Homeschooling Young Children: Let Them Be

One of the strange things about homeschooling is this notion of young children. I see mention of this species everywhere. When I read it, I automatically think, oh, they must mean those small and loud people that go to colorful rooms called preschool where they paint with their fingers and sing songs about an old Scottish farmer who had a lot of different animals. That's small children! I got it!

Except I don't get it.

I skim read this part of the book, because honestly, what does this have to do with me? I don't have small children. There is no need to read this section thoroughly, please get to the part where it talks of big children and their big capabilities, thank you.

Then a word or three jumps out during all this skim reading of young children. Words like, "ten years old" or "eight to eleven years old." They are using those words to define young children and I'm beginning to wonder if I have undiagnosed reading comprehension problems.

What are they talking about? Eight-, nine-, ten-year-old children are not young. They are....I don't know what they are, but they aren't young!

Then I realize what has been lost during our five years spent in government education and it makes me incredibly sad.

My five-year-old kindergartner was never a five-year-old kindergarten. He wasn't expected to act his age. He was expected to act older and be prepared for first grade, which is really like second grade. My kindergartener was expected to be a near second-grader.

My third grader was never a nine-year old. He had to prepare for a state-wide standardized writing exam in the fifth grade while in the third grade. My third grader was expected to be something akin to a fifth grader.

Since I pulled my boys out of government schools in 2nd and 4th grades, I don't know where it stops. I know 5th graders are expected to be middle schoolers, because I heard about prepping kids for middle school in the 4th grade. I don't know why that mentality would change for middle schoolers, who I imagine are expected to be like high schoolers and high schoolers are expected to be like college students?

And so I read these homeschooling books and articles and see them refer to children as something other than miniature adults. This notion still strikes me as something new, even though I work every damn day to peel away the layers of preconceived notions I have of children and how they learn best. It's so easy to slip back to those old ideas, familiar and ingrained as they are.

The challenge is not to get my 10-year-old to write 3-5 paragraph essays.

The real challenge is to hold onto that deeper wisdom that knows sooner is not always better.

They are young children. Let them be.

10 Regrets I Have About Homeschooling

Some of the people who read my blog aren't homeschoolers (they're infidels instead), so they may not be aware that it's very popular to post a 10 (insert whatever things) About Homeschooling on your homeschool-related blog. This is what counts for creative content when all of your creative energy goes into educating your children, which also explains why I rarely write anymore.

And since I rarely write anymore, I have no recollection of how to transition into a list. So let's just jump right into the 10 Regrets I Have About Homeschooling and pretend I transitioned that very smoothly.

1. I regret that I rarely write anymore. Did I mention that already? My creative energy is spent going through our colonial history curriculum, paring up each lesson with the perfect, most interesting library book ever written on the subject and a fascinating living history field trip and/or project. By the time I finish those mental Olympics, all I can write is "a;hd ghaie"

2. I regret that I have moral objections to imbibing in drunkedness and duct tape in the presence of kids. Because some homeschool days? Damn, y'all.

3. I regret that my parenting high horse died. It was almost 12 years ago the day it happened. Payton absolutely refused to breastfeed as a brand-new newborn and I had to flash my engorged boobs to several perfect strangers and my next door neighbor, all in attempt to get that baby boy to LATCH-ON, for the love of god! That's the day my parenting high horse died, which is sad since it was only with us about 3 days. I really miss that horse, because if I had him now I could be one of those sanctimonious homeschoolers whose kids never ever bicker, all due to our perfect family culture and the Bible. Amen.

4. I regret the time I spent trying to find cheaper curriculums. Spend the money on quality curriculums. It's worth every penny.

5. I regret the time I spend trying to find quality materials. Sort of. Of course I think my kids deserve the best quality materials. I just wish I didn't have to wade through so many crappy programs to find the gems.

I see your school uniform and raise you one individuality

6. I regret that I don't have a school janitor. Hey, boy bathrooms stink, even with just two boys in the home! Also someone makes repeated messes in the kitchen and calls it "chemistry experiments." I don't know who does it, but when I catch him I'm going to do something very heinous and punitive, like force him to look at the Land's End's school uniform catalog.

