Not Back to School!

In July, when we were coming up to the deadline to give our notice of intent to homeschool for this school year, P started saying she'd like to go back to school, "just for one more year." We talked some about why. It lit a fire under me to look for ways to make things more interesting and satisfying for her, as well as doing more active strewing so she doesn't spend so much of her day on the computer. (P has told me that, although the computer interests her a lot and can occupy her for hours on end, she feels dissatisfied when she spends too long using it without doing other things.) We had good conversations about what she wanted that school might provide, and how we might get those same benefits and more without school. She wanted to be able to walk some places and do some things on her own, so we settled on a first experiment: having her take the bus to the library to turn in a DVD, with me tailing her at a distance so she could fall back if she needed me. I told her I'd be all right with her doing that sort of thing without a tail, once she was comfortable with all the steps -- she was most uncertain about how she'd know when to get off the bus. We ended up getting rained out on that errand, but not before P had had a taste of doing something on her own. P also wanted to see more of friends, so we planned more play dates. Most of all, she said she wanted more one-on-one time with me. (School wouldn't have helped with this, but it was something she said would make her life better, so we started having fairly regular "date nights" when P and I would do something, just the two of us.) But P still said she wanted to go to school.

She expressed some apprehension about being asked to do things at school that she wouldn't know how to do, and asked me if I thought that would happen. I said I thought she'd be very strong in reading, would probably need to work on her spelling (but that seemed doable to both of us), and might be confused about some of the math notation. She's been working with a lot of math concepts, but not in a schoolish way; e.g., she knows what division is about and can do it in her head to a reasonable extent for a 2nd/3rd grader, but she didn't know what a division sign looked like. The math part gave her the most concern, so I pointed out that long ago she'd picked up a 2nd-grade workbook at a book sale, and that by working through that, she could make sure she'd seen most or all of the same stuff as her peers. She wanted to do that, so we worked out that at 15 pages per day, she could finish the workbook before school started, spending less time per day on it than she'd spend doing desk work at school.

P set out on that course, but after a few days of doing worksheets on skills that, while useful, were out of the richer context she's grown accustomed to having with her learning, she was souring on the idea of school, and decided she wanted to stick with unschooling after all -- though she did exact my promise that we could continue with play dates (subject to the desired friends' availability, which we knew would be a lot less once school started), with increasing independence for her, and with date nights.

I sighed with relief, my feelings far less mixed than they were when P initially left school. I've grown to enjoy this way of life and the improved relationship I have with both kids, without school dictating our sleep schedule and shaping most of our daytime activities. I'd been trying to prepare myself, mentally and emotionally, for supporting her in returning to school. I knew I could let her come home again if she changed her mind. What I expected to be hard was letting P's relationship with school be her own, not stepping in and ruthlessly enforcing the demands of school. I was a very dedicated student when I was in school, and then I was a schoolteacher for four years, and it's really hard for me to imagine supporting a student who is in school by choice in not toeing the line on homework, attendance, etc. I was working on figuring it out, and someday that time may still come. But for now I'm glad we're still out of school!

Sandra Dodd wrote a very thought-provoking essay, "Public School on Your Own Terms," that was helpful to me in thinking about the possibilities for different relationships between me and my kid's school. I am uncomfortable with the idea of lying to school authorities about absences -- I really dislike outright dishonesty and avoid it whenever I can -- but the rest of it makes a lot of sense to me.

So, all that aside, a lot has been going on since I last posted. In the past six weeks we've been in overdrive on housing changes. UnschoolerDad and I decided we were spending too much money on housing for our one-earner lifestyle to be sustainable, so we moved out of our house into a small apartment, prepared our house for sale, put it on the market, got into contract to sell it, searched for a new house, and got into contract to buy one two towns over, about the same size as before but MUCH less expensive. Hopefully both sales will go through! We held off on the decision until we knew P would not be returning to school this year, so we wouldn't be yanking her away from school if she chose it. Both kids have been helpful with the transition. They are sad to leave our home, but they have been excited about hunting for a new one, and they both love the one we've chosen. They are sharing a room in our transitional apartment, which has led to some additional conflict, but also to much more opportunity for me to be with both of them at bedtime, and not only with T. (On good nights, we've had one parent with each child, but UnschoolerDad's schedule and mine sometimes mean there's only one parent at bedtime.) P has gotten clearer as a result that in our new house, she wants her room near T's so bedtimes can still be shared, and not on another floor as she previously thought. That helped with our choices in house hunting! We're moving to an area where the schools, should our kids want them, are still good, though not as highly rated as those we're leaving. My belief is that if a child is in school by choice, he or she will be much more able to suck the marrow out of school, regardless of what school s/he attends. I remember my parents saying something like that to me when I was college hunting -- that it would be helpful to find a college that would be a good match for my style, but that because I was so active in pursuing learning, I would be able to get a good education almost no matter where I went. So here's hoping it's true.

