Not Inadequate

• A couple of weeks ago, Big became quite interested in the sea birds around here. So I did what any lazy good homeschool mom would do – had Amazon send me some books, then chucked them at him and said figure it out lovingly sat and discussed birds until I wanted to run far, far away. But that wasn’t enough, because apparently there are about a ZILLION kinds of seagulls and they are all different in only the most minuscule of ways and looking at pictures was not sufficient. Which meant walking down the street to where the birds hang out and stalking the poor creatures until we could figure out if we have California gulls or Herring gulls.**

If going OUTSIDE and BIRD WATCHING and actively engaging in a spirited discussion about the teensy marks on a SEAGULL’S BEAK is not a sign of true love, I don’t know what is.

I am awarding myself ten-thousand homeschool mom points for this bird business.

I should get a plaque or something.

**eventually narrowed it down to either Western gulls or Glaucous Winged gulls, but couldn’t make a final determination, especially once Birds of Oregon revealed that the two groups often winter and “hybridize together,” at which point I lost the will to live we were satisfied.

• We went to the beach on Monday afternoon (is it awful when I say that? I feel like I’m tossing off something really obnoxious, like “I went for a drive in my Bentley to buy a Birkin Bag and some new Manolos like I do every week” because the beach is JUST SO FREAKING AWESOME and I wonder if talking about getting to go there as often as I used to go to WalMart is mean and heartless to all you guys who can’t go too.)

Anyway.

We went to the beach on Monday and walked down a little further than usual and we SAW SEALS.

SEALS, PEOPLE!

FROLICKING.

THERE WERE SEALS FROLICKING IN THE OCEAN!

Not 20 feet from us!

I squealed like I was 7 years old, it was so exciting.

• I realized in the middle of the night that we need to work on Big’s math facts. He needs to get them down more solidly than regular book work is doing for us. I think flashcards, although boring, are the answer. However, there is no dollar store here, and I didn’t bring any (yes, there are PILES of flashcards at home in storage, fat lot of good they are doing me), and I didn’t want to spend four hundred dollars on ink printing them. Finally, it occured to me to check for an app, and what do you know? The kids LOVE them.

I think it’s the phone. It’s novel. Having them play on it makes me twitchy.

Me: are you okay, baby? it’s not too hard is it?

Kids: it’s FINE mom. jeez.

Me: I was talking to my phone.

Here are the apps I like best – Math Flashcards, Math Bingo, and Montessori Crosswords.

• Read aloud Hello, Mrs. Piggle Wiggle. Listened to chapter 1 of Ordinary Jack by Helen Cresswell on Audible.com.

• Little flew through All About Spelling Lesson 2; Big sulked through spelling and his uncooperative attitude keeps him on Lesson 1 of AAS Level 2.

• Big sulked his way through Math-U-See chapter 20, but did well on the test. He gets to sulk his way to chapter 21. Little finished Singapore Early Bird Kindergarten Math Book A (could that HAVE a longer title?) and began Book B.

• We are reading Cheaper by the Dozen aloud in the evenings. When I got to the part where Grandma Gilbraith stores a packet of camphor in her bosom during cold season, I sort of skipped over the bosom talk. But Big could tell I had skipped something and made me go back and read it properly.

So I did.

And then he asked what a bosom was.

So I told him.

And then he got all embarrassed.

So I started telling him stories of my own grandmother and how she put all SORTS of stuff in her bosom – dirty Kleenex mostly.

And then he was even MORE embarrassed.

So now I am bringing up the word Bosom more than is probably entirely appropriate.

A few days ago after they came in from playing outside, Big kept demanding that I feel his forehead. “Mom, feel how sweaty I am! Mom! Feel my head! It’s all sweaty!”

I declined.

He insisted. “Mom! I’m so sweaty! Feel my head! Mom! Why don’t you want to feel my head? Mom!”

Finally I was all, “I can see you’re sweaty. I don’t need to feel it and get sweat all over me. You know what? My bosom sweats, you want any part of that?”

And then he melted into a little puddle of mortification.

Mom for the Win!

• There was a freaking HURRICANE here again this week. Lots of ominous news reports about river flooding, power outages, high surf warnings, etc. etc. At one point there were SIX severe weather alerts on my weather app. So obviously, we went to check it out. And get coffee.

While we were out, I made Jim go into the grocery store and get 3 gallons of water and some candles. He laughed at me, but he wasn’t the one glued to my phone and freaking out at 3 am. I felt better, that’s the main thing. PLUS! Plus we talked about candles and looked online to see how they work. Which I did not know, so it was very educational for all concerned and THAT’S why it made the wrap-up list of Brilliant Accomplishments.

