Just what he needed

Do you know who's thriving at home so far? My three-year-old. He potty trained and having a potty available to use as necessary is what did it. He naps as he needs, just goes and tucks himself in and then comes out when he's awake and ready to come out. He spent close to an hour every day painting with watercolor. I just need to get him water and close the door to the sunroom. He has been painting sheet after sheet, mixing colors, using different brushes, making up stories about his creations. Then he cuts them up, tapes them, modifies them further.

He has been playing with Cliks: building swords and guns of all kinds, imagining things, creating whole worlds. He is all about weapons and shooting and fighting, yet he's extremely mellow to his younger sister. This is a healthy release of aggression.

He made a cockroach

He has been playing with his older sister non-stop. I often end up breaking up their play to get her to do her schoolwork. He sidles up with his Costco book, and he does his "math"; he just circles what he likes on every page. He recognizes a few letters. Last year in Montessori he supposedly knew him all. Now I can see that not everything has stuck, but it's ok, because he is only three and I want him to think that what he's doing right now, all this painting and building, is what's important.

We've been to the zoo and aquarium and he loves the ocean pop-up book. He keeps asking to go back. He wants to go to the park or hike trails. He often tramps around outside our large yard, digging in the dirt, finding bugs and other treasures. He rides his trike down the path full speed.

At the zoo

Childhood is short. Childhood can also be easy and not require much. I forgot how much I love this stage, when they are old enough to talk and say the darnest things (Mommy, can I help you make coffee cause I Love you). They are still little, but they can already do things for themselves. They do not have an attitude yet, but the personality is there. I am pleased to have this child back at home with me.

even more unschooling

4 yo started reading Bob books. I had them forever, and I was pretty sure that she knew her letters, or at least enough of them to start reading. I knew that she was interested. When I pulled down the first one, she looked at it and read it as if she knew what is inside. She definitely has a tendency to name letters rather than say the sounds that they make, but I am sure it will go away. I am in no rush to get through the set or to get her reading fluently, but she is ready and interested. No drilling, no pressure, no stress, no reading readiness programs, just good old interest and house full of books.

Yesterday 10 yo chose "What Your Fourth Grader Needs to Know" as his car reading on the way to tae kwon do. From what I know about those books, if he learns everything that is inside, he will be ahead of most 4th graders. Since this is not the first time he is reading that book, we should be OK.

8 yo agreed that he should practice some writing. He has been picking poems to copy, of all things. We tried a limerick, but the lines were too long. Tonight he copied some lines from "Why oh Why Are Deserts Dry?" Considering how I feel ready to give up on getting this child to write down anything, this copying is very good news. He plans to copy the entire book, one stanza per day.

4 yo fed the chickens while the boys attended a workshop on poisonous plants. Afterwards I got a long lecture on which plants I should be careful not to eat ( foxglove, oak leaves, pear seeds). 1 yo crawled and crawled through the grass and pointed at those chickens.

The boys had zoo homeschool class. I took the two younger ones to the sprinkler park. 1 yo crawled through the splash pad and scuffed his knees and ankles pretty badly. By the end, he seemed eager to walk, downward facing dog style. If the PT will not cause him to walk, the desire to be on all surfaces will.

At home, 8 yo and 4 yo are organizing a desk in their room to serve as their workshop (some sort of ninja training center, I suppose). They brought over markers, scissors, a chair, and a notebook. I am wondering whether 8 yo is ready to start making projects on his own terms. I cannot even imagine what they will look like, but they are his projects, not mine.

10 yo made a model of a hillside with a secret entrance to an army base underneath, complete with stairs and chambers. The other day he made a pueblo. His material of choice is card stock. I thought I will use it to print out posters and flashcards, but kids have other plans.

In the middle of doing Chumash today, right before we got to new pesukim, 10 yo asked me, totally out of the blue: "What is your biggest fear?" I answered: "Something bad happening to one of the kids." I asked him what is his (I was pretty sure that was the reason for the question). He said: "Losing out financially in a major way." Well, I did not know that was on his mind, although after blowing a whole lot of his allowance and present money, he has not been spending any of it lately. I told him how even if you lose all the money, as long as you are willing to work hard and be smart about it, it is possible to be OK.

