Sunshine does the soul good

Surfing in San OnofreSurfing in San Onofre

I grew up inland from Malibu so it’s not surprising that I am addicted to the sun. For the past 15 years, I’ve lived in Ohio where the sun makes few appearances between December and the end of February. That’s a long slog for a sun worshiper like me!

This week I’m reconnecting with my parents, siblings, aunt, and a few close friends in Los Angeles. My mom turned 75 years old and my sister, brother, and I took her to a B&B and the Getty Museum. Lots of fun! (Click on the links for photos.)

Fortunately for me, So Cal is having unseasonably warm weather and blue skies. Meanwhile back home, Ohio has inches upon inches of snow.

I am doing my best to keep up with email this week, but if you don’t hear from me as quickly as you are used to, resend. I will try to get back to you ASAP.

There’s a metaphor in here somewhere about finding your happy place in the middle of winter; of keeping connections to your roots; of standing still in the sun soaking it up against the longer bleak days of snow and gray. But I won’t clock you over the head with it. (Maybe I just did.)

Mostly this was a serendipitous trip to family (love), the beach (ahhh!), and my favorite city: Los Angeles.

Grateful.

I’m noticing that our retreat is continuing to pull in registrations. Woo hoo! I’m so looking forward to it. I hope you find a way to join me.

More homeschool support to come; once the sun clears the fuzzies in my head.

–Julie

Early morning sunEarly morning sun at Santa Monica Beach

Cross-posted on facebook.

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The Comparison Game

Brave Writer

When you compare your kids’ writing output to what your neighbors’ kids do in school, you literally change the felt-sense atmosphere of your home. You dial up anxiety, urgency, and haphazard (spray it with a shot gun) tactics for “catching up” or “competing.” It’s like inviting depression in for tea, only when it arrives, it adds salt and soured milk.

Yes, your neighbors’ kids have been producing book reports and paragraphs about how much they love spaghetti and autumn leaves for months now. These kids are trained to start with a topic sentence based (often) on a topic the teacher selects.

The young writers must sit in hard chairs and write (right now!) without much help, dialog, or support. They have lines to fill and specifications for what to put on those lines. They get to the task of puzzle solving.

Occasionally they will freewrite a bit or brain map. Occasionally they do the work at home, by themselves, in a bedroom when they are tired and want to watch TV.

They will turn in writing assignments, and a teacher will sit in front of her favorite sitcom and read them enough to give them a grade. Her handwritten, red ink comments will be sincere, but also removed from the moment of writing and thus, not useful to the student in the end, who glances at the feedback but is already in a new non-writing moment.

By the end of the year, a folder of writing products will follow the child home. Some of these children will toss those folders on the backyard summer bonfire (our neighbors ritualized this activity each summer).

None of them will have eaten brownies while writing.

Your kids, by contrast, will freewrite oodles of pages with lots of parenthetical statements and remarks about how the process of writing feels (“I’m stuck” and “I hate this!” and “I wish I could play Mario Kart”). They will ask you to jot down their “too busy” thoughts. They will add a sentence at another time. They will hem and haw and not want to write.

So you’ll read books to them and recite poetry over scones and then one day, all of you will get the Best Writing Idea Ever. In you’ll go, the deep end of the pool, writing, revising, laughing, talking, clipping and pasting. The final result is one you hold in your hands and admire. That one project, that one happily executed, not necessarily well-planned project will be a source of pride and joy. You’ll all relish “having written.”

Then nothing. Nothing. Not a single word of writing for a desert of weeks at a time, maybe even months. The recovery from success feels like the line to Space Mountain. It moves so slowly and the eventual ride begins to seem absurdly unimportant for all that waiting.

But then, you arrive! At the next inspired writing excursion! Off you go again! The talking, writing, figuring out, adding, deleting, laughing, wondering if there is some photo to go with it, illustrating, showing it to Dad, showing it to Mom.

Maybe at the end of the year you’ll have 3-4 writing products and a slew of freewrites, and even more pages of copywork and dictation. But these you do actually have. And no one will burn them or toss them in the round file. You’ll hold onto them for years to come, long after your kids lose interest.

When your young ones become college kids, they will write differently than their peers and their college professors will notice. They’ll be intrigued—because the writing won’t be the cookie cutter formula writing so many of their students produce.

Don’t compare. Even though it feels like you’re behind, you are actually…ahead.

My motto: Keep going!

Brave Writer Natural Stages of Growth

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Poetry Teatime: Favorite homeschool event!

Poetry Teatime

We had our first ever Teatime Tuesday yesterday. We ate frosted cookies & scones. We drank hot tea & egg nog. We read to each other from several Shel Silverstein books and also from a children’s poem book. My kids (13, 11) told me that it was their very favorite homeschool event – ever. (This is our 8th year homeschooling.)

Carrie

Image (cc)

Visit our Poetry Teatime website!

