School update

Well here comes my little break from the blog. Posting will be on the lite side as we delve into our new life over there. And just when I need to blog too--so much to share. Go figure.

Someone mentioned to me that I hadn't talked much about our homeschooling lately and this is true, probably because we haven't done much of anything different yet other than having the kids home. Right now we're unschooling and trying out little bits and pieces of Waldorf style homeschooling. We really do much of what we've always done,--story time, painting, nature walks and raiding the recycling bin armed with duct tape, glue and string. The only difference being that we do it pretty much full time now and whenever we want. It kind of makes me dread the scheduled version I've created for Fall of next year. I really think unschooling works and I trust it but I'm not alone to decide and I have to respect Seb's say in things. It's been hard enough trying to make him see the benefits of waiting for Fall for S to start reading again. Maybe over time he'll see. A few years back I thought the whole concept of unschooling was completely daft. I mean who lets their kids do NOTHING all day? Now of course I get how it works.

Actually we do a lot in a given day and we've learned lots of new things like mini bookmaking and S is really in to portrait sketches now--no idea why! He never drew people all through maternelle and up until last year. The psychologue who saw him each week at school thought this was a big sign of something wrong Now it seems he ONLY draws people. Of course he only draws people from the story of Narnia, these sort of medieval people with weapons, and then he tapes them all over the walls of our house.



One of the funnest things we've started doing is knitting. I've taught Little S finger knitting and even though it took a few weeks of trying and stopping and trying again he finally got it all on his own in one of those divine "spurt-leap" moments that John Holt talks about so often in his books. It was like suddenly it just clicked in a split second. I'm doing real knitting now which I learned by watching videos and I really enjoy it too. I hope to teach S next year and he's really eager to learn. He's very cute with his knitting and walks around with the yarn everywhere he goes. We try to do handcrafts in the afternoon a little each day to prepare for next year when we'll follow the Waldorf homeschool curriculum I've chosen. We also do a lot of wet on wet watercolor painting which is really relaxing. I have a hard time getting them to use one or two colors but they're learning. Color and paints have always been a staple in our house so it's almost impossible to backtrack and say "okay today it's just YELLOW" but we're getting there. We have a set story time after lunch where they sit around and I read to them from the internet (mainlesson.com is a great resource for this). I sometimes forget about it but they don't. They hound me chanting story time! story time! at exactly one-thirty. I'm surprised they like it so much. After story time we break out the block crayons and they get to draw their perception of the story. I push Little S to do MLB style drawings because I know this will help jumpstart him when we start lesson in the Fall. He does beautiful borders and he even reminded me that people in the moyen age did borders on their pages and books. If you know Little S he is completely obsessed with the moyen age so I'm not surprised he found a connection.



The rest of our afternoon is devoted to being outside, usually a good ninety minutes to two hours of playing, exploring and walking. We've invented some games that we regularly play and we bike a lot. It's a good rhythm.

In a few days we'll pack up the paints and supplies and haul them downstairs. I imagine we'll have to buy more supplies while we wait for our things to be shipped to China. See this is how I end up with so many art supplies--all the moves!

Where we are

I'm still here! Life is flowing nicely and we're building a calm routine (as I say this the kids are in the middle of a screaming match!) I'm reading through lots of homeschool curriculum materials and trying to plan our school year. My hope is to start first year in the Fall with Little S. I hope Seb agrees. For now it's just a matter of building rhythms. I'm really liking our life now. Everything feels like it just works better.

People are very curious when they hear the kids aren't in school. Of course it's just until we move so I don't mention homeschool. It's mostly when we're in shops, "and why aren't these little people in school?" I say "well we live in another country and it's vacation time." And I try to leave it at that but there are always questions! I try to avoid all question and stay very vague. It helps that the kids speak english. It's funny because I feel like we're doing something wrong like I'm guilty of something. Public school felt so wrong to me but there is shame in homeschool which feels so right to me. I don't get it. It seems all backwards.