I haven't been tracking the kids' activities here during the whole move process. But here are some things I've noticed and remembered about what they've been doing.

Reading

• On a visit to the library, P picked out LOTS of chapter books and some picture books. She and I had just been talking, in the context of our school-or-unschool conversation about third grade, about the fact that in school she'd be exposed to lots of stories she might not otherwise think to read. I pointed out that, since she'll be in contact with her schooled friends, she can ask them about what they're reading and check it out if it seems intriguing. I also offered to read some of the same books she's reading and discuss them with her, or help her follow up on doing or learning more about subjects in which they pique her interest. Perhaps that inspired her to be more adventurous about trying new series and authors, in addition to picking up Book Two in the How to Train Your Dragon series, the next 39 Clues book, and another book by the same author as the Fairy Realm books she's been enjoying. On another visit, I picked up a bunch of things I thought she might like. She's enjoying some mystery books, and I'm reading The Chronicles of Prydain out loud to both kids for bedtime reading.
• P continues to read to herself and out loud, to me and to T. She's really quite fluent, and she usually asks about words she doesn't know, if I'm listening.
• More in the anatomy book: the digestive system, appendicitis. 
• I've been reading Parent/Teen Breakthrough: The Relationship Approach: The New Program to End Battles With Your Pre-Teens and Teens, which gets a lot of recommendations from parents of grown unschoolers, even though it's clearly written with schooled adolescents in mind. When I started to read it, I was thinking in terms of things I might need in a few years, but I'm recognizing some of the preteen/teen relationship patterns from my current relationship with P. It's already been helpful to put the book's main advice into practice: Rather than trying to control your adolescent as you may have when they were younger, put lots of energy into building a strong, warm relationship with your child, because once they hit adolescence and their main mission in life becomes individuation and independence, a solid relationship is the best way to have a good influence in their lives. At this stage in P's life, a certain amount of direct control is still possible, but I already see her starting to resist in places, and I know I don't want to go down the path of ever-more-draconian measures to keep her in line -- that's a losing battle all the way around, especially as she gets older. So this book is becoming helpful in steering my thinking away from battling for control and toward building warm relationship and positive influence, including real dialogue with the kids about what's going to help make our lives as individuals and as a family go well -- not just me and UnschoolerDad figuring it out and announcing our decisions.
• I read Roald Dahl's The BFG to both kids. They enjoy the nonsensical, yet intelligible, talk of the giant. Every once in a while P asks me what something means. Usually it's a coined, nonsensical word, but what she really wants to know is, what is the giant trying to say, and what does that mean?

Doing

• P did a Young Inventors workshop at the local children's museum. She took apart an analog clock and built a lizard-grabber thing from craft sticks, egg cartons, tape, yarn, and paper clips. She was very pleased with it.
• The next day, P did a Dinosaurs workshop at the same place. She found a plastic stegosaurus in a digging activity, but another girl really, really wanted the stegosaurus, so P gave it to her and settled for a brachiosaurus. ("Of course she wanted the stegosaurus. It is our state fossil, so everyone wants it!") P had lots of questions about brachiosaurus -- how did it defend itself from predators? Were predators even interested in taking on something so much larger than themselves? Did brachiosaurus swim all the way underwater? P also exclaimed to me that there was a dinosaur (spinosaurus) that looked just like the spiny animals my character was hunting in World of Warcraft. I pointed out that the WoW creatures had two spiny fans rather than one, and P said yes, they could get twice as much heating or cooling that way, and wasn't it cool how WoW was based partly on science?! In the workshop, they also compared the sizes of parts of their hands, feet, and fingers with dinosaur tracks of different sizes, and P remarked that some of the dinosaurs were pretty small! I came across a fact the other day, that on a linear time scale, Triceratops lived closer to humans than it did to Stegosaurus, and P was as surprised as I was to hear that, but the facts bear out. We have a long way to go until the dinosaurs will have been extinct for as long as they ruled the earth.
• Both kids and I did an ice-cream-making workshop at the same place. We had fun making a really basic vanilla ice cream in nested ziploc bags. P and I talked a little about ice crystal formation and the role of stirring in making ice cream with a good texture.
• The kids have started "keep-trading" toys with each other. I warned P, when this started, that T, like many four-year-olds, didn't have a very good sense of permanance of trades, and that she needed to be ready to trade back if he asked her to. At first she was called on to trade back a lot. Now T seems to be gaining more of a lasting sense of what trading means, but P is still good-natured about it when he occasionally wants to trade back. And sometimes P wants to trade back, and T is good about that, too.
• As the garden starts to grow in earnest, we've been doing things like eating green onions and beet green thinnings together, straight from the ground. I talked a little with P about how beet greens have the vitamins and minerals of spinach, but without the oxalic acid to prevent calcium absorption. T enjoyed tasting beet greens for the first time, which he was remarkable non-reluctant to do. We pretended to be caterpillars. T is also showing me which squash to harvest, based on their size, and enjoying looking for squash of various sizes and stages as they grow. P and I are looking forward to our fermented (traditional pickle-crock) dill pickles being ready. Today I showed her the bubbles that are rising in the crock as the fermentation process really gets going. Periodically we cut off a piece of pickle and taste it to see how things are changing.
• T and P played a complicated board game, Lords of Waterdeep, with UnschoolerDad, who simplified the rules a bit to make it friendlier for not-yet-reading T. After a while T lost interest, so UD and P played with the full rules. P is very enthusiastic about playing complicated strategy games. She went to a mostly-adult game night with UD and played the game there, to both their great satisfaction. I know UD will be glad to have someone in the house more interested in the really complicated games than I am! Fluxx is about my speed, and UD, P, and I played that together once or twice.

