Trouble with School

Willow is going through a phase (I hope).

Is it a tween thing? Re-testing the same old boundaries using new strategies learned through greater maturity? Is she about to have a growth spurt? Has she finally, in her ninth year of life, figured out that she really hates her parents and plans to make our lives difficult for the next ten years?

It's one of those short-term things, surely. Ideally.

Willow has always been one of those kids who insists on following her own agenda. I remember getting flak from her grandparents when she was a toddler, because I wouldn't make her go to the bathroom before a long car trip.

"If she says she won't go, then she won't go, and I'm not going to be able to make her," I said, already world-weary.

"I'll take her," said one of the grandparents, and off the two of them marched, only to march back a few minutes later.

"She won't go," said the grandparent, then informed Willow that we were NOT going to stop during the trip for a bathroom break.

Of course we stopped during the trip for a bathroom break. Miraculously, everyone survived.

Is this one of the unplanned bathroom breaks of our homeschool journey? No, because that's a terrible metaphor. Nevertheless, Willow, at eight years and two months, has discovered stalling and sass, and is using them whenever possible, primarily to get out of doing anything academic, secondarily to get out of doing anything else, and thirdly just for the pleasure of stalling and acting sassy, it seems.

I know that many of you are pretty sure that I'm doing it wrong (as am I on many days), but I do require my kids to study, and I do require Willow, who is very bright, to study hard. I've thought hard about my decision, and that's just the way that it's going to be. Three hours of learnin' four days a week, and a half-hour or so of chores every day, doesn't seem to be an unreasonable way for a child to live her life.

Unless that child chooses to fight me every second, that is.

Willow's Favorite Strategies for Avoiding Schoolwork

1. Sitting in front of her work, frowning at it, for an eternity.
2. When required to complete the work that she's been frowning at for an eternity, scrawling an answer illegibly.
3. When required to erase and rewrite said answer, erasing a hole in the page, then breaking her pencil lead.
4. Wandering off (Will I stop working with Sydney to focus every second of my attention on keeping Willow in her seat, or will she manage a temporary escape?).
5. Weeping and claiming that the work is either a) too hard or b) too boring to complete.
6. Insulting me.

Unsuccessful Strategies for Dealing with this:

1. Lecture. This, despite its ineffectiveness, is my go-to strategy. Every time I think that THIS time, with careful explanation, Willow will understand why schoolwork is so important, why a good attitude is the key to a good school day, and how applied effort will result in her finishing all her responsibilities in good time and having the rest of the day at her disposal. It has never worked.
2. Time-out. Matt tried this out on Saturday (which is not a school day unless you farted around all week and didn't get your responsibilities done), and it actually did end with Willow coming back to the table and starting her math, but it took a two-hour commitment on his part to mediate her through an eight-minute time-out. It might be easier if we had a spot for her to complete a time-out that is more boring and less in the family eye, but otherwise I just don't have that time to invest.
3. Taking away stuff: Matt also tried this out last week, and it actually did work for a day or two, but 1) I simply can't get on board with taking away a kid's stuff (although I'm pretending to in public for the sake of parental solidarity) and 2) Will doesn't really play with any of her stuff, and so doesn't really care that much, actually. Perhaps if she was super-focused on working to get her belongings back I'd be more invested, too, but as it is Matt simply has a car backseat full of toy dinosaurs and library books and interesting rocks.
4. Naughty chores. Although these work very well for naughtiness (Will loves to work, and I think that it distracts her from the unhelpful mindset that's causing the naughtiness), giving her a naughty chore for balking at schoolwork is essentially giving her a license to escape!

Basically, discipline strategies aren't working. The good news is that I'm slowly learning ways to recalibrate Will's schoolwork that make her more willing to complete it.

Successful Strategies (So Far!)

1. LOTS of variety. I might get Willow to complete one activity on one day without a ton of fuss, but if I ask her to do an even slightly similar activity the next day, there WILL be a ton of fuss. So instead of four days of practice doing addition with carrying, it works better to have one day of an addition worksheet, then one day  using a Grade 3 Math ipad app--

playing Splash Math Grade 3

--then one day playing some kind of math game with me and Sydney, then one day doing some kind of project.