One of the biggest changes I've noticed is a gentle nature which is starting to emerge from Little S. He was starting to get angry and resentful. He was cynical and always grumpy after school. He was angry and aggressive at home. At school we knew he was very timid and never spoke. We figured these outbursts at home were his outlet for all the teasing and prodding he got at school. He wasn't like this until he started school, never mean. Now there is a shimmer of another person. A small light. He still gets angry, curses and has fits but it's slowly disappearing. I've also changed. I don't blink when he has a fit. I just dust the furniture around him, yawn and go on. It really does work better if you don't react. *

For now we're baking and painting. We listen to music and do crafts. The tv is off (and by tv I mean the dvds because we've never really let them watch regular broadcast tv). I have a few neighbors and we've seen them and their kids. They're nice and we have some kid contact which is good, something they've missed. My only complaint is that our lives have become so different that it becomes hard to integrate with others. Our neighbors for example, the mom who parked the kids in the bedroom with a Disney movie on the entire time we were there. I felt precious time slipping away as I sat there talking to my neighbor, her giant tv blaring in the background over our own conversation. I couldn't think to even talk. I don't want to alienate ourselves but at the same time I figure what's the point?

No worries because we have some friends visiting next month during the vacation and we have a whole new group of people to meet. They don't see 200 people a day anymore, but was there any benefit in that. I'm not so sure.

Right now we're doing wet watercolor painting, baking cookies and playing a lot outdoors. Life is good.

* (as I've in the ast the Parenting Passageways blog in my sidebar is really helpful for gentle parenting advice--I've learned so much from it)

Half a year of maternelle

I dread making the call to the directrice at Charlotte's school that she won't be coming back. It's been about four days now of calling in sick. I'm going to have to tell them soon. I'm still not sure what I'll tell them either. They're very nice so I don't want to say anything negative, but then again I don't want to have to fabricate lies. *

Yesterday both kids were home "sick" so it was a taste of what the future will bring. I let them play happily in the house in pyjamas building things. We read a few books and enjoyed the rainy day inside the house. As the day wore on I began to have phone calls, "was S okay?" "would I be able to take L to school tomorrow morning for sure" "could we make the schedule for the pick ups and drop off and the lunch schedule tomorrow," all different mothers who depend on us for ride shares and scheduling. I wonder what will happen when we aren't here anymore? Who will they turn to to help manage their busy lives. For one day I got to experience the feeling of freedom from worrying about scheduling our life around school and it was very liberating.

I'm slowly ordering the books we'll need for next year. I won't have the library at my disposal and no way to order materials in China. That part worries me but then I say whatever, it will force me to be more creative. I'm worried about not having enough nature around us and the nagging feeling that the parks are the hands off type. But then I say, it's okay we'll figure it out, we'll make do as long as there are trees we'll be okay. But still I worry about that a lot because I'm not much of a city person and this is a very big city. I want them to be outside as much as possible. It's the basis for my whole curriculum with them. Outside, outside, outside. If we're trapped inside with books the center of everything will fall apart. I plan on using Steiner and Charlotte Mason which recommends two hours outside in the late fall and winter months and six hours outside the rest of the year. I'm hoping we'll be able to make this work in a concrete jungle somehow.

Explorer Robert Scott wrote this in his last pages of his diary-- a letter to his wife. He talked about his son:

"I had looked forward to helping you to bring him up, but it is a satisfaction to know that he will be safe with you....make the boy interested in natural history if you can. It is better than games. They encourage it in some schools. I know you will keep him in the open air."

I think about that when I have doubts about homeschooling. Little S has two fifteen minute sessions of recreation per day at his school. It isn't near enough. Charlotte has about thirty minutes a day. Both have their outdoor time on a concrete courtyard. The last few times S played at his best friend's house he was bored because L wanted to play video games the whole time. This is a boy who always built forts in the garden with him and now he's glued to a television screen nearly every time we visit them.

At home maybe we can't recreate a forest school but we can try to get closer to it.

* I called charlotte's school and they were really understanding about me taking her out. I said she wasn't adjusting well and it was probably best for her. I did get a short speech about the time it takes for adaptation but I stayed firm and said said "yes maybe you're right but it's best for us now if she just stays home." And so just like that she was out. They'll give me certificate that says she's been enrolled in a French school because if she ever needs to enroll in a French school again apparently she needs this paper. Just like in the military she has her discharge papers!

Prattle

Still waiting on Seb to come back and let me just say it's loooong this time. It's been two weeks now and we have another to go. I really feel like I'm the single mom with no family around. Yes this is me whining! I want my husband back. He actually is pretty handy to have around.

