Albert's Teepee

I think a teepee is rather the essence of experiential learning. We made Albert one for his birthday. He loves it. We’re still working out the details of having a fire inside without getting completely smoked out. I spent an hour out there the other day in the pouring rain (with a fair bit of water getting in but an equally impressive amount staying out) just thinking about what life would be like if this were my house. If there were no “in” to go into, as Louise says.

Kids of all ages

I was talking to the mom of a daughter in Louise's farm “school” and we were planning to get the girls together for a playdate. We talked for a while and then I mentioned Albert's birthday was coming up. She then asked me how old Louise was. I told her that Louise would be 8 in January.

And then a funny thing happened. As she told me that her daughter Nancy was going to be 7 in March, I heard a strange doubt in her voice, and I felt it at the same time in myself: Our kids are not the same age. We both brushed it off, but it occurred to me later that I habitually use age as a filter when we meet new children. Needless to say, in school, Louise and Nancy would most likely never have met, let alone become friends.

Louise, Albert, and Katherine simply look for kids that they like to play with. Seems like they have the smarter system.

More Orphans

We seem to have orphans on the brain. Louise and I have been reading a novel based on the screenplay of Annie (as in Little Orphan Annie). It's not really a kid's book. The chapters are endless, the words are difficult, the description is copious, the historical references are oblique. Nonetheless, Anna begs for it, gets mad at me if I only read one chapter (20 dense pages), and seems to understand every word. I wonder how she does. But it's clear that she does.

I'm a bit concerned about Asp and Punjab, the "Oriental" and "nine-foot Indian", respectively. Even in these early chapters, they seem like little more than racist caricatures. And it's not like their nationalities are important to the story (except in their stereotypical roles as guards). And, honestly, I'm not crazy about Warbucks, so far the ruthless capitalist, as our hero, even if, as the foreshadowing seems to portend, he saves Europe from evil.

Meanwhile, in the car on the way home from Acting, we were talking about all the little orphan girls we've read about. Pollyanna and Anne of Green Gables, Mary Lennox and Annie. Louise was interested in the fact that each has a stern, gruff character who has the most power in the story, a friend in the house who helps her, but isn't as powerful, and then a kid-friend.

Louise is learning to play the piano!

Animal Diversity Web

What a cool Web site with all sorts of information about the Animal Kingdom:

Animal Diversity Web

The Chocolate Kingdom

Louise and I decided to go out and plant the milkweed seeds that we had gathered weeks ago. Then we came back and I wanted to write down where we planted them in our garden journal. But the garden journal is in Catalan and I didn't know how to say milkweed in Catalan. Hey, but that's what the Web is for, no? On we go, googling milkweed. And then we started reading about milkweed, which is of the Asclepia family (or some such). I figured if we could find its Latin name then we could search for it on a Catalan site and find its translation. But first I had to explain about Latin names. We had a pretty awesome discussion about dividing all living creatures into categories based on certain tests. And we looked up the tests for the five kingdoms: monera, protista, fungi, plants, and animals. But Louise was curious about the different animals so we started investigating which animals were part of which phyla and which classes. It was hard for her to understand the concept of each group having its own characteristics, and that there were bigger and bigger groups. Still, it was a good start.

Except that she was getting bored and tired. Actually, when I asked her, it turned out that she was distracted by the thought of her Halloween candy. Which gave me an idea. I got her to go up and get her candy, and then we classified it into the Chocolate and the Gum kingdoms. Then Chocolate got divided up into "chewy", "nuts", and "only chocolate" groups. And then the nuts got divided up into "almonds" and "peanuts". She then got out a piece of paper and drew out her chart, and then wrote the names of the different kind of candy bars under each category. As a treat, we went out to Nolan's (the local convenience store) to get two more pieces to add to the (already pretty depleted) mix. Can't wait for Halloween next year!

More Rings

We went for a walk in the forest today and Albert remembered how we had counted rings the other day to determine a tree's age. This time I had my camera.

Following your heart, and working

Albert spent over an hour this afternoon collecting rocks to make a firepit. Every few minutes I would go to the window to check and I would see him skipping, literally skipping, around the yard, picking up small and large stones, and then skipping back to fit them into his carefully honed circle. He was so concentrated, so focused. He was working hard. It is amazing how motivated he (or anyone) can be when he's following his heart. I loved seeing him building instead of destroying—which is his other passion these days.

It only seemed fair to reward him with a fire...

Push

The other day I asked Louise what she wanted to learn, and she said she wanted to learn to knit. In fact, she said it so insistently that it was almost annoying, even though I've waited for that day ever since she was born. Alas, when we sat down to actually do it, she could only barely stand to do it. I'm not sure if it's the way I teach, or the fact that I sort of take up all the space of knitting in our family (I do knit a lot), or if she's just not really ready. I try to be endlessly patient as she spews all sorts of nastiness and general frustration my way ("why do you have to control every last thing my fingers do?" and "I _know_how to do that!" are two common ones. She knows it all already, there's nothing she wants to ask me. So I just keep my mouth shut until she wants to know something, even as I'm watching her grab the string from the wrong side, or not hold onto it with enough tension to be able to grab it at all. Then, as the frustration mounts, she throws the whole thing at me and screams, "you fix it, I can't do it" and thuds backwards onto the couch. I gently pick it back up, put it back together, show it to her again as she says "I know how to do that!"

At dinner I told her that I wasn't quite sure what to do when she gets frustrated, if I should push or if I should just let her quit.

"Push," she said immediately. So I will.

Homeschool Fruit

My friend Nancy Bea just wrote about how in her family when kids want to eat ice cream and cookies they first have to eat a piece of fruit.

I immediately wondered if this would work with homeschooling. Imagine, for example, that the kids want to play SimCity... can I ask them first to write or add or read? Perhaps the clue is figuring out what the educational equivalent of fruit is. We're not talking Swiss Chard here (read: workbooks). The idea is to help them find something so enjoyable and fulfilling that they might not need the SimCity fix after all, or if they did, they'd already be mostly full of nourishing things and one wouldn't mind so much.

[Note: SimCity is perhaps like homemade oatmeal raisin cookies... sweet and sugary but with many redeeming values nonetheless.]