7. I regret that someone hasn't figured out how to bottle up patience and sell that shit at Target. Not only I could become a better homeschooler, but I could scope out the clearance aisles all at the same time. Until then I guess I'll keep eating Ghirardelli chocolate chips in place of a patience potion.

Where are the Pottery Barn baskets when you need them?

8. I regret that I don't own stock in Usborne and DK Eyewitness books. I should be a stockholder with the amount I buy.

9. I regret that I don't have a Pottery Barn magazine house, because, Jesus, where am I supposed to store all of these books?! It's like we're a learned household or something.

10. I regret that we didn't start homeschooling sooner. Seriously, I wish we had and I regret I spent over four years being too scared to take the leap, even though the signs were knocking me upside the head every single week we were in the public system. I wish I had believed more in myself and my kids, because we are having the best damn time.

There's an educational lesson in this photo, I just don't know what it is yet.

Embrace the Feminine

If it isn't bad enough I'm subjected to farting play-wrestling with the knowledge that my neighbors can hear my sons' primordial screeches of flatulence domination, just 45 minutes later I was forced to watch testosterone-overdose shows, like Myth Busters.

What the hell, people? We have two T.V.s in this house. I don't know how I always end up having to watch this male stuff on the bigger T.V.  Except there's some ideal called "democracy" that's deeply rooted in our culture and these primordial farting heathens take advantage of it. Damn all that homeschooling and learning shit. I refuse to watch TV from the bunk beds in the children's room. It's only 720 dpi, for god's sake!

I've had some physical problems lately.  I hate to mention it since I don't like to give attention to such things, but it's been odd pains, like in my breasts and shoulder and back. I researched it a bit, and if you're one of those kooky types that believe pains and illness have a psychological root (and I totally am one of those kooks), the pains are related to me not expressing my femininity.

Well, no duh.  How am I to express femininity when I can only watch half of a chick flick once every six weeks when they all go for a hair cut?

I decided I had to take a stand. For my health. Enough is enough, and it's my boobs we're talking about.

Wally and I spent an afternoon landscaping our backyard. Since it required digging up 740 cubic feet of grass and dirt, it was obviously labor-intensive and not the kind of labor-intensive that sounds very feminine, if you ask me. So when Wally turned to me, wondering aloud when I was going to have a turn with the shovel, I told him I was embracing my femininity at the moment. Since this decision also allowed Wally to embrace his masculinity, it killed two birds with one stone, so I don't know why he rolled his eyes at me and muttered unintelligible things under his breath.

And then a fire ant got into my bra and bit me on the boob during this landscape work.

What is the Universe trying to tell me now?

And You Think Employers Wanting Your Facebook Password Is Bad

There are many benefits of living along the Gulf Coast, and one of them is the short time frame of warm but not yet scorching temperatures during March and April. It's those fleeting days when you can leave your doors and windows open all day long, enjoying the fresh breeze and lack of sweaty armpits all at the same time.

However.

When your two sons begin play wrestling and yelling back and forth as loudly as they can, "No face farting!" and "I just farted!" and "I just farted and it STINKS!", you begin to wonder what your neighbors think of you.

Maybe open windows aren't so great after all, no matter how beautiful the weather.  There is no way to be your every day uncouth self yet still keep up appearances to outsiders.

Ghirardelli Would Have Sponsored This Post Except I Talked About Goat Shit.

I was at a party this past Sunday when someone told me how much they liked reading my old blog.  And that made me remember, oh yeah, I have a different blog now and I should write something on it.

I made it all the way to the sitting down part. And I had a some idea of what to blog about but now all I can think about is getting up and eating more chocolate chips straight from the baking bag....

Wait, I have to go get a few more....

Okay, so this time I brought the entire bag with me, to hell with this getting up and walking to the kitchen multiple times to gorge on more Ghirardelli (which, I'm sorry, is the ONLY brand to buy, people. All you Nestle people get the hell off my blog.) chocolate chips.