In all my spare non couple time I've been reading up on ready made homeschool curriculums and this seems like the sanest route for me--especially with all the changes of us moving to a new home and country. I don't really have time to design a curriculum and I think I just need something "microwavable" for at least the first year even if I'm not necessarily the microwavable, type of educator. I'm looking at three different Waldorf inspired curriculums--Oak Meadow, Christopherus and another one designed by a homeschool Waldorf mom who seems really together in her video presentations. The problem is I can't decide! I'm awful with making choices. I can spend six hours just trying to choose a winter coat so choices just confuse me. I'm a knit picker and they only give you teeny samples of the curricula on the various sites. My big fear is to pay all that money for something (they aren't cheap) and end up with a curriculum whose secret agenda is religious or worse still Americentric, and be stuck skipping over huge passages or tearing out my hair trying to make them work.

I'm really eager to get started and I'm hoping Seb continues to agree and approves of the method I choose. I don't think I'll be as academically strict as he likes but I think these methods will work for me and our kids and to me that's what's important. I'm on my second John Holt book since Seb left for China and I've read enough about Waldorf-Steiner to make me feel like this is definitely the right choice. In fact I'm so in to my readings it's gotten so as soon as I walk in Charlottes's school I groan a little more each time. I can see all the problems jumping out at me in big bold letters. All the while though I have to pretend that this is the right choice for her sake because she's still crying each time I take her and I can't be anything but cheery and positive. Today she had another substitute teacher though and I was ready to just say never mind and take her home but I left her crying on the floor because the school was closing its doors and I felt pressured to leave and not be the indulgent parent. Then when she came home she told me she was in Mme. Lanne's class (another teacher) and she wasn't scared. So as far as I can see they divided the class yet again and put her off into another group for the day and I'm not even sure why! Poor thing. When I see the Oak Meadow curriculum for preschool it makes me think why don't I just take her out now and invest a few hours a day in playing games with her and going on nature walks instead of sending her off to the Land of Chaos. I may end up doing that after the vacation if Seb will agree but I'm not sure if he will.

As for Little S he is zipping through the CP (first grade) global reading method like gangbusters and it's also got me worried. He isn't necessarily understanding much of it though and they just keep going and going. One mom told me "they go too slow! they should be halfway through the book by Christmas shouldn't they! I think they must be bored" I didn't know what to say. "Actually the book is crap and full of "prattle" and I'd like to throw it out the window" but instead I said, "well I'm glad they're going slow for some of the kids who aren't raedy to move on yet."

For me it's too much too fast. It's the pail analogy--he's being filled and filled and I think his pail is overflowing. He just seems saturated with information and you can sense the urgency of the system to get him reading and writing and on his way. In December and January we'll empty the pail, dry things out and in February I will try to light the spark, but maybe the pail will need to be emptied a little more before it can light. I won' t start his Grade One program until at least February and we'll continue it through the Summer at a very casual pace. I can't wait.

More ramblings about HS

I've been thinking of nothing lately but of getting the kids out of school and getting them in a program of my own. I won't criticize the school and go on and on about their shortcomings. It's like a bad blind date--the guy is nice enough but it just isn't working out. You just want to get out of there without hurting anybody's feelings. I feel like that about the kid's school. No hard feelings just show me the door please, PLEASE. (I will mention that Charlotte is now on her third teacher--and it's only been two months--Go Ed. Nt'l for placing a teacher 7 months pregnant in the class! I've actually considered taking her out until we leave.)

There's a lot of behind the scenes on this I haven't blogged about so I guess it sounds a little out of left field to suddenly get on the homeschooling wagon but it's a combination of several things--mostly a thought I had waaaay before children came into my life that I would homeschool them someday. I'm not sure why. I guess it was mostly based on my own bad relationship with school. Like a lot of things in my life (my 45rpm collection!) I let all those homeschooling thoughts go with the wind with my move to France. After all how could I home school in another language? IMPOSSIBLE! Well at least I used to think that and yet now it's bothering me less and less which should be scary in itself.

So yes here it is all back again. Homeschooling. How did it come up again.

First it was Little S's learning problems and the psst in my ear from his moyenne section teacher that some kids are just different and won't thrive in a traditional French school. In other words, "run for the hills! you're funneling down a drain" She told us this off the clock of course and admitted that her own son was in an alternative school because he doesn't fit into regular school and she recognized S as being a bit like her son..

Second was my application to the Rudolph Steiner school for teacher training, --I got an interview in May but we decided to go to China so I left it lying. AGONY! I really, really wanted to try to do this but life gave us a crossroad and I chose the safest path I guess which was to not stay and try to browbeat a committee into accepting my application. (by the way Steiner is Waldorf to you 'mericans--Steiner was the founding father of the school's philosophy) In preparation I've been studying Steiner (Waldorf) methods for over a year on my own and really loving it--even learning about it for the pure pleasure of it and not for my entrance interview. I have had a complete change of attitude about the way children learn and think. It's how I should have been taught as a child.

