Your Inner Darwin

I really shouldn’t play the favorites game, but… I am so in love with the new book! If you only ever grab one Extraschooling title, make sure it’s In My Nature. This book has all the best of me in it, as it not only combines my passions of nature and education, but was also requested by my son and compiled with him in mind. And, while most of the ideas I write about are based on learning adventures we’ve had, I made this book specifically for us to use in our current day-to-day. I could keep on about it, but I’ll spare you. In short, if you are a nature-loving family, want more excuses to get outside, or are looking to cultivate a broader awareness of the great outdoors, then here – go grab a copy!

Okay, now, moving on…

We love science around here. One of my favorite things about it is that, while science seeks to answer a myriad of deep and important questions, it is infinitely approachable. With my other recent reads behind me, I quickly ran through The Earth Moved, by Amy Stewart, and am now listening to Darwin’s Backyard, by James T. Costa. The first pulled heavily from Darwin’s research on earthworms, which piqued my interest and made me reach for the next book. The other night there was a passage that struck me, about the origin of the term scientist. A word that can now seem so lofty was only coming on the scene when the man who would become one of history’s most well-known scientists was sailing around the globe on the HMS Beagle.

Did you know the number of toes on a salamander can help identify it?

Darwin was what any great scientist – professional or, as he was, home-based – still is: an experimenter. This is the beauty of the subject; while it is great to amass knowledge in any of its many branches, there was a time when nothing was understood, when everything was a fresh marvel. Just as babies reach out to feel, squeeze, and examine everything interesting that crosses their path, so were the many mysteries of life on and off this planet uncovered. One does not need a degree or a reference book or a step-by-step instruction guide in order to explore. All one needs is to be able to squint thoughtfully at something, tap their fingers a few times, and utter the words, “What if…“

We are surrounded by a wide world to question and consider.

This has been our weekend of schooling around here. I got out the salt and posed a few questions. I knew enough to be able to offer up the elements from the periodic table that create salt and water, and then that ran my store of chemistry knowledge pretty well dry – but that was enough! So far we have had oodles of fun poking and prodding these two basic ingredients to see what happens. We have:

• Cut a small potato in half and immersed one part in plain water, the other in salt water for a day.
• Dried both potatoes and left one as is while covering the other in salt.
• Checked to see if there is a point at which salt stops dissolving in water.
• Let the water sit overnight to see if the salt settles with time.
• Boiled both salt water and plain in covered pans to make “clouds” on the lids to see if salt evaporates with the water.
• Boiled the water off to leave the salt behind.
• Set up a stalactite string.
• Frozen salt and plain water to see if they freeze differently.
• Had a bunch of discussions.

And none of it required an ounce of research or planning – just a question, and a few simple materials.

Just add salt and… presto! Let the fun begin.

Science is about curiosity, discovery, experimentation, delight, and being willing to get your hands dirty, make guesses, be wrong, and then to try again. It is about making volcanoes in the sink, blending paint colors on a canvas, stalking bugs in the yard, peering through a telescope, taking a closer look at the world, and approaching life with “What if…?” always on the tip of your tongue.

Hint: Goldenrod is an amazing place to find a wide variety of incredible creatures.

If you want to try some explorations with your family, here’s a download to get you started, ripped from the pages of – you guessed it! – In My Nature: A Field Notebook for Kids Who Like to Explore on the Wilder Side. This is based on the scientific method, which is all the guide you need to dive into this amazing, diverse, and fantastically fun subject.

pdf-scientific-methodDownload

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This Eclectic Life

Which way do you like to homeschool?

I’m still working on fully defining this for myself – and it could prove ever-changing, since homeschool allows for, and even breeds, such evolution. We certainly fall under eclectic, meaning I pull from many different resources and methods to sculpt something that fits us. I would say my style is probably a blend of three main types: traditional, unschooling, and interest-led.

As a homeschool/unschool graduate myself, it might strike some as odd that I have an element of the traditional in me, but I do. I am the offspring of teachers, so perhaps it is in my blood – or an unconscious nod to how permeated our culture is with a certain concept of what “school” looks like… Or maybe it simply speaks to my personality. Whatever it is, I both like and feel the need (which I don’t always like) for some structure, some bookwork, and a little grind-it-out mentality.

However… I also struggle with how stifling open-and-shut projects and ideas can be. I prefer to learn and teach in an organic, exploratory fashion. If you ever pick up an Extraschooling book, you will find the essence of what I enjoy. Something will come along and catch my interest, which will remind me of something else, which will inspire me to share some knowledge, and then we’ll be off down some rabbit hole on an adventure. Those books show the paper version of so many explorations we’ve undertaken. In fact, I’ve often said my son would make a perfect unschooler. He has such a boundless curiosity and the enthusiasm to see it through.

