Small Scribbles

When I was a kid and my siblings were in the thick of learning safe driving skills, one of them rolled the van. The van with the automatic transmission and the windows. Our only vehicle. We all payed for that error in the form of the replacement vehicle. A navy blue stick-shift cargo van that had windows only in the places where it is customary for a cargo van to have windows. My dad had it customized; he added in a few rows of seats in the cargo space and pronounced it fit for our annual family vacation. The eleven of us loaded up and headed to Gettysburg. Mom and Dad enjoyed the view; the little ones wrestled in the middle seats and we teenagers in the back griped for a good share of the trip. The griping appropriately reached its climax on the Gettysburg Battlefield. Mom and Dad, long on enthusiasm for history and short on wisdom for vacationing with a carload of teenagers took us...in our nearly windowless van...on an autotape tour of the battlefield. With time (twenty yea...

Come. I've moved aside some selfishness to make a bit of room for You, here in my heart. Come. Join us at the breakfast table. When I remember You, we'll crack open your Word and search for treasure. When I remember. I remember until a fork clatters to a stop in front of me and then I forget. YOU DO NOT THROW SILVERWARE! SET THIS TABLE LIKE A LADY! I toss the fork back and it hits a water glass, and water and ice cubes spill out. The silverware tosser bursts into tears and loud cries, and I hear the words of my heart voice, Your voice, "That's not My way." And it's not. I dry tears and mop water and fill the glass again. Come, heart dweller. Sit with me on the sofa. Feel the press of a warm, wiggly little boy body. Listen to the story sounds and the giggles and the "Read Move Over Rover again, Mama." Hear the interruption, "I can't find my spelling book." And my irritation, "I am tired of looking for your school books! When you ar...

It's almost summer.  Or maybe it already is summer because the kids have been swimming every day this week.  Time for school to wind down?  Not for us.  We're picking up the pace and buckling down.  For some reason we always get more school done in the summer than we do any other time of the year. The kids have been busy with a new language arts program and a new approach to handwriting.  (More on these soon.)  Lauren is obsessed with biology.  We work in the gardens and she holds out specimens to the girls, "Look!  It's a gastropod."  Or, "Come see this wood louse!"    I introduced Claire and Faith to long division this afternoon.  This evening the children worked on art projects and played with a pile of hand-me-down stuffed animals while I read Great Expectations aloud to them.  At ten I closed the book and after a quick candlelight question, sent the children off to bed.  At 10:1...

Stuart rang this morning, "Have you seen the Google homepage yet?" We had. John did a little Gollum dance in front of the computer to let us know. "Come quick! Hurry!" Morse code. The kids all joined John in his little Gollum dance to celebrate their new favorite form of communication. We read Cheaper by the Dozen a few years ago when the little ones were too little so, my chore time pep talks, "Frank Gilbreth would roll over in his grave if he saw you clearing that table one plate at a time," only generated blank stares. Finally, after Mr. Gilbreth came up for the twentieth time Faith got curious. "WHO is Frank Gilbreth and WHY do you keep talking about him?" Out came Cheaper by the Dozen . We rolled our way through the chapters, holding our sides. A story of a motion study pioneer who practiced his techniques on himself and his supersized family with hilarious results. A born teacher, a man who made the most of his time. We were spellbound. ...

They stand, the one born in 2000 and the one born in 2001, side by side at the kitchen counter chopping up peppers for the freezer. This is new for these young hands and the work goes slowly. To pass the time they discuss their favorite subject, science. Tonight extinct birds are on the menu. "Mom, did you know that there used to be such a thing as dodo bird?" "Yes, but now they are extinct." "Yeah and there is a kind of pigeon that is extinct too." "You're thinking of passenger pigeons." "Yeah, passenger pigeons. The last one was shot by a fourteen year old boy and now it is in a museum." Claire slices methodically. "Oh, I didn't know that." I say while corraling chopped bits of pepper in plastic wrap. "Yup. A kid the same age as John killed it. I wonder if he went to jail?" Faith wields her knife like a sword. I try not to look. "The last pigeon died a long time ago. A long, long tim...