Then some other things got peppered into the mix. My interest in doing art with the kids over the past few years has lead me to lots of homeschooling blogs and this is where I learned about project based learning, which I realized was basically what we do in our free time anyway. I was already pretty much homeschooling go figure. The kids do projects all the time. Right now I have a cardboard Narnia city being built in my dining room. Okay here I am doing it. Cool.

The whole HS thing really got pushed though when I started researching schools in Shanghai and I realized that there weren't any that fit what we wanted or needed for S who is more or less a special needs kid. Alternative schools? Chinese education tends to be really strict so even the alternative schools are a bit rigid like people who just won't relax even when they finally can. My mom is like this when I try to massage her head during our little beauty seminars--she just can't relax. I'll say "come on, relax mom!" and she'll say "I am!" but you know she isn't and she never can or will. So the one singular Montessori labeled school was out just based on the description alone which sounded vaguely masochistic. I'm not such a huge fan of Montessori anyway. It seems too reliant on materials that most of the schools hardly ever use and IMHO there isn't a huge pedagogy behind it other than the pretty classrooms. Yes Little S loved the rabbits at his Montessori school in Mexico but it was a very big price to pay to pet rabbits.

So this is how I've come to making our secular curriculum based on Steiner, Charlotte Mason (for Seb and meeting the requirement of the Ed. Nt'l of France) and Project Based Learning, but leaning heavily towards Steiner for the moment. I really like my curriculum and I hope Seb gives it an approval so I can start gathering materials for it but of course it can change again, again and it probably will. The cool part is that if it does change I don't have to get it approved by any committee or board I can just do it. Well I guess Seb has to approve it but he has a vested interest in the results so he's easy to win over.

I have just added a mother-lode of work onto myself before we leave if we do decide to do this and I'm slightly freaked out about the lack of ME time I have to admit but it's kind of exciting at the same time.

Time is flying

I can't really believe that the kids only have about two months of school left before we leave. It seems like time is flying by again. I realized this as things have come up like school pictures, would they even be ready in time before we leave? and parent-éleve elections and donations to the caisse d'´école where we won't even be here for any of the class field trips. It just seems strange because our community is so centered around school and here we are leaving behind all that--the schooling too and entering a sort of no-mans land--exciting and scary at the same time.

Seb seems to be really warming up to my homeschooling idea. We even decided that the kids won't start school in 2011 and at least until the end of February they'll be home. I'm a little daunted by the whole thing and worried that they'll be bored, that they'll fight, that they'll overwhelm me. I think I'm mostly afraid because I know Seb wants to start a school curriculum at home and I had no intention of doing it like that. He told me he wants us to create a little school with set hours. I feel like it's doomed to fail! I think I need to sell him some more on my unschooling idea but I'll have to do it in small doses. He had such a strict upbringing!! Even during their last visit my in-laws hounded Little S about getting a peek at his homework. It was his birthday and they had his books out on the table. When he visits them they spend lots of time tutoring him on the abc's and his numbers. I can't say their method doesn't work because Seb is definitely well-educated but Seb is also a workaholic who takes no pleasure in anything outside of what his duty is. I have a hard time getting him to relax and do nothing with me and the kids.

Fortunately all along Seb has had my little voice in his ear and now he sees things firsthand. Homeschool was so abstract before but now he sees how laxidasical the teacher at S's school is about his relationship with the kids and the effect it has on his son. We had a small conference with S's teacher last week and he just seemed bored. He worked into the conversation three times how he was overworked and how he wasn't getting paid for doing the overtime for after school study groups and for the conference we were in with him. I think he's a nice teacher and I hate criticizing the school so I won't go too much in detail but many of his responses, his general attitude about a bullying incident and Little S's general attitude since he changed schools has even the most skeptical, Seb, changing his mind about public school.

I'm reading Holt's How Children Fail right now. I've only read excerpts from his books but I finally ordered two of them for my library. I'll probably be talking a lot about this in the next few months, sorry in advance!

By the way here is a l i n k to an interesting emission on TF2 about homeschooling in France. And then another I found on a local savoyarde tv news channel. Very interesting to see homeschool families here in France.