Fine Print

TODAY'S ACTIVITIES:

• Sorting
• Making Patterns
• The Phonetic Alphabet
• Lauri Puzzles
• Bead Stringing

Hi, my name is Megan, and I am addicted to my new (!) printer. My poor husband has no clue that I have fallen passionately in love with the gorgeous, sleek, black machine that came home with me last Monday and now sits upstairs, spurring to action at my command, spewing out perfect page after perfect page. I shudder to think that this affair may one day end in hair-pulling, handwringing frustration--it is an HP printer, after all--I mean, I'd really hate to go all Office Space on such an aesthetically pleasing piece of equipment. Thankfully, as of now my printer and I are still happy honeymooners, madly in love and printing with wild abandon.

Now that I can print anything anytime, I'm realizing just how much the internet has to offer homeschooling moms like me. It's fantastic, but it's also a little overwhelming. Surfing the web, perusing all the wonderful websites supplying educational resources, I'm reminded of how I feel whenever I go shopping at thrift stores: I know there are gems to be found but I don't know whether I have the energy to search through rack after endless rack to find them. Luckily, I don't have to actually leave the house and wander through some old musty-smelling store to search for good, appropriate educational materials and activity ideas. The internet is literally on my lap, at my fingertips, so I can sit back at night with the TV on and browse around while sort of paying attention to Mythbusters or The Daily Show or Top Chef or whatever.

This morning, I put a couple new activities on our school shelves--one sorting, one patterning--the materials for which I found on www.montessoriforeveryone.com (in the "Free Downloads" section). Parker chose the sorting activity first, probably because its big red Xs appealed to him. (He's loving X-ing things out.) It's basically "One of These Things Is Not Like the Other," like those old Sesame Street segments. I at first thought he didn't understand the point of the activity, because he kept X-ing out the black bird in the first four-set (a set three birds and a stack of plates and cups). I finally realized (over an hour later, of course) that he'd singled out the black bird as not belonging because it was the only thing that wasn't colorful (the other two birds were multicolored, as well as the plastic tableware).

X-ing out the black bird.

The nest doesn't belong in this one!

Parker found the pattern activity a little more challenging. We've been creating simple two-item patterns (e.g., rock-leaf-rock-leaf) together for a while now, mostly just for fun while we're at the beach or coloring or bead stringing. (Or even eating and drinking. Parker will alternate bites/sips, then exuberantly declare, "There's a pattern in my tummy, Mommy!") In the activity I downloaded, the aim is to complete various patterns, which consist of three items rather than two (like apple-orange-fruit basket, as in the picture below). We'll definitely have to keep working on these more complex sequences.

The pattern strip needed to pretend to be an inch worm before we could proceed with the pattern work.

We repeated the phonetic alphabet practice we'd done on Monday. I didn't add any new letters or supplement the activity in any way. I want to be very careful not to overwhelm or pressure Parker as he learns to read and write. It's a long, elaborate undertaking, and there's nothing to be gained by hurrying him through it. That being said, he did remember all that we'd practiced on Monday--the sounds of a and t, and how to trace them, then write them in the salt--which surprised me. I thought I'd have to remind him, but apparently not.

I recently moved Parker's Lauri puzzles to his school shelves. In terms of the pacing of our school sessions, it occurred to me that he could benefit from taking a break from "desk work." Sure enough, after he'd been sitting at his table for a while, sorting and completing patterns and learning letters, Parker reached for his stack of puzzles, sat down on the floor and completed four of them. The Lauri puzzles are pretty difficult--they consist of just a bunch of different-sized shapes that you have to assemble within an empty frame--completing them helps Parker acquire an understanding of how two-dimensional shapes can fit together to form a picture.

Getting started on the helicopter puzzle.

Finishing the airplane puzzle.

Let's Talk Tempo

TODAY'S ACTIVITIES:

• Dressing Busy Board
• Transferring
• Cutting

"Stoic observation. Stoic observation. Stoic observation." That's what I kept repeating to myself, mantra-like, as I pulled out our school shelves this morning. It's a little funny that I'm now struggling to rein in my emotions, given that my father (also, eventually, several therapists) used to beseech me to open up and talk about how I felt. I was a pretty phlegmatic kind of kid. My own child seems to feel no compunctions about wearing his heart on his sleeve; the way he carries on at times makes me wonder whether he'll end up being a Shakespearean actor, or the next Pacino or Shatner. Which I suppose is just desserts for me. (Or not. There doesn't always have to be an explanation, you know.) Anyway, I did OK keeping my anxieties about school less apparent today. I didn't do that well with the sitting back and observing, but that was my son's fault, not mine. He likes to talk, a lot. And not monologues, either; he expects full-on back-and-forth, give-and-take conservations. Also, he wanted me to do school with him right from the get-go ("Let's take turns with my yellow board, Mommy!"), so my sit-on-the-sofa-and-watch plan effectively got tossed out the window before my butt even hit the cushions.

But because noninvolvement had at least been my aim, I did do better at not interjecting my two cents every five seconds. When my son stood by the shelves for several minutes, fingering the materials, I didn't say, "What do you want to do? Which activity? Want to try the blocks again? How about the fabric basket? If you want to do the tongs, don't just sit there, eating the crunchy pasta. Bring the activity over to your table. Please." I just waited (stoic observation!), and he eventually left the pasta alone (temporarily satiated, I guess) and grabbed the transferring materials. Later, I got to thinking about pacing. You see, I'm starting to realize that a lot of the turmoil I'm feeling about our homeschool has its roots in my unconscious expectation that our school look/feel like the schools I have taught in and attended. I get anxious because my son isn't doing what he's "supposed to do," I worry that there's not enough structure, I feel frustrated that he doesn't follow my instructions, I crave "ta da!" moments and tangible results (like worksheets I can draw a happy face on and affix to the refrigerator door). And I get really really nervous when there's a lull in the action, when my son pauses for a few minutes, when he looks (emphasis on the word looks) unengaged. Teachers are taught to conduct their classes with a quick tempo; lecture, worksheet, quiz, lecture, worksheet, quiz. Give the kids a few minutes of free time, and they'll get restless and look for ways to misbehave. Untasked kids mean unruly kids. Well, I think that's a pretty pessimistic way to view our youth. Just because they don't look like they're doing anything of note, who's to know what's going on inside their brains. It's actually kind of fun to wait and see what happens after a kid's been sitting there ruminating for awhile. The results are often not only surprising, but ingenious, too. We should change that old saying to, "Idle hands are the mind's workshop."

Now to put all that into effect. It's one thing to sit here and blog about how I'm not going to be a slave to my conditioning; how I'm not going to be a monkey on my son's back during school just because aspects our homeschooling sessions clash with more traditional school methods. Changing the way I behave is another thing entirely. But I'll do my best. I'll keep trying to let go of this instinctual urge to control. And it does work. Today I didn't bug Parker about how he was holding the scissors or about trying to hold the paper himself (as opposed to making me hold it), and he got creative: he balanced the paper so that it would hang over the table's edge and then cut it, unassisted. When I reached out to help him position the paper (not stoic observation, I know), he said, "No, Mommy. I can do it by myself."