But… I can only venture just so far into the unschooling world myself. While I think it can be an amazing way to learn that has the potential to build skill sets hard to achieve many other ways, it has its downfalls as well. As much as anything, I have struggled with some of the community. For a philosphy that begs to have a very relaxed mindset, I have often found it anything but, and I struggle when it gets taken to the extremes, as I feel boundaries, rules, expectations, and so forth can be helpful for all of us.

I probably find it the most comfortable to settle into the notion of an interest-led approach. This is a bit separate from the term child-led, however. Education in this house is a joint venture; I certainly learn as much as he does, and we dive into our schooling side by side. I love helping him explore his passions, but I think it’s important to share my own, too, as well as those of others, so that he has a treasure trove of ideas to enhance his current collection. This also goes along with the concept that we don’t know what we don’t know; my dad always talked about the benefits of exposure to a wide array of topics, and I now subscribe to that wholeheartedly myself.

…Which can then lead back to some traditional studies. And so the circle keeps on going round.

So to all the folks who are almost-not-quite-ish, un-label-able sorts – you’re not alone. It’s perfectly okay to not fit in a box – or to fit one day but not the next. Learning should be a fluid, adaptable, enjoyable process, and that is what really matters, rather than what your approach is defined as. Let’s celebrate this eclectic life together; feel free to comment or reach out and connect whenever you need. Here’s to blazing your own personal learning path!

Curious Minds

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How important is curiosity to you?

I have said before that, for me, it might be at the top of the list of the 4 C’s. It is such a vital element of how we learn around here, with a question or hypothesis launching an exploration into new terrain. I have also named it as the first word I think of to describe my son; his mind is always rolling over the possibilities in anything he comes across.

But is this the case for everybody? It doesn’t quite seem so. Much has been said, in one forum or another, about whether public school crushes innate curiosity in children. I think it can, but it doesn’t have to. There are various factors that can lead to its diminishment, but none are a definite death knoll. I’ve seen some parents say their children simply aren’t curious by nature, and perhaps that is possible. I have a feeling though that curiosity is a pretty innate drive in us, as it is one of the forces that led to all the great discoveries and inventions that humankind is known for, and spurred us to ask some of the fundamental questions of life, such as. “Is that edible?” and “What’s that noise in the bushes over there?” Probably everyone has wondered at least once, “Where do we come from?” or something similar, or I’m not sure that either astronomy or religion would exist.

So, yes, I think we all have at least a degree of curiosity within us. This (of course!) begs the questions, How important is it in your household? and What do you do to cultivate it?

Some points to ponder:

• Do you have active interests or question things in your day-to-day?
• Do your kids see this, or is it something you pursue in your downtime?
• Do you encourage discussion and debate over a wide range of topics, or are some off-limits or closed subjects?
• Is disagreement okay?
• Do you help your kids find answers to their questions, applaud their interest, and/or counter with a follow-up question of your own?
• Are there any “dumb questions”?
• Are you comfortable working with an unknown concept?
• For abstract questions, do you provide concrete answers or an array of possibilities and why some people believe in various ones?

When it comes to education, I am definitely someone who prefers to learn organically. I start with a rough idea and see where it takes me. I might get inspired and dive deep or I can fizzle out and move on to the next great thing, but one thing that I just don’t do well is plan. Recipes, instructions, or any other sort of step-by-step how-to’s are just not in my wheelhouse. If I do an experiment, I’m likely to not look ahead to see what’s supposed to happen. If I do, I then become goal-oriented, and it becomes about the destination rather than the journey. Not only is much of the fun lost (for both of us), but the extra chances to learn are as well.

Lessons, projects, and experiments in books are often written with a formula such as: Do steps 1 through 5 and X will happen because of blah, blah, and blah, as discovered by so-and-so.

Ummm… did you have the chance to wonder about, oh, anything?

What if it said this instead: Try doing X, Y, or Z. What do you think might happen? What did happen? How do those two compare? Does this make you think of anything else? Who first decided to try this out? Why? Did this lead to any other discoveries?

I tend to avoid close-ended projects in favor of an interest-led style because, while the former is not guaranteed to crush curiosity, the latter is giving it room to grow. There are times for cut-and-dry lesson plans that get a point across, can be wrapped up quickly, and get you to the next thing or offer a sense of accomplishment when complete. Time, confidence in being able to “teach” what you may not know yourself (really better called something like guided exploration rather than teaching), resources, and other factors can dictate the way learning is approached. However, I think it’s crucial to find time at least occasionally to explore something in an open-ended way – and the more this is done, the easier it becomes and the more opportunities for it are discovered.

Cultivating curiosity is also a two-way street. My son is naturally curious, but there’s some nurturing in there, too. We feed off each other and lob ideas back and forth. Unknowns are not a thing around here; if a question is hanging out there unanswered, the refrain of, “Let’s look it up!” is soon to be heard.

