Goodbye Sixth Grade, Third Grade and Kindergarten

Our third year of homeschooling will be logged in the books this afternoon when we meet with our Education Specialist and turn in our final report cards. The charter school system is funny, great, annoying and helpful, all wrapped up together. I am lucky to have a supportive credentialed teacher to help us out with curriculum decisions and roadblocks, but that comes packaged with the requirement that our kids third grade and up take the state standards test and turn in report cards.Report Cards

Filling out the end of the semester report cards is always such a revelatory experience. After weeks of wondering if we’ve made any progress at all, being blind to the forest for all the trees, I sit down with my calendar and curriculum to document everything we’ve done which counts as school. It’s a lot. And it’s all beautiful stuff. And I get to give everyone straight A’s because we don’t give up on our work until we get it right.

In a couple of weeks we will be attending homeschool graduation for our Kindergartener, just like her two older sisters did in their traditional school. I can’t wait to snap pictures of her little tiny face, with a cardboard graduation cap on top of her curly head.

As I say goodbye to my third year of homeschooling what do I have to say about this lifestyle? Well, it continues to be less stressful for our kids, and about the same amount of stressful for me. I have learned a lot about setting a schedule in place and counting on that to return to as I plan my weeks. This might be normal regular stuff for those of you out there who’ve been excelling at adulting for years, but I have always been a reluctant planner. It was a revelation that doing some work planning ahead can leave me space for more flexibility each day.

I’ve also made big strides in learning how my kids learn, and how I excel at teaching. We thrive listening to books together and discussing them. The skill my older two have in critiquing a work of literature or dissecting an argument or philosophy astounds me. It has grown simply because we spend up to an hour every day listening to literature from different genres and eras as we go about our day. If nothing else, my kids will grow up to be skilled editors.

Most amazingly, I’ve learned to love being a teacher who happens to be teaching her own kids. A couple weeks ago at the members meeting at church our head pastor stood up to give his 5 minute breakdown of what he feels our church’s mission should be for the next ten years. “More of the same,” he said. Knowing that he is an enneagram 7 (the Ethusiast) like myself, this was a powerful statement. Embarking on an adventure of sameness is hard for 7s to focus on, but it’s exactly the most adventurous thing you can do. Picking a trail and walking as far along it as you can gets you deeper into the woods than anyone has ever gone before. Walking the first 5 miles of every trail you see doesn’t ever bring you to the serious mountaineering of life.

Homeschooling lets my kids deeply explore their interests without the distractions of busy-work and superfluous grade requirements. It lets me relearn these topics with my adult brain and understand them so much more deeply. Yes, even long division. It also gives us time to become more interesting people, who go camping, rock climb, write movies, travel together, and serve our communities. As I say goodbye to this year of learning, I think I am saying hello to a committed homeschooling future. I’m saying hello to more of the same. And that’s something I have been striving to say for all of my life.

Politics and Homeschool

Our kids have been very interested in the political events of late. I bet yours are, too. We spend so much time talking about the debates and issues in the mornings, in the car, before bed, that I decided to switch gears in our school curriculum for the next few weeks.

Normally we use the Build Your Library curriculum as our core and supplement science with group classes. Build Your Library (BYL) is a literature-based, history rich curriculum which uses Story of the World as its spine and much historical fiction for the literature. It’s Charlotte Mason inspired, so mostly learning through experience. I add in map work and documentaries to make it work for our kids. But as our interest is moving towards American politics, I am planning to skip most of our BYL work except the Story of the World readings and our timeline, to make room for a cool Presidential Elections Unit Study I found on Oklahoma Homeschool.

The first week of the study has the kids do research on voting rights around the world on the CIA website. It’s a really cool idea but there was no direction to the research. When my kids are given an assignment like that they mostly just look at me and say, “What am I supposed to be doing?” So, I made them this CIA Voting Rights Factbook Scavenger Hunt to get them going. They loved it so much that I’d like to share it with you. Feel free to download it, and even share the link to this page. Let me know if your kids use it and what you think. I’m planning on making more of these scavenger hunts, so look for more later.

