And Another Thing...

It just hit me that the kids watched almost no television this week, except for the odd Veggie Tale in the a.m. and Curious George/Clifford while I showered. They probably reduced their overall tv consumption by about 2 hours. Holy crackers; they've been watching waaaaay too much boob tube.

Maybe, just maybe, the improvement in their behaviour is tied to less tv? Could it be? I remember about 15 years ago I babysat for two different families when they went on vacations sans kids. One family had kids who never watched tv. Never. The other had kids who rolled out of bed watching videos. The no-tv kids were soooo much better behaved than the tv kids. Coincidence? Not sure. Seems unlikely, especially after watching my own kids this week.

A Week of Surprises

And the biggest one so far has been Grant.

My little boybarian, the one who frequently destroys things by the simple expedient of picking them up, the one who finds more trouble to get into than a sackful of chimps, this wonderful, difficult, awesome boy of mine absolutely thrived this week.

He wanted to do activities, he asked for paper to practice writing his name. He proudly taped his work to the living room wall. For the last year he has driven me right out of my tree with his inadvertant naughtiness and all he needed was a semi-bastardized pseudo-homeschooling program. Who knew?

I have to admit, my children have fought less with each other this week; Abby Kate has even shown signs of latent maturity by helping her brother with his work. I, who am so structured myself, totally missed this crucial principle: kids do well with structure.

One of the best things about the week was actually the scheduled cleaning activities. Over the course of the week we mopped, cleaned the bathrooms, put away laundry, dusted and tidied the living room...for the first week it went much better than I'd expected. Abby Kate totally took initiative and put her own laundry away after watching me explain to Grant how to sort his clean stuff in stacks and put in his drawers. That made me immensely proud. Some stuff was longer and more drawn out than if I'd done it myself and certainly their least favorite activity was tidying the living room, but when do they ever do that except under protest? The house still looks like 3 messy kids live in it, but it's progress.

We learned a lot of cool stuff about the ocean this week, worked on patterns and addition and odd/even numbers, practiced following directions, made models of jellyfish, made a jello aquarium with sharks in it, watched the coolest video of an octopus fighting a shark and generally expanded our understanding of the natural world. Kinda neat.

I have total respect for people who do this all the time. And I am profoundly grateful that I live in a community with excellent public schools.

Day Two

went pretty well, though not as smoothly as yesterday. I am enjoying the planning and prep so far, but not enough to want to homeschool on a permanent basis. Today we talked about sea turtles, which was fun for me and they had a good time with the on-line games I found (who knew there'd be sea turtle-related games out there for the asking? I guess you really can find everything on the internet).

I am trying to make things a little looser and more fun around here. Certainly the instructional stuff helps with that, but I am finding that it's hard to get other stuff done at the same time...stuff like laundry and cooking. Hmmm. That's a drawback, of course.

Two more keys to my success are going to be a) earlier bedtime (10 p.m. vs. 11 p.m.) and b) a judicious use of caffeine in the afternoon. Those two things coupled with the planning and prep are what's going to see me through. Tonight I have to double plan for Wednesday and Thursday since I'm out with Angie tomorrow night.

Day One...

of the Great Homeschooling Experiment is over and I think it went pretty well.

Some of the materials I wanted to use are being shipped, so I had to scramble around a little to find some stuff to do today, but once I decided on dolphins (mainly because I have a great Level 2 reader called Amazing Dolphins that I thought I could build on) things came together nicely. The afternoon looked like this:

1:00 Maggie went down for nap
1:00-1:30 Kids and I mopped kitchen, half bath and front entryway
1:35-1:40 Quick snack
1:40-2:45 Dolphins -- read dolphin book; Abby Kate read 5 pages aloud; played dolphin memory game; Kids made dolphins out of Floam; Abby Kate did writing practice with dolphin body parts and freewrote a sentence about dolphins, Grant circled the correct body parts when directed; kids did coloring sheet about dolphins as a listening exercise; observation of differences/similarities with plastic dolphins, whales and sharks.
2:50 Maggie woke up

I could not have asked for a better timetable. We had a few hairy moments with the kid mops, mainly because G wanted to mop the walls, doors, counters...but a time out later he decided he'd rather toe the party line than give up his mopping privileges. They loved learning about dolphins. Heck, I think they just loved being busy in a purposeful way, rather than shoved in front of the tv. We did a little learning, a little art (Floam: what is that stuff?), a little cleaning. Just what I'd hoped.