Here’s some ways to begin integrating it into your typical day-to-day routine:

• Mealtimes or car rides are perfect moments to have a “What if…?” type of conversation or discussion of a news item. Switch out who brings the topic, and try to find ones that have multiple viewpoints or possibilities. What will they find at the “edge of the universe”?  Why did someone first decide to write something down? What is the right amount of screen time?
• Have everyone pick an item from around the house and then make guesses as to where, when, and why it originated.
• Read a random chapter or passage from a book at bedtime and try to concoct a story around it. How did the characters get where they are? Where should they head off to next? What inspired the author to write the book?
• Grab a food from the kitchen while making dinner and examine it. If it is a fresh item such as produce, consider why it might have the color, shape, texture, etc, that it does. Where is it from? Who eats it? What does the rest of the plant look like? How has it been cultivated? Is it native or introduced? If it is a prepared food, where was it first created and how has it been modified? What sort of nutritional content does it have?
• When there is something someone in the family either loves or can’t stand, take it a step further. What makes for the strong reaction? Are there related things that might bring out a very different response? Why is this? And why do certain subjects make us feel deeply in the first place? What topics universally elicit such emotion? What does this say about us?
• Send everyone off to find 3 or so questions. Any questions. We did this recently and my son brought back ones like, Who invented hammocks? Why does a branch decide to form where it does? and How is salt made? They may take 2 minutes to answer or inspire 2 weeks of exploration… Run with it!

On the flip side, if curiosity is not high on your list, then that will (of course!) lead me to ask – So, what is? …Let me know in the comments.

Happy exploring!

The Big Worries

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There are a handful of questions and concerns that crop up regularly in any homeschool forum, so I thought I’d take a few minutes to gather some advice in one place. For additional thoughts, read the recent post Homeschool Reality Check, look over the Homeschool Supply Checklist, or consider a guided planner. I hope all this is will be helpful!

How do I start? First and foremost: know your laws – and your resources. Some regions require registering as a homeschool by a certain age; some places have no requirements at all. For some, you must administer yearly tests; others need to see a portfolio of work. Some areas offer funding for homeschoolers; in others, you’re on your own. Look to your state department of education or similar government institution for the specifics for where you live. After that, I always advise to start small and add to your repertoire bit by bit as you start to find how your family learns best.

Am I doing enough? ‘Enough’ is a dangerous rabbit hole of a term. I would replace this question with, “What is my goal here?” The goal, as I tend to get a bit preachy about, is to create lifelong learners. How? By helping them stay curious and enjoy learning and by equipping them with the ability to learn – to know how to question, research, sift information, and so forth. I have to admit, I did not enjoy my foray into college; I always grumbled that I wished it could be completed in the same manner as taking the GED to pass high school. I wanted some cumulative exam to show I knew how to take a test and write a paper, as the rest felt like mind-numbing tediousness just to prove the same thing in the end. The earlier grades are much the same: we need a working grasp of math and other concepts, but the mountain of stuff waded through in school is, by and large, trivia meant to fill the days and check the boxes.

What about socialization? Socialization in homeschool will look very similar to socialization in normal life: you go to functions, run errands, go see friends, visit family, and talk to random folks waiting in line with you. Peer socialization may require being a little more intentional as so many kids are tied up in school most of the day, but hitting the park around 3:30 can help with that. Likewise, many activities – 4H, Scouts, library events, and so forth – are built around public school schedules, so there’s plenty of time to find other kids. If you want to find other homeschoolers, there are endless groups online these days, so chances are getting continuously better that you can make connections.

What does your day look like?/What curriculum is best? No two homeschool families are the same and comparing will likely not be all that helpful – plus, asking this will find you quickly drowning in responses with 100+ variations, which can be wildly overwhelming. There is no best, just best for you. There is no requirement for what a day or week should look like, and no schedule has any particular merit over another. Chances are next year (or sooner) will find you picking up a new book or adopting a new routine – or tossing both books and routines out the window. Assume that trial and error are your best bet and start experimenting!

I’m not sure I can teach. That’s fine – you don’t have to. And kids can have a tremendous ability to teach themselves, depending on age and subject. What you need to be able to do is to be their facilitator – the person who can help them find resources and reach their goals. This may be through teaching, discovering mentors, researching programs, or just encouraging them. At the end of the day, most of us can probably fumble through early math and whatnot; after that, it’s more important to keep showing them how to find their own answers, as I mentioned earlier, than for you to be able to instruct them. Think of it like cooking: if you can provide a kitchen and supplies, and then show basic safety and techniques, there comes a point where it’s up to them to find a recipe to follow – or to make up their own.

My child doesn’t want to do anything I try. Give yourself a little grace here. Being together – especially for those used to a different set-up – can be trying at times. We butt heads here, too. Honestly, it’s usually my fault. I can get a little carried away or determined I can make something happen just because I want it to. I like to challenge us with concepts and to offer exposure to advanced ideas and can forget when to bring it down a notch. Or sometimes it’s him doing that child-testing-their-parent thing. It happens. We talk about our successes and failures, and it’s another learning experience in the end, and tomorrow is another day. It takes time to figure out exactly what everyone’s role is, plus those roles change as we age. Time is on your side, though. If it’s not working today, toss it aside. Try it again tomorrow, next week, or next month, if you want.

