actual homeschooling ( for real this time)

So what am I doing with those older boys?

I am calling it a taekwondo/chumash year. They are clearly progressing and achieving in taekwondo. They are earning their belts and stripes, getting stronger, lowering into splits, focusing and performing. As the year goes on, the progress is obvious. I also see that 9 yo grabs an opportunity when he sees one. He asked his teacher to check a certain sparring sequence. 9 yo got it wrong and was sent to practice. That did not deter him from asking to be checked at the next opportunity. He had to be checked three times before he got it right, and days passed in between. But he is focused on getting eligible to test for black belt, so he keeps on practicing.

With our crazy schedule, I make chumash a daily priority. We are in Ki Tisa with 11 yo, right at the golden calf right now. We do five pesukim a day, I ask both boys to prepare before they sit down with me: preread the pesukim and look up any words that they don't know in the dictionary. 11 yo got sneaky and looks up in Rashi instead. If Rashi doesn't comment, he fudges his way through, hoping that I am not paying attention. Meanwhile, I am prereading all the Rashis, just in case he asks a question and Rashi has an answer. This is doing wonders for my Chumash learning. In fact, I highly recommend for anyone who wants to master a particular area to try to teach it to their children: the preparation will force you to slow down and focus on depth. I am starting to appreciate Rashi much more.

11 yo's chumash skills are pretty good. He does moan and groan occasionally, but it is much less than it used to be. I know that he is on the cusp of mastery when we hit a Rashi on mysterious בגדי השרד. Since he didn't look the word up, I sent him to Rashi. I also asked him to pull out מקראות גדולות, to see if anyone else comments. Before I had a chance to sit down with him, he browsed through אבן עזרה and רמבן and told me that he likes אבן עזרה more. He did not even realize that he switched to a chumash without nekudot, and that he was able to do exactly what I was hoping to accomplish: independently look up מפרשים. Of course, this was one time, but it is a clear progression of daily skill acquisition.

9 yo is doing three pesukim a day. We review three previous peskim and then he prepares three new ones. He has hard time using the dictionary, as he keeps on forgetting the words that he already looked up multiple times. In addition. his ability to find shorashim is not so good, and he is afraid of looking up the wrong shoresh, or that a dictionary won't have it. Overall, however, he is at the point where he can scan the Hebrew, but recite the translation. Also, he gets plenty of pesukim that he can translate without having to look up any words. His Rashi skills are coming along. He worries about the length of Rashis, and he tries to memorize the meaning, just in case. I try to pick interesting short Rashis, but I especially make a big deal whenever he asks a question that Rashi asks and answers. For example, when we read about 11 children of Yaakov that crossed Yabbok, he asked me: Yaakov had 12 children, what happened to Dina? At that point, he did not mind reading the whole Rashi with the whole explanation. I keep hoping that slowly but surely his skills will improve and his confidence to "get it" will increase.

I spent a large chunk of the year fretting about boys not doing mishnayot. We never got a teacher for 11 yo, and the program that I tried ordering for the boys took forever to arrive only for me to realize that it is not usable without teacher materials, and teacher materials are costly and require preparation. So I did what I did best: fretted and fumed, worried and harassed 11 yo ( and my long-suffering husband) to do something! Finally, one Friday night, after refusing to go to shul, I said that 11 yo has to read something meaningful instead of another Percy Jackson-like fantasy. He opened Illustrated Mishna Shabbos, and read the whole thing! I am pretty sure that he did in a few days what usually takes months. No, he did not read it all in Hebrew. and he definitely would have gotten more out with a teacher, but, judging by his little quotes here and there, he read enough of what interested him.

Additionally, I went online looking for some sort of mishna yomi program, maybe something that would e-mail a daily mishna with some explanation. I stumbled across these mishnayot. The boys each picked an area and are reading and listening to two mishnayot a day. 11 yo picked Avodah Zarah, with a detour to Megillah in honor of Purim. 9 yo picked Sanhedrin, no doubt influenced by his brother. This is not what I had in mind, but I am learning to be flexible and accepting that children will pick what works for them.

