We’re settling in to somewhat of a “tax season routine”.   My work schedule has shifted from about 8-15 hours a week to about 25 hours a week and I’m feeling it.  

We’re pretty much sticking to Jordan and Alex do some reading and math 2-3 times a week and once a week we do something with history and once a week we do science.   

Monday we went to a fun program at the library.  A local melodrama group did a very goofy presentation on inventors.  Today we finished the bones and muscles Noeo experiments.    

The big fun news is that we have puppies.   Aubrey and I have been volunteering at a local shelter walking the dogs.   We decided to expand to fostering and we got our first assignment yesterday—two five week old pointer pups.  They are pretty cute–but poop monsters.   My computer is acting up or I’d post pictures.  We will have them for 2-3 weeks.    The kids are quite enamored with them and I’m hoping that since I chant 100 times a day that they will be going back, that they will be ok.   

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7406521&sc=emaf

 I read this article with great interest.   It pretty much sums up our experience with public school and formal testing.  In a nutshell, they decided early on that Jordan just wasn’t going to be able to learn a lot of things.   Jordan left kindergarten unable to write most of her letters and telling me that she was stupid.    She is one of the hardest working kids I know.  Easily frustrated, yes, but once she has decided she is going to do something, very little will get in her way.   My focus with her for the past few years has been to encourage this will of hers and to believe in herself.    The child that they once told me was at high risk for dyslexia is now reading completely at grade level and continuously challenging herself to read more difficult material.   She is demanding that I teach her cursive and so is starting to learn this ”early” compared to the public school schedule.  She has definate challenges in math, but she is currently working through and around them and making consistent progress.  

 And, most important of all, she will tell me often that she is smart and can do anything she works at.

If only this would be common knowledge in the world of public school.

We’re a bit snowed in and the house shows it.   The dogs have been mostly inside and their stench finally induced me to giving them baths and when I was done the bathroom looked like something furry exploded in it.   Yuck-wet dog fur clinging to everything.   Then the tracking fire wood in several times to keep that wonderful fire blazing.   And since we are having more relaxed school time, there are train tracks all over the middle of the floor (actually going around the remains of a board game play), bits of tissue paper seem to have escaped the table where Jordan has been busy making a princess hat and the kitchen is a haze of flour because, what else can you do when the house looks like that, but bake?   We made flour tortillas.   It was my first attempt and rolling them out and then watching them puff up a bit in the pan was a big hit–as was eating them with a bit of honey right out of the pan.  

 So, we’ve been hanging out with our pleasant smelling, fluffy pooches listening to “Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban” and playing games and doing art projects.   

 I did decide we would keep going on some basics right now.   Jordan and Alex read to me and then we do some sort of math.   Aubrey is always reading something, but she is also going to work some each week on her Geometry and her Spanish and we are stilling working through the Mystery Disease project.   Jordan is reading the first Harry Potter book to me.   Yes, it is too hard for her, but it is still a big leap and she is really only needing my help on a few words per page and she really things she’s hot stuff now!

 For math yesterday we used the unifix cubes to make addition and multiplication problems.  Then we did some math adlibs and some Times Tables the Fun Way.    I have been hoping to inspire them to want to do some more science experiments, but so far they’ve found too many other things to occupy their time.  

 I may just have to do something about the state of the house before we become unable to walk through it.

We have a natural swing back and forth between fairly structured learning and something close to unschooling.  Lately we’ve been sliding into the most structured time we’ve ever had.  We’ve even been doing spelling tests.   Alex’s spelling is often undecipherable and only marginally phonetic.   So we took some time and memorized some common sight words and did a few weeks of spelling lists.     Jordan and Alex were excited to do the spelling tests and after studying the words a few times they always got most or all of them right.   It felt a bit too schoolish to me—spelling wasn’t something I ever planned on “teaching”, but it seemed to be what they need at the moment.  We’ve been doing formal history with SOTW and science with our new Noeo stuff. 

And then something snapped.   It was me.  I was just done.  I’m starting to work a lot of hours (tax season, ugh!) and so the built in structure started fading and then I was having trouble coralling the kids into doing their stuff and suddenly it all seemed like busy work.  So, I’m feeling guilty because the kids are thriving on the structure right now and usually when we swing away from structured learning it is because we all need some time to reflect and absorb or we’ve really gotten into some project, or the weather is just too beautiful (definately NOT the case at the moment!).   Yesterday the kids got out their math and handwriting and Explode the Code and did it on their own.   We’ve been studying Ancient China and Friday they really wanted to work on this kit I got that has a calligraphy brush so we watched the Reading Rainbow “Liang and the Magic Paintbrush” and then they spent a couple of hours painting examples of Chinese characters and then painting their own.   Then Jordan and Aubrey made their own seal to sign their pictures out of fun foam.   All very spontaneous and had nothing to do with what I had put on my agenda for that day.

On the other hand, I think Aubrey really DOES need the unstructured time right now but she is horribly resistant to it.  She has an agenda and she wants me to be the timekeeper.  She was upset that she didn’t have a list of things to get done.  Eventually she ended up doing some math and she’s requested the book “Freakonomics” from the library because her dad is listening to it in the car and it intrigued her.   Oh, and she’s decided she’s going to be a vegetarian and so she’s also requested books about the vegetarian diet/lifestyle.  

 So, here we are.    Today we have an on the go day but they are already asking about tomorrow and I don’t know which way to push.   I guess we’ll just see.