Serendipitously, a friend of mine just recently wrote how kids' emotional health comes before academics. I was thinking how his question had nothing to do with what we were learning and could have been misconstrued as stalling or distracting. By now, I seem to sense when they are distracting, and when they have a pressing need which takes precedence over learning.

Bananagrams

We played a few rounds of Bananagrams with 10 yo. He always ends up being a rotten banana: parts of words hanging, made-up words, misspelled words. I noticed that 8 yo kept stopping him and correcting his words. 8 yo does not play; too much pressure. I kept talking up how he seems to be quite good at spelling now and he might want to give it a try. He reluctantly agreed with me. He made a bunch of three letter words, and it was hard adding other words to them. I stopped my game and helped him out. He breathed a sign of relief when we used up all the letters in his pile.

Today, I told the boys that we are going to restart doing Chumash ( I took a break during Pesach). 8 yo said that we have mainly not been doing anything, so it is time to start a lot of other things. I asked him, what else? He said: spelling.

I almost fell over.


Then there was an evening game of Bananagrams. I could not play with both boys at the same time, and 1 yo was very cranky and very ready to go to sleep. Bottom line, I messed it up badly, by totally creaming all involved parties ( including my husband). 10 yo was on 8 yo's team, and 8 yo was in tears. When I finished, he said that he's so bad at this, so bad.

And then he swiped across the table and scattered the tiles.

10 yo had no problem scrambling all his tiles mid-game and coming up with this monstrosity

I am not holding my breath for spelling for tomorrow. But now I have evidence that he at least knows when the word looks right and when it needs to be fixed.

unsupervised backyard dig

In my house, a major part of what kids are doing is working on "the pit" in the backyard. It is a clubhouse, a rain shelter, a guard tower. Once or twice I was asked to come out there and inspect it. Overall, though, they are perfectly happy trudging up the hill behind our house with shovels and disappearing into the thicket. leaving me behind.

Overall, and especially with unschooling this week, I let them be. They come back, eventually, sweaty and muddy. The weather is warm enough so only clothes need to be shed, not the winter jackets. The huge clunks of mud are scraped off on the ridges of front steps, but that red clay still makes its way into the coat closet, to dry and fall off and disintegrate into dust, covering the knees of baby's pajamas. He pulls up by the front screen door now, asking them to take him along.

I do not supervise the digging and the backyard exploring. Whichever conflicts they have, they work out on their own. Occasionally someone might come in crying, but it is usually more fun to be out there.

I do not always view all this digging favorably, especially when I am the one stuck cleaning up the mud or washing yet another load of laundry. Sometimes I wish they did something more productive and useful. Sometimes I wish they did something more academic. Sometimes I wish they were in school, clean and neat.

And bored.

And wishing to be out there in the back, digging in a pit of mud, covering it with pine branches and old shower curtain; crafting a desk and decks and other spaces discrete only in the rules of their game.

Play is so fundamental to humans. Freedom to explore and make mistakes and try things out without any grown-up oversight: why should this be saved up for college instead of being an essence of childhood?

One of things I bemoan is living in a place without sidewalks, without a library or a park within walking distance, on a block without other kids my kids' age. I wish they had a gang, a group. I wish that I could send them to a corner store with a ten dollar bill to buy milk. I wish there was somewhere for them to walk to on their own. I wish that it would be viewed as normal. Moreover, I think that my kids do not wish those things because they expect to be driven to places and rely on grown-ups to get them there. I saw a statistic that fewer teens are getting their permits and licenses, presumably because they see no need in having the independence of a car. That scares me.

But back to play. I even have a nice article backing me up that unsupervised play today is in danger of disappearing. Caution: it might cause severe nostalgia for your own wild childhood, because, chances are, whichever childhood you had, it was more adventurous than whatever your kids are getting.

the past couple days (photoblog)

 Friday afternoon in the park ( for 20 minutes, I dragged all the kids to the library for the book sale which is taking place in MARCH).