9 yo is doing Lashon HaTorah, Workbook ד. He is having hard time with it, even though I see an improvement in his skills when it comes to chumash. 11 yo is doing Rosetta Stone, We had a glitch where our house computer died and he lost a lot of his progress. He is not in the rush to finish, but I see him trying to strike up conversations in Hebrew. Unfortunately, my Hebrew is not that good, and his siblings do not understand what he is saying, so it is not going anywhere. I am still waiting for those Israelis to enter our life and make my kids fluent...

I wanted to do Megillah Esther, but I don't think I have it in me this year. The boys read over the Youth Megillah and The Children of Shushan Fight Haman. Neither boy is enthusiastic about reading and translating. 11 yo halfheartedly suggested listening to baal koreh and following in English in Stone chumash. Megillah will have to wait another year.

What about halacha, minchagim, Jewish history? I definitely unschool those. I have Sand and Stars, and after a visit from another homeschool family, I pulled them out and 11 yo read them on his own. 9 yo might have glanced inside, or he might not have. The boys are welcome to attend shiurim in our shul, and they come and go as they please.I do not know how much they get out, but they will pipe up once in a while, so something somewhere is trickling in.

The secular subject update will have to happen at some later point.

a few simple things

I have not written about actual learning, so here are a few simple things that we are doing:

Read aloud. About a year ago, the boys politely but firmly declined my offers to keep on reading to them good night stories. 7 yo said that he can read well enough on his own. I fretted about it for a bit, discussed it with other homeschoolers, but decided not to push the issue. We still got tons of library books, and the boys read all the time. 4 yo (as of this week!) looks at tons of books, too, and she has her favorites. She is more than eager to get HER good night story, and has been bringing two or three books at a time. About a month ago, out of the blue, the boys asked me to read to them a story while they were lying in bed. I thought that we need a chapter book and grabbed "Pollyanna" which I was pretty sure nobody read yet. I got it from some library sale. We have been reading a chapter a night. 9 yo very early on said that she has the concept of hakarat hatov (recognizing the good). I have never read it before, so it is fun to follow the story with the boys and to be on the same page.

Label everything. For years, I was thinking about labeling objects around the house in Hebrew, so that we could learn all the new words painlessly. Somehow, I was not getting around to it. Since 7 yo got diagnosed and I was searching for all possible approaches to deal with his writing and spelling difficulties, a teacher friend recommended doing a word wall, so that the words and their spelling was constantly before him. I combined the two ideas and started labeling everything around the house. I do five words per night. It tends to skew towards objects, and I try to pick the words where English spelling is not obvious. Some nights it's fun, other nights I am having hard time coming up with what to label. 

Base ten blocks. For 4 yo, it's perfect material for building a succah. 7 yo uses it for regrouping in adding and subtracting large numbers. 9 yo used it today to model division with remainders. I got a relatively cheap plastic set, and if you are considering getting one good math manipulative, I recommend getting this.

Daily vocabulary calendar. I picked it up in Costco sometime in the fall. We keep it at the breakfast table. The boys like reading the word and especially its etymology on the back. Yesterday 9 yo said: "Today will be bad. The word of the day is berate." Somehow, we managed. I can envision writing sentences, using words in conversation, challenging everyone to come up with a sentence which uses the most new words. Instead, it is unobtrusively sitting there at breakfast, waiting to be looked at.

http://www.amazon.com/Words---Year-2014-Page-A-Day-Calendar/dp/0761172963/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1389843553&sr=8-4&keywords=daily+vocabulary+calendar

dancing the dance/stumbling in the fog

Some days, we make a list, get everything done before lunch, the boys are agreeable and pleasant enough, then the baby goes for a nap, older kids assemble themselves to chill, and I get a break. On those days, I feel like we are dancing.

Other days, it is an uphill battle. Nobody listens, everyone sulks, I feel snappy and stretched too thin, nothing gets done, and we are all grumpy and exhausted by each other's presence. I am groping in the fog, trying to find my way back to the dance floor.


I give more structure, and my kids push back against it. Hard.

I look at 9 yo, as his desire for a perpetual shortcut, the "easy way out" and keep thinking: this kid will do really well later on in life. He'll invent things because he's lazy to do something the proper way. But now we have to survive till that point. Today, instead of writing "he sanctified" he wrote "he holidized". When I asked him, why, he said that it was easier. It is easier to invent a new word than tediously copy one.