Why did you decide to homeschool? Because I was homeschooled, and I know the benefits as well as the reality behind the myths. Because I have been teaching him – or helping him learn, at any rate – since the beginning. Because I want his days free for more: more fun, more adventure, more interests, more time to just be. Because I get to learn too, and I get even more out of it now than I did way back when. Because I love watching him light up when he figures something out or discovers something new. Because life is short, and I want to be present for as many moments as I can. Because I think the education system needs an overhaul. Because there is a lot more going on in schools beyond learning that concerns me these days. And… honestly, many more reasons, including simply because I enjoy it.

I hope this answers some questions and assuages any concerns – if you have more, feel free to reach out and ask. If you want to know more about what I consider important, read previous posts such as The Four C’s, which are the main tenants that guide what I choose to focus on. It may take time to find a rhythm, but it is definitely doable and absolutely worth it. Best wishes in your own adventure!

Homeschool Reality Check

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What does it mean to be homeschooled?

There was a time when those of us who were homeschoolers were just that… Homeschoolers. It wasn’t that long ago either. Now, though – phew! You might be unschooling, Funschooling, gameschooling, wildschooling, roadschooling, or virtual schooling. You might be Classical, Charlotte Mason, Montessori, Eclectic, or Waldorf-Inspired. You might do unit studies, block scheduling, interest-led, or boxed curriculum. And don’t forget to deschool if you were originally in public school!

It makes my head spin, and I’m a veteran at this stuff. I’m rather amazed newcomers ever manage to wade through the overwhelming pile of terminology and get to what’s really important: the learning.

It doesn’t matter how you go about it. Seriously. What matters? That it works for your family. How do you get there? What does that mean? Here’s my advice, for what it’s worth.

Take your time. There is no rush. There is no ticking clock with a bell that is going to ring periodically. You do not have to start at 8 am on a late-August morning. You do not have to be mindful of days of the week, holidays, or any other time constraint the school around the corner does, nor do you have hundreds of kids to attend to. You have the luxury of time.

Start slow. Don’t try to figure it all out at once. You may have a hunch what your schooling style will be, but let it evolve. Depending on your choice, it can range from dirt cheap to really expensive, so test the waters. I always recommend starting off with an inexpensive book or two to cover math and English basics, then spending a lot of time playing games, reading, exploring interests, and other low-key activities. If you run across a resource that seems to fit, ask around (hint: when looking for advice, ask for the why in any opinion; that will give you a better understanding of if it will work in your situation) or test it out. There may be free samples, giveaways, or used options out there to begin with. Build over time in this way, until you feel you have a solid collection or know you want to invest in something specific.

Find your balance. Ignore labels and boxes. You may be a structured homeschooler using a grade-oriented boxed curriculum 4 days a week, but there’s nothing stopping you from unschooling the rest of the time. Or vice versa – let them have at all week long, but maybe Saturdays are workbook bonanzas. It’s okay. We all fall at different points along the schedule spectrum. Some of us (ahem) are a little disorganized but require at least a pretense of structure. Others have their ducks in a straighter row but like to let their hair down now and then. I’m betting all methods have their pluses and their minuses… The only thing you need to adhere to are the laws for where you live. The rest? Bahhhh. If I had to label our style, I believe I’d invent a new term altogether: Medley-schooling.

Grow your village. Be it family, friends, people in your community, fellow homeschoolers, or online groups, expand your circle. Homeschooling is amazing, but it can also be a lot. Not everyone relishes every aspect of it, and we all need some support at times, not to mention inspiration, commiseration, advice, sounding boards, and regular infusions of humor. Lots and lots of humor!

Know your goals. This is two-fold. You will undoubtedly have your own goals for homeschooling, but there are a couple big, universal goals to any education out there, and if your version is achieving them, you’re set. The overarching goal is to nurture a lifelong learner. This is done by first fostering or maintaining a love of learning and encouraging curiosity and exploration. Then it is fortified with the ability to learn, a working knowledge of how to ask the right questions, find the right resources, and absorb the right information to propel oneself forward in life. If you have those in your back pocket, you can set your course in any direction you wish and find your way.

Embrace change. What works today may not tomorrow. We change, we grow – it’s natural. Luckily, homeschooling is malleable and can adapt to your needs. Adjust anything at any time, put stuff on hold for a while, or take a time-out from routine to go off on a lark. Education should be an adventure, so see where it takes you.

Remember the words way up at the top of this page: Explore, learn, laugh, grow, repeat. They’re more important to keep track of than all those terms I listed at the beginning. Homeschooling sure seems a lot more complicated than when I was a kid, but it really isn’t. The upside of the astounding variety of choices is that there are a lot of really great resources out there now, and homeschooling is far more popular and mainstream. If you need additional help sorting it all out, there are three versions now of the Extraschooling Guided Planner & Journal: same information to assist you in navigating your way, different sizes because… You know. That schedule thing. Different strokes for different folks, as my dad would say.

