First Day, Second Time

It was our annual First Day celebration today! Our first official day of semi-structured home learning....sorta-school. You may remember last year, our first big recognition of the occasion.

I want the boys to feel special, for learning to be ardently celebrated and yet to avoid the pale, cheesy, chasing after "normal," pretend about making a xerox-of-a-public-school here in the living room. Walking that line. I was going for warm tradition capped with a little buzz and hoping to avoid wanna-be mimicry. We had warm apple dumplings for breakfast...apples because they are a modern symbol of teaching and dumplings because they are a once a year treat that goes down delightfully sweet and fallish. Each boy came down to a special congratulatory sign on his plate, welcoming him to his new grade level. And then I put a candle in each boy's dumpling and A and I sang to them "Happy First Day to you, Happy First Day to you, Happy First Day, happy first day of schoooool, Happy First Day to you!" So fun to see big sparkling eyes and happy grins, over the top of the flickering flames.

Then we hopped in the van for our 2nd annual drive around the block to the street in front of the neighborhood school where we hooted and hollered and honked the horn and then wheeled back around and took Daddy A to the train station for work. Once we were home we had a big dance party in the kitchen and commenced the formal learnin'.

Mondays we will studying My Place In This World which is a self-composed course about micro-geography. Our street, our neighborhood, our city, and eventually our state and then a sketch of how that connects to the country and the world. Right now we are going to focus small and work from the concrete things they can easily grasp: What is an address? Where are N S E W in relation to my front door? What is a neighborhood? And move outward.

Tuesdays we will be studying Science, right we will be talking about Fungi, Molds and Their Kin. Lots of hikes and experiments in our future. Hopefully a lot of mushroom picking!

Wednesday will be Art day. We'll be mixing together some big art projects (weaving! beading! drawing in perspective!) and sometimes field trips or artist studies with our new basic piano instruction plan. I am not a piano professional but this a bite sized nobler book about beginner theory on reading and counting music and even I can hack it.

Thursday we will have another mama-hatched ideas, a Social Skills class. This will be like a modern manners course mixed with Life Skills for kids: how to make a friend, how to tell a joke smoothly, how to read body language, cultivating empathy, good listening tips, appropriate greetings, how to read expressively etc. Am excited about this concept and about the many field trips required to make sure my boys get a lot of practice building these skills into instincts.

And we 'll round out the week.with History. We are still going to be in the ancient world moving on past the Mesopotamians, Sumerians and Baylonians to Greece, Egypt and Rome. So much good stuff to read, experiment with and go see together! Very exciting.

Reading, writing and math all happen every day in addition to the daily topic.

Here's to the next learning season! Happy First Day, y'all!

Teaching Empowerment

Teaching a small person to decipher letters and learn the secret code of reading is an electric experience. I feel completely amazed at the power of discovery, the beauty of achievement and the incredibly special tenderness of watching literacy unfold.

I have been teaching Ru to learn and he's chomping along in the reading book, learning bigger and bigger words but still not really making the leap to reading himself or devouring story for himself. I continue nudging him along and he's still making steady progress and I am waiting for the lights to blaze full in his face and set him mind buzzing with the possibilities of what he has just grasped.

In the meantime, Dee nuzzled up under my elbow and started begging to have a reading lesson too. At just four year old he's not really ready for the physical elements of writing free-hand but he is able to trace my letters and follow dotted-line letters I set up for him and at his urging I started teaching him the basic first nibbles of reading. By golly, he's getting it! He's reading little words all by himself! I feel like a rockstar in the presence of all this acquisition!

Happy First Day!

We're off! Galloping along on a new school year. I think last year was a fake out...this year is when it really all begins. I have a first grader and he's almost an independent reader. I'm officially schooling at home at this point, no denying it...the two years of pseudo-school before this were excusable. Maybe I was just keeping my kid home extra long but now, there's no dodging that bullet. My kid is with me in the grocery store in the middle of the morning, time for random strangers to start asking..."Why aren't you in school?!?"

We started the morning of our First Day of School with a celebratory ride around the block to the elementary school. This is where the boys would be going if they weren't being free-schooled outside of the system. We all piled into the van and the boys excitedly noted kids along the route with backpacks and lunch bags, all headed off to school too....and when we got to the school we rolled the windows down and hollered, "Happy, happy First Day!!!!!!!" There was a lot of giggling afterwards and a little bit of extra cheering as we rounded the block headed for home. I think we can safely say that the school year was begun with gusto.

 I totally had the first verse of Revolution by the Beatles going full blast in my head. Most of us only change the world in teeny little ways, this feels to me like some small piece of it for me. I believe in freedom for children to explore the world, for unconventional ways to learn, and for love to be one of the biggest lessons on the syllabus.

We've got all kinds of subjects on the docket for this year: Ancient History, Science Explorations, Name Writing, Reading, Addition and Subtraction, Potty Training, along with a couple of extra-curriculars in the form of an indoor sports education course and a fall semester outdoor wilderness skills class. I think we'll have some very busy, very happy boys at our house.

I have a little pile of genuine school books now. Just like a real teacher. We have safety scissors and glue sticks and lots of erasers in our school bin and there's been an inaugural trip to the library for new story books for the preschool set. I plan to leave off there though, I need  no more traditional teachery items: instead throw in a few sea shells, a Kitchenaid, some flip flops and my camera. We've got all we need. The world is our classroom, and we're all of us teachers, even the short ones with dimples. Wonder what I'll learn this year in my classes?