Learning at Home and Everywhere Else

So this weird thing happens when anyone asks me about homeschooling.

I make it sound all lame.

Some mom at the playground innocently asks how homeschooling is going, and I get all excited and talk on and on and on, and I can see the mom's face sort of getting a funny kind of "oh, dear!" look on it as I talk, so I go on even more excitedly about even more great stuff, and then they ask a question about curriculum, and down it goes from there.

And they leave to go home and tell their partners, "Remember Julie? Well, she homeschools now, and I'm pretty sure that her kids just sit around and watch Spongebob all day."

We do not watch Spongebob. Well, the girls watch Spongebob, but only at the dentist, and they think that he's a piece of cheese, not a sponge. If you don't want your kids to watch Spongebob, you have to go to the pediatric dentist in Bedford, which is a half-hour drive from here.

One of the problems, I think, is that what excites me most about homeschooling, and thus what I talk on and on about, is often not what would excite most other parents about their children's education.

It excites me that the girls get to play pretend ponies for as long as they want, and never get interrupted.

It excites me that most days we bicycle to the park, and that park that's a block away is generally a three-hour trip, door to door.

It excites me that Willow doesn't even bother to ask for my help with Zoo Tycoon anymore, because she's way better at it than I am--"No, Momma, the spotted hyena needs a den to sleep in, not the bamboo bungalo!"

It excites me that sometimes the girls don't even get dressed all day, because they're too busy drawing, and playing, and listening to audiobooks, and lying on top of their bed staring out the window. If they don't feel like going anywhere or doing anything in particular, then we don't.

It excites me that I don't have to try to make the girls go to sleep at night if they're not sleepy, and I don't have to wake them up in the morning if they are.

It excites me that we can spend the whole day at the library, including the half-hour bike ride there and back, and we can stop at the park on the way, too, and at lunchtime we can walk over to another park to hear a concert.

Are those things nothing? They seem vitally important to me.

I always forget to bring up the stuff that I probably should be telling everyone about.

Willow can read anything you put in front of her--is there a certain grade level associated with that?

The girls have listened to the Magic Tree House audiobooks so many times that they can tell you all about Pompeii, the Titanic, the Great San Francisco Earthquake, the shoguns of China, and one-room schoolhouses.

They're quite looking forward to the Disaster Dioramas of Pompeii and the Titanic that I told them that we could make next week.

Willow is fascinated by human evolution. We all watched Ape to Man the other day when it was her turn to choose the movie, then we checked out the interactive timeline on the Smithsonian website, and then we had Matt print a bunch of pre-human bios to put on our basement timeline.

We're also building a miniature log cabin with twigs and hot glue, and a chia farm in the pony playset.

Sydney and I made half a dozen pinwheels that spin in the wind, and the next time we get to Lowe's we have a list of supplies that will improve our design immensely.

Every time we're in the car, we listen to The Story of the World, and it's the first time that I've really understood world history.

We took a field trip to an apple orchard. We took a field trip to a famous fossil site. We took a field trip to a different apple orchard.

On the two-hour drive to fossil site, Willow read Shel Silverstein poems out loud to Sydney, and both girls laughed and laughed and laughed.

Today we collected pinecones.

We also made bracelets out of UV-reactive beads, so that we'll know when to put sunscreen on.

Tomorrow we're going to bake a chocolate cake just for the hell of it.

Is that what I should be explaining about homeschooling?

Halloween Project: Monster Bread

Look what's hiding amongst the vegan hamburger buns:

GRRR! ARGH!

You can sculpt faces out of any low-rising bread dough, and bake it for the same amount of time that you'd bake rolls.

Don't even worry about the monster part--the oven will take care of that for you.

Ballet Girl, Baseball Girl

For the past several Saturdays, we've found ourselves enmeshed in an all-too-common, and fortunately for us, temporary, insanity--we've spent Saturday mornings, the ENTIRE morning, driving our children to and from their various activities, and cooling our heels while they perform them.

One activity is a definite keeper:

Our Sydney is a ballet girl, wouldn't you agree? She demonstrates one of those truths that I know about children and yet sometimes allow myself to forget--children, just like everyone, learn best when they're doing what they love. Sydney pays attention to her teachers, she follows directions, she takes turns, she tries her hardest--just what we want her to be learning. The ballet part is her business.

Willow comes with us to Sydney's ballet class, wearing her orange Sports Shorties team shirt that exactly matches the orange elevator down to the ballet studios:

She's happy to hang out in the hallway during Sydney's class, reading her latest Nancy Drew novel:

Then we head over to her sport:

 

Enjoy those photos, because those pictures of Willow, warming up with her dad, may be the only pictures that you ever see of that child playing baseball, for Willow has reminded us of another truth about children--children, like everyone else, do not learn well when they are not doing what they love. And what Sports Shorties has taught Willow is that she does NOT like team sports. She does NOT pay attention to her coach. She does NOT follow directions. She does NOT try at all. As soon as the coach starts to talk, a sweet, sweet man who is revered by all other children, just so you know, Willow retreats in a sulk to the sidelines, where she stays, facing in the direction opposite team play, until, exasperated, we drag her out.