See them on Amazon:

90-Day Jumpstart

180-Day

Year-Round

Back to School… Or Staying Home?

It is somehow already August… There are kids starting back to school, and others will be following in a week or two. What will school look like this fall? It is still quite up in the air, it seems. In our area the Delta variant of COVID-19 is spiking at the same time that the local school board has voted to no longer require masks. The collision of the two issues is causing many in the community to feel uncertain and reconsider their options. Thinking on one’s toes and being able to pivot as needed has definitely been the name of the game for the last year and a half now!

I hope that wherever you and your family are, you feel safe, comfortable, and confident about your choices for fall. For our part, it is an exciting time as this is going to be the first year our homeschool will be officially registered with the state. If you are in our same situation, you may want to try our project from last summer, Name That School, to get everyone excited about your launch. You may also want to check out the Homeschool Supply Checklist to see if there are any items you want to add.

Additionally, I am thrilled to say across this year I have begun working on homeschool journals and planners, and the very first one appeared on Amazon just yesterday! It is geared especially toward new homeschoolers who are trying to sort through the noise and get their footing, figure out their style, and gather materials that will work for them. However, if you’ve been homeschooling for a while but want to explore deeper or change things up a bit, it’s got you covered too. This is a 90-day crash course to get your thoughts organized and test-drive your methods. This month there is a giveaway on the Extraschooling Facebook page, so be sure to enter – like, share, and leave a comment about why you enjoy homeschooling and your name will be added in a random drawing to win a free copy of the book at the end of the month.

This coming week the “Look inside” feature should become available on Amazon, but in the meantime, I’ll post a couple of sample pages to give a sense of what to expect. The idea is not for the book to tell you what to do, but rather to ask the questions that will help you find your own answers, and to do so in a progressive way, where one topic builds on the next. One of the things I really love about the 90-Day Guided Planner & Journal – that will feature in all of the ones to follow as well – is a scrapbook section to collect the fun (and funny) moments along the way. One of the biggest assets we can have is a good sense of humor! One of my all-time favorite lines from my son was when he was 3 and I was asking him to identify shapes. I pointed to a circle and he exuberantly announced, “Roundtangle!” These are the moments to treasure.

Sample – Table of Contents

Sample – Section 2 Overview

Sample – Scrapbook Page

So, happy August! For everyone – homeschoolers, public schoolers, private schoolers, and any other schoolers, including lifelong learners of all ages – I hope this upcoming season finds you happy, healthy, and hopeful. We all could do with more of that these days! Keep your chin up, keep making the decisions that are best for your family, and keep smelling those roses. Here’s to the new school season!

UPDATE:

The flip-through video here is for the original version of the 90-Day Jumpstart Guided Planner & Journal. I have since improved the Filing Cabinet and planner sections… But the front matter still has all the same great tips, prompts, and information!

Leverage

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What do you want most for your child?

I have been reading Ben Hewitt’s book, Homegrown, and in it was struck by his desire for his sons to have their sense of place. It resonated with me, the idea of implanting in your child this grounding force, this knowledge of where they belong in the universe, this innate feeling of their correlation enmeshed with their ability to be happy wherever they are and with whatever surrounds them because they feel at home within themselves. While I agree with this sentiment wholeheartedly, it has led me to also consider what else I find vital to impart.

As I touched on in The Four C’s, I think curiosity is essentially the engine that propels humanity. Curiosity goes hand-in-hand with imagination; one fuels the other in a snowballing effect. In my son’s early education, this has been the keystone I have focused on: promoting his curiosity, feeding his wild imagination, exposing him to the possibilities, differences, questions, and wonders that surround us on both a grand and tiny scale: the immense mystery of the cosmos, the global human condition, the life that abounds at dirt-level on our acre.

My assumption has been that with a healthy sense of curiosity and a whopper of an imagination, he will be both inspired to pursue a variety of educational paths naturally and then have the where-with-all to find solutions to problems that arise. I have thought about this in a small scope though, just to the degree they apply to his “school age,” shall I say (though it’s not like there is a point we technically stop learning – I learn far more now as a mother than I did at that age it seems). I know that the more interested and engaged one is with a topic or issue, the more one learns, gleans, probes, and adds to. But it wasn’t until recently I began to think of the longer view and how these elements can be of service to him.

I admit, this fall has not been my favorite. There has been plenty of personal stressors at play in my life that I have yet to sort out, and it has led to plenty of self-reflection. During a recent visit with homeschooling friends, I was asked if I felt I had been adequately prepared for life by my experience being homeschooled/unschooled by my father. My answer was a bit muddled at the time, but I have continued to roll it over in my head and I have realized some of my difficulty in answering is because of the overlap of parenting and education. These two things are – and should be – so connected that it can be hard to discern where or if there is a separation at all. I think now my answer would be something like this: Yes. I was given the tools and the choice to use them. I was exposed to the world while taught that my own space is enough. I have always felt intelligent and competent. I was given the gift of knowing there is more than one path to success, as well as that success is in fact located in more than one destination, including simply finding yourself happy in your own skin. My hesitation in answering was due to my wondering if I should have been pushed harder, forced to achieve more based on capability. Later I concluded this is a very individual parenting decision – and one I don’t yet know quite where I stand on.