2. Requiring some work less often. Yes, copywork is tedious, and so is grammar (to her--I think it's fascinating!), but they're both important to our study. Nevertheless, it's just too much work to get the kid to do them every school day, much as I'd like her to. Copywork is just about impossible to get Will to do more than once a week these days--

copying part of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech

--but I can get her to write, say, a letter to a friend once a week, and complete a writing project once a week--

making Civil Rights timeline cards

 --and then do a craft project that involves a lot of cutting one day, to strengthen those fingers! Subjects like grammar and Latin we're down to doing maybe just once or twice a week for now, and then having Willow do some independent science or a big chore on the other days.

3. Reviews are races. After the two hours that it took Willow to do 12 math problems on Saturday (that were supposed to have been done on Friday), she was left with 8 problems to go. I challenged her to finish those eight problems in eight minutes--she finished in five. She sat down willingly to do some grammar, but got bored with it with five sentences to go. I challenged her to finish the five sentences in five minutes--she finished in three.

4. Showing their work to Daddy. The girls have weekly checklists with all their chores and schoolwork on it; when they complete something, they mark it off, and when all the day's activities are marked off, they can do as they please. I had been asking them to put their finished work on my desk after I'd gone over it with them, so that I can date-stamp it and set it aside, but lately I've been having them put their work back in their binders, and then when Matt gets home I encourage them to go show him their binders. He admires their work (which means that he knows exactly where they are academically), talks about it with them (extra review time!), praises them for what they've accomplished, and asks about what they haven't completed. I feel like it makes it a lot easier for Matt to co-parent, since he stays up-to-date on what the kids have been up to while he's gone during the day, and I certainly appreciate the extra accountability of the kiddos knowing that they're going to have to explain why they didn't finish something.

The funny thing is that these strategies that I've been painfully learning for Willow would work miserably for Sydney. Sydney loves the mastery that she feels with repetition, and she hates the getting things wrong that comes with learning new work. She likes copywork because she can get it perfectly right--

--and she likes activities like the Kumon workbooks, which drill one very specific skill over and over:

Kumon Word Problems, Grade 1

She doesn't like races (because she might not win!), and she doesn't like showing her binder to daddy if there's even a single thing that she hasn't checked off (because then it's not perfect!). While also giving her lots of repetition, I've been working on having her apply new skills in lots of different ways--

Number Bond Machine

 --and on encouraging the girls to do activities cooperatively, since Willow has also been lashing out at Sydney a lot lately:

Reading a Magic Tree House Research Guide together in preparation for Magic Tree House Club

Another strategy that I constantly employ (that, frankly, doesn't seem to work at all to prevent future naughtiness, but what else are you going to do?) is patience, patience, patience. It wouldn't help to scream at Willow--I don't think it would necessarily intimidate her, but it would certainly give her something to fight about that wasn't schoolwork!--even when I'm screaming my lungs out silently inside my head. I do a lot of what I call "boring the kids into behaving," in that they are required to behave correctly--if they do something incorrectly, they do it again correctly. If they ask for something rudely, I require them to ask again nicely. If they throw the pencil at their sister instead of handing it over, they are required to go fetch it and then hand it over again. If they stomp across the floor in anger, they come back and then walk across the floor gently. If they slam a door (also in anger), they come back in and then go back out, shutting the door gently. If Willow writes an answer illegibly, she erases it and then writes it again legibly. If she yells at me or insults me, she is required to apologize politely; if her apology isn't polite, she tries again until it is. It's wearisome (for everyone), but I truly feel like it gets the point across that appropriate behavior is required while encouraging patience (for everyone!).

I also admit that my lack of a consistent daily routine doesn't help get school done. I try to start school first thing in the morning, and most days we do, but if the kids get really involved in play first, I let them be, and if Willow decides that she wants to bake cookies all by herself for breakfast, then I think that's pretty darn important, too!

The same thing can happen after lunch, if we haven't finished before, or if we watch one documentary and they want to watch another (and another and another!), or if they want to go to the park, or even if they just want to go outside and play. All of that stuff is just as important as sitting down for school, and I just have to figure out how to get all of the priorities aligned. My overall goal is for them to learn how happy and full and free their days are when they just do their schoolwork and chores first thing.

I mean, there are homeschool families who do get it all done every school day, with cheerful, hard-working kids who appreciate their schooling, right?

Um, right?

Our Homeschool Photo Album from Snapfish

How to keep track of all the work done during just one homeschool year?

Hmmm, hmmm, hmmm...