Back to this party where someone mentions my old blog. It's very strange, remembering I was capable of writing funny things that people recall over a year after I stopped.  I think of myself then and who I am now and wonder, who in the hell was that masked bandit?

I scraped goat shit out of three pairs of shoes today, people. GOAT SHIT. I just looked down at my hand and saw this green stuff dried on my finger and thought, Jesus, did I miss some GOAT SHIT on my finger!?!? That is unbelievably disgusting! Then I realized, oh no, that's just leaf juice on my finger from arranging cut flowers.

I don't know why I told you that, except to ask who the fuck has taken over my body? Goat shit and flower arranging?

Payton's latest obsession is dog breeding. Is this hormone-related or something? He's a tween now, should I be worried? I can't figure it out, yet it appears to be contagious.  When contemplating whether to make myself sit down and write or not, I temporarily entertained the idea of not and reading his library book on the history of dog breeds instead. I don't even like dogs nor care about how these breeds were created. Except it's a book and I think my love affair with books has tipped from a healthy appreciation over to some kind of human relationship replacement.

I miss my friends.  And not necessarily those "real-life" ones, because I never had that many to begin with. I mean those whose back and forth reply-all emails made me laugh so hard and kept my wits on its toes.

I miss my ability to see the funny little stories within the folds of every day life.

And I'm shutting up right here, because this is turning into a pity party, and worse than that, I ran out of chocolate.

Just to let you know how things are going in homeschool land (and because I refuse to end this on a pity party note), I came across a blog carnival with a school idea for a DIY paper bag book. This is where you turn paper bags into a book. And then paint each page. You know, for your kid's literacy.

I'm pretty sure that particular blogging carnival is sponsored by neurosurgeons in attempt to bring in new lobotomy customers.

Elderly Farting Torture

I have an old cat, very old. We adopted her back in our pre-parenting years when pets were cute and adorable and you found yourself thinking in that naive and childless way, why, no I don't mind cleaning up the piss and poo of another living thing, bring it on!

I now have two young and loud male beings that some people call "sons". Do I need to tell you the implications of having these sons and an old cat confined in a 1500 sf space almost 24/7? Well, I'm going to tell you anyway. The implication is something you might call TORTURE OF THE ELDERLY IS MY FAVORITE PASTIME!

Good lord, who is responsible for raising these heathens?

This elderly torture pastime has gotten out of hand lately, with all of the LET'S SIT ON THE OLD CAT and LET'S CHASE THE OLD CAT AROUND THE HOUSE and LET'S TRAP THE CAT UNDER THE LAUNDRY BASKET AND MAKE HER CRY and then back to LET'S SIT ON THE OLD CAT again. It was time for those boys to come to The Jesus.

Look, boys, this cat here? Do you know how old she is? She's over 14 years old. That means she's 98 years old in human years. So when you think you're "playing around" when you sit on her or chase her around the house, that would be like you sitting on and chasing a 98-year-old woman. If that's how you plan to treat me when I'm elderly, I'll just leave all of my riches to a cat shelter instead of you!* Keep that in mind next time you feel the heathen-istic need to sit on this poor cat.

That gave the boys a new perspective, relating this poor cat to a 98-year-old elderly person, and their treatment of the cat improved. But change is slow. Or my children are learning impaired, because the lesson didn't stick.

Not a week later I caught one of my sons not just trying to sit on this elderly cat but trying to sit on her so he could fart on her. I immediately yelled, "STOP TRYING TO FART ON THE ELDERLY, MY GOD, WHY ARE YOU SUCH A HEATHEN?"

For some reason this sent the farting offender into a fit of giggles. And then I heard my other son yell from the den...

"IS PAYTON TRYING TO FART ON YOU, MOM?"

What the hell?

My nine-year-old thinks I'm elderly.

That's it. No inheritance for him.





*Riches to inherit? Ha! Good things we haven't shared our Great Recession 401(k) statement with the boys or else lies like that might not fool them.