I look at 7 yo, how he's struggling with reading Hebrew. He gets the whole prefix/shoresh/suffix deal, but he wants to be able to see a word and know what it is and what it sounds like right away. He's a sight reader, whole word reader. This is bizarre, since I am a believer in phonics and we did Bob books for English reading. Hebrew is a whole new beast, with changing nekudot and the related words sounding so different. Besides, his frustration level rises so suddenly, that one minute he's sitting next to me, working hard and at peace, and the next, the book is flying across the room and he's arching his back, screaming. Today I asked him what he would like to do for modern Hebrew practice. We hit a roadblock in Rosetta Stone, which he is not ready to overcome, and he did not want to go back and finish Llama. I said that I have S'fateinu, and he seemed interested in taking a look. He did the first 6 pages of first grade book, remarking that he likes it. He read all the words, underlined and circled, but he drew the line at coloring in the pictures. Then he told me exactly where he wants to stop ( on page 7) and that he wants to do 6 pages every day. I was thinking of my homeschooling friend and her three year rule: it is possible to learn all the material very quickly and pleasantly when the student is mature enough instead of butting heads with a younger child over concepts and skills. Why not wait and make it easy?

I thought that by now I would have more of a rhythm, of a groove. I thought that I would be wiser, know what I am doing. Instead, a lot of it feels like making the same mistakes again and again.

If all is well, tomorrow will be another day and we will all get another chance to start anew.

it's been a year

It's been a year since I took a deep breath, and pulled the oldest out of school to embark on the homeschooling journey with all the kids under the same roof. While a part of me wants to make grand statements and find the sum total of the experience, another part simply wants to describe what our day looks like now.

My husband was on call, so I woke up alone. I slept in till almost 8. The boys have been up for a while, trading Pokemon cards and playing their games, still in pajamas. 3 yo was still sleeping or chilling in her room. Either way, she did not call out till I was walking around.

By 9, everyone had breakfast, cleaned up the breakfast dishes and got dressed. The boys started on davening, while I davened with 3 yo. She routinely says Mode Ani, Torah tziva lanu Moshe and the first paragraph of Shema. Both boys went downstairs to daven, and I heard some drumming, usually a sign of 8 yo davening. Then it got quiet. When I called them, I found out that they were davening together and 8 yo was teaching 6 yo how to say Shemone Esre. They came upstairs to continue. 8 yo pointed out all the words to 6 yo and said them slowly. The last bracha that he knows is Al haTzadkim. 6 yo stood nearby and followed. Then they said Aleinu together. All of this took place without any direction from me.

My homeschooling friend called and we headed over to their house. She taught a Montessori lesson on the beginning of the universe to the older kids while I kept an eye on the younger ones playing tea party and building. Then the older kids played some more Pokemon, the younger ones played with train tracks and we got to sit and schmooze.

We got home around 11:30. I wrote up the schedule for the rest of the day. 8 yo sulked a bit about chumash. Both boys chose to do math before lunch. 8 yo zoomed through addition with thousands and ordering numbers. 6 yo broke his ruler while measuring in centimeters, and then got frustrated when he had to choose objects to measure. It was not the measuring part that was hard, it was spelling out the objects' names. I served leftover mac-n-cheese, which was inhaled, followed by baked beans with fake taco meat.

After lunch, both boys continued in Rosetta Stone. 8 yo is in the middle of the second unit on level II, 6 yo is in third unit of level I. 8 yo usually does three activities at a time, while 6 yo sticks with one, unless he's particularly motivated.

Then both of them did Lashon Hatorah. 8 yo just started 4th book, the past tense. 6 yo started the Kaf family in the second book. Both were done pretty quickly, as the material was new and introduced slowly.

Then everyone took a break to finger-paint with their sister before her nap. There was talk of painting erupting volcanoes and tornadoes.

Afterwards, it was on to spelling for 8 yo. He stopped me after getting two words wrong, and studied those. 6 yo read a new section in Lama. He read it smoothly and translated. Then he moved on to spelling. Two of his words were "there" and "their". I explained the usage. He had hard time coming up with a sentence using "their", "I want the sentence to be about me, not about them!" Well, don't we all...

8 yo finally got to chumash. My husband popped in for lunch, which was good because the kids might not get to see him tonight. 8 yo went to him to finish up. He wrote down the words he did not know from the new pesukim, looked up kin'ah (jealousy) in the dictionary, and reviewed some previous pesukim.