This conversation tied in with the importance of curiosity and imagination to me. I sometimes ask myself, as many do, if I should do more “formal educational stuff” and have more consistency and structure. I make the comparison mistake when considering those subjects that are being drilled into my son’s peers. Do they know their ABC’s? Can they read? How high can they count? What sort of math can they do? …And so on. Nope, I am not immune to this line of thought. But then I snap out of it (until next time I forget myself at least) and remember how amazing this child I share space with is. Can he read? No. Is he mesmerized by stories and happily listens to thousands of books a year? Yes, across a vast array of subjects. Can he do basic math? With some help, if he wants to – which, at almost 6, he rarely does. There’s a back yard to play in and the dirt beckons with a siren’s call. What does he have? This insatiable curiosity that perpetually astounds and stumps me as he asks the questions I can’t believe never occurred to me. To keep up with this, he has this ever-burgeoning imagination that is about a half-step away from being able to make something out of absolutely nothing. It is akin to alchemy what he can concoct.

And that is what I want most for him. I want his life to be like this morning, when we sat on the porch and read about the creation of the Boeing 747. Before the book could close his eyes were lit up with possibility and he exclaimed, “I want to build a plane!” There is now a flamingo making test flights through the house in a bucket with everything from a miter box to magnets to vacuum parts attached. I want this because someday he will have a season that doesn’t go well, and he will need to navigate his way through it. He will need to be curious enough to wonder if he can chart a course and be able to imagine possible paths. There is more to pretend play and childhood creations than fun and games; it is them test-driving their problem-solving skills. Daydreams are practice for seeing other possibilities later on when naysayers are telling them something can’t be done. Literacy and arithmetic are essential skills, but so is the ability to conceptualize something necessary, new, audacious, or maybe even a little crazy. I want him to always be able to come up with a question for himself and then work out multiple ways to answers from there. My dad liked to say with a lever placed strategically enough one could move anything, and so what I want most for him is to equip him with the lever of imagination placed just so on the fulcrum of curiosity.

What is important for you?

The Grade Debate

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Here at home, we take school pretty lightly still. My son is five (and a half, he would tell you) and would only just now qualify to begin kindergarten, which is optional in our state anyway. By taking it lightly, I mean it is highly disorganized and informal; I live off that view of my father’s, that everything is a homeschool lesson, and long ago realized tons gets learned through simply being present in life (note I said ‘present’ – i.e., taking an active role, not just existing). We explore, play, read, and roll with whatever pops up. I foresee this having a natural pace of development for the both of us and being a really organic and fun evolution. But. That is not always the case – for us and many others right now. Due to the pandemic and concerns over schools re-opening, we are helping a native public-schooler this fall, a 5th grader who will return to her usual environment eventually. This has led to a number of new considerations for all of us as we have begun testing the waters of this joint venture. One of these for me has been the issue of grades.

Hmmm.

How do you grade a sudden homeschooler? Do you even grade homeschool?

I have to admit, I loved grades, whether at home or within an institution. I got good ones most all of the time and was always very competitive – with myself even if with no one else. I was known to argue grades and their overall merit, push to correct a correction even if it didn’t affect my grade, and also sink my grade in a class if I deemed it unworthy – but overall, I strove to hit top marks the majority of the time. Now, though, as the teacher, I am wondering what a grade really amounts to, and how fair it is of me to impose one on work.

The argument against grading includes several factors. This is a year we have both been dropped into; I am working to learn what she knows and how she operates while she works to learn the process and my expectations. If I pull out a 5th grade math text and expect she can handle it simply because she is that age, what good does it do to rate her against it? She could be above, below, or at that point. My job isn’t to whip out the red pen, it is to figure out how to best lead her to the next step in her educational path – whatever that is. I have no outside funding to flaunt test scores in front of to keep the doors open. If problems are wrong, that shows us what we need to focus our attention on. If they are right, it shows us we need to ramp it up a notch. I want her learning, curious, and ready to try new things, not focusing on getting an A or worrying about getting something wrong. Yes, I want her to be diligent, but in an effort to understand, not get a certain mark.

So are there reasons to assign rankings to homeschool work? I did actually decide yes to this, just not in the traditional sense. There are no percents, no lettered grades. Instead, we are operating on a color system (which I have considered making akin to a stick shift, with several forward gears, a neutral, and reverse – we’ll see). In essence, green denotes forward progress, yellow means things are holding steady, and red means things are moving in the opposite direction as desired. Within this framework, I look at 3 qualifying areas: work accuracy, thought/effort, and individual growth. Thus the standard score gets mixed with how much attention was paid to it as well as what it sparked personally, and is considered over a length of time, rather than per assignment. For example, last week I ranked science as our top subject when we learned about the solar system. The work wasn’t perfect, but the involvement and interest certainly filled in the gaps; likewise social studies led to curiosity and discussion throughout the week. Meanwhile, what I lump as “Extras” we rotate through (music, language, etc) got a yellow as they were perfunctory across the board. English fell in the red zone as the work suffered from minimal effort despite the assignment being tailor-made according to a favorite activity.