Teaching Elementary U. S. History Without Textbooks - Early Native Americans

In case you can't tell from the obscure title of this post, I'm going to talk about teaching United States history without textbooks. Not that I have anything against textbooks. Except I do. They are boring with a capital Stab Me In The Ear and End My Misery.  I know this because I attempted to teach U. S. history with a textbook and my children tried to stab me in the ear. With their whining and complaining. Needless to say, I gave up on the book rather quickly.

My next step, once the textbook was demoted to the pile of books I use as a tripod for my camera, was to search ALL OVER Homeschool Internet Land for the perfect one-stop U. S. history book. This experience was much like getting stuck in a Hall of Mirrors, confused by all the distortions. There were problems, to say the least, and it went beyond the obvious challenge of the sheer volume of selection.

I didn't want anything with the words "God's plan for the U. S. as shown through history!" because, quite frankly, I find that idea a bit arrogant. And it's more than a bit slanted to the Christian viewpoint. So I narrowed the hunt down to secular history books, which is more challenging to do in Homeschool Land than you might think. But then I came across one that started off sort of like this....

Think back to the time before the earth was formed, when everything was a black void and.....

Just stop right there. What? You want me to think back to before the earth was formed? That's not even possible. And you want to call that history?  Uh huh. If they had only changed "think" to "imagine" I would object less, because then the author's theory of what it was like at that time wouldn't be presented as a fact. I intend to raise critical thinkers here, people, and that type of text doesn't help. 

I gave up the attempt to find one all-encompassing book to teach elementary level U. S. History. Instead, I spent hours and hour and hours and hours honing those latent over-achieving tendencies as I poured through our library and Amazon, looking for topic-specific history books. Did I mention the hours I spent doing this? HOURS. (More proof that you never fully recover from over-achievement addiction.) I may no longer hand-decorate 3-tiered birthday cakes, but by god I research the hell out of curriculum!  By the time I finish planning just this part of history, I'll have spent so much time at the library that I might as well set up camp in the children's department with a Goblet of Fire-esque tent (of course!) and mooch off of the library's free internet and bathrooms I don't have to clean. I still have the Revolution to plan too! Might as well move in.

I actually had a couple of goals in mind when creating our own history curriculum, which is unlike me. I'm very goalophobic, after all. But this time I actually had some sort of plan. It's like I'm becoming an real adult or something. Weird. But here is what I had in mind when planning our history...

• No boring books
• Hands-on learning
• Challenge the superficial white European beliefs about our history - i.e. that the Indians were a sparsely populated, primitive people running around in loin cloths and bird feathers, at the whim of Mother Nature with no way to influence their environment, making them the type of people who really should have been invaded for their own good. And it was God's plan to kill them off with small pox so we pilgrims could steal their left-behind supplies. That kind of stuff.
• Basically, I'm not concerned with the memorization of facts but more focused on my boys understanding the ideas at the root of our national history. 

Here I'm going to list out all of the books I found to teach Native American history. Doing this is risky because you could look at this book list and say, "Shit, Heather, you spent all of that time and this is all you came up with? You suck!" And maybe I do suck. I don't know. You probably shouldn't listen to anything I say about homeschooling. I don't know why you're still reading this.

Starting off American history with who came here first and how.

Who Discovered America
Start here. At the back of this book. I'm not kidding, start at the back. This book fits more into the explorers section of U. S. history than early Native American, but the end of the book talks about the latest archeological evidence of the very first people to come to America. (Spoiler alert! It may not have been across the Bering Strait.) (Spoiler #2! I'll use this book again for the explorer unit.)

If you have an advanced reader who is super interested in more details, I recommend Before Columbus: The Americas of 1491 by Charles Mann.  If you are interested, read it yourself or 1491 by the same author.

American History Interactive 3-D maps
This book has a 3-D map you can make that demonstrates the Bering Strait immigration theory (to the left there), along with maps to other major events in history.

The boys and I talked briefly about Central and South American natives - the Aztecs, Incas, and Mayans, of course. If I had found this book earlier, I would have read it aloud to them. We also briefly talked about the ancient North American Indians, but I still wish we'd had that book. (Spoiler #3! We have her books on explorers and colonists and I've read them, which is why I wish we'd had the earlier ones.)