One day while skipping around the internet, I came across these: And when I clicked on the sample , I knew we had to change spelling curriculums. Again. Goodbye Spelling Power and MacMillan and Sequential Spelling ! We've found our true love. The problem with the afore mentioned curricula is sheer boredom. Memorizing lists of words is mind numbing and as my children don't like their school work to lull them to sleep, they often push spelling to the side in favor of more exciting lessons. When I found Spelling Wisdom , I realized what has been missing: an idea, something to engage the mind so that learning the difference between than and then occurs almost incidentally. Sandra Shaffer uses the writings of famous men and women (Helen Keller, Beethoven, Winston Churchill...), Bible passages and quotes from quality literature...poems and novels ( Robinson Crusoe , The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew , All the World's a Stage...) to teach more than six thousand frequently...

A few weeks ago I read this statement from a fellow homeschooling blogger , "We have a big stack of Mike Venezia books from the library at the moment and I don’t have to “make” the kids read them; they just do (quite often when they are supposed to be doing something else." This intrigued me. Mike Venezia is the author of several series of books, among them, Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists and Getting to Know the World's Greatest Composers . We've been busy painting and composing here so I have been feeling like a little art and music history might be in order. And here was an endorsement about books that are so good they magnetically attract children away from other tasks. I had to check them out. So, I went to the library, the big library, and found the skinny art section. Two books on photography, one on origami, and...and that was all. I did the next best thing, grabbed up my free Amazon coupons and Lauren helped me decide which ten books...

Our books are aranged on set of shelves alphabetically by the author's last name. This is a blessing and a curse, a blessing because I can locate Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel in five seconds and a curse because the books must be returned to their proper place in order for this system to work. It is hard for the little ones to figure out how to reshelve so up 'til now they have taken out books and then returned them to the top of the shelf when they are finished for me to take care of when I have a few minutes. I grabbed the camera and ran down the hall to record our pile of books to be shelved. Unfortunately, it was not very impressive. Some days I have a towering, leaning stack that threatens to topple and takes forever to put away. In my forays around the web, I came across an idea from the blog Se7en.org that offered the perfect solution to my dilemma. This is why we painted yesterday. We were making book markers or more accurately book shelf markers. The idea is ...

The kids and I took a creativity quiz the other day and the results were completely predictable. My artists were crowned Hands On and my "Box? What Box?" thinkers were deemed Bright Sparks. This comes to mind because today we painted. "You can only paint on these rectangles of paper and you can only use blue and green. (I'm going through a color coordinating phase.) Other than that, you may paint any way you choose." Charlie immediately got to work and slopped some paint on his paper. He was fascinated with the way the paint swirled through the water when he rinsed his brush. John and Faith painted with exuberance and speed. They were more into the process than results and happily swirled and spattered. Then they ran off to play chess leaving Lauren and Claire at the table. These two continued with their pencils and brushes for another hour. And the purpose of all this? That has to do with my results from the creativity test. As an Eyes Wide Open thinker I do...

Yesterday, Charlie got a letter in the mail. The Christmas activity we were working on came to a screeching halt. Letters for four year olds are not a common occurance here. "For me? A letter for me? Look! A letter for me! I got a letter!" When Charlie was done waving his letter around, he opened it. He pulled out a sheet of stickers. "Ooh stickers! What is this animal?!" "Move it back a little, Charlie so I can uncross my eyes." He did and we identified animals from the African plain. "Mama, do you want a sticker?" "Sure." "Which one?" "I don't care. Which one do you want to give me?" Charlie smacked a elephant onto my chest and decorated himself with a monkey. But wait! There was more in the envelope. A note and a dollar. A whole dollar. "Do you want me to read this note to you?" "I got a dollar! I got this dollar! Is it store day? Can we go to the store right now ?! (insert much dancing and wav...

We took a few days off from school last week to make applesauce. I'm not much for gardening or canning but I just can't tolerate that watery jarred stuff that passes for applesauce at the store. I was starting to panic because our freezer was almost starving. A couple of bags of frozen kidney beans, a few loaves of bread and the last two quarts of applesauce from our last extravaganza. It looked like we were going to have to drive for hours to find an orchard but I finally found an apple orchard just one short hour's drive on the back country roads. We came home with five bushels and got busy. Here's a clean pile of Arkansas Black apples. They make a good thick sauce and a pretty decent apple pie as well. John and Charlie on apple washing duty. Charlie helped a bit but mostly he assigned himself the job of taste testing. Lauren was my girl Friday during the four days in the kitchen. Without her help, I'd still have four bushels of apples in my closet waiting f...

