My Soapbox

I wrote an email to a nice person today about my wariness of homeschool blogs that style themselves as "LDS" or "Christian" and decided to post parts of it here. Allow me to begin with what I feel is a very important truth:

Homeschooling is not mandatory for salvation.

I often find myself uncomfortable reading homeschool blogs. Many blogs preach (and I mean preach) a certain type of homeschooling, such as TJEd or Charlotte Mason, or unschooling. The more attached a blogger is to a certain philosopy, the more uncomfortable I feel. Not because I think there is something wrong with those homeschooling methodologies but because homeschooling is not the one true religion. It is a valid choice among many valid choices. And each particular methodology is a valid homeschooling option among many valid homeschooling options. When I read homeschooling blogs, I usually wind up feeling alienated rather than supported or inspired.

I'm not saying that there can't be homeschool blogs aimed specifically at families utilizing a particular approach. Obviously, Charlotte Mason fans want blogs specifically aimed to help them reach their specific homeschooling goals. That only makes sense. It is mostly the attitude I find troubling. The us/them feeling. I like to learn about different methodologies so I can take what I like from each one. I do not like to read a blog that insists one methodology is the one and only way to true homeschooling happiness in this life and the next.

As for sanctimonious LDS homeschoolers . . .. I find it troublesome when any Christian homeschoolers, but especially LDS homeschoolers, imply or outright state that homeschooling is somehow more morally correct than not homeschooling. This is a very pervasive attitude and again, I think it is alienating and ridiculous. Of course, many homeschoolers believe no such thing. I am not trying to say that anyone who made a decision to homeschool based on revelation or a fear of unhealthy influences at school, or because they think Halloween is a wicked holiday are sanctimonious. I would not homeschool if I didn't feel that my Heavenly Father approved. However, I will never put a quote from President Benson (or any other religious figure) on my blog as a way to support or legitimize my choice. It is not doctrine to homeschool.

I'm afraid I might have stepped onto a soapbox again, but I feel strongly that we are all here to support each other and that means nixing the attitude of us/them or right/wrong (as pertains to homeschooling--not the commandments).

And now I am stepping down from my soapbox.

My children

Since you're going to be hearing a lot about my children, I thought I would introduce them. Emeline is 3. Her older sister cut her hair. Not a pleasant memory. Cowen is 5. He's hilarious. Eli is 16 months--my very favorite age. He just learned to make kiss faces with the accompanying kiss sound. Love it. Miriam is 6 (turning 7 in June). She's very busy and has the most incredible imagination.

And this picture is me flagrantly showing off my baby because he is beautiful. And he's the baby. You understand.

Language Lessons for the Very Young

My friend, BB, is probably going to show up on this blog at one time or another. She's making the decision to homeschool (Luke, her oldest, is five) and is exploring this possible future for her and her family with a great deal of anticipation and trepidation. Sound familiar?

She is very curious about materials that I use, so I promised her a few reviews. Here's the first one.



I love this product. I am not necessarily a Charlotte Mason home educator, but I have to say I am very impressed with this language arts book for numerous reasons.

1) The artwork. I know, I know, I am just one of the crowd. Most of the reviewers at Timberdoodle (where I purchased it) said the same thing because it is true! My children love looking at the pictures, talking about the pictures, creating their own narratives about the pictures. Even three year old Emeline participates in this part of our studies. I am exceedingly impressed that the author picked artwork by the masters. Thank you for not dumbing down our children.

2) I love the questions after the artwork and the poetry. Allow me to step onto my English teacher soapbox for a moment. Picture, if you will, a grade 11 classroom where all the students have been divided into very small groups (four max) to discuss the book their group has been reading. These books are not erudite, alienating, or over-their-heads. They were handpicked by me in a variety of genres to actually appeal to the high school crowd of non-readers (including things like Louis L'Amour and Orson Scott Card and Andromeda Strain). The students liked the books. The students also liked me--and this is important for this example. We'd been together through the evil research paper and perfect essays and Bohemian poetry. Trust me, we had a very tight bond and it was the end of the year and the students were more than willing to do what I asked.

So I asked these students, whom I loved and had worked with all year, to get into their book groups and discuss what they had read so far. After all the noise of moving around desks and shuffling papers, the room was silent. They had no idea how to discuss literature. They weren't trying to be disrespectful, they just didn't know what to do. After the first wasted fifteen minutes, I started producing helpful prompt questions. That would generate a sentence or two, and then, nada. Nothing. Zilch. They were quiet or off-topic within three minutes.