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“Cater to your strengths” day

Running WomanWritten November 19, 2013:

Once in a while I get caught in a tangle of trying to shore up my weaknesses. What that usually looks like is me surrounded by resorted stacks of paper, with very little of it winding up in the trash can. I have a hard time knowing what to do with paper so it grows over night like a creeping vine. When I decide to finally “address the stack,” it simply divides itself into new stacks with category names like “bills,” “paint strips,” and “scraps of writing too good to throw away, but too undeveloped to use.”

These then get moved to a different surface, more neatly piled on each other, until they grow and divide again. I’m hopeless with paper (which is why my scanner is salvation, and a shredder must be in my near future).

So today, a day when for some reason I feel a little low (depleted, out of steam, unsure of myself), I’m going to cater to my strengths—do the stuff that lets me know I’m not the piles of paper in my house.

I started the day with a run, because running is the one thing I can always do when I feel blue.

I’ll call one of my kids and have a long talk.

I’ll go teach my students and remember how good it is that they get to learn the stuff I know well and love.

I’ll pick paint colors for my walls.

I will find a way to eat mushroom bisque, my favorite soup.

I’ll read something worth reading, to feed my mind.

I’ll tune into sports radio so I can have an informed opinion about that last call in the MNFL game last night.

I’ll answer emails from customers, and listen to my friends who need me, and get new flowers to replace the dying ones.

What will you do today, on my unofficial “cater to your strengths” day?

Cross-posted on facebook.

Image ©  | Dreamstime.com

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Let loose!

Day 326 - Toy PileImage by saebaryo

Let me introduce you to “play.” That is, I’d like you to play with your homeschooling tools. Rather than focusing so much on “getting it right” and “scheduling enough time” and “completing the objectives,” what if you saw your manuals, your books, the pastels for artwork, the piano, your yardsticks and calculators, computers and binoculars, writing prompts, dissection kits, vocabulary cards, and field guides as toys in a big box waiting to be opened and discovered?

What if you skipped chapters and went straight for the single most interesting concept in the entire book (and it turned out to come nearly at the end, rather than at the beginning)? What would happen if you tried to build the catapult before you had learned how to hammer nails? Wouldn’t you find yourself suddenly far more interested in nail-hammering with this fascinating project in front of you that can’t continue until you’ve got the basics mastered for balancing the little nail between your fingers and smashing it with a swing of the hammer? Sometimes the end leads us to the beginning, and that leads us to enthusiasm!

What if when you read a chapter about revision in writing, you scan for the one key idea that stimulates brand new thoughts, and skip all the insipid ones about tightening your sentences or embellishing skimpy paragraphs with additional detail? What if you simply went for the best, brightest idea, such as: hiding a secret, or foreshadowing a future event within the budding story?

If this grabs hold of your attention, go for it!

Why not?

Why not play with the toys of your curriculum? If you try a little, you might find you develop a taste for it all. These tools are under your command. You get to decide how to use them. It’s perfectly fine to throw your attempts at a wall and see what sticks, rather like testing spaghetti noodles for their “doneness.”

The most difficult part of being a home educator is that you feel you are flying blindly. As a result, you put far too much trust into the text books and materials, as though they hold the keys to educating your young. But they don’t. They offer you a possible pathway to mastery—that is it!

As the one in charge, you can determine which pieces actually accomplish that goal!

Not only that—please enjoy the educational process.

If you open The Writer’s Jungle, for instance, and you find yourself curious about “dumb writing assignments,” why wouldn’t you skip directly to that chapter and read it!? It might scratch your itch.

It’s okay if your child hates the Topic Funnel or resists the study of “literary elements” for today. That’s just today. Find some other tidbit worth enjoying and exploring. You may circle back to the items that were resisted and have more success once a child “buys in” through joy in another aspect of the program (whatever program – not just mine).

I literally have no stake in anyone approving every teaching I offer. I have a huge stake in your happiness at home with your children. I would imagine you do too, or you wouldn’t even attempt this slightly demented program of educating your children of multiple grade levels all day every day without a break from your charges.

You can trace the birds in the field guide without ever looking at a real bird, if that is what suits you. You can choose to never read poetry at teatime and instead only read geography terms or watch movies.

Your homeschool is under your control. But even more than that, it is meant to be wonderful. Play with the materials. See what happens when you allow your imagination to fuse with the orderly structure of the texts.

You may find, for instance, that jumping rope while skip counting is more fun than doing it at a table.

You may find that emailing the child’s father at work the five amazing facts about his favorite football team is more engaging for your young student than writing a mini report.

Try a little. Test it. See how it feels. Skip what disinterests you. Trust the process, not the product. Trust yourself, not the invisible educator not present in the room.

My goodness! You are all adults. You know what you know and you know how to find out what you don’t know and you won’t cover it all anyway, and what you do together with your children is going to be enough because you can never do it all.

Anything you miss? I promise, they will meet it again in college or they will never need it again (or they can AskJeeves).

Let loose a little. January is a good time for that.

Cross-posted on facebook.

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