CIA Voting Rights Factsheet Scavenger Hunt

Risk and Vulnerability

Our family generally rewards risk taking. We climb high things and say “yes” to opportunities. We watch YouTube videos of extreme skiing and sky diving. We homeschool and camp and drive cross country.

This week at our homeschool park day one of our daughters, E, was climbing a tree with a friend. She was about 3 stories high in a sappy pine tree and going higher. This is the child that fell 8 feet out of a tree onto her head last fall. This is the child that more than anyone else in the family needs to “save face” when disciplined in public.

I told her I was uncomfortable with how high she was in the tree and said she needed to come down. Her friend began to climb down, grumbling about how her dad would have let her climb the tree. E stayed in the tree. She wasn’t budging. I was trying as hard as possible not to lose my temper as she blatantly told me she wasn’t coming down out of the tree. I didn’t want to yell at her or threaten to take away her privileges, but she was not coming out of the tree and I was running out of patience. There was quite a bit of back and forth about getting out of the tree as my blood pressure started rising.

Finally, my daughter forced herself to say, “I can’t come down. There is something keeping me up here but I don’t want to tell you unless I can tell you in private.” I wasn’t going to climb a sappy pine tree, so we were still at a stalemate.

“Come down out of the tree so you can tell me in private.” I called.

“I can’t come down. I can’t tell you why.”

Finally, I asked her friend if we could have some privacy and she trotted away.  E immediately began to climb down out of the tree. She was really angry with me and was crying. “I couldn’t climb down because I didn’t want anyone to see me crying,” she said as I hugged her. “You have to let me take risks mom. I was being very safe up there and it felt really good to try to get that high.” I understood what she was saying, but I was just not comfortable with her climbing so high in a public park.

“I know, but if you had made a mistake and fallen it would have been really bad, and I didn’t want to let you take that risk.” I said. I stood my ground like a good parent should. I had said, “climb down” and I didn’t relent until she had climbed down.

2014-07-01 18.58.54

But I could see she was disappointed in me and confused about the whole situation. I’ve let her climb boulders that high on Mount Diablo and given her permission to ride a really high zipline. I always tell her to be brave enough to make big loud mistakes so she can learn. And now I’m making her climb down out of a measly tree?

I remembered when I was a kid we’d climb this enormous pine tree in the back yard. There were 4 or 5 kids all at the very top. We’d all hold onto different branches and take turns leaning back so the tree would bend at the top, and we would try to make the tree top spin around. We were at least 50 or 60 feet high. We were 7 or 8 years old. Our parents yelled. They grounded us from playing outside. We would try to pretend we hadn’t been in the tree but the sap smeared on our hands gave us up. We felt free. We were alive. When we were forced to climb down we were being crushed by tyranny and oppression, held back by uncomprehending parents. I had become that tyranny.

E wouldn’t look at me. She was really mad. She wanted to take risks. We value risks. Why wouldn’t I let her take this risk? Couldn’t she prove what she could do? I discovered something very true about myself in that moment and I decided to take the risk of being vulnerable with my kid.

“Hey!” I called to her as she walked away from me with a big pout on her face. “Come here. I wanted to tell you something else. I just wanted you to know that if we were in our own yard, and this was our tree I would have let you climb it. I really think you could do it. But the real reason I was uncomfortable and made you climb down is because I’m worried that the other moms at the park will think I’m a bad mom for letting you climb the tree. I probably shouldn’t care what they think, but I do. I’m sorry.”

“That’s OK, Mom. I understand.” She hugged me. She ran off and played. I don’t know if that was the “right” thing to do in this situation. But it seemed to me that taking the risk of honesty was probably a better choice than playing the tough guy when my kid was hurting.

What do you think? Have you ever been totally vulnerable with your kids like that? What happened when you did?