Does this alternative ranking system amount to a hill of beans? Not sure yet. I did feel the need to have some accountability within our work, but akin to that of a parent: I will praise the good and encourage more of the same, hold accountable for the bad, and let the rest coast as is allowable. Additionally, there are explicit instructions that when encountering something too complex, to write “I don’t know” rather than waste energy: learning should be fun, not a chore. There are also extra points (not sure what they count toward!) for recognizing a bad question if we are using supplemental material, asking good questions, and having an opinion, hypothesis, or idea of one’s own. It is on the docket to actively find things of interest to examine more closely, even if that throws my lessons off course.

The most important grade, in the end, will be the one I receive as temporary instructor. I hope that this rare chance for so many to educate at home offers both the children and the adults something of value that they can take on in life. I feel the need to impart a lot in a short amount of time, but we will see how it all turns out. There is such a beauty in breaking down the walls, so to speak, of formal education. If nothing else, I hope to get past the point where I get questions that begin with “Can I…?” We should never be taught to ask permission to learn and expand our universe. If I can get that alone instilled, I will give myself at least a yellow.

To grade or not to grade – or how to grade? What works for you?

A Few Summer Musings

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Oh, dear!

I’ve been pretty derelict, haven’t I?

I must admit I have been absentee for over a month, both here and on the Facebook page. Part of it is the new eye issue, part is ongoing internet problems, and part is just the doldrums, to be honest. I haven’t found myself hit with inspiration as much over the last so long – or maybe just have too many things competing for brain space – and I just have fallen into bad habits. However I finally decided to dig in and do a little work. If you peek across the menu up top, “Featured Activities” is now “Features,” as I decided to add book recommendations along with lesson ideas (also this month you can find a Homeschool Supply Checklist, with items that are handy to have around). I posted our current early-literacy practice along with a dozen books we have fallen in love with this month. I also went page by page and tried to clean up old clutter from each so it stops looking like the construction site it has been since March. Hopefully I will keep this motivation and add some new topics on the Learning Ideas page, but for now… I am here.

I don’t have a specific thread of thought for this, I’m afraid, but rather some scattered observations of late. Bear with me!

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This summer we have stayed away from lakes and pools, but ironically this is the year my little one seems ready to start swimming – with only our little 8-foot pool to work within. It has reminded me again of the key to him learning: Show him what’s possible, then leave him to it. Whether walking, drawing, swimming, or anything else, he will resist my every attempt to push him along. Then one day he’ll suddenly do it all on his own, with a mysterious proficiency, as if he gets up and practices at midnight when I am unaware. I started this summer where I ended the last, trying to convince him to try floating on his back. He wanted none of it, and for a multitude of reasons. This month I was then surprised to see him suddenly snorkeling his way around the pool, diving underwater, and attempting handstands as if it was second nature. Typical!

He has always avoided art like the plague… until he suddenly decided to devote himself to a careful rendition of his all-time favorite toad, Flower. Who knew he was such a great artist?

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Discipline can be tough sometimes. I recently had a bit of a cranky spell; then, after a couple nights of lackluster sleep, he took my place. I found myself both annoyed and feeling bad for him, as he wound up eventually sent off to an early bedtime. It seemed unfair, as I generally feel he is the better person of the two of us, and I don’t face such repercussions when I act up. Granted, I did once upon a time. Next, though, I realized I rather wish I did have someone to crack down on me at such times – someone to stick me in time-out or force rest upon me when necessary. In fact, there are plenty of days where the notion of being sent to rest in a quiet room would actually be a very welcome opportunity. I ended up struck by the notion that I have come full circle and what was once a punishment of the direst sort would now be considered a nice break, and the irony that by the time the consequence of an action is understood, it is no longer an option due to the demands of parenthood. And I went in to give him snuggles and read a bedtime story in a bemused state of mind.

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I miss faces. I am not the most social creature, so I was surprised that just going about basic errands, like grocery shopping, I began to really miss people. A lot is made of how much of an individual lies in their eyes, but I am finding this but half of the picture. When my son was little I was constantly told by random strangers how refreshing it was to see a baby’s mouth without a pacifier in the way, to be able to see his expression and hear his noises. This is how I feel now: I want to peruse unencumbered faces again, enjoy the multitude of shapes, sizes, and ways we emote with them. I want unmuffled voices and to see mouths form words. This was not a complication of coronavirus I had anticipated, yet strangely the desire to see a whole human again is getting to be really high up the list.