• And we reviewed spelling rules. And Little read aloud to us from Run Bug Run. I can’t even describe what it’s like hearing my children read and knowing I taught them that! So cool. Also it means I’m that much closer to them teaching themselves stuff while I watch The Real Housewives.

We wondered what the sea birds do when it is so stormy. Apparently, they hang out and look grouchy.

This article is too good to wait for Random Monday – In Praise of Homeschooling. Here’s a snippet:

“A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government.”

Yeah. So suck it, haters.

And plus – PLUS !  ”…homeschooling parents save taxpayers an estimated $16 billion annually.”

We don’t need no education
We don’t need no thought control…

Ta Da! I’m actually gonna do this!

At least once in a row.

Okay, this week we:

• Started back to school at the bright and early time of 10:30am on Monday. Mama’s gotta check in with the internet, you know.

• Spent hours at the beach and learned to identify Limpets, Anemone, Ochre Sea Stars, Snails, Mussels, Barnacles, etc. Read from Seashore of the Pacific Northwest and talked about the tides and tidal zones; identified some of the seashells we have collected and creatures we have seen. Printed out some relevant info from a Magic School Bus literature unit I had; then lost control of the conversation and it turned into a spirited debate about which of the phytoplankton look most like Phineas’s head.

• Tried to deflect Big’s idea to get a flashlight and go octopus hunting in the middle of the night.

• Read Aloud: Mrs. Piggle Wiggle and chapters 1-5 of Cheaper by the Dozen. I have never been the read-aloud mom (Hi! I suck!) so this is a big accomplishment. I am surprised at how much everyone likes it, even my husband wants me to wait until he can listen too. Cheaper by the Dozen might be a little advanced for my group, but it’s our first foray into the reading aloud, so whatever. I LOVED those books my entire childhood. Assuming I don’t backslide into Sucky Mom territory, I think we’ll try the Little House on the Prairie series next.

• There was assorted math and vocabulary; and Little positively breezed through Step One of All About Spelling, solidifying my feeling that the girl is ready to start reading.

• I also became increasingly vexed with the state of my hair. I don’t know if there is something in the water here that’s building up, or if it’s possible that whatever product she used at my last haircut is still cemented to it, but there is SOMETHING ON MY HAIR. Only the hair on the top of my head, not the back or sides. Some film. It’s nasty. I never use products on my hair. I’ve been washing it two or even three times in the shower, but it won’t come out. I alternate shampoo. I’ve even used BAR SOAP on my hair to try to get the gunk off. Right out of the shower, it feels sticky.

Tacky.

Greasy.

GROSS.

Any ideas, internet?

The first thing to do regarding the Wrapping Up is confess that with all the house-selling/packing/becoming nomads business, school slipped to the back burner for like, say, the last *mumble-mumble* months. Rather than try to cram 15 weeks of school into the next 3 or 4 minutes, reality thankfully smacked me in the head and I decided to stop running our school schedule from January to December and switch to August to June like normal people, which will have the happy side effect of giving me until June to finish last year’s work.

This means that Big’s first grade year will have taken a year and a half, but I’m okay with it. For one thing, we started school a whole year before he could have attended public school (due to his December birthday). So in fact, my slackerism has brought us around to Right On Schedule. See? Inadvertent Win!

Okay, not really a win, but not a loss either. Maybe a TKO, whatever that is.

Whichever, the main thing is we are starting with a clean (and not behind) slate; and I can dismiss all that guilt that’s been following me around for months.

In the first part of 1st Grade, we:

• Did 19 Chapters of Math-U-See Alpha, dabbled with Life of Fred
• Completed All About Spelling Level 1, began Level 2
• Did a little over half of First Grade Literature (Memoria Press)
• Tried and ditched A Word A Day; switched to Wordly Wise 3000 Book 2, did 5 Chapters
• Did some random Critical Thinking exercises – Lollipop Logic, Dr. Dooriddles, and so on.

• Wrestled passionately over handwriting practice and the dreaded skip-counting
• Watched a bazillion documentaries – Galapagos, Blue Planet, How the States got their Shapes, Yellowstone, etc. etc. etc.
• Took ice skating lessons for 6 months and swimming lessons for a year
• Read voraciously (well, Big did. I read Us Weekly)

• Spent 3 months on the Oregon coast, played on the beach, and learned to identify various coastal creatures.
• Visited the Denver Museum of Nature and Science twice, our local zoo half a dozen times, and the Boulder Butterfly Pavilion once.
• Showed three adorable little girls how to grind wheat and make bread.