First there's all the written work, you know--workbook pages, reports, copywork, sentence diagrams, Latin translations.

But then there are the big, messy, elaborate projects that make up the bulk of our homeschool days--the big basement timeline, the cave painting, the salt dough maps, the volcanoes in a test tube, the sewing, the baking, the pounds and pounds of clay and gallons of paint and glue that we go through, just the three of us. Can't punch three holes in that and stick it in a binder!

There's also the travel that we're able to do because of our freedom (and my willingness for the younger kid to skip a couple of ballet classes each semester). I consider our trips to beaches and amusement parks and the sites of old forts and Laura Ingalls Wilder's house and museums from Florida to Michigan to be crucial to the kids' education, even if those experiences don't fit well into a binder, either.

And then there's the other, most important category of work that the girls are able to get done with hours to themselves each day: play. How to track the marbles chased down, the structures built, the toy ponies endangered and rescued and married off and endangered again, the sidewalks drawn on with chalk (or painted on with paint--I don't care)?

Oh, and all the books that get read around here! I don't know how you would EVER keep track of that and also do anything else with your life!

Before I deal with that big stack where I date-stamp and then toss the kids' written work, I'll just start with what, for me, is the easiest way to record the travel, the projects, and the play.

Photo album!

Snapfish asked me to test their new 11x14 Lay-Flat Photo Book by making one for myself, so I chose as my topic the previous homeschool year, which in our homeschool runs August-July (we're year-rounders, ya know).

I LOVE the format for putting the book together, especially with the tons of photos that I put per page. Basically (unless you're picky, and then you can alter it), Snapfish determines the best sizing and layout for the photos, and as you drag each new photo onto a page, it immediately rearranges the sizing and layout of the entire page for you--if you don't like it, you can ask it to rearrange it, or rearrange it manually:

I loved the layouts that Snapfish chose for me, and had no problem swapping various photos around the layout to better show off my favorite ones.

You get one text block on each page (as far as I could figure), which I used to caption all of the activities that the photos on that page encompassed. Each two-page spread counted as one month of our homeschool year, and I really wanted another text box to record the month, but I couldn't make it happen for me. One of the paper choices for the photo book did include exactly the kind of calendar set-up that I wanted, but it started with January and couldn't be altered.

No fear--I simply waited until my book came, and then made my months all crafty-like!

With that addition (which makes me happy in particular, since I really like mixed-media projects, anyway), I could not love this photo book more. I think that the reader really gets a sense of the huge variety of projects that the kiddos are invested in every month, and the frequency of our field trips and other travel--it's very light on photos of actual "schoolwork" (oops!), but I don't plan for this to be our only record of the homeschool year, so that's okay.

I also love how easy it is to watch the seasons pass in this book, as the children grow from the beginning of our school year--

image on the free endpaper at the front of the book

--to fall and winter activities, sledding and ice skating on four different pages, and then stomping in mud in their sweaters, and then posing for the big ballet recital in a sleeveless leotard out by the fountain--

--and then finally posing in their pirate garb for Willow's eighth birthday party, right at the end of their school year:

How they've grown!

I chose for the cover image a candid shot that I took of the girls during their T-shirt dress photo shoot--

--and you also get to title the spine, so that I'll be able to pull exactly the year that I'm looking for out of a shelf of fifteen identical photo books when the babes are all done with school:

 

My favorite part, however, is the back cover, where you can put yet another small image and a caption:

Because even more than the chance to travel, and the time to play, and the fast-track to higher-level math, and Latin on the third-grade curriculum, if my girls someday understand that we schooled together all these years simply because of my deep love for them, then we will have had a successful homeschool.

[Snapfish gave me this photo book for free (I paid for the shipping and a couple of extra pages that I added) in exchange for my feedback on it.]