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Lastly, a few conversations recently led me to the epiphany that often what at one turn may be considered our worst quality may in another instant be seen as our best. My son was wanting me to better explain this to him, so I offered an example for each of us: I can offend people as I can come across as blunt or tactless at times. However, that same directness can be useful and appreciated when there is an issue that needs to be dealt with. Meanwhile with him, there are days my eyes start to pop out of my head and my ears want to run away from his endless talking, questioning, and wanting to know everything that is going on at all times. But on the flip side we were recently doing an exercise of picking one adjective for each person sitting around the table, including ourselves. What did I pick as the word that best summed him up, the word that described what I love best about him? Curious. He is endlessly curious, which is hard to be if you are tuned out and not busily thinking up excellent questions. Funny how we balance out! Forgive the extremes and enjoy the spectrum. We are not just A or Z, but all the alphabet in between as well. To that end, I will leave where I started, with another Andre Gide quote:

The color of truth is gray.”

The Learning Web

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Some days I actively approach a topic with my son. Some days I don’t. And then some days it just happens, and I am happily surprised when I look back on it. Today was like that. It occurred to me tonight, as I reflected on the ground we had rather accidentally – and somewhat haphazardly – covered, that the learning process is so well-suited to life at home because it is just not linear by nature, something it has to be within an institution that has to serve the masses. Food chains have been far more accurately described as food webs, and education works this same way: one thing leads to another, then some random off-shoot takes you down one or more paths that then branch off in their own directions – including, sometimes, back to where you started.

Our morning began logging our egg experiment that we began last night. We documented our set-up, initial observations, hypotheses, and questions, then examined the egg and noted the changes. Next thing I knew I was being invited to a “dinosaur show,” which consisted of my son acting as a presenting paleontologist, going through nature artifacts, like a nest with unhatched eggs from last year and random bones. We wound up comparing a T-Rex pelvis with that of a human when he tried identifying it, and when he pulled out a snail shell it led us to wondering if they were around at the time of the dinosaurs. I mistakenly called them arthropods rather than gastropods for half the day, which of course led me to researching all these points once I realized my error, finding snails have existed for some 500 million years and are in the same phylum as the octopus, while arthropods include insects and crabs.

In a move that will seem unrelated, we switched over to math, as I had been flipping through some new library books while he was eating, and he requested I read. I had been looking at Fun with Roman Numerals, which may be joining our personal stash soon, so I started showing him how they worked. I have not looked into Latin for backing, but I discussed how C stands for 100 so likely bears connection to words like century while M may be because of ties to millennium. (Which, typing this, I just learned has two n‘s – who knew? Spelling was never my forte!) Now hold that thought until the next paragraph, because, remember, I mentioned how learning is not linear, so – we then tried skip-counting by 5’s with the book Hands Down, in which we also read that oak trees are the most susceptible to lightning strikes, a fact we will be tracking down to see why this may be. (Height? Moisture content? Who has a theory? Ask your kids for thoughts before you check Google!) Afterwards we played around with fractions thanks to Sir Cumference and the Fracton Faire, which he really enjoyed and seemed to catch onto the easiest of the three concepts (though it would seem the most complicated of the lot to me).

It has been rainy for a couple days, but we got the itch to go for a hike, so we donned our ponchos and headed for the hills. After feeding the neighbor’s horses and amid walk and play, we delved into discussing the role of bright colors in nature (warning or mimicry), why sudden sun on a humid day makes me think of how microwaves work (heating the water content of an item), identifying birds by sight and call (because it is his passion), explaining the process that leads to a hay bale (there were tractors, and I grew up on a farm), considering the role of scent markings (since last outing we smelled a possible bear), how rain in the mountains leads to flooding in the valleys (the area is under a watch right now), and hunting fractals (of course!), we came full circle: we found a centipede. This created a twofold conversation. First, how ideas are combined within words: -pod, -pede, -pedal refer to legs/feet, then gastro-, centi-, and bi- tell us how many or give us more information. Second, centipede and millipede are connected to those Roman numerals (or at least my theories of them) in that centi– is related to century, and milli- is related to that two-n’ed millennium. And there it was: paleontology, Roman numerals, and hiking all suddenly fit together. Of course. That’s why Paleonumeriking 101 is an essential class in school, right? There is just that natural link, after all!

This evening we watched Big Al (Allosaurus: A Walking with Dinosaurs Special) and did our last analysis of the egg for the day to fully round out our experiences, while I considered the beauty of the winding path of exploration and education. Don’t get me wrong, there is a time for hitting the books and being able to put your nose to the grindstone – but this is the foundation for that. The more you discover, the more you realize awaits you, and one simple question suddenly leads to five or ten of increasing complexity. The more you feed and develop that curiosity and taste for knowledge, the more effort you are willing to put into pursuing it. You can sit down and learn about a subject, or you can follow it to a point of inspiration and then take off. Just like a spider’s design, learning is an art form, a science, a bit messy at times, and something to marvel at.