The Hardest Button to Button

I sewed a button hole! My very first! OK, so it doesn't look all that great, but I didn't even know it was possible to sew a button hole by hand until two days ago (thank you, wikiHow)! Hooray me!

OK, calming down now. As I mentioned earlier, one of the practical life exercises we'll be doing in our homeschool will be learning how to button, so Parker will need buttons (and button holes!) with which to practice. My mom taught me how to sew a button onto fabric ages ago, but the curious creation of button holes had always been a mysterious matter. Not anymore! Now I just need to sew about a hundred more until I've refined my technique enough to make some beautiful button holes for my son's school supplies.

Location:Prince St,Cruz Bay,US Virgin Islands

Back to Basics

School's IN for summer! Tomorrow my son and I will start spending up to a couple hours a day doing Montessori activities at home. Not everything for our homeschool is quite ready: the shelves aren't finished, I don't have a child-sized table yet, I need to make the busy boards, and the tongs and graduated blocks have yet to arrive from Amazon. But I feel like starting homeschool is sort of like having baby; no matter how much you prepare, you're never really ready. At a certain point, it's just time. I've read the books and I've acquired (most of) the materials (preparing them will be an ongoing process), so now it's time to begin. The pertinent question is where? I have a laundry list of school activities to present to Parker, but with which lesson shall I start?

Fortunately (and not surprisingly), the Montessori method was designed to be taught in a specific order. You don't just do sandpaper letters one day, pouring rice the next and the spindle box after that. There's a progression, and it makes sense to me. Practical life exercises come first; things like pouring, dusting, folding (a napkin or item of clothing), buttoning and tying a bow. These are considered school activities because once a child has mastered these tasks, he can care for himself as well as his surroundings (to a certain degree, of course). In other words, he can dress himself, wash himself, clean up after himself and keep his belongings neat and orderly. Endowing a child with a sense of independence is of primary importance to the Montessori educational philosophy. The idea is that a child needs to feel as though he has mastered his environment before he will be ready to focus on the more complicated and abstract processes and concepts (e.g., ABC's and 123's). And as a mom who spends a huge chunk of the day dressing and cleaning (and cleaning up after) her son, I can definitely get behind this whole make-your-preschooler-more-self-reliant idea. Parker does a pretty good job putting his toys away, but he has yet to show any significant interest in dressing or cleaning himself. (To be honest, this is probably at least in part because I haven't been patient enough to really allow him to spend time trying. I've tended to have the "Oh, just let me do it" attitude.)

Sensorial exercises (more about these later) follow practical life exercises, and only after that do language and numeracy activities begin. This feels a bit "back to basics" to me, and perhaps will for my son, too. Thanks to sticker books, puzzles, iPhone games, TV shows and his enthusiastic parents, Parker--on a good day--can identify all 26 letters as well as the 10 numerals. But do they mean anything to him? While watching TV, I sometimes come across that commercial in which babies "read" flash cards; the babies almost seem like performing monkeys to me. Not to denigrate my child, but I can't help but wonder whether Parker has any deeper understanding when he identifies a letter "A" or a number "3" than those "reading babies" do. I took calculus at the local junior college while I was in high school. Imagine my shock when, two years later as a college freshman, I received the following for my first mathematics assignment: read the first page of Euclid's Elements. (For those unfamiliar, the first page of Elements contains the first ten or so of Euclid's "Definitions," e.g., "The edges of a surface are lines.") It seemed insane to go back to "A point is that which has no part" and "A line is breadthless length" when I'd already passed calculus. I soon learned, however, that though I had memorized all the relevant equations, I at that point possessed no real understanding of the concepts behind calculus, or basic geometry for that matter. Only after I had gone back, begun with the Elements and then progressed forward from there, did I feel like I really knew how, for example, the Pythagorean theorem worked. So maybe activities such as sweeping and pouring are not too--shall we say--elemental for a kid who has already memorized the alphabet after all.

(Most of) Parker's School Supplies*

*Some assembly required.

Location:Prince St,Cruz Bay,US Virgin Islands

Let the Scavenger Hunt Begin

Sometimes I think the weather forecasters err on purpose, just to keep us on our toes. As you can see, it's a beautiful morning here, so we'll soon be crossing Pillsbury Sound to do some school supplies shopping on St. Thomas. There will certainly be times when we feel as though our quest to find every item on our shopping list has degenerated into a wild goose chase. In light of that, I'm hoping we have extra reserves of energy and patience in our back pockets today.

Location:Prince St,Cruz Bay,US Virgin Islands

No Kid Is an Island

I am not at all crafty. I don't "scrapbook," I don't knit, I have a hard time drawing anything that looks like, well, anything and I never learned how to use a sewing machine. So the knowledge that I will soon be needing to create Montessori teaching materials daunts me. But it is a challenge for which I am ready. What I find more daunting about my decision to homeschool my son is the fact that I will not only need to develop his intellect but also his social skills. Socialization is integral to the learning process; a child never ceases in his quest to figure out the nuances of social interaction as well as his own identity within his social framework. I feel confident that I will be a skilled guide in my son's quest for knowledge; I am fraught with insecurity about whether he will grow into a socially well-adjusted human being in the absence of classmates (and siblings).

