Just a little bit of whining... just a little

I think our biggest trial in homeschooling right now is getting over whining. An interesting response to my cry for help from a friend who taught in public school said to me that she often found it easier for the kids to stop whining when the other kids would remind them of the rule to not whine. I suppose it is a lot easier with other kids around doing work, for a child to work without complaint. When I channel my school days I can remember the feeling of doing my work while others were doing it around me and I liked it. I never considered this. However, we've made up our mind about homeschooling and about our homeschool philosophy (we knew we would have to before we started), so this advantage is just out of the question for W. He is the oldest and he will just have to learn to stop whining. My goal: to be as patient as possible and act as if it the first time I am asking him to be happy, every time I ask him. THAT will be so tough! Luckily, this newfound knowledge brings me a bit of contentment about our homeschooling future. It will get easier as they are all sitting at the table doing their work. They'll be in it together.

Also, I'm looking for ways to make it just a bit more exciting for W, so he won't whine and complain much of the time. If anyone out there who reads my blog has ideas, please share. Fellow homeschoolers, what do you do, in your attitude, or your simple approach, to make school work less uninviting to your little pupils?

Choir

W started taking voice lessons about a month and a half ago. He has shown an interest in music and I knew that it would be good for him to receive some formal instruction in music theory. His instructor tells me he has a really good voice for singing and can hit the notes very well. He has been practicing a few songs. The first time he went he wasn't sure he would like it, but now he really likes going and his instructor is so great with him. She is very kind and patient. I just think she is great. She has many compliments about W and is impressed with his intellect.

She took the assignment of directing a children's choir in her neighborhood (our old neighborhood), that would be done through the elementary school's PTA. She asked if W would want to be a part of it and I thought it would be great to try. Salt Lake has a homeschool choir that I really want my kid to be a part of, but there is a lot of commitment and the practices and performances would be 30 mins away. It just seemed like too much for me as a young mom. I think maybe someday I will feel more confident about it, when all my children are more grown-up and independent and not needing naps. This small casual choir seemed like a great idea instead.

Today was the first time he went. I think it looked like fun. He had a bad fever yesterday and was laying in bed all day long. This morning he woke up with a scratchy voice and was a bit subdued, but no more fever. When we got to the choir practice, he was very nervous (which was weird to me because he is usually excited about being around a whole bunch of other children), but he participated whenever he knew the words to the song and he tried to do the actions as he watched the director. But he didn't seem very happy. Afterwards I asked him if he had a good time. He wasn't too thrilled about it. But he did say he would go again next week and see how it goes.

I think it will be a really good thing for him. He will learn how to follow instruction in a big group, and he will be able to be around some friends and perform with them. He seems to be apprehensive about most things at first and ends up enjoying them. That actually sounds a lot like how I am.

I hope he begins to like it. I really think he will, and the thought of him being a vocalist is pretty exciting to me. I think it will be really wonderful if the instrument he chooses to become accomplished in is his voice.

The Pledge of Allegiance

We say the pledge every morning in our home school. We are on week three now and E has it memorized already. I'm impressed with her. Her brain has been developing fast in that last few months. I need to pressure her more on her schoolwork, it isn't easy to get her attention. However, she has managed to get the Pledge of Allegiance memorized, without intention. :) She just recites it randomly, hence the impromptu parking lot video.

First day of school year 2013-2014

Our first day of school went so well, we were pretty much done by lunch time. With the exception of E, who had a 3-year-old moment and was sent to her room and ended up falling asleep. I am glad that today went well and I hope it sets a precedence. But I don't think most days we will end up having two sleeping girls during prime learning time. It was very nice to get started early in the morning when our minds are fresh and not feel the pressure to be accountable to anything else for the rest of the day but learning at our own pace. I hope my kids can always have a simple life full of learning and not be one of those families always going to and from and eating fast food all the time.

We started the day with history, reviewing the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. I am learning more about how to take on teaching history. I tried to pile it on too much last time, so this time I am taking it easier. Will likes doing the map work and suggested activities and projects, so we will be trying to do more things like that.

After lunch we had time to do some Happy Phonics. I bought this from the Love to Learn site when I got their complete First Grade curriculum kit for W a couple years ago. This came with it and I never even opened it because Will was already reading. I guess kids generally don't learn to read until first grade? I always thought they were taught to read in pre-school and Kindergarten. Anyway, over the summer I got it out and cut everything up and put all the games into sheet protectors and ziploc baggies and rubber bands and put it all in two huge binders. There is A LOT of stuff with it. As I was cutting it all up and learning about all the games I realized how cool it was. I don't think we will use all of the games for one single kid, but it is nice to have all the options and it all seems like such a fun way to teach reading.