 7 yo and 4 yo davening together

 We went to the RV show. None of us have ever been inside an RV, but, with 4 kids, hotel room rental is getting tricky. We are dreaming about RV ownership at this point, but we learned a thing or two. The kids had a blast going through different RVs, looking to cool features.

 Our dear friend built a tether ball for the kids. They love it and spend all their free time playing.

 A trip to 4H. The kids learned about animals, petted and fed the sheep, saw the eggs incubate and handled the baby chicks. 

 This is the second part of 4H trip: wilderness survival. The kids learned what to put into emergency kit, how to avoid survival situation, and how to take care of your needs in case of emergency. The culmination was building a shelter. Each one of my kids ended up on a different shelter-building team. Somehow these unsocialized homeschoolers were able to come together, delegate, self-organize, and build. The last step was taking the shelters apart and the kids did it without fuss (mostly).

snowy day

Since we actually got snow and ice, I declared today to be a snow day. We have not been having very good days lately, and I have been quite anxious about my husband being at the hospital overnight while I was home with constant talk of losing power and heat and water. I was snappy, and the kids were not cooperating.

So this morning I said that today will be snow day, only chumash and mishna for 9 yo ( his rebbi walked to our house; I am so impressed with his level of commitment, and I think it made an impression on 9 yo, too). 9 yo finished Sanhedrin today.

The kids were not even eager to get out into all this. I thought: they have been hearing all the crazy things about ice and snow, so why would they think there is any fun to be out there? Meanwhile I got dressed and marched out, at 8 am, using the opportunity of my husband being around.

I was the only person out. It was still snowing, and beautiful. I kept stopping to look around and take pictures. As I turned around to come back, I was confronted with a set of footprints in the snow, my footprints. I have not been so starkly aware of the path I leave behind me. I was retracing my steps and clearly saw: here I slipped, here I dragged my legs, here I stopped. It is so easy to think that what I do and how I do it does not matter, but here I had a material evidence of my mark.

When I got back, the boys went out to shovel and play. They sledded in the backyard on a roll-up plastic sled I got in Goodwill years ago, made little snowpeople and scraped off the cars. 7 yo came in first; he was hungry for breakfast. 9 yo stayed out close to an hour.

By noon the sun came out, and everything started the melt. By the end of the day, snow remained only on the lawn. I was so glad that I did not tell kids to do schoolwork today and instead let them go out there and enjoy this brief winter visit.

 This video is from yesterday. It is baby's first experience in the snow. He loved crawling in it.

back to more structured learning

These past two days we went back to having more of a structured day. The kids had breakfast, got dressed and davened as usual, and then I wrote up the plan for the day. Both days they were done with the schoolwork by lunch, which meant that they worked from 9 till 12 ( with breaks). Both days we had an outing in the afternoon. Even though the baby did not nap as much as I wanted him to, staying home while he napped and working with the boys helped. I even dare say, these two days went along the lines I would like our days to go: a good balance of assigned work, spontaneous learning and play.

In a nutshell, here is what 9 yo was assigned to do:

• math
• chumash
• mishna-with rebbe
• Lashon HaTorah
• script
• Rosetta Stone-Hebrew

Here is what 7 yo was assigned to do:

• math
• chumash
• Lashon HaTorah
• Printing Power
• Rosetta Stone-Hebrew

Yesterday we went to mini-golf as a siyum for 9 yo completing parshat Noach. He gave a short d'var torah on the Rashi which explained the difference between the generation of the flood and the generation of the dispersal. Today we went to see a new Marco Polo exhibit. Both days we were home by 4, which gave me enough time to cook dinner.

Both days the kids spent quite a bit of time reading and playing. 9 yo killed at least an hour each day on his DS. They watched some TV (documentaries and Magic School Bus, their choice). 3 yo did her projects and played. I caught her this morning leafing through a chapter book.

These two days, structure felt nice.

Relaxed schooling

I have not posted much because last week everyone took turns being sick, and then we have been out and about as much as we can before the baby comes. So this is a photoblog of some of the things we have been busy with.