It's all going to hinge on my preparation. If I am lax, it won't work. And, as I remember so well from my teaching days, it never hurts to be overprepared with more than you think you can actually get done. I really wasn't sure we'd finish everything today, but we did and it gives me a good gauge for what I need to come up with each day.

My biggest fear is that I will get pooped out pretty quickly, having to prep so much, but if I build in some days off -- like for library visits and playdates (and whole weeks off, like during zoo camp) -- and if I am consistent about planning and printing what I need, I think I can pull it off. It seems logical to make my summer revolve around Habitat as a theme, rather than more discrete subjects like rainforest, desert, ocean. Habitat is specific, yet general enough to encompass a lot of stuff, and it lends itself to a wide variety of activities in all the disciplines.

Tomorrow will be different; Maggie's morning nap will be our cleaning time, so the instructional time in the afternoon will be longer. Not sure yet how this is going to play out, but I am encouraged after today.

June Came in With Rainclouds

Oh my, has it rained. I am sick of it.

So I am posting a non-rainy picture to boost my morale. Abby Kate went from "Don't let go, Daddy!" to figure eights in the driveway in just a week's time. I am so impressed. That face just says it all. Her dad calls her Pink Speed, and now it's truer than ever.

Okay, so summer is starting in 3 days. When I ran my ideas by Tim last night, he said "So you're basically going to homeschool them for the summer." That gave me pause for thought. I guess that's more or less what I'm proposing, but I always think of homeschooling as a very neat, orderly, quiet sort of thing -- all the stuff my kids aren't. They're loud, boisterous, and messy, so when I visualize these activities I picture a certain amount of arguing, a lot of jockeying for position, several attemps at going off half-cocked, and me needing a handful of Motrin at the end of it. Still, I'm going to give it the old college try. Win one for the team and all that.

One thing I have to commit to is pre-planning, to the extent that I lay out materials the night before and write up a lesson plan just as I did when I was teaching real school a hundred years ago (of course, I taught high school, so I spent a portion of my classes trying to wake people up, rather than trying to calm them down as I do at home). Trying to organize this stuff is half the battle. I realized this morning that I don't have anything even remotely resembling a planner -- which, although not strictly necessary, would make me feel spiffy.

I was working on "Improving the body" last night and came up with this list:

• water balloon fight


• dancercize


• bike ride


• hopscotch


• go for a walk


• swimming lessons


• wash van


• play tag


• p.m. at the pool


• Rookies Class -- a 4 week sports exploratory, 1x/week

I'm pleased that I, the consummate couch potato, was able to come up with some good stuff.

Under "Improving the Mind" I have:

• zoo camp


• individual reading time


• writing/alphabet practice


• kid science


• library visits..and the coup d'etat:


• Spanish lessons

This really is a coup. My sister, who is an elementary Spanish teacher and general foreign language goddess has agreed to do Spanish with my kids once a week, all summer long. Sweet.

For "improving the soul/spirit" I have:

• painting class (Abby Kate 1x/week for 4 weeks)


• rubber stamping


• card making


• paper punches and glue stick


• watercolor painting


• working with stencils


• sidewalk chalk


• playdoh


• scrapbooking


• Vacation Bible School


• photo safari/photo scavenger hunt


• making placemats

This is more unfocused. I have posted before about my hate/hate relationship with crafts, so the fact that I have trouble figuring out what to do here is not a huge surprise. Still, if I keep the activities focused on my themes -- oceans, rainforest, desert -- maybe they won't be so scattershot. I, personally, love to do crafts, but supervising children doing crafts gives me a stomachache. We shall see about this area of my plan...

Next post I am going to map out what I think a typical day will look like.

Trying to Avoid Chaos

She is just so beautiful. And she is fine -- no ill effects from the Weekend of Disasters.

I am looking ahead to the summer, which is going to be here in just 5 days. I have been mulling over this for about a week...how to provide a sense of structure to our days without running myself ragged or relying on countless hours of PBS Kids.

I think simple is probably best. I want the day to have some structure, but not be overwhelming for me or the kids. My ideas are kind of embryonic right now, but the bare bones look like this:

Every day we will do 1) something to improve our environment 2) something to improve the mind 3) something to improve the spirit 4) something to improve the body 5) something for fun.