This game is called The Muffin Game. It's the first game in the set, but the creator recommends to first teach them the alphabet song. That is easy. Then she recommends teaching them that the capital letters match the lowercase letters. That is where this muffin game comes in. I have had a hard time getting E interested in learning to read. The same techniques I used with Will do not work with E, but she LOVED this game. She thought it was so fun and felt so proud when she matched a muffin top to it's bottom. 

This game is fun too. You write down the letter they are suppose to find in this letter scramble and have them circle all of that letter on the page. E is trying to circle all the M's in this one. She is not quite ready for this game, but we will keep trying.

Brother helping sister.

I just love being at home with my kids. When we first decided to homeschool I was pretty worried about my mental well-being. I kept hearing all the other mom's around me talk about how they love when their kids are in school because they get that break during the day. I'm sure it would be nice to have that to get some errands done without the kids or be able to finish laundry all in one fell swoop, or do anything at all without interruption. But I can't help but feel happy that I get to spend my time with the three most awesome people in the world. They make me laugh and allow me to be myself and I get to be just like a kid with them. They like to help me and really want me to show them love. No one else in the world does that for me personally. I also know that they are getting the best life and the best upbringing possible by being with their mom most of the day, that is where children are meant to be. They aren't meant to be with strangers, it doesn't matter what their learning, they're meant to be with their mom and each other.

I think we're ready

I ordered and received all the books, I put our schedule in the calendar, I've organized each cubby (until I find changes need to be made). I think we're ready.

This is our board that my mom contributed to our school. I bet you didn't know why I wanted this memo board and that you were giving a contribution when you bought it for me, did you mom?

We are in a new home starting a new year and we've had a chance to really settle in now, so I'm trying to be more official about it at this time. At first we were going to do school in the basement, but it was too hard doing that at the end of last year, because as I needed to get things like laundry or dishes done, or to make lunch, I had to be away from the kid that was learning. We've been doing a little schoolwork through the summer and the kitchen just seems to be the best place to do it. We also have a front room that we are turning into a library where some school work (reading) will be done too. That is where our cubbies are currently located. We still have a desk in the basement in case W needs to get away from the distraction of the little girls to do some work or some reading.

I really felt like I needed an official desk for the kids to put in the library or near my desk in the kitchen. It was difficult to find just what I had in mind, but I think I scored with this antique children's desk and chair.

I love antiques and this is my first true antique, I got it for $50. It needs some polishing up, and some screws tightened, but other than that it is in great shape. I want to get a tempered glass top for it someday. It fits perfectly in this spot and looks great in our kitchen. W is kind of too big for it already I think. Or at least he will be for sure in about a year. So we are pretty much letting E claim the desk for now. She will be doing some actual structured work now, of course most of it will be playing. :) Will works at the kitchen table.

Cubbies 

I feel hopeful about this year. Last year was a train wreck, with the move and the pregnancy and baby arrival. I am praying a lot and trying to keep a proper frame of mind. Since the kids are taking Chinese language lessons during the day, we don't have the same kind of abilities as regular homeschoolers. It is hard to do schoolwork in the afternoon when children are programmed to play at that time, and friends are dropping by. I worked something out with their tutor to try starting lessons at 11:00 instead of 9:00. If we start at 8:00 every morning, we could get some of the tougher schoolwork done when our minds are fresh. I appreciate their tutor willing to start later and to try this out. It made it SO hard on all of us to have Chinese language lessons take priority. 

Art

I am not what you would call, "Artsy". For art classes while I was in school, I just followed the instructions exactly and tried to get the work done and over with. I remember being criticized in 7th grade art class for my pencil drawing. The assignment was to do this pencil drawing of a photograph of our choosing. I chose a photograph of a cat from a cat calendar I had at home (seriously didn't care). This art teacher started trying to teach me how to do a better job on my drawing. I'm not criticizing her at all! She was just doing her job. However, I remember walking away from her thinking, "I'll never understand that."

While the subject of Art is a small one and not as important as all the other subjects, I still think it is important for children to tap into their creative side. I do recognize the benefits, so I want to incorporate this into our home school.

I have just had the most difficult time finding a good book to use to teach my children art. I bought a coloring book that had pictures to color of all the different "masterpieces" from all over the world. It also had a brief history with each picture. My son seemed to like that book and enjoyed coloring it. But I think he is like me when it comes to art. He doesn't like to venture out and be creative. He likes to color the picture exactly as the original. I keep telling him it would be okay if he colored that girls hair neon orange, whatever he wanted. Nope. He had to look at a picture of the original painting and color it exactly the same. I get that he doesn't want to do much decision making with the colors, he would rather just do what has been working for centuries.

