Image by Nathan Jones
Your very first friend. How did you meet?
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Friday Freewrite: First Friend
Plan a “Back to Summer” party!
You know how we often hear about “back to school” sales events, or themes? As homeschoolers, learning is far more seamless than the traditional brick and mortar style educations of school. Sometimes you don’t even have an official start and stop date.
Summer, however, is especially welcome with its relaxed schedules, a hospitable outdoors (at least in most places), and new energy for activity.
Use this momentum in your homeschool now. Here’s how.
Plan a party!
Make a guest list (family may be enough, if you have lots of kids, but you can also include a friend for each one, or you can host another family or two).
Pick a date and time. (My bias: daytime is great to take advantage of the wonderful blue skies and sunshine.)
Summer Theme (pick and choose)
- Blow up beach balls (can work as party favors!)
- Small wading pool (even if you have older kids – good for splashing and reloading water guns and water balloons)
- Croquet set (to play!)
- Badminton net, birdies, and racquets
- Beach towels to sit on
- Cheap sunglasses hanging from tree limbs
- Pails and shovels can hold party favors
- Nail Polish for pedicures
- Balloons for water balloon fights (get the right kind – they are their own type of balloon)
- Nerf Water Guns (ask guests to bring their own, but also supply a few in addition to your family just in case)
- Everyone wears water-worthy clothing (bathing suits or t-shirts and shorts)
- A Sprinkler
Games
A free-for-all water fight is always awesome (save til last). Kids can use water guns, balloons, scoopers like measuring cups or big pitchers.
Filling a bucket with water by racing across a preset length of yard, using a teaspoon to carry the water. The most water at the end of the predetermined time limit wins. (Do this in teams, line up and race.
The traditional Water Balloon Toss is always fun! Pair the kids, have them face each other, and on the count of 3—toss the water balloon to the other person. Step back a pace, toss again, on cue. Keep going until one pair is left without a broken balloon.
Water Limbo: A parent holds a hose with a long powerful stream and kids make their way under it without getting wet. The stream of water is lowered each round. You’re out if you get wet. Last one dry, wins!
Non-water games
Not all the games have to be water related. Use the croquet and badminton sets, provide magnifying glasses to hunt through the yard looking at bugs, bring a huge bunch of flowers from the store or your yard and provide tiny vases. Suggest kids trim the stems and make little floral arrangements to decorate the yard. Other ideas:
- Water colors and paper with an easel
- Sidewalk chalk
- Face-painting station with designs
- Basket of dress up clothes
- Popsicle-finishing race
- Music to dance to
- Fizzy drinks with little umbrellas in them
Preparing a party is a great summer activity. You’ve got hospitality, handwriting, counting, planning, keeping to a budget, shopping, setting up, execution, and clean-up. These are wonderful skills to teach your kids and to experience together. Plus, really fun.
Like pearls on a necklace
Image by rosemary
It’s not unusual to feel muddled when you think about what the best course of home education is for your children. There are competing promises among the many choices.
freedom
depth
flexibility
“children learn best when children decide what, when, and how they will learn, and for what purpose”
advanced academic preparation
mentoring
“inspire, not require”
connections between subjects
personalized education
“a well trained mind”
“a science of relations”
character building
religion-free, multicultural, world citizen
“literature-rich, Christ centered”
“open-and-go”
structured and thorough
comprehensive
parent-led
child-led
I’m sure you can add quotes and slogans of your own.
With the advent of the Internet, there are even more homeschooling groups, websites, blogs, forums, email lists, and Facebook groups than ever. Each promises a happy, well-educated, well-adjusted child at the end of the journey.
What happens when you explore is that the advocates of any system typically believe in their system so thoroughly, they disregard the value of any other system.
When you make a choice to adopt a specific program or plan (even if the “plan” is to let go of the “plan”!), the initial experience is often like trying to join a marathon in progress, only you’ve never done the training. You get tired, you say the wrong thing, you do the wrong thing… while the trained runners whiz by you.
Missteps and misunderstandings of the principles lead to strong exhortations on the part of the advocates: everything from advice-giving, to figurative hand-slaps, to humiliations.