Civil Rights on the Big Basement Timeline

Although, as I mentioned before, we're not going into many explicit details of the Civil Rights struggle in America in our study of Martin Luther King, Jr., the girls are familiar with several key dates now. Instead of memorizing them, one morning I asked Willow to comb through our many reference materials and collate several such dates; she and Sydney then helped me search Google Images for appropriate imagery. The girls divided the images, dictated a caption for each, then wrote the caption with the image. They cut everything out, grabbed our big jar of sparkly Mod Podge and a foam brush, and headed downstairs with me, where I helped them place each date in its correct spot on our big basement timeline and they glued them to the wall:

Let's see...we've got King's birth and death, of course, but also the Montgomery Bus Boycott, King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Ghandi, George Wallace (I wasn't thrilled about including him, because I didn't want to have to see him every time I walk downstairs, and I flat-out refused to permit the girls to include images of segregation--I told them that I just didn't want to see pictures of people acting ugly on our wall), and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

I am growing ever unhappier with the lack of foresight that I showed when laying out our basement timeline--the amount of room that I allocated for modern history is critically tight. I have long harbored dreams of moving to some little hobby farm or other outside of town--let the need for a much more spacious wall timeline be added to my list of reasons to move (along with a sunny yard to garden, a creek, space for a flock of chickens and two dwarf goats, and a second storey to the house).

Horrible Histories in Song

I'm obsessed with Horrible Histories. Have you heard of it? It's a BBC show based on the book series, and it's unavailable in the US except as digital downloads (Remember my long-term gripe that stores never sell what I want to buy? I want to buy a Horrible Histories DVD set!), but clips from the shows are pretty widely available on YouTube, where I swear, the girls and I watch them by the hour. I've actually gotten into the habit of hopping on the treadmill when we start watching them--I can't set the speed very high or you can't hear the videos, but I can set the incline VERY high and so still get a good work-out in.

The nice thing about just having the clips, I suppose, is that I can show only the clip that relates to a specific topic, and I can put them in my various homeschool pinboards, and I can put some of my favorites in chronological order for you below:

At the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site

In January of last year, the girls and I did a short study of Martin Luther King Jr. Our brief study went really well, and studying Civil Rights through the lens of Martin Luther King Jr. seemed like a doable (ie. less frightening) way to introduce the subject, which is one that I do want the girls to know about, however young they are. I lecture them often about privilege and gratitude and volunteerism and responsibility (especially in a homeschool context, since Willow is going through a phase of feeling very ungrateful about the privilege of homeschooling, and very reluctant to work through its responsibilities, and I am really struggling with helping her through it), and I'm always looking for real-life illustrations to help make such vague concepts clearer to them, occurring as they do on the global level, as well as in our tiny home.

This summer we've done a much longer, much more detailed study of Martin Luther King Jr., culminating in the morning that we took off from our drive home from Florida to visit the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site right in our overnight stop of Atlanta, Georgia:

Martin's boyhood home

 All of us (except for Sydney, but she can be pacified simply by being carried by Daddy!) really enjoyed the tour through Martin Luther King Jr.'s boyhood home, inside of which I was not permitted to take photographs (sigh). Few of the home's original furnishings remain, but the National Park Service used King's family as a resource when purchasing replacements--the family chose antiques that were identical, as closely as possible, to what they actually did own, so it's a very careful recreation.

The tour guide was terrific, too, and I learned a LOT of new information, such as the fact that although the King family's neighborhood was segregated, it was by no means ghettoized--families of all income levels lived there, as you can easily see by look at the historic homes along the street, ranging from the very small to the very large. Some of the homes are still privately owned today, and some are rental homes owned by the National Park Service, all with strict guidelines about preserving the homes' exteriors, of course. I spent a while fantasizing about moving to Atlanta with the family and living in one of these rental homes--I still might do it!

The King Center was a lot less showy, although I gather that they have an impressive collection of artifacts off exhibit (I wouldn't be surprised if they're working towards a major renovation). I was very excited to see King's Nobel Peace Prize displayed among some of his other awards--

--and the displays of some of his personal effects, such as the suitcase that he packed to take to Memphis on the trip during which he was murdered, and his minster's robes, were touching.

Willow spent nearly the last dregs of her spending money here, purchasing one of those little rubber bracelet things with the saying "I Have a Dream" on it, and some retro candy. I purchased some postcards, a Civil Rights coloring book, a deck of Civil Rights flash cards, and a retro candy choice for each of the girls (Willow was pretty stoked to be able to show up her sister by purchasing MORE candy for herself, silly girl).

The weather was fine, and the walking around the historic neighborhood was just the thing to stretch our legs before we began our long, LONG drive home that day:

Dr. and Mrs. King's lovely memorial

I don't know if the girls necessarily have a larger grasp of Civil Rights after our visit, but I'm certain that they now see Martin Luther King Jr. as a real person, and most particularly as the little boy whom our tour guide so evocatively described during our house tour, the little boy who broke his sisters dolls on purpose, who liked to play board games and listen to stories on the radio, whose favorite place in the house was the kitchen. A few days after we got back home, we were driving across town and Sydney cracked open another picture book about King that I'd checked out from the library.