I have bought other books since and sent them right back to Amazon after looking at them and thinking that either A - it looked completely DULL, and art should be fun, or B - the book would require some knowledge of art to even teach from it (and I just know the color wheel... mmm yeah that's about it).

I just wanted to share that I found a very simple and easy book to teach art from. (Click on the picture to go to product page on Amazon)

We've done the first two lessons and they are easy and the kids thought they were fun. The book is SO simple and lesson plans are laid out step-by-step with a list of required materials to the side. There are even fun pictures of examples of the art. It says it is for grades 1 - 6, and I totally think you could start the book over and do it over and over again and the kids could do something totally different each time. You'd have to be a complete idiot to not be able to teach art from this book, and I'm an art idiot.

You might misunderstand.

I want to preface this post by saying two things first.

One, Perhaps I am a tad sensitive about this particular topic, so I apologize in advance.

And while I had, at one time, expressed interest in using the online K12 curriculum through Utah Virtual Academy, I have since made a definitive choice not to use it. Let me explain why. For one, I was interested only because I was SO overwhelmed as a mom who was pregnant and thought I would use it for just a year or two until I could get a better handle on things. Now I realize how silly that thinking was, because if I want to home school a certain way I just need to keep doing it and work it out. It won't get better if I put it off or ignore it. Also, while Utah Virtual Academy is a "charter school", and I understand what charter schools are, I know they are using K12 and that is a curriculum that is made by the government. While this is definitely a better option over sending your child to public school, I don't want the government to have a handle on my child's education at all. Especially now with common core among us, what a scary thing for our children! K12 professes to be a tailor made option for your child and we really need that for Will, but I am afraid it just doesn't offer some of the major components of a Classical-style education that we want for our children.

Now, onto the purpose of this post. As we are settling into a new area and getting to know people, and people are getting to know us, we are hearing all kinds of opinions on home schooling. Some people say, "Wow, that is so great that you are doing that!" and some people follow that up with, "I just don't have the patience and don't feel like I could do it." or  "I wish my husband were on board with that." Now these kind of personal revelations do not bother me and I can certainly understand them, and it makes me feel good that people applaud me in our adventure.

We also have been getting comments like, "I know it's just not right for my kids, they need that social aspect of school," and various sayings of the like as if people are trying to defend their choice to me for sending their kids to public school. First of all, I really don't care what you do with your kids as long as you aren't screwing them up so bad they'll be delinquents, I don't need your excuses. It's like they hear I home school and automatically assume I have opinions about their decisions. I don't! It is your own life, your own children and it is not my business. But then they say that and I think they have opinions about my children's social abilities because I am keeping them out of public school. I must say this is where I get the most defensive, because the whole "social" argument is just about the most stupid argument I have ever heard in my life for anything on the face of the earth. And yes, I am including any argument about Mormonism, such as we have horns on our head. Homeschoolers being socially inept is just about more dumb than that. (See my post on the social aspect of homeschooling). Here is what I really wish I could say to the people who come at me with that comment: "So you prefer subjecting your children to playground fights, mad gunman, pregnant teens, drugs, and pedophile teachers." Yeah, okay, maybe a tad extreme, but come on! Where is there evidence of socially inept homeschool children (don't give me the examples of the extreme Christian crazies please. I am talking REAL homeschooling parents who are homeschooling because they genuinely care about the quality of education their children are receiving)? We are slammed with images of children harmed at public school in the media, wouldn't THAT scare parents from the social aspect of public school, and looking at the accomplishments of homeschooled kids like Tim Tebow make them want to homeschool so they can have more control/influence over their child's social life? So this comment not only makes such little sense to me (also because in Utah, your kids can still participate in public school extracurricular activities), but it makes me kind of mad.

Sometimes I also get people saying, "My (son, daughter-in-law, niece, etc.) homeschools. They do the online thing that's free." So in other words they are using the K12 program, which is free, and all the books and supplies, sometimes even a computer, is sent to the student - uh, all at the taxpayers expense by the way. This comment bothers me because it is NOT THE SAME as what I am doing! I wish people would take the time to understand exactly what and why we are homeschooling and not lump us in with the people who are essentially public schooling at home. That isn't the same at all!!! I spend a lot of time researching curriculum every year, and a lot of time buying the curriculum and setting it up and organizing it and a lot of time WITH my children in actual teaching time, they aren't just sitting at a computer with a virtual teacher who did all the work regarding curriculum. I EDUCATE at home. That is the big difference. We are doing this because we know that the public schools are incredibly inferior to what we can offer at home. We aren't doing it because we tried public school and our child wasn't doing well there with their peers, or whatever reason you might want to have him schooled at home, so you do the virtual thing. From the beginning, when my son was just a year old, my husband and I made the choice and never looked back. Maybe we didn't know exactly how we were going to do it at that time, but we knew that we didn't want the minds of our children to be touched by the public education system. We knew it would be hands-on, we knew that we would have tocollect a lot of books to be around the house, we knew we would have to answer a lot of questions and have to do uncomfortable things that most parents get to have the school do. We aren't virtual schoolers. Maybe someday we'll use a private school online for some subjects, who knows, but if it is publicly funded in any way, it's not going to happen, and we'll always be customizing things a very specific way to each of our children. To sum this up, K12 is easy, the way I do it is not, and I just hope some of these people will understand that. Am I prideful and selfish for wanting this recognition? Maybe. But mostly, I just don't want to be lumped into the other category.