Even when you earnestly seek to apply the principles in their entirety, if you run aground (have struggles, find that the method isn’t working for one of your children, or discover that you aren’t having the success you envisioned), sometimes you’re blamed for not applying the principles correctly, or enough, or with the right tone of voice, or according to the right schedule (or lack of it!).
Learning how to live according to a vision someone else cast is demanding. No two people understand the vision the same way. Add your family to the mix (where you’ve done all the research, and they’ve typically done none), and you have a recipe for confusion—particularly during the transition away from one paradigm to another.
Parenting and education are broad categories. There is no one (single) way to bring children into adulthood as learned people. We know this because the world over uses a variety of parenting and educational strategies, and the world embodies brilliant minds and close connected families in cultures completely different from ours.
Our goal can’t be to find the right set of tools, or the right ideology, or the right system. It can’t be to advocate so righteously for one method that we overlook the benefits or valuable insights of another.
Any philosophy that adopts the viewpoint that if you experience “failure” or struggle, you aren’t doing it right, is in danger of putting ideas ahead of people. No one lives any belief system so purely that they never run up against the limits of that perspective.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say that all perspectives have limits—and all people have limited abilities to carry out their best intentions.
Examining your principles is a good place to start (principles are easier to live by than rules). But purists can turn principles into rules… so be careful.
Your best bet is to be gentle with yourself and to surround your homeschool life with people who are advocates for *you* more than your philosophy of education or parenting. You should have room to air your confusion, your mistakes, your failures, and your successes. You shouldn’t have to pretend to live up to the ideals of the group in order to participate. You shouldn’t be subjected to unkind scrutiny for the sake of being a lesson for others.
It is possible to get value from a perspective, even if you don’t adopt all of it.
It’s possible to use a style of education for a few years, and then try something else for a few years just to change up the energy in your home.
It’s great to read the powerful arguments for a variety of educational theories so that you avoid getting into a rut of thought where you make one view “all bad” and have to defend your view as “all good.”
These are rarely useful ways to evaluate.
Lastly, some seasons demand different styles of home education for everyone’s peace of mind. Families dealing with chronic or terminal illness in a parent will necessarily approach home education differently than those with parents fully functioning.
What matters—what will matter most to you in the end—is the feeling that the people you love consider home and education to be pleasant, peaceful, and life-giving. No family or home feels like that all the time in any philosophy. Many philosophies help you get there. Most often, the philosophy is only as good as the emotional health of the parents anyway.
Your goal is to string together (like pearls on a necklace) moments where you can say, “Today was a good day together and we learned something too.”
When these accumulate, life starts to hum. Don’t worry so much about how you got there. Enjoy it while it lasts. Note it. Be proud of it. Don’t doubt it.
Weirdly, that’s enough—whether you co-sleep or bottlefeed or homeschool or put your kids on a yellow bus.
Love in the home, created by conscientious parents, who take education seriously (in any of its myriad forms), is what we all want.
Go forth into your homeschool this morning and enjoy whatever philosophy it is that has your fascinated today.
Cross-posted on facebook.
Poetry Teatime: Around the campfire
My name is Rebecca, my children are Roman (almost 8) and Simone (5). Poetry Tea Time gives our family rhythm and respite – some quite time among the complexities of math, of learning to read. It easily blends into many other aspects of life. We use it to practice proper table manners or to learn to cook the goodies we will eat.
I wanted to share with you a photo from our most recent Poetry Tea. It took place while camping in the Santa Fe National Forest, about an hour from our house. No fancy tea cups and pastry this time. However, campfire s’mores, tall Ponderosa Pines and cool mountain air are a good trade.
I love listening to the giggles of my children as I read Hat by Shel Silverstein. The poem is about a child who is wearing a toilet plunger as a hat. The reader can only assume he must have been told this by an older sibling. I think as mother’s we can all relate to the plight of our youngest children. I feel as though I have come full circle when I read poems by Silverstein, my parents read them to me as a child, now I am sharing them with my children. They are silly and deep at the same time.