Making

• P has been drawing and labeling even more house plans for the cars, eraser pets, and other tiny toys both kids have. They're getting better thought out, with more relevant furnishings, room for doors to open, and more.
• P and T are building elaborate block structures using both their sets of blocks, now that they're in the same room.
• T has become a Lego fiend. He has several "Creator" sets (these are great because you can use the same set of blocks to build 3 or 4 different models), and he plays with them every day for long stretches, both building from the instructions and improvising his own designs. He needed a little support with the instructions at first, but he figured them out very quickly and now can build completely independently with the age 7-12 Creator sets. He does frequently need my help getting blocks apart, which is a nice chance for us to reconnect. Sometimes I help by finding the blocks he needs as he builds, or by organizing his blocks to make particular kinds easier to locate.

Writing

• I've found a few things in P's room that seem to be either price lists for a store game or game rules -- not enough context to tell.
• P wrote in her workbook when she was considering school.
• P wrote a gift tag, very neatly, for her cousin's birthday gift.
• P has written some stories in books in Minecraft, and she's getting faster at keyboarding. She's also written and illustrated some stories in paper booklets she puts together.

Watching

• A "Disney Connections" DVD about the Colonial (English colonies in America) period and pirates, and how moviemakers portrayed them. I was disappointed because I thought it would be more history and less Disney-movie pseudohistory. The kids probably would have enjoyed it more if they had seen Pocahontas or Pirates of the Caribbean.
• P and I watched The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. T still doesn't like movies that get this scary, so he watched other things and hung out with UnschoolerDad while we watched. It's interesting to me, as a non-Christian who knows the stories of Jesus's life quite well, to see the close parallels between Aslan's sacrifice and Jesus's crucifixion that I missed when I read the books as a child, before I knew C.S. Lewis was a Christian theologian. I think P is likely to have some similar, interesting revelations at some point. I don't know whether we'll talk about it explicitly. P is interested in comparative religions already, so she may get to it sooner than I did.
• P and I watched a video from the library about puberty for girls. The information went by really fast, so we stopped it a lot to talk about it. She learned some of the essentials she'll need in the next few years about body changes, periods, mood changes, and more. It was a good opportunity to talk a little about how our relationship is evolving as she starts to think a little more about her future as an adult and wants to move toward more independence, but still has a lot to learn that I can help her with.
• P and T often watch shows together. Recent  hits include My Little Pony, Horseland, and old favorite Phineas and Ferb, which is still releasing new episodes.
• P watched some of the second season of Downton Abbey with me. It didn't suck her in as it did me, but she asked questions about the social conventions depicted and we discussed the relevant history (mostly battlefield tactics and conscription practices circa WWI) a bit.

Listening

• P and T are having to get better at listening to each other, as we live in close quarters and need to share the space, and as they share a lot of play together. I've been trying to support each in hearing what the other is saying, and thinking about what kinds of responses will contribute to a happier relationship and to their getting their needs met.
• P has been paying more attention to the radio, when I have it on in the car, and asking questions about what she hears. We've talked at some length about presidential politics as we've heard snippets from the Republican and Democratic conventions.