This is where living on a small island is both helpful and a hindrance. It's helpful because the community is strong; we've lived here for over a year and by now it is difficult to run an errand without bumping into a friend or acquaintance (and thus having some sort of social interaction). Parker is almost always involved in these run-ins. Though he still at times likes to "play shy," islanders never fail to say hello to him, ask him how he is, what toy he's holding onto--whether he's in the mood to answer or not. And he cannot fail to notice while I conduct neighborly conversations with the people we encounter throughout the course of each day (e.g., neighbors, store clerks, friends). Another beneficial aspect of living in a small community is that a trip to the playground is pretty much an instant playdate. St. John has a total of two playgrounds and my son nearly always sees a friend of his when we go to one or the other, which we do at least three times a week. Plus, I quickly met some other mothers when we first moved here, with whom we now have a weekly playgroup. The downside of living on a small island is the limited population. There aren't a ton of kids Parker's age on St. John, and all of them (except for Parker, of course) attend school outside the home. In a larger community, we could conceivably get to know other young kids whose moms have decided to homeschool, and even do school activities together with them. Here, it's getting more and more difficult to arrange playdates due to Parker's friends' school schedules.

So, running into people around town, playground excursions, a weekly playgroup and occasional playdates: is it enough? Our weekly playgroup consists of Parker and two of his little friends. This morning we had it at our house because the aforementioned rains made the playground where we normally meet up nonviable. Playgroup on his "turf" definitely stresses my son's social skills. The last thing I want to do is overanalyze his every interaction with his playmates but, as I said earlier, I am fraught with insecurity about this whole socialization and homeschooling thing. My son yelled at his friends this morning; is this a certain sign that he's doomed to be antisocial for the rest of his life? Should I derive confidence from the fact that he apologizes readily and seemingly sincerely? He generously shared his toys with his friends but he also had a potty accident; did he pee his pants because socializing causes him anxiety? I know. He's 3. I'm overanalyzing. But what about when he's 6, or 16? Will this decision to keep him home with me prove positive?

Ding!

The time has come. Over the past month or so, I have espied my son experiencing occasional moments of (gasp!) boredom. Plopped down on the couch, he gazes across the room at one toy then another, and then sighs and turns to stare out the window. This instead of joyfully hopping off the couch and grabbing a car or a puzzle or a stuffed animal (or what have you) and becoming engrossed in play. I know why this has been happening; I know, too, that in those instances when my son is bored I, the stay-at-home-mom, am not doing my job. My son recently turned 3, and though it may seem strange to compare my child to a mass market frozen turkey, the metaphorical pop-up timer in his brain just, well, popped up. He wants more, he needs more: more to absorb, more to discover, more to practice, more to master. Though he is still learning as we move through the course of our days together--playing, reading, walking, shopping, cooking, cleaning--he is no longer as stimulated by the "everyday" as he was when he was younger. And though life often surprises us with unexpected joys to study (like the tadpoles in the rain puddle we've been monitoring), I cannot rely on those surprises to complete my preschooler's education.

So, time to erect some framework in support of Parker's learning. Time to formalize his education. In other words, time for school. I have chosen to homeschool (at least for now), and I have chosen to use primarily Montessori methods. In addition, I have chosen to share my adventures in homeschooling via this blog. My goals in this endeavor are to instill in my son a sense of discovery and awareness, as well as to engender in him a sense of independence and initiative. Grandiose and abstract, I know. It's all well and good to want to raise a lifelong learner, someone who approaches life with curiosity and wonder, but good intentions don't amount to much without a good plan of attack. In light of this, I have been reading the books you see listed in the bibliography at the right and I will continue to refer to them for inspiration and instruction over the course of this venture.

Unsurprisingly, "some assembly is required" not only for many of the activities detailed in the books at right but even for the very establishment of our homeschool. The school will need a set of shelves, some trays and baskets, a child-sized table and a child-sized chair. To create the materials needed for the first few weeks' activities, we will also need sandpaper, cardboard, fabric, clothespins, buttons, beads, a miniature pitcher, miniature tea cups, miniature tongs and more. Acquiring these items wouldn't pose much of a problem if we lived in the States, but they will be almost certainly impossible to find on St. John. But St. Thomas is a ferry ride away and relatively awash with big stores such as K-mart and Home Depot, so my husband and I made plans to take a family shopping trip to St. Thomas together on Saturday. I just checked the weather forecast, however, and on Saturday it is supposed to be soggy, and neither ferryboats nor St. Thomas roads are much fun in tropical downpours. So we shall see whether we will be able to shop 'til we drop this weekend. I know that I can start school without all the bells and whistles, but I was getting so excited about setting up shop and putting all the materials together. Props matter.