Sometimes our Poetry Tea is fancy and proper, sometimes it is lemonade and cookies in the park, sometimes it is mud pies and sticks in the river and sometimes it is up in the tall pines of the mountains. In the photo we are enjoying what we love most about homeschool, independence. We are camping, during the middle of the week, in an empty forest.
Regards,
Rebecca
Visit our Poetry Teatime website!
The professor-archetype
Have you ever noticed that in some children’s literature, a professorial type male character is often included as a father-like figure to a gaggle of kids? He might even be the father.
This man is usually interesting to the reader because he seems oblivious to typical parental worries—he doesn’t throw up red flags of caution when the children experiment with dangerous tools, contraptions, or potions. He is unworried by their retellings of journeys into magical worlds or forests. He is non-plussed by their cheeky philosophy or their impolitely expressed opinions. He often accepts their fantastical tales with aplomb, barely registering alarm when they return from adventures riddled with danger, and shows a surprising capacity to believe the stories at face value.
This man-character doesn’t lecture children and sometimes, infuriatingly, doesn’t even give advice or warnings when they seem most merited. He, himself, might be engaged in his own mysterious doings and ponderings, which leave the children bewildered and impressed.
I think of characters like Professor Dumbledore (Harry Potter), Professor Kirke (Chronicles of Narnia), Professor Martin Penderwick (professor of botany, The Penderwicks), Merlin (The Sword and the Stone), Wayne Szalinski (Honey, I Shrunk the Kids), Gandalf (Lord of the Rings series) and even the benign homesteading pioneer, Pa Ingalls (Little House series).
This archetype is an intriguing figure. Children gravitate to these men and I’ve been curious about why. I have a few hunches. It seems to me that children crave the experience of being taken seriously. They want their words to be weighed by adults and then found to be full of truth, sincerity, and importance. Even if children’s ideas or experiences could be explained away by an adult’s greater worldliness, children still hope to find in the adult they respect, an appreciation for the way they know the world so far.
These professor-like men uniformly respect a child’s grasp of the world they live in and they are appropriately engaged in their own battles and explorations so as not to be overly impressed by the children’s, either. These men’s lives are independent of whether or not the kids turn out, survive, or discover the same truths the professor-types take for granted.
Additionally, the professor-archetype believes he doesn’t know everything and is open to learning from any source, including the naive experiences of kids. This openness registers deeply with readers. It gives child-readers hope that the thoughts and feelings they have about the life they are living can find a kind, sympathetic, or at minimum, respectful audience in the adults they love and trust.
When I get worked up (wanting to cover all the bases, trying to protect my children from danger – even my adult children!, lecturing them from the vast-expanse of my more abundant failures and successes, disbelieving their reports because they don’t match what I’ve known to be true), I sometimes envision Professor Kirke and his wave-of-the-hand type attitude. He couldn’t be bothered explaining away Lucy’s experience of Narnia. If she reported it and she was trustworthy and we admit that there are things in the universe we do not yet know, there must be truth in Lucy’s report. End of story.
A profound respect for the truthfulness of children. Impressive.
When faced with my children’s inexperience and their youthful impulses, I have to resist the temptation to be a stodgy, know-it-all adult who fails to see magic and opportunity in a child’s point of view. I have to sometimes sit on my hands (which tend to do all the talking, lecturing, and waving) and let the perspective “ride”—let it run its course or express itself without restraint to hear the full-bodied nature of what it wants to say. I have to make room for what makes me uncomfortable.
I’m learning how to let risk be a part of a child’s (or young adult’s) exploration. I’m trying to hang back, talk less, and listen more. I want to be open, quieter, more curious, less case-closed.
I want to relate to my kids, believing that life is a better teacher than a lecture.
I want to respect their experiences without being a busybody about them.
It’s funny. This professor-archetype character is so popular with kids. They just love the surprise of an authority figure who would treat children as peers and invite them into real danger trusting them to their competencies, heart (valor), and goodwill—at least on the level of how they express their participation in the world around them, and how they understand their part in it.
These men (and women) make good role models for us. Don’t you think? Who are your favorite adults in children’s (or any) literature? What have you learned from them? I’m curious.
Cross-posted on facebook.
Image Portrait of Professor Benjamin H Rand by Thomas Eakins (1874)