We didn't spend an tremendous amount of time on this part of history. Much of it is still unknown and my kids didn't show much curiosity to know deeper details, which is my cue to move on. We're doing a timeline of U. S. history so it helps us keep better track of how the Native American history evolved from the ancient people to the more advanced civilization they had before 1492.

Now we're getting into the nitty-gritty of Native American history

Native Americans: An Inside Look at the Tribes and Traditions
This is a DK book. I like DK published kid books and so do my boys. This particular book was published back in 2001, so it lacks the latest in research on how America was first populated and I skipped the first chapter in the book. (We'd already covered the topic anyway.) I think this book does a good job of giving overall information on family, spiritual and daily life and then moves on to the regional area tribes. We read each chapter on the tribes, say on Northeast Woodland Indians, for example, and then detoured into region specific hands-on projects from....

Iroquois longhouse project

Easy Make and Learn Northeast Indians
We used several projects out of this that I felt reinforced important aspects of their history, such as their agricultural practices and how they lived in tune with the seasons. (Did I almost sound like I know what I'm doing or what?!) This teacher's website shows video examples of how he used these projects in his class. Again, my point in doing this specific work was not to make them memorize anything, but to help the boys understand how advanced of a society the Native Americans had before European "discovery." Oh, and to have some fun too...that's an important point.

and

Easy Make and Learn Southwest Indians
Dude, these people hunted rabbits by throwing sticks at them and picked prickly pear with these giant cactus tongs. Like, successfully! It blows our ever-loving Nintendo/microwave oven mind they were able to figure these things out and live. Who would have ever looked at a rabbit racing across the desert and thought, hmm, I'm gonna take this big stick, throw it at that motherfucker and kill it? Human ingenuity is astounding.

Northwest Coastal Cedar Plank House

Some of the projects in those two books can be used for other regional tribe studies, like the basket weaving or papoose project. I just realized that sentence sounds like something the head psychiatrist of a mental ward would say. Basket weaving? Total insane asylum activity. But some days it's hard to tell the difference between homeschool and the looney bin, so whatever.

This website has free printable projects too and we used the cedar plank house when we studied the Northwest coastal Indians. If you really want to flip your hands-on history lid, go to this website and follow the directions for building a wigwam. You learn how the Indians used math to build them.

If you really, really want to flip your history lid, make your kids construct you a real, live moon lodge where you can escape during your period and someone else does all of the child care, cooking and cleaning for you. I don't know how Native American women felt about this, and in my younger, single college days I thought this practice was very anti-feminist.  How dare those primitive men make women disappear during their period, as if they were tainted! But now I have a family and a home and enough dirty dishes in the sink to rival Mt. Everest and I'm all, HELL YEAH, I'M GOING TO THE MOON LODGE FOR THREE DAYS! I'm convinced this moon lodge thing is a version of heaven.

The Three Sisters

Native North American Foods and Recipes
We used this book along with the Northeast Indian Make and Learn book for more detailed information on how Indians cultivated crops and food (see picture to the right). We also used a book titled American Indian Science: A New Look at Old Cultures by Fern G. Brown for similar purposes. (Amazon doesn't have it, so no link.) I felt both of these were important in conveying the idea that this was a more advanced civilization than we assumed.

Nations of the Southeast
I selected this book because it's the area where we live. Our hands-on learning for this region comes from visiting actual historical sites in our area, so you wouldn't care about the details unless you live in the same area. Basically it includes planned field trips to historical sites with some reenactment festivals thrown in. Mix and bake for your area.

And so that's how I'm teaching U. S. history without using a textbook. You could also call this How a Recovering Overachiever Channels Her Need For Both Intellectual Challenges and Bucking The Status Quo. Stay tuned for Part II of this series - explorers! Or? Stay tuned for news of my commitment to the crazy farm where I attend basket weaving classes. It's a toss up.

(Did you make it to the end of this post? Good god, you deserve a gold star. If I gave those out. Which I don't. You should just feel good from the intrinsic motivation to better yourself.)