Willow will not be showing up to the rest of her Sports Shorties classes. I don't have a problem with taking her there each week and letting her either participate or sit out, but watching her do it just makes ME too mad, so I'm calling that tuition done and gone in the name of making me a better parent. And, hey, our Saturday kid-shuttle just has to transport one kid now--yay!

In a few weeks Willow's ice skating classes will resume for the season. Ice skating, now, is a sport that Will LOVES. It's a solo sport, you know, and it moves you fast, and she's very good at it. It also has the virtue of taking place on a weekday afternoon, so it's not during family time, but part of normal homeschool time.

I doubt very much, however, that I'll have a performer in the ice show this year, but there is always Sydney's spring ballet recital to look forward to...

Fresh and New

There, now--don't these photos look so much fresher and happier than my old, blurry pics?

Little Dinosaur on a Vintage Dictionary Page

Skull and Crossbones on a Vintage Dictionary Page



Shout-out to Webster's! Of COURSE that is the exact dictionary that I use when I make my pinbacks.

And then, a for-real brand-new listing:

Original Crayon Rocket Pops



I might reshoot that one after I make my next batch of pops.

Willow Teaches Science: Watch Out, Solids!

In this episode, Willow teaches us about solids:

Remember, friends, that to change a solid's shape by throwing it against the wall? Well, that's just cheating.

To see the rest of Willow's five-part series explaining the states of matter, check out my shethecougar youtube channel.

Etsy Reshoots, or, Welcome to the Light Tent

Instead of doing the etsy work and craft fair work that perhaps I ought to have done this week, I spent it housecleaning, watching movies with the girlies (Ballet Shoes with one, and Ape to Man with the other--want to guess which kid is which?), joining them in all their little projects and fantasies, bicycling around the park, playing on the playground, reading and reading and reading, and planning some plans for the education of October.

However, now I'm beginning to feel the panic that is entitled "I MUST MUST MUST Get My Etsy Holiday Updates Done!".

So of course my Matty took the girlies off for a good long while today to watch football (football must be watched in an empty classroom on campus, on account of we don't have viewable TV here), and the perfect opportunity presented itself to get in a good, long etsy photoshoot.

If only it wasn't rainy and gross and overcast outside.

In other news, did I already tell you about my light tent? I found the plans, years ago, for an excellent DIY light tent to make out of scrap lumber and white ripstop nylon and it just, you know, never got done. Familiar tale. Anyway, at a garage sale this summer what do I see, but the exact same light tent that I was going to make, handmade very well out of scrap lumber and white ripstop nylon! I want to say it cost five dollars, but Matt says that it cost two, and he's the one who holds the money when we go to garage sales, so I guess he would know.

Storing this light tent is an absolute bitch, and yet I love it so.

Back to today--gross day outside, out comes the light tent inside. Want to see what it can make of a shot taken inside my dark living room on a dark day? Here you go:

For shooting pictures inside our house, which has absolutely no natural light to speak of, it's a dream.

The little tree pinback photos are much improved:

I'd tell you that tomorrow I'm going to keep updating my pumpkinbear etsy shop with even more pinback reshoots and list some new pinbacks and the red, white, and blue crayon rocket pops, but...

Tomorrow, we're going to the apple orchard. We're going to play more games and do more projects. We may make pinwheels out of watercolor paintings. We'll go to the park, and Willow might bring her skateboard instead of her bike. We'll make pumpkin bread. Perhaps we'll sponge paint orange pumpkins and black bats on the windows.

In other words, business will happen when it happens.

Willow Teaches Science: We're Lucky Air is Gaseous

Willow's Grandma Janie recently mailed her a copy of Science on a Shoestring, by Herb Strongin. The book contains loads of wonderful experiments that use really cheap and/or really readily available (circa 1970...I mean, mealworms???) materials. Will unwrapped it, flipped through it, picked out an experiment that she wanted to do, and, noticing that she seemed especially intrigued by the teacher's script offered in each lesson, I suggested that she be the teacher and I the student.

Will told me the supplies that she needed, we gathered them, and within ten minutes from the mailman leaving the book at our door, we were ready to roll. Here is Willow's first lesson, which will make you appreciate the wonderment that is a gaseous atmosphere:

I'm a little claustrophobic, so I'm gonna tell you right now that my nightmare tonight is going to be about being trapped in a solid atmosphere in which I cannot move or breathe.

And that's science.