Huh. That doesn’t look so bad. I guess I sucked less than I thought. That’s good news, yo.

One of the things I decided I am going to do this year for school is a Weekly Wrap Up. Or Monthly Wrap Up.

Or Yet-To-Be-Determined-Interval-of-Time Wrap-Up.

Hopefully this will do a couple of things:

• Force me to drag homeschooling out of the old cool-whip container in the back of the fridge and into the forefront of our lives
• Help me realize that we do, in fact, do lots of educational and other things of value (I just forget them all due to Peri Menopausal Sieve Brain Syndrome)
• Help me recreate our Awesome! and Impressive! Learning Environment in case the guvmint man ever shows up on my doorstep

Most likely my wrap ups will not look like Melanie’s, whose writing contains sentences like “…he also wrote a three page essay discussing Aeschylus’s treatment of justice throughout The Oresteia…”

No.

Not likely at all, and no one is more disappointed than I.

Probably mine will look more like “…Argued with Big for 45 minutes over the proper way to make a nine. Vented to husband, then ate a pan of brownies. Decided skip counting was stupid. Did not do chemistry due to pathetic discovery I am too lazy to boil a cabbage. Watched 2 hours of The Real Housewives and spent 327 hours on Twitter. Forgot I was supposed to pay the bills this week.”

I found out today that I have actually been nominated for a couple of Homeschool Blog Awards!

I am nominated for Funniest Homeschool Blog category and Best Nitty-Gritty Homeschool Blog. Just being in those categories is such a compliment. They are exactly what I hope my blog is.

I am completely blown away by this! I don’t know who nominated me, but THANKS! It’s very exciting! The thought that someone would take time out of their day to nominate me for an award is a huge honor.

Not only that, but it’s given me a lot of new ammo when I need to cajole my hubby into helping with my computer – “Sweetie, I need you to fix this. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I’m kind of a big deal now.”

I am not particularly concerned about winning (not so unconcerned I neglected to vote for myself, mind you), but if you feel like voting for me, head on over.

And thanks so much to whoever nominated me! Let me know who you are, and I’ll get your check in the mail right away.

An Op-Ed piece by Hall of Fame football player Fran Tarkenton appeared in the Wall Street Journal the other day wondering what the NFL would be like if it were run the way the public schools are run.

It’s a brilliant analogy. Brilliant.

Here’s a snippet -

“Imagine the National Football League in an alternate reality. Each player’s salary is based on how long he’s been in the league. It’s about tenure, not talent. The same scale is used for every player, no matter whether he’s an All-Pro quarterback or the last man on the roster. For every year a player’s been in this NFL, he gets a bump in pay. The only difference between Tom Brady and the worst player in the league is a few years of step increases. And if a player makes it through his third season, he can never be cut from the roster until he chooses to retire, except in the most extreme cases of misconduct.”

Do you see where he’s going? And he’s right. The article gets better from there, carrying the analogy even further until the point is blindingly obvious. There’s some good discussion in the comments, although I did not get very far.

And then there’s this article about some poor mom who used her father’s address to send her kids to school in a better district and WENT TO JAIL FOR IT.

“Only in a world where irony is dead could people not marvel at concerned parents being prosecuted for stealing a free public education for their children.”

To stop this sort of Educational Thievery some schools hire PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS to FOLLOW CHILDREN HOME to make sure they live in the district.

So that’s not creepy at all.

Anyway.

I am not trying to start a political rock fight. And I’m not suggesting that I know how to fix the school system. But I don’t think that the likes of Albert “I’ll start representing kids when kids start paying union dues.” Shanker is the answer, either.

Nor is this guy, who says that “closing achievement gaps, reducing drop rate rates, improving teacher quality…..need not and must not be achieved at the expense of due process, employee rights, or collective bargaining. That is simply too high a price to pay.”

It’s that time again!

I LOVE the Not Back to School blog hop! It’s so fun! I love finding other weirdos homeschoolers and reading about how they operate their homeschools. I have been homeschooling for TWO WHOLE YEARS now, so get ready for some Amazing! Insight!

We started back to school last Monday after a very short summer break. I have been very disorganized this year. I didn’t even finish making the schedule until about 11 o’clock on Sunday night. That’s partly because I didn’t get started until Sunday afternoon and partly because I managed to lose not one, but two schoolbooks in the last few weeks and wasted a lot of time tearing apart the house looking for them.