All in all, we were done a bit before 3.

The boys have taekwondo later, 3 yo is napping, I am making a yogurt cake from expired yogurt. The boys are downstairs doing their own thing, which is unexplainable, unquantifiable and untestable. Whatever it is, it is keeping them happy, engaged and occupied.

I did not know a year ago that a good homeschooling day would look like this. I am not sure if everyone would agree that this is a typical good homeschooling day.

What I did learn is that I do not care. what everyone else thinks I know how we feel and I know what works for us, and that is making me happy.

a day of Chanukah

Today we did HaNerot Halalu with 6 yo and Al Hanisim with 8 yo. I found on chinuch.org a printout, with Hebrew text on one side, and the other side blank.

6 yo highlighted prefixes that he knew, and plural suffixes. Then we sat together and I helped him translate, line by line.

8 yo wrote in as much translation as he could muster on his own. Then we went over, and I added shorashim  for the words he knew. We looked up a few words in the dictionary. Overall, I was quite impressed, both with his skills ( he translated about three-fourths unassisted) and with mine (I only was not sure of a word or two).

We did some journaling. I assigned either writing from the perspective of one of the soldiers in Yehuda HaMacabee's army or any topic of their choosing. 6 yo threw a fit, then wrote two sentences about he does not want to write, wants to have free time and schoolwork is boring. He corrected "schoolwork" on his own, since "school" was one of his spelling words. 8 yo wrote a nice little story. I got my creative writing done, too, so this post might be a bit boring. I like the idea of journalling next to the kids, but it might take a long time till it is all fun and productive.

In the more fun department, we had to get an emergency menorah for 6 yo. He made a beautiful clay one, and painted it, but it cracked two nights ago. So today we made a run to the local Judaica store. They did not have many choices, but I think 6 yo found the one he was happy with.



When we got home, the kids watched Shalom Sesame Chanukah. I have it on tape, and when that tape goes ( or the VCR), it will be a sad day here. Then we set up the candles, and while we were waiting for my husband to get home, we made dreidel art. Basically, we took a tray and put a piece of paper inside. Then we took plastic and metal dreidels, dipped the tips in paint, and spun them on the paper. I was expecting more of spirals, but we ended up with spin art. The kids loved it, even 8 yo who originally claimed no interest.

8 yo's edible menorah in the "snow" 

We are also trying to finish up a wooden model of the Beit Hamikdash, would be nice to wrap it up before the end of Chanukah.

what does your daughter do all day?

I have two school-age boys and a 2 yo girl. The question I get is, how do you keep 2 yo occupied while you are teaching the boys?

As you can surmise from my posts, I do not spend hours every day just sitting and breathing down the boys' backs as they cover subject by subject. I am present, and I might be more involved in some areas (chumash, kriyah) than in others. Most of the activities are hands-off for me, and I just check the final result, or tell where the corrections are necessary. That gives me more time to attend to 2 yo.

As far as her schedule goes, she gets quite a bit of freedom. She gets dressed when the boys get dressed, eats breakfast with the rest of us, davens after the boys and just hangs around, observing and joining in whatever we are doing. If the boys are sitting at the dining room table, writing, she will do one of her "projects". She knows where I keep the scrap paper, stickers and shapes for gluing. She gets glue and scissors, pencils, crayons, whatever strikes her, brings them over and starts working. Then she will tell me when she is done, and usually wants to display her creation. She is also pretty good about cleaning up after herself.

We had quite a few spills and messes. She cut up things while learning how to use scissors. She made large puddles of glue, but it is all washable. She spilled her shapes and we had to sing clean up song numerous times to get all the shapes back in the bucket. The tables get some of the mess, too, but it is all washable and wipeable. Besides, since I am usually more focused on the boys' work, I am not breathing down her back to be perfect, either.

Working alongside her brothers

Today she chose to do play-do while the boys worked in the morning. She got out the shapes and a small tub, set herself up in the kitchen and had fun time cutting and mushing. Then she put it away and joined the boys at the dining room table. She brought over a lacing kit. I was asked to untangle the strings and then she proceeded to lace a dog while the boys did Lashon HaTorah and math.