We finally sprouted some seeds, almost a month after Tu B'Shevat. The kids wrote the labels, put the seeds into the right compartments, and observed them for a week. They were upset when I did not let them plant the seedlings outside, but we still get frosts here. 

We went to the park to ride bikes. The oldest brought my adult-sized scooter, that my friends got for me in college, and mastered it. 3 yo finally learned to pedal on her tricycle. One of the biggest regrets about the area where I live is that you have to drive to the park, it would be over an hour walk, with crossing a major street. There is no sidewalk on our street, and our driveway slopes downward, so the kids have to be taken places to ride their bikes. The boys also got to wing with abandon, and 3 you finally decided that she's ready for a big-kid swing.

Since we do not follow a school calendar, we were able to have some friends over for President's day, who were off. The boys still had a list of scheduled things to do, but they did them quickly, since they wanted to spend more time with their friends. It worked out nicely for me, since I could focus on one boy at a time, while the other one played. Here is the whole gang, eating lunch. The secret to easy set-up and clean-up: paper goods and get everyone to pitch in.

It was also the last day of the Great Backyard Bird count. I printed out a tally sheet, explained to everyone what we are doing, and they went outside to bird watch. There was a record keeper, bird spotters, time keeper, crumb thrower, and whichever other positions they came up with.

One morning I woke up to 8 yo and 3 yo making bridges out of card stock. They were using Polly houses to test out their strength. They made a reinforced arch and strong triangle bridges, then they doubled up cardstock to see what happens and what kind of load it could take.

Yesterday, after coop classes we went to the zoo. The kids asked for the reptile house and the pandas. They finally spotted the king cobra, which previously had been hiding in one of the pipes in its exhibit. There is so much to b said for getting memberships to zoos and museums and coming there every couple weeks, so that small changes can be observed and whichever concepts are learned can be reinforced. 6 yo learned how to read by looking at the exhibit signs. That works well if I take time to read those exhibit signs, even if it is for the fiftieth time and I know them by heart!

In the Story of the World, where we slacked off for a bit, we finally came to the wars of the Greeks. One of the suggested projects was soap carving, to make Greek statues. The boys tried their best, but followed their hearts. 8 yo carved two fish, an Olmec head and a self-portrait. 6 yo carved two faces, schematically, after some crying that he is no good at carving.

Today we went to the Puppet Theater. The show was good, and there is also museum and a build-a-puppet workshop. The kids made lighting bugs. The presenter first asked about some facts about bugs, and 8 yo raised his hand and explained how the chemical reaction takes place inside by mixing two chemicals, and how bugs use it to find mates. Then there were detailed instructions on building a puppet and optional participation in putting a show together. They boys were on the team with two other kids. They worked out who will say what, and then presented it to the audience. 3 yo built her puppet with some help from me, and then went buzzing around the room, tagging other people. 

3 yo buzzing 

her own monster

reading about different kinds of puppets

In the news without photos, since we were stuck home last week, we were able to crack quite a bit of megillah with 8 yo. I offered a siyum in Lego land (his dream) if he finishes the whole thing. Being at home allowed us to do a perek a day. Today he declared that he wants to finish it up. The only problem: we did not get home from the puppet show till one, and, with lunch, did not get to schoolwork till 2. And we had the last three perakim to go, of which two are really long. He sat at it for over hours, and we got a perek and a half down. He reads the Hebrew and translates, with some help from me. I am quite proud of his skills and his perseverance.

too much Pokemon

My kids got into Pokemon this summer. Really got into it: the cards, the lingo, the games, the stats, the videos. I assumed it is a fad and will pass. But this fad has been fed by 8 yo getting Pokemon cards as a reward for good davening in his groups on Shabbos. I also got the wind that the other boys are not so into Pokemon, so has quite a good time picking.

I have been waiting for this to go away. I gave it months and months. I let them play some games and watch some videos. I let them keep their cards and washed quite a few of them in their pockets. But the love of Pokemon is not diminishing. Moreover, it is all they talk about and play. At least it seems like that. It is consuming a large amount of their time and energy.

