April in Pictures

So, April happened

Everybody Wants to Quit in February

Things have much improved since my last post about homeschooling where I was on the verge or quitting.  They say you always want to quit in November and February.  The school year started in September, and that made 2 out of 5 months sucky, or 20% of the year.  So no wonder life seemed so bleak.  

We held our first poetry tea time this week.  A Brave Writer idea.  Big success.

We've been keeping active.  Each week we take trips to the pool or to the skate park, plus a Thursday Parkour class, Monday hikes or outdoor meetups, and Friday music lessons.

I've gotten more firm than earlier in the year by insisting that electronics stay off in the morning.  This has been as much of a challenge for me as for the kids.  But I feel less despair about our week when the TV is off.  I insist on about 10 minutes of practice time reading or a workbook activity, then another 10 minutes practicing music before the screen time can begin.  The kids still fight me on this like I'm imposing a prison sentence, but I know that I'm not torturing them.  Twenty minutes a day is really not that much of a burden on them, but it always takes about an hour of arguing before we get started.  I'm sure that eventually they will realize its easier to just do it... or they'll convince me to stop requiring it.  But I hope they start taking pride in their progress one of these days, because I feel it's a good compromise and balance between work and play.

I've also been noticing more and more how much Minecraft and the youtube videos supplement Kaio's world.   He's creating his own universe within the Minecraft game.  Sometime maybe I can get him to make a video tour of it.  It represents his vision, his values, his dreams, and his imagination.  Nala learns tons from the shows she watches on Netflix.  She's always recounting facts about animals and the world.

We took a trip to the National Building Museum for a homeschool class on city planning.  The kids constructed buildings out of recycled materials and then placed them on the city grid in a zoned area.  Apparently the National Building Museum is still teaching an old form of city planning, with distinct zones instead of mixed zone areas.  Personally I'm a fan of multi-use zoning, but it doesn't hurt for the kids to get exposed to this perspective too.

We've been getting out with other homeschoolers more often.  These pictures are from a hike to celebrate the blooming of Witch Hazel (above).

So in general, I'm optimistic about the 'education' Kaio's getting right now.  Maybe it's more like an edumakation.  I've peeled away from most anything academic.  But I realize that we're not there right now and it is a waste of time and energy to try to force it down his throat.   And, really, I knew all along that we'd be a nontraditional family.

As much as I realize public school is not the right place for Kaio, I realize it is the right place for Nala.  At least Kindergarten.  We have two girls Nala's age on either side of our house, and they are all three best friends.  She wants to go to school with them and get on that big yellow bus.  I know she'll do great in school.  She's attentive and interested in learning new things.  She loves craft activities and talking to new people.  She'll be a model student, I'm sure.  My main hesitation in sending her there is just a fear of her being tainted into bad habits,  basically I'm afraid of loosing my sweet girl.

So I've been putting off registering her.  But she wants to go, and I do really think that she'll enjoy the activities and constant information.  When I asked her about kindergarten, she said, "How about I go and see if I like it, and then do homeschool if it's too long."

She's seen what our homeschooling is like, so she knows what she'll be missing out on.  I hope that she goes and gets a sense of what school is like, creates that memory, and then decided she wants to homeschool.  I think that if she makes the choice after having the public school exposure, she'll take more ownership of her homeschool education and be more mature because of it.

Kaio's such a different story though... much like I was as a kid... or...uh... still am.

Someone's Sleeping in My Bed

Two different instances over this weekend, I walked in to my room to find a little angel sleeping soundly in my bed.
10am Monday:

8pm Sunday:

A Pile of Blank White Paper and a Trip to McD's

Every night I leave a pile of blank white paper near colored Sharpies in Kaio's room.  And every morning I find fresh reflections of his latest musings.

I save them.   All of them.

I have a stack about two inches high of these drawings.

Sometimes I get him to narrate what's going on, and I transcribe onto the page.

The pictures usually portray scenes using characters from games and cartoons he likes.  Many times he creates mashups between two worlds, like turning Super Mario Brothers into Angry Birds, or making Angry Birds in a Minecraft world.  I see this ability to thread ideas from one realm with another as critical working skill that leads to incredible innovation.  For example the new Bowing Dreamliner was built inspired by the flight efficient albatross, which can soar great distances expanding very little energy.

I'm also impressed by his ability to change perspective of the subjects.  So he can draw them forward, sideways, upside down or from behind.  He's been able to do this for a while and I think it's a pretty advanced skill.

I deconstruct the drawings like a literary novel.  The use or lack of color, the white space, the movement, and the vehicles.  I love seeing these drawings every day.  They are my window into his mind, his obsessions.  And I'll probably save them forever.