This might not seem like a huge problem to some people but think about this: most of the world's most profound questions and ideas are found in literature. If you can't discuss literature, how can you discuss ideas? If you can't discuss ideas, how can you learn to think for yourself?

I propose that you cannot. And we all know that if you can't think for yourself, other people will do your thinking for you.

The ability to discuss literature is critical in so many ways. Suffice it to say, I started having mini book discussions at the beginning of each class where I modeled what happened around my family's dinner table all through my growing up years. I learned that knowing how to discuss what you read is a learned skill. Teach it to your children!



3) After each poem, there is an opportunity for the children to draw what they pictured. When I first introduced the book to my 1st grader and pre-k boy, I gave them new scribblers and pencils. (Then I had to run downstairs and find a scribbler for my three year old who felt left out.) They carefully and lovingly wrote their names on the inside cover and then waited anxiously for what came next. We looked at the first bit of artwork, talked about it, took turns telling our own version of the story of what happened leading up to the moment in the picture.

Then we moved on to the poem, "Stopping by the Woods" by Robert Frost. After I read the third line my children, quite of their own accord, started drawing what they were hearing. It was so natural for them. Creating a tangible reminder of what they pictured in their head was important to them and certainly cemented the ideas into their young brains. Creating art is naturally and gracefully included in this manual.

4) The grammar is basic, quick, and painless. I don't believe in rushing young children into learning "concepts." When a child turns eight, you can start to formalize your instruction a little bit. Before that, you are better off (IMHO) to keep their interest in learning high and keep close tabs on when they are ready for something new. Nothing turns brains off faster than grammar. Unless you're like me--extremely sick. My children love everything about the poetry and artwork and they don't hate the grammar. That's awesome. Queen (the author) keeps things very simple and age appropriate. I think it is a practically perfect language arts primer.



In some reviews, people mentioned that they didn't like the quantity of copywork. I also think the amount of copywork is overkill and I've already mentioned that my daughter hates writing. That is an easy problem to fix though--don't make your child do all the copywork. Miriam writes two sentences a week. She acts like I'm killing her, but then she has fun reading through the poem to pick her favorite lines to copy.

Also, the book can be used as a workbook, but since I'm all about reduce, reuse, and save money, I just do all the assignments in a scribbler.

This line of language arts books are available for numerous age groups. It isn't as easy as you'd expect to pick the right book for your child's age. I purchased Language Lessons for the Very Young 1, recommended for ages 6-8. Miriam, my first grader, is doing all of it, including the grammar. My pre-K (5 yr) son is doing all the art/poetry narration stuff, but he loses interest in the grammar sections. That's fine with me. I'm happy with that arrangement. However, for Luke, and other kindergarteners, there is Language Lessons for Little Ones 2 (for ages 4-6) and Language Lessons for Little Ones 3 (for ages 5-7). Based on my experience, I would get Cowen the Little Ones 2.

Here's the link to Timberdoodle. All the Sandi Queen language arts materials can be found under the language arts link.

Hope this was helpful and not just long-winded!

Two Success Stories

Before you think I'm an impressive home educator with mad "o" skills, allow me to explain these two pictures.

On Sunday, I was asked to sing at a graveside service the coming Thursday, or put together a group of people to sing at the service. I called three friends and they met at my house this morning to run through the song the family had picked, "Angels Among Us" by Alabama.

As a group, we decided that the "Oh" at the beginning of each chorus was awkward for us, and so we crossed it out.

My five year old son heard that we were crossing out "o" and ran for a colored pencil. He pulled over a chair to where the women folk were sitting, got his own library book to put his paper on (just like us) and started crossing out all the "o"s he could find.

When the women left, Cowen proudly handed me his paper and said, "I found way more 'o's than you did!'"

Awesome.

The other night I was done with my children at 6:30 pm. This has been known to happen around here. I put everyone in bed, but as a precaution, I gave Miriam a book to keep her out of trouble. Since she was at my mercy and would read anything I handed to her, I gave her Little House on the Prairie. While that is easily within Miriam's reading level, she still likes shorter books (she's only 6) so this was my chance to show her that longer books are okay too. She read 3/4ths of it that night. Success!