I have two choices. The first is to ban Pokemon outright. I tried it the first time around, about 3 years ago. I said that no Pokemon talk will take place at the table and they can talk Pokemon with their friends and not with me. It worked, but the primary reason was that 8 yo was not a fluent reader, and 6 yo could not read at all, so there was no feeding into it. They also did not have stacks and stacks of cards. This time around it will not work.

The second choice is that of quail (slav). When the Jewish people wandered in the dessert, they had mann: a perfect food. But all the wanted was quail, the real meat. The lesson of the quail was that it covered the ground one day, and there were giant heaps of it. It was more that anyone could eat, or wanted to eat. It was coming out of their noses. Afterwards, the people did not ask for quail again.

So I am thinking: oversaturation. I will get some library Pokemon books, I will make them spend a whole day doing just Pokemon games and Pokemon movies. I know that they will reach a point where nobody will want to deal with those Pokemons. My limit setting has been backfiring, so no limit might be just the cure for this malaise.

I am planning this Pokemon marathon for one day next week. Stay tuned...

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.

motivation

Yesterday, we took kids bowling, It was a rainy day, my husband thought he could squeeze it in between procedures, we have Kids Bowl Free, and we have not gone in a long time. The kids were all excited. It served as a good motivator to daven and get dressed quickly. The davening took a bit longer than expected, but the new siddur was the name of the game.

When we got to the alley, we saw that a few other people had the same idea. We ended up bowling all on the same lane. Of course, the question was: bumpers or no bumpers? We chose to got with bumpers and a bowling contraption for the 2 yo. Pretty amazingly, she got a strike on her first push! The boys did not too shabby themselves. By the end of the game, I tied with 8 yo and three of us broke a hundred. Since we had a second game free, and everyone felt quite good about themselves, we decided to try bowling without bumpers. After first gutter balls, the boys lost all confidence. It did not help that my husband had to leave in the middle of the second game. By the end, 6 yo was bowling with a contraption, and 8 yo was in tears that 2 yo had a higher score than he did. I wanted to say that it's not about score, it's about practice, but then stopped. Why did we make such a big deal about all the strikes and spares on the first round if it's not about score? How often do we expect kids to be just as good at something as we are, without realizing that we had years and years of practice? And then we choose to measure the success by numbers.

It was not a peaceful car ride on the way back home, fueled by hunger. During lunch, when 8 yo calmed down a bit, all of a sudden he said: "My body is telling me it wants to learn some Torah." I wanted to know what kind of learning his body was in the mood for. He  said, his arms say, Shmuel Aleph and his legs, Shmuel Beit and his head is not sure. I wondered if any of his body wants to continue Vaeiyra. He said, yes. I asked him whether he remembered what was the last thing we learned ( over two weeks ago). He remembered about Avimelech taking Sorah. I told him that I got a new chumash for him in Israel, with Rashi with nekudot. He got excited about it, I showed it to him and we started. We did three pesukim, he needed to be reminded what is "be'er". We finished on the place being called Be'er Sheva and I said that we traveled very close to it. I pulled out a map of Israel and then he found Be'er Sheva on it. He hypothesised that sheva were four slaves of Avimelech, and then Avraham, Avimelech and Pichol.

Overall, I was quite encouraged that he asked to learn. Maybe I can let go on the Judaics and they will happen with desire.

I have been reflecting on my davening a bit  lately. I have been saying it for years by now, starting at 13. I remember feeling envious of others who said it so quickly and ( supposedly) knew all the words they were saying. It took me a long time and I knew every 5th word. It did not help that I was taught some davening just by repetition after a teacher. It did not help that my first siddur was all in Hebrew and I did not have anyone telling me which page had what on it. But somehow, over the years, I got to the point where I know what most of the words are. No worksheets, no intense study, no fill-in-the-blanks, no tests. No crazy motivation either, just a desire to say things fast enough to keep with the tzibbur. (After praying at the Kotel without the tzibbur I wonder whether the reason for lack of concentration has to do with keeping up with others. In yoga, you are told to do what is comfortable for you, and not to look at others. Why should our tefillah be exactly in lockstep with others?) So, if I got to my level of understanding just through years of slow-and-steady, why do I want my kid to get it all "now"? Why don't I give him a siddur with English translation, so he can look up meaning as he chooses? Why not leave the books on tefilla  around instead of constantly telling him to sit down and focus and pay attention and not mumble?