"Look, Momma!", she called out, holding open the first page of the book to show me, and there was the wallpaper in Martin Luther King Jr.'s house! Many of the illustrations in My Brother Martin, written by King's sister, are clearly taken from the rooms on the birthhome tour, with details down to the fireplace screen and the old-fashioned stove and the pattern on the family's china plates laid out on their dinner table--all stuff that the kids had noticed at the time. And then Sydney got to the pages in which a childhood Martin's little friends have to tell him that they can't play with him anymore, and the look on little Martin's face is so vivid, and SO sad, that Sydney actually cried out. She may not understand racism, or understand Civil Rights, but being excluded by her playmates for no good reason--that's something that ANY kid understands. And if Civil Rights means that it's not okay to exclude others, then she's all for it, whether or not she totally gets the point of the Birmingham Jail or the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

At the Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum (Again!)

I once read an essay in a travel magazine written by a woman who claimed that she and her partner had a policy to never visit the same vacation spot more than once. Now, I don't know to what level they took this--"We've been to the Mona Lisa gallery in the Louvre once, so we'll never go into that gallery again," or "We've been to the Louvre once, so we'll never go again," or "We've been to Paris once, so we'll never go again"--but the practice immediately struck me as something that I'd NEVER want to do.

Mind you, I'm also not going to be going to Disney World five times in two years like one particularly obsessed mom friend of mine (Kimberly, I'm waving at you!), but I do appreciate visiting a well-loved place again. It makes a lot of sense from a parenting perspective, since the child who loved Chicago's Field Museum at the age of four is in for a whole new world of experience when she comes again at the age of eight, and the children who just rode Big Thunder Mountain Railroad five minutes ago are going to enjoy the feeling of mastery that comes with knowing what to expect when they ride it a second time, and they're going to love it even more the third time, the fourth time, the fifth time, and the sixth time, after which they might be willing to take a break, but only if it involves ice cream bars shaped like Mickey Mouse's head.

The same scenario applies to adults, too, however--or at least to me! I loved visiting Hawaii for the first time as a kid, and I loved visiting Hawaii for the second time on my honeymoon with Matt; it was a whole new Hawaii, experienced as an adult, following my own agenda, with my partner. We didn't stay at the nice resort of my childhood, but we did stay in a hostel where we both thought that the owner was going to kill us in our beds (seriously, if I had a buck for every time that has happened to me...); we had our own rental car, we drank a ton of guava juice, and we came so close to active lava flows that if I'd tripped and fallen I would have burned my face off.

I can't wait to visit Hawaii again and show it to our girls.

So it bothered me not at all that the girls and I were just at the Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum last year; we still like shells--

--the girls are older and know more science and geography with which to appreciate the museum's collections--

Shells from Africa--how apropos!

 Once again, I studied with fascination the collection of Sailor's Valentines--

--but this time, now that each girl is a year older, the project struck me as actually pretty doable for me and the girls and our huge shell collection. Stay tuned!

Inspired by our museum visit, Willow asked if we could study mollusks. I'm starting us off by learning the order of taxonomy, then zipping down to Phylum Mollusca, where I'll need to do a lot of preparatory studying, myself, frankly, invertebrate biology not being a huge part of my own childhood curriculum.

Let the adventure begin!

On Sanibel Island

It's something pretty well-known about me that I keep trying to go to the beach. In a couple of months, for instance, I'm taking the girls on a road trip to visit some friends of ours. We'll drive almost nine hours to visit them, stay for a couple of days, and then... well, it's only another seven hours from there to the beach, so why not?

A beach stay after our time at Disney World was, therefore, crucial to my planning, and I knew exactly where I wanted to go. Remember this little island that the girls and I visited last year? How much better it was to actually STAY there for a few days! Once again, since it was the off-season, we rented a nice condo right on the beach for a very reasonable rate, stocked up on groceries, kicked off our shoes, and stayed for a while!

Disney was exactly right for a vacation for us, but this lounging, swimming, napping, watching movies, digging in the sand... it turns out that this was exactly right, too!