pick a corner of a room where people are (no isolated space gets used in a homeschool family so make this space a part of the family activity), prop a pillow or two up against the wall and place one on the floor (a bean bag chair works too, or a futon). Next to the floor-level cushiony space, situate a basket with books in it (tempting ones, a range – fiction, non-fiction, short, long, easy, challenging). Next to the basket, add a small low table with a lamp on it. Or alternatively (to “up the cool factor”), put a clip light in the basket for the child to attach to the book itself to provide lighting. Be sure (if it’s winter where you are) to add a cozy blanket to snuggle under. Specify that the corner is for reading, not for any other activity. Any child may go there any time he or she wants to read, even if only for a couple of minutes. (In big families, you may need several hidey-holes—don’t forget hidey-holes under tables or near fireplaces or behind sofas, too.)

2) Write personal notes in the book that the child is going to read.
My daughter does this for siblings when she loans a book. She writes notes at particular moments in the story in the margins for the sibling to read. These might be comments like “Bet you didn’t see that coming!” or “Isn’t so-and-so a jerk?” or “Tell me when you get to this chapter so we can discuss. It’s so infuriating!” Knowing that these notes are in the margins waiting to be discovered can help a child sustain attention to keep reading just so he or she can see what you wanted to say to him or her.

3) Light a candle for “reading time.”
Everyone in the family reads while the candle is lit. Start with 5 minutes of silent, family reading and build over a period of weeks to 15 or 20. During the “reading time,” no one will get up to get a glass of juice or a snack for a sibling or child. No one will pull out the Legos and build a fort (unless you have some pre-readers who need to do something while everyone reads). When the candle is extinguished, reading time is over, talking and noise resume.

4) My mom’s tip for reading worked wonderfully for my siblings and me.
She sent us to bed at whatever bedtime was the current one. But she always told us we could stay up as late as we liked as long as we were reading in bed. This strategy had two benefits. First, we found ourselves reading every night because, in part, it meant we got to stay up late. Second, we wanted to go to bed to read to find out what happened after we fell asleep with the light on the night before—it made the whole “getting to bed” routine much less of a big deal and it turned all of us into readers!

5) Go to the library on a regular basis.
Even if you have digital books aplenty, there is something about walking through the stacks and getting to pick out your own books that makes the library a fabulous incentive for reading. Don’t worry if your child picks books and doesn’t read them or doesn’t finish them. The accumulation of information, language, and story from repeated visits, paging through books, reading some, ignoring others, will generate more reading later. Only good can come of it!

Posted in Brave Writer Lifestyle, Brave Writer Philosophy, Language Arts, Living Literature, Reading | 3 Comments »