Why I Homeschool

Since starting to homeschool, I've noticed that I LOVE to hear why other people homeschool. It is almost an obsession, to the point where I don't feel like I really know a fellow homeschooler until I've heard their "why I homeschool" story. I don't have a story so much as a journey. I'm sure I'll share more of that later. For right now, I'll tell you why I started homeschooling. The first reason, and perhaps still the best reason: I wanted my children to have exceptionally close relationships with each other. Very close sibling relationships are not always the norm now that people live in cities where other friendships can dominate the growing up years. I wanted my children to be the exception in that they are tight. Tighter than my brother's football team tight. Tighter than my brother's football pants tight.

So far it has worked like a charm. See exhibit A (the picture below).


When I was growing up, we moved around a lot. By the time I left for college the longest I'd lived anywhere was almost three years. There were nine children in my family and we were tight. Very tight. I have long believed that this is because of three reasons. 1) We lived on a farm when I was younger and developed relationships there because we lacked other playmate options. 2) We moved around so much that we were always the "new kids." When you are the new kid you don't have a best friend yet, so you play with your siblings. That gave us a six month period every other year at least to renew our sibling relationships. 3) My parents liked us and liked doing things with us, so there was a whole lot of wholesome recreational activity around our house. Besides that, there were so many of us that there was always something going on. It might have also helped that my dad is a white Bill Cosby mixed with Weird Al and my mother a goddess in the kitchen. Good jokes, good food, good friends--my house was amazing.

Now that we are all grown, we are still tight. Family website tight. Call at least one of my sisters daily tight. Catch up on each other's blogs tight. Write YA fantasy together tight. Reunions, get-togethers, in each other's business tight. I love it. I want that for my children.

But my hubby and I aren't going to pick up and move every two years like my father. We don't live on a farm. I attempt to make my children feel as loved and liked as my mother did me, but I'm a lot like my father (why fates???) so I don't think I do quite as good a job at that as she did.

Enter homeschooling. I really did decide to homeschool so my children would be forced to build the kind of relationship that I was able to build with my siblings. I'm not saying that other people who lived in one place their whole lives and attended school can't have tight relationships with their sibs. I'm just saying I wanted to make it a priority and homeschool seemed like the right solution.

That is one reason. There are others. So many others. I'll tell you more later.

PS--Becky B., my buddy who is about to embark on a homeschool adventure of her own, has labeled my blog useful, but lacking a certain consistency of posting. I promise to post more often. Really.

Fantastic Library Find--Score One for the Sloths

I was recently at the library (duh) looking for pioneer books (stay tuned for the complete pioneer unit coming in about two months) when I ran across this tremendously entertaining book: Score One for the Sloths.

The cover grabbed me. The illustrations are priceless. Especially the page where the sloths are building a tower with blocks, but it takes so much out of them that they have to nap in the middle of the project so the end tower has several blocks and several sleeping sloths all piled on top of each other. You really have to check out the book if only for that one illustration. Charming. Hilarious. My children loved this book.

The plot was okay. Better than many children's books. The sloth school is threatened with closure because the sloths aren't meeting basic scholastic achievement requirements. Sparky, a perky sloth, saves the day.

Fortunately, there is more napping than anything else in this book. I loved it. Check it out!

Score One for the Sloths by Helen Lester is available from the Davis County, UT library system.

Unintended Results

Today I bagged most of school in favor of practicing for our upcoming end of school show that includes four short plays (written by me--they last approximately 1 minute each) and four songs with special appearances by Cowen on the trumpet, Miriam on the piano, and Emeline on the drum. Since the performance is the 24th and we're performing before that at two rest homes, it has pretty much taken over school.

But then, in the late afternoon, we decided to go for a walk. Miriam likes to take a notebook with her on walks these days. Because she had a notebook, Cowen needed a notebook. After our walk, we were all sitting on the driveway (the grass is too muddy) and Cowen handed me his notebook and showed me a perfect "D" he had written. He said he was writing daffodil. He asked me what came next and I said, "ah." He wrote an "A." Then I said, "fff" and he wrote an "F." We did that for the entire word and he spelled it based entirely on the sounds!!! It was awesome.

Since I praised Cowen to high heaven, Miriam decided she needed to write words. The girl is six, reads at about a fifth grade level, but hates to write. She usually scribbles and then tells me what she meant, or she sweet talks me into writing things for her. Today, though, she wrote lots of spring words like baby, spring, flowers, and rain. All without any prompting from me.

And such is the bliss of the homeschool mom who goes outside for a walk and winds up with an English lesson.