Sounds ambitious, but improving our environment is my fancy way of saying "cleaning." The spirit refers to something of an artistic nature and also to Vacation Bible School; the mind is just something academic -- reading practice, reading time, alphabet practice, zoo camp (which the kids are signed up for in July) or something sciency from a cool book I found. Improving the body is where I'll slot activities like swimming lessons or time at the pool. And doing something fun is really so that I remember to play with my kids. I am going to expand on these in a later post, just so I can work out what I want them to look like, but just under "improve our environment" my general drift is something like this:

• Monday we mop & take out trash
• Tuesday we tidy (living room and bedrooms)
• Wednesday we dust
• Thursday we clean bathrooms
• Friday we put away laundry

In theory, these are all things the kids can either do or help with in a substantial way. I think I'm going to pick up some kid-sized mops at ToysRUs so they can really help with the mopping. I am in the process of making lists of activities for the other things on my master plan.

I'm also thinking about integrating mind, spirit and body activities in some simple thematic units like oceans, rainforest, gardening. I think the activities will be more meaningful if we have a loose, exploratory framework to guide them. Not at all sure how this will play out...still working on it.

I don't want the summer to be frittered away on TV and videos. There'll be time enough for that when the weather keeps us indoors again.

The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

As if I needed another one.

It didn't start out badly; the kids all slept until 7, which is fairly abnormal for them, so we woke up more rested than usual. It pretty much went downhill from there.

Maggie woke up with one eye totally crusted over. A phone call to my pediatric nurse MIL confirmed our suspicions -- she probably had an ear infection. So Tim got the big ones ready for church while I threw on some clothes and took Maggie to the (thankfully open) peds clinic for a quick ear check. Diagnosis: double ear infection. No wonder she's been napping so poorly all week and acting crabby as all get-out when she's awake.

After church, we were trying to get some little chores done around the house before heading to my parents' house -- getting the laundry up from the basement, putting recycling in the bin, that sort of thing. The two older children found some glass jars from the bin and were banging them together to make "music" until two of them shattered in Abby Kate's hands and glass shards went everywhere. She was, mercifully, not cut at all. Grant got a small glass sliver in one finger because he just couldn't resist touching the broken bits, but that was our only casualty.

After we'd dealt with all that, Tim and Iwere standing in the kitchen when we heard a muffled sort of thump thump thump sound. We wheeled around, realizing two things simultaneously: Maggie was missing and the basement door was open. I dashed to the stairs just in time to see her tumble the final half-dozen steps to the concrete floor below.

Two things, I think, saved her from serious injury. One was that she went down sideways instead of end-over-end and that meant she took the brunt of the fall on her torso rather than her head. The other is that she appears to be made out of rubber. She ended up with a bruise on one cheek, another on her forehead and a small scrape on her shoulder. When I think how badly she could have been hurt, it seems clear that God was watching out for her yesterday. And for her stupid parents.

We were pretty badly shaken by that, but since Maggie seemed to be OK, we went over to my parents' for dinner. A baby gate fell over on Maggie while we were there, not hurting her but definitely scaring her and requiring us to carry her around for most of the afternoon -- fine by us. We were just settling into dessert, when we couldn't locate Grant.

The kids had finished dinner long before everyone else and had gone outside to play. Abby Kate came back in to go to the bathroom, but when we called G in for dessert, we couldn't find him anywhere. After a few minutes of slightly panicked shouting, we found him in the downstairs bathroom. He'd been so busy playing outside that he'd ignored the urge to "go" and by the time he actually made it indoors his sneakers were full of pee.

Worse than that, he'd pooped his pants -- something he hasn't done since he was 2 1/2. He'd tried to take care of it himself, which meant there was pretty much poop everywhere. I can't even begin to describe how gross it was. YUCK. He had to be thrown in the tub and his clothes had to be bagged up to take home. Except for the Lightning McQueen underwear. That we sacrificed to the Poo gods. Sayonara, little undies.

Since we had no other clothes for him, he ended up wearing one of my mom's t-shirts -- one that said "Maui Christmas" on it -- and going totally commando under it all.

We got home and put everyone to bed and then just sat, sort of looking at each other. I think we have never been so glad for a day to be over.