As I was clicking through blogs yesterday, I came across this picture and it made me laugh. Those of you who are Sonlighters know that Christmas in September feeling when a carton of school supplies shows up on your doorstep. Wild delight. We've opened many of these in the past seven years and showered a great deal of affection on the contents. Children have huddled around for the unveiling of new curriculum and and then sank in a collective heap, each lost in a different book. Until this week. Delight did not accompany the arrival of this box . John and Lauren intercepted the package from Mr. Fedex and took off toward the lake across the street. "Where are you going? Come back here with that box. Guys? Come back!" "No! We're taking this thing to the lake. Frogs and crabs and fish belong in the lake, not in the house." "Guys, I'm warning you! Come back here. There's more than just the dissection stuff in there." (Really, how much authori...

It's been a wild couple of years here. We get a lot accomplished but our methods are not pretty. The children and I have opposing worldviews. I say to them, "For six days you must labor and do all your work. That means this is not playtime! Get out your math books!" They duel with me like Lethargarians, "From 9:30 to 10:30 we dawdle and delay. From 1:00 to 2:00 we linger and loiter..." Oh, the banter. It's been an exhausting battle trying to stay on top of school and chores. I've come across several posts in the past week that made me remember that chaos did not always have the upper hand. Sarah posted pictures of her chore wheels and Jennifer put up her family schedule . Hmm. We used to operate by charts and schedules. Maybe we should try that again. Duly inspired by the organization of others, I spent all last weekend making up a schedule and chore charts (I went with rectangles. Circles baffle me.) Stuart leaned over me and offered helpful suggestion...

My blog was recently added to a homeschooling blogroll. You'll see the new blogroll listed in my side bar as soon as I learn the magic spell. I thought I'd celebrate with a schoolish post. I was reminded today of how frustrating it was to teach handwriting in my early homeschooling days. At the time I didn't know I was teaching an Asperger's child. Aspie kids tend to have sensory processing issues and once we nailed down what we were dealing with, Thursday afternoons were spent at the occupational therapist's office working on John's fine motor skills. I learned a great deal about teaching handwriting. John eventually learned how to type. The first thing I learned was that we were using a writing program that was entirely inappropriate for a child with handwriting difficulties. Originally, I chose Italic Handwriting because it features a beautiful style of writing and the letters don't change much in the transition from printing to cursive. What the o...

I spent quite a few hours this summer by the pool with book in hand. It was a summer replete with good books and I have some treasures to share. Jim the Boy by Tony Earley. A story of a young boy raised in North Carolina by his widowed mother and his three upright and understanding bachelor uncles during the depression. The author paints his scenes with a beautiful simplicity. The Blue Star by Tony Earley. The sequel to Jim the Boy . Jim is a senior in high school. He falls in love against the backdrop of WWII. Teenage pregnancy and racism are dealt with in a compelling and compassionate manner. Honestly, I think the reaction of the teenage father is my favorite scene in the book. The characters in both books are well developed and believable. This will be a book that I encourage my older children to read both for the story and to study the author’s writing style. The Penderwicks and The Penderwicks on Gardam Street by Jeanne Birdsall . When I first discovered the series, I chec...

Faith is in love. I discovered this a few nights ago on my late night rounds. The light in the girls' room was blazing. It was nearly midnight so I reached in and snapped the switch off. "Don't turn it off, Mama! I'm reading." Seeing the position she was in ... ...I made a wild guess. (Well, it wasn't an incredibly wild guess because I am a connoisseur of fine children's literature.) "Are you reading Pippi Longstocking, perchance? "Yes. And I need the light to see." Look at her. How could I turn the light off? I'm so excited. It's the first chapter book that she's picked up all by herself and is reading cover to cover. Pippi is the first character she has bonded with all on her own. It's my book. Finally, a child who likes to read what I liked to read in days gone by. In spite of the late night, she greeted me early the next morning with bits of grass clinging to her hair and back. "Pippi starts her day with forty-thr...