We're still around.

I just wanted to update a little since it's been six months since my last post. We moved our home to a different city in March and it was stressful and we are just barely settling in. We have been continuing schooling obviously, but there have been some interruptions since we remodeled some. Now that it is summer and W is still way ahead, we have been working on the subjects we need to catch up one, one at a time. July is when we finish 2nd grade level math. Our goal is to be all the way done with math by the end of July. Then in August we will finish up Science and Grammar. We plan to stay in this house for good, so hopefully come September, we can start on a regular and consistent track.

Our daughter E is finally learning to read. I have finally been able to squeeze in some time each day to work with her a little bit on this. She is 3 years old and has been ready to learn to read for some time. She isn't as engaged as W was as a 2 year old, but she seems to like it more and more each day.

Sheltering them.

When we made the decision to home school, I will admit that it had very little to do with "sheltering them" from the world. But let me just say, that I am NOW, so very glad that I do home school so that I can shelter them from most dangers in the world.

There is so much in public schools that threaten the innocence of children. Technology, while it is a blessing, is also a great danger. Good parental values are diminishing. People are getting more and more lazy as parents, because now it requires A LOT more work! Yeah, things were simple when we were children, but they are not so simple anymore. I want to give my children the simple life that I was offered, and I can do that with home school. With public school I can't. There are too many influences in public school, even teachers can be a horrible influence. Children are not safe there, and I am not talking about crazy maniacs shooting up kindergarten classes.

When I was a teenager there were many things in the media, and in music, and in school, and right in my face as I walked around the mall or even at school, that encouraged me to be unchaste. If you consider me old fashioned and ridiculous for using that word, then you are welcome to stop reading now. But God does not change, the world does. I believe in God, and I believe in his plan of happiness and ALL that he says will make us feel happiness and joy. Anytime I slip away from the way the God wants us to live, or anyone close to me in my life slips away from it, I am a miserable person. Anytime I am engaged in His work and regularly learning about His gospel, I am happy and more kind and more productive. I know that chastity is among the greatest of God's commandments. That being said, amid all the temptations I had as a teen, I stayed clean, and it was not easy, it was hard.

I believe it is far worse now. I believe that just in the last 15 years, that virtue in the portrayals of the world pretty much does not exist. I am so worried for my children, for I believe that this is the biggest tool of the devil to thwart God's plan of happiness. Desensitization to violence is also a problem, but is it bigger? Not in my opinion. Rationalizing dishonesty and secret conspiracies is also a problem, but is it bigger? No. The devil knows the weakness of man, and he is jealous that he does not have a body and we do, so he wants us to misuse our body so that we cannot return to the presence of God and Jesus Christ. These messages and images are EVERYWHERE. Yes, even while I home school, my children will be exposed, I'm not turning Amish any time soon. But if they are in my home while they are young, my husband and I are the biggest influence on them, and we are observant of their actions and can teach them and talk to them MORE OFTEN than if they were going to a different school. Their foundation will be what they know from being in their home. Not from being in their home and also being at school, being shown things and told things all day long that they should not see nor hear as okay for them. My children will also be encouraged to play with their playmates in MY home and not at someone elses, unless I get to know their parents very well. Is this sheltering? NO. It is called being a responsible parent and trying to raise good, genuine, disciplined people. These people are successful in life.

If my children mess up, I will always love them and I will not judge them. They are human and humans make mistakes. But unchastity is like a poison. I feel some fear for them. I know of the joy that a fulfilling chaste life can bring. I want them to know that.

I will do everything in my power to protect my children from this poison and other poisons that the world offers. I will work extra hard, and I am glad that I home school because of it. This world is not anything like it was when I was younger, let alone when my mother and grandmother were young. It is full of mud and muck and misconceptions about life. I am so happy for the gospel and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day-Saints, which provides resources that help me to be a better mother. I am thankful for prayer and for the scriptures, which tell the true stories of ancient people who, when going against the commandments of God, suffered consequences which eventually obliterated them. I am grateful for these examples.