Later in the afternoon, she found a papier mache peach and wanted to paint it. Originally I thought it would make a great sukkah decoration, painted and covered in mod podge, but it never happened. Now she pulled out paint, a jar for water and a paint brush and worked on adding different colors to it. When she was all done, she wanted to thumb tack it to the board in the kitchen. I tried explaining how it would not work, but she wanted to display it. I suggested hanging it up in the dining room. She brought me a piece of string and we hung it from a curtain rod.

When she is not involved in these projects, she plays with her dolls, puts them to sleep, changes their diapers, makes strollers out of bins and spreads out blankets for picnics and boats and whichever way her imagination takes her. She got tall enough and strong enough to open the fridge doors, so she can help herself to the snacks I keep in the bottom drawer: squeezy yogurts and regular yogurt cups and string cheese. I leave the bowls of dry cereal on the table ( if someone didn't finish theirs during breakfast) and she would snack from them.

Painting

She comes to sit on my lap occasionally, and to cuddle up. But lately she has been valuing her freedom of roaming more than the comfort she gets.

Someone must be thinking, what about the academics? ( As if all this that she does could not qualify as a full day of schoolwork). Well, she likes when I read books to her. She knows the first two letters in her name and points out that combination whenever we encounter it. She learned the first letters in her brothers' names. I have a bag of magnetic letters which I got when the oldest was one and half. She likes to assemble them on the fridge.

She can count solidly to ten, and more shakily to twenty. She is learning her numbers from pressing them on the microwave pad to cook her morning oatmeal. When she is asked how old she is, she says that she is in "quarters", which means two and three quarters. She also knows that if you have one marshmallow and you need to end up with three ( like your brother), you need two more. And she know what two more looks like!

She knows what we do on Shabbat, and how we get ready for it. She knows that Hebrew books go the other way from the English ones. She has a few favorite Hebrew songs, and she sings them on her own: HaShafan Hakatan, Af Echad, Torah, Hashem is here.

She also still mercifully naps most days ( my boys gave up naps right after turning 2), so we all get a bit of downtime.

So, while I cannot tell you exactly what she does all day, I know that she keeps herself busy. Lately, 6 yo complained how she does not get to do any real schoolwork, and all my talk about how her playing is her schoolwork was not what he wanted to hear. He is not the only one. I just saw an article where a veteran homeschooler explained how all different activities can count as schoolwork. As far as I am concerned, she is doing quite well, whether formally, or informally. She is proof that unschooling works.

the art of bread making

Quick accomplishments, by the kid:

• 2yo can recognize "Publix", both the logo and the word. She pointed it out on her body wash, a bag of flour, seltzer. (Now you know where I prefer to shop!) I gave her Chobani yogurt yesterday. While eating it, she told me that it has her name on it. She meant that it has Ch, just like the beginning of her name. She can also orally continue patterns: red, blue, red, blue, etc. She spent a lot of time making "birthday cake" with geoboard. And she is working hard on memorizing a few of her favorite books.
• 6yo finally got the hang of tying his shoelaces. We tried last year, but it was an exercise in frustration. This time, the first time I showed him, he was able to tie them. His math is going smoothly, he wants more greater than/less than problems. He got his first notch in tae kwon do. He reads books to 2 yo, when he's in the mood. He is riding his bike.
• 8yo wrote another ambitious plan for today, with 20-plus points. By late afternoon, he accomplished six. He wrote Chumash and math first, and those went well. Right now, he is reading his way through Yahadus textbook, based on Rambam's Sefer haMitzvot. He informed me that he reached his first mitzvah derabanan. 

I called boys to unload the dishwasher and set up the table for dinner. When they were not coming fast enough, I discovered that they were actually cleaning up a Pokemon game. They used to leave things like that for some hazy later, which never happened. We also ended up having most of our dinner meal in Hebrew. I didn't know how to say "string beans", but the kids knew orez (rice), dag (fish), mitz (juice), mayim (water). They also thought it was great fun, and kind of started it themselves.

I keep reminding myself to take deep breaths and to look at the big picture. There is such a drive to get something accomplished NOW, that sometimes it is hard to realize that skills take a long time. I keep looking at all the things that were such a struggle for 6 yo last year, and now they are going much smoother. A child is like a loaf of bread: you cannot hurry up the dough to rise, nor you can bake it super-quickly. To get a good result, everything needs to take time.