As a broader question: how much of a certain state of mind can be taught and how much of it has to desired from within? How much space should I be leaving for my kids to develop their relationship to Judaism? How much learning do I need to facilitate and how much will happen despite of me? I know that I cannot control my son's desire to learn. I can only make sure that I do not get in the way.

And today, I got in the way of that learning. In the morning , we went to a Children's Museum. He had one0time passes that we won in a raffle, and today was raining again. It was a bit too young for the boys, but they stopped by the ball station. There, all different machines pick up balls and make them go on belts, up in the air, from station to station. They stayed there for hours. 2 yo checked out everything else: the underground, the painting, the store, the house, and delivery truck, the kids' show.

As we were driving back, the boys asked to watch Pokemon. I used to say no, but yesterday I said that I will think about it. SO I said that they can watch after we finish the perek. That was a bad idea: 8 yo was obviously trying to finish ASAP, and was not interested in getting in the intricacies of the perek. I got his attention a bit with discussion of what is Eshel, but overall, he was not here, but in Pokemon. The funny part was, once I found the movie and the kids sat down to watch, 6 yo ran out five minutes into it, screaming that it's too scary. He was not able to finish it. Somehow, Mommy still knows best.

random ramblings

A few snippets from these few days:

On Monday we went strawberry picking. After we were done, we had picnic lunch. At some point, 7 yo went to poke in the mud with a stick. 6 yo ( he's six today!) went to another picnic table to munch on his matzah in quiet. I was having a conversation with my sister about importance of being by yourself instead of a part of a group and how independent thinking can only be achieved this way. I was remarking how 7 yo did not ask to have playdates, see more friends, etc, but he spent a chunk of his time by himself. She was objecting, saying that my personality is more introverted than most ( it's true) and it would not work for everyone ( probably also true). As we were finishing this conversation, 6 yo suddenly says: "So, could Hashem multiply himself?" I'm pretty sure such questions do not arise from groupthink.

Later, as we started on our way back home, 7 yo said: "Everything in the world is made from something else, like tree comes from a seed." What a great opportunity to explain creation yesh meyesh as opposed to yesh meayin! Again, I'm sure that if he was playing with a bunch of kids previously instead of digging in the dirt, those thought would not develop.

Today, at breakfast, 7 yo asked a classic hagaddah question: why do we say that this year we are slaves, aren't we free? This led to a discussion of what is slavery and what is freedom.

This afternoon, the kid decided to sail cardboard boats in the bathtub. 7 yo made of his own design. Now, I can tell you a bit about buoyancy, etc, but it is one of rites of passage for a boy to design and test out his own boat. Nobody else will celebrate its triumph/failure, nobody will grade it, nobody will test it, but the lesson of making something with your own two hands and your brain will stick.

The homeschooling coop is planning a curriculum swap. This fills me with anxiety, especially being asked, now that I have a second grader, I must be using a curriculum. The truth is, I do not have a curriculum, and I'm questioning the need for curriculum till much older ages ( middle school? high school?). But I have a drive to get my kids to learn. And they have a drive to learn. Even if it involves digging in the dirt.

A friend of mine posted this:

She said it is especially for kids with special needs. I wonder if play deprivation creates kids with special needs.

As we were entering homeschooling coop today, my 6 yo grabbed onto two door handles and walked his feet up the door, till he was practically hanging upside down. No school would tolerate this behavior. I know that if he were in a traditional school, sooner or later someone would attach some kind of label to him. ADHD. Hyperactivity. Impulsiveness. Defiance. Immaturity. You think of one and slap it on. I know that by keeping him label-free, I get to see his other sides: generous heart. Overflowing gratitude. Kindness. Fairness. Intensity.

If I learn to look at my kids as just kids and not my ambassadors to the world, not test scores and brilliance and behavior issues, I will be able to relate to them as kids and not as problems.