This is what he made last night.  Nala told me in the morning that Kaio kept her awake playing McDonald's and making her food.  I'm peeved at how McD's has managed to infiltrate our lives.  Their happy meals have toys from the new Lego movie and the kids somehow know that through watching videos on youtube.  So today they begged me to stop at the M's on the side of the road and squeal with joy at the site of the big M.
A clash between my healthy all natural parenting side and my homeschooling side.  Healthy me wants nothing to do with Mc'D's but homeschooling me sees lots of opportunities for quality discussion.  I ended up taking them to McDonalds for Lego Movie happy meals and the kids were the happiest happy meal kids in the world.  Kaio planted four kisses on my lips and put on his seat belt without a fight.  We talked about why I don't like to eat there, about factory cows and pastured cows.  I don't think its a big deal to make trips like this once in a blue moon.  But In the end McDonald has won.  They have one more set of youth hooked on their child marketing machine.  I only hope they make smart decisions about how often to eat there when they are older.

School - You mean JAIL!

"This isn't working!" I said with a hint of hysteria.  "You need to go back to public school."

"You mean jail." He replied without skipping a beat in the annoyed tone of a 16 year old.

For my boy, who's like a space cadet most of the time, this was a very definite, clearly opinionated and thought out comparison.  It shook me.  He doesn't usually say thoughtful things.  He usually just talks about video games and cartoons.

And how did he find kindergarten to be like jail?  That's pretty rough.

Then when we try to do homeschooling lessons at home he says, "Ugh.  Why do you make me into a slave!"

This is even activities that I would think would be fun, like lego inspired work.

Some people are just not meant to be teachers, and I am one of them.  I am failing miserably.  It's not that I'm a perfectionist, which is the usual reason why parents fail as teachers.  I'm struggling so much with different approaches, trying to find a rhythm that satisfies us both.  But everything I try doesn't work, and I give up, and then I freak out and do nothing, and then that doesn't work either.

I tried teaching with work books and reading materials from different curriculums.  He just boroughs his head, flops on the floor, or stares into space.  I tried visual math games, and different reading programs that were working for him at public school, he whines and begs not to do it saying, "I hate math, this is too hard!"  It takes consent redirecting and threatening to get through a workbook page that he can do, easily.  Then I contemplate, is this stupid page really worth the fight when he obviously gets the concepts?

I've tried taking a break from all the pressure, and just letting him roll with his interests all day.  He watches you tube all-day-long.  I can't handle it, seeing him waste a day glued to the ipad, never turning it off, eating food in front of it, eyes never leaving.  I ask him to turn it off and take a break, he wont, then we fight and I have to take it away.  I feel the pang in my gut, feeling guilty for being a dictator.

Last week actually went the best.  I told him that we wouldn't have any screen time before lunch - a compromise.  I stuck to the rule myself too, which was really hard for me!  During that time, I dedicated 45 minutes or more to just sitting with him and playing in whatever he was doing.  We didn't fight, we got out of the house for more activities that week, and screen time was cut in half.

But I still felt like I needed more.  Like there is so much more to the world than just sitting on the floor and playing with legos, and I need to be feeding him this information.  But it's such a specific blend of more that he needs.  And I need a PhD in Child Psychology to figure out how to cook it up.

I've had many people ask me what we do for homeschool since I'm not teaching reading.   I have this really cool response that always stops their criticism dead in its tracks, "We're emphasizing a science and engineering focus, hands on and experiential learning.  So we do building, robotics, chemistry, electricity, physics.  Things like that."  These people know he wouldn't be getting that in public school except a couple hours a week.

Ice Globe

But, I feel in my heart that its partial BS.  Sure I can come up with tons of ways that we do physics (play bad piggies, shot sling shots and bow and arrows, watch movies about space and the planets)  But I don't have anything to show for our days homeschooling.  No proof to demonstrate he understands the things we talk about.  And then I fight with myself internally over whether that matters or not.

Mari thinks I should just put him back in school and quit it with the drama.  He's fully supportive of homeschooling but wants to protect me from getting so depressed and frustrated.  The thing is I know that homeschooling is better for Kaio, but I think I'm failing him by not knowing how to help him through the areas he struggles.  At least in school, the special ed teachers were really good at that.  He always kept up to grade level.  Since we started homeschooling he's fallen behind on every measure - from academic to social to confidence to level of general happiness.

Even though he was 'learning' in the traditional sense, he hated it.  He thinks it's jail.  What kind of parent would I be to send my kid to jail?  I don't want to do that.

But I gave him an ultimatum.  If this week is leaves me with that bad feeling pit in my stomach then he needs to go back to school.  I think it is better than getting yelled at by me throughout the day.  I know that if I do send him back then we'll still be fighting before and after school.  I don't really want to send him back, and I'm going to try to find ways to get the evidence of progress I need to feel comfortable, without having it take so much haggling and threatening.