Talking

• Both kids have been wanting to tell their dreams. It's interesting seeing how they listen, respond, and often fail to listen to each other, interrupting with corrections, of all things! It's a good chance to work on listening skills, and on my own patience with dream retellings that loop back on themselves and are full of contradictions.
• P took a one-hour job at the company that makes the Rosetta Stone language software, repeating 200 sentences in English or Spanish to give them data to improve the way the software works with children's voices in native and non-native languages. She earned a $25 Visa gift card for her work. T and I built Lego models very quietly in the corner of the room while P worked. 
• T and P are both working up some enthusiasm for learning Spanish, especially as the town we are moving to has a larger Latino population than the one we are leaving. They're noticing people speaking Spanish in public and wanting to be able to communicate more with them.

Visiting

• Both kids went to a birthday party at their cousin's martial-arts dojo. T was the youngest child present and didn't think at first that he would participate, and he did sit on the sidelines taking pictures for part of the time; but when the obstacle courses got started, T was fully and joyfully in on the action. When he wasn't participating, he was using UnschoolerDad's spare camera to document the action.
• The kids and I visited a local history museum we hadn't seen before, one day after looking at some houses we were considering. They enjoyed it and we didn't see everything, so we'll probably go back soon. We played a lot with a water table where you could open and close gates, directing water to farm fields, cities, recreational river activities, and more. They enjoyed the challenges offered on the museum display for the water table.

Thinking, asking questions, planning...

• P is noticing more things that she'd like to film. I've enlisted UnschoolerDad's help to gather together our video-recording technology.
• At a park recently, T was playing on an odd playground feature shaped like a hippo, with major hippo organs (including at least three stomachs) portrayed on the playing floor. T remarked, correctly, "Oh, these must be the kidneys." Further conversation revealed that he wasn't reading the labels on the organs, but identifying them by their shape and position, based on our reading in the last couple of weeks about kidneys and the urinary system. We traced through the respiratory and digestive systems on the hippo diagram, much to T's delight.
• T showed me recently how he could make "a part of your heart" with pattern blocks. He arranged three blue rhombuses into a hexagon, and then he made thump-bump sounds with his mouth while moving the pieces apart and back together. I saw immediately what he was doing -- it was a tricuspid valve, which he remembered from previous readings in our library anatomy book. I was impressed and told him so. P happened along then and said she'd actually thought of it and showed T. Still pretty cool!
• P wanted to know why we were picking up a vaccination form at the doctor's office, so I told her we were signing her up for a homeschooling umbrella school, which would change our day-to-day life not at all but would mean she wouldn't have to take standardized tests unless she wants to. She said sometimes taking tests was fun and that she would like to try it, and I told her I'd look for a test we could do and grade at home so she could give it a try. She said she thought she could do pretty well on a 3rd-grade test, and I said one thing that might be on it that she hadn't done much was multiplication. She said she already knew some multiplication, and told me some multiplication facts that were true. I said sometimes people used multiplication tables to learn more about multiplication and the patterns that go with it, and she asked if I would make her one. I made the grid and filled in the numbers along the side and top, and then I started filling in the grid with her input. She noticed the 2's row was like counting by twos. We kept going, using mental arithmetic tricks she knows to fill things in (e.g., four sixes is the same as two twelves, and she knows how to add two-digit numbers, so we did that to come up with 24). The more patterns she noticed, the giddier she became! I recognized the feeling from when I started learning about multiplication, and shared my memory of that pleasure with her. I told her that when I looked down our growing columns of sixes and sevens, they looked like old friends. "Oh, hello, sixes! Good to see you again!"  We kept going, and she started physically rolling around on the floor with excitement. I recognized this behavior from a much earlier time when I tried to help her figure out some math stuff on a worksheet, at her request if I recall correctly -- I can't remember if it was before or after we started unschooling. That other time, though, I thought I saw a lot of tension and unpleasant feeling, perhaps frustration or fear, going along with the giddiness I saw today. It was good this time to see the pleasure of figuring things out unalloyed with anxiety! She kept begging me to go on. Finally I called a halt since it had gotten quite late and we had plans the next day. By the time we stopped, we had visited place value into the billions, why commas are used in really long numbers, different symbols people use to show multiplication (x, dot, parentheses), a little bit of order of operations, diagrams to show multiplication with tiny squares forming larger rectangles or squares, what multiplication of multiple-digit numbers looks like, and how to show inequalities with < and > symbols, with a lot of fun along the way.