I am still missing one.

I finally gave up and ordered another, which guarantees the lost one will mysteriously fall on my head the minute the UPS guy knocks on the door.

It’s okay though, because the schedule needs to be re-done anyway since we got behind on the VERY FIRST DAY due to a Giant! Math! Hissy Fit! my son decided to throw fourteen seconds into the exciting new school year.

ANYway!

I have two kids, my son Big, who is 6 1/2 and my daughter Little, who is 4 1/2.

Do you need a moment to admire what are quite possibly the most innovative blog pseudonyms ever?

No?

This is the first year that Little will be joining us with real schoolwork instead of having sticker books chucked at her to keep her quiet sitting beside us, sweetly playing with a basket of special educational toys that I lovingly selected.

And so here is The Plan:

Little

• Explode the Code Workbooks A, B, and C
• Singapore Earlybird Math Books A and B
• All About Spelling Level 1 (starting in January)

Big

• Math-U-See Alpha/Beta
• All About Spelling Level 2
• Prima Latina (beginning in January)
• Memoria Press 1st Grade Literature
• Real Science 4 Kids Pre-Level 1 Chemistry

I love love LOVE Math-U-See and All About Spelling  and anticipate using them all the way through (in fact, I am an affiliate of All About Spelling and you can read my review of it here.)

We do everything together, so Little will do Literature and Science right alongside us.

Last year I realized that my kids actually retain more when we do less formal schoolwork, so I have really cut back on the scheduled workbook-y type things. Math, Spelling, and eventually Latin will be our top priorities. I discovered Notebooking, and my kids love it, so we will be doing some Interest Led Notebooking – we are still working on a 50 States in 50 Weeks study, and there will also be random book reports and science stuff. They also enjoy activities like Phonics Ad-Libs, Lollipop Logic, and Dr. DooRiddles. Last week after the Giant Math Hissy Fit, I purchased a one month trial of IXL.com and both of my kids love it – the math drills are excellent, and they’ve each spent over 4 hours playing so far.

I also spend a truckload of money at Amazon (don’t we all) to keep them in interesting, living books. In fact, today we are expecting one of the largest orders I’ve ever placed, containing books like Fifty Famous Stories Retold, Aesop for Children, The Story of Inventions, all of the Little House on the Prairie books, the entire One Small Square set by Donald Silver, and a bunch of biographies by Ingri and Edgar d’Aulaire.

Dadgum it. I just realized that I spent a fortune at Amazon and did not get one single thing for myself. That is not right, yo.

I can’t wait to see who links up and read all about your homeschooling adventures! Happy NOT back to school!

(ps – if you are still undecided on a grammar/language arts program, I have Emma Serle’s Language Lessons for sale. Read more about them here)

Today we are back to school after a fleeting summer break.

So far we have spent the last 3 hours on a Giant! Math! Hissy Fit! brought on when I chirped we would be cutting back on our workbook pages and doing a Fun! Math! Activity! instead.

Last year I found a great (FREE) website with math drills – Math is Fun.

See? SEE? It even says FUN in the name! Don’t you wanna have fun, you little turkey butt?

Fun Online Math Drills = Worst Mom EVER. ARE YOU TRYING TO KILL ME OR SOMETHING?

He actually said he’d rather do flash cards than Math is Fun. (Flashcards which he announced I could make myself. Obviously.)

I mean, come ON.

He also suggested maybe I could find a better, FUNNER math website.

Sure, I’ll get right on that.

Which I did, grudgingly.

After sifting through tons of math TWADDLE, which I did not even realize existed, I finally found another terrific math website that he DOES like - even though it’s practically THE EXACT SAME as the first one, EXCEPT this one costs EIGHTY DOLLARS A YEAR.

I swear.

It looks like a great site with a HUGE variety of drills from Pre-K – 8th. I told him we’d sign up for a one-month trial to see how we liked it. Because I am a Super! Sucker! Homeschool Mom!

I even braved my husband’s basement lair and emerged victorious with a teeny-tiny mouse that fits his hand perfectly.

It’s now 2:00 in the afternoon.

I have not checked anything off my shiny new schedule.  It’s the first day, and I’m already behind.

And I’m wondering if taking my kids through the liquor store drive-thru would be wrong.

What’s that? Oh, sorry.

I mean HOMESCHOOLING IS AWESOME! We sang hymns for one hour this morning, then we baked cakes for the elderly, and this afternoon we will be making dioramas depicting the entire works of Homer! Which we read in the original Greek!