My 9-year-old learns art techniques & origami
by practicing them over and over and over.
When I was new to the world of homeschooling, and pedagogy in general, I heard about the term "teaching to mastery," and it perplexed me. The idea is that you
teach something until the student understands and retains it. You test as you go along, but if the student doesn't score highly on any given test, you adjust your teaching style and go over it again. What perplexed me was that there were teachers
not using this technique.
It makes sense in a homeschool situation. Or, in other words, the reverse makes no sense. There's no reason I would, say, teach my child fractions, have them be confused and doing them all wrong, and then say, "Welp, that was all the time we have for fractions! On to geometry. You get a fail on fractions." I wouldn't hold my child back a grade in homeschool in some punitive sense, and, conversely, there's no time pressure to move up at a certain pace. We can speed ahead of things they've got down pat, and slow down for the more frustrating bits.
But then I remember my experiences in school, where teaching to mastery was not the norm. You kept up — or you flunked out. I was strong academically, so my two personal examples were in art and physical education. Fortunately, both were graded more on effort than skill, but I remember being criticized in art class more than learning how to complete assignments. In P.E., I remember being ignored most of the time. I wasn't worth bringing up to scratch, I suppose.
Have you seen the
pandemic-schooling schedule floating around?
(To give proper credit, it's from
Jessica McHale, and I'm not posting this to call her out because I know what I'm talking about here is a common parenting mindset.)
There are joke versions crafted on this template that replace every slot with screen time or
Frozen 2 or fighting over toys. That's all good and fun.
But I'll direct you to the last two slots marked Bedtime: Any kids who follow the daily schedule and don't fight are entitled to an extra hour before bed.
When I showed this to Alrik, he had the same reaction I did: "
Why would you punish your kids by making them sleep? Isn't sleep something we all need?"
Astronaut
Rotating with no axis,
unfurled tether
keeping you in place.
The atmosphere around you
unbreathable,
so air comes to you.
Extraterrestrial glow
illuminating
the dimness
As you spin and twirl,
no upside down
or right side up,
Weightless,
waiting,
your hand before
your face
Waving to Earth.
If you've been staring at
bare paper-products aisles in distress, I have some suggestions to brighten your day. You can cut down or cut out your use of toilet paper while maintaining your comfort and convenience.
I recommend a mix of
family cloth, a bidet attachment, and, optionally, a much smaller quantity of toilet paper or wet wipes as needed, such as for guests -- in the future, when guests are a thing again. You might remember I first tried family cloth, or reusable cloth toilet paper,
several years ago after a lot of debate and skepticism. I'm glad to report I've kept using it, but I admit I didn't get my family fully on board until this coronavirus epidemic! Necessity is the mother of getting your kids to use less toilet paper, apparently. Happily, this transition is going very well. I think we can stick with it, so I'll share my updated thoughts on managing family cloth for a whole family.
Well. We're in a global pandemic. All over social media are posts encouraging you to make the most of this time your children are off of school. There are many tips on how best to continue schooling while you're isolated at home as well as memes to let off steam about how much teachers should earn, how cooped up everyone's feeling, and how no one's taught to carry the one anymore. (Is this true? I'm too old to have realized this.)
As a parent who's been homeschooling for my children's full schooling years so far, I want to offer my take on how best to homeschool right now for those of you thrown into schooling at home. Don't worry, I'll be gentle. Seriously. Because:
- This is not homeschooling. If your kids are usually in school full time, what you're doing right now is not any form of regular homeschooling, which is intentional and planned and much less panicky on the whole. What you're doing is crisis schooling. It's stress schooling. It's not vacation, and it's not not vacation. It's weird, and you're distracted and anxious, and your kids might be, too. This isn't normal even for homeschooling families because all our classes, co-ops, excursions, and social interactions are canceled. All children are missing their friends and routines and stimulation, whether they're already used to homeschooling or not. You're missing yours. Maybe you're still working full time in an essential (read: stressful) job. Maybe you're trying to figure out working from home. Maybe you're out of work and worrying about how to pay the next bills to come due. Maybe you or loved ones are sick or recovering. Maybe you or your kids have disabilities or other special needs that make it hard to miss out on the services that make your days more manageable.
I feel you. But only figuratively and from a socially mandated distance.
Whatever you do right now with school, it's fine. It's really, really fine. You don't even have to Make Every Moment Special™, which is its own form of unnecessary pressure. Kids can be bored. Kids can use screens. Kids can play the day away. Kids can fall behind in schoolwork. If your school has gone virtual and is laying on the pressure, you have the right to ask for dispensation and excused absences right now. Because:
Alrik has discovered the joys of
Google Slides (PowerPoint-like presentations).
It all started when he made me watch multiple inane YouTube videos that were quizzes purporting to help you discern things like what color you should dye your hair, but then all the questions would be things like, "What kind of flowers would you grow in a garden?" and "If you could be any type of animal, which would you be? Now choose from these three options."
To celebrate the nonsense, I made my own quiz that I forced my family to complete:
Feel free to total up your numbers, and do let me know which animal you are!
I've been finding myself sharing posts on my
Facebook page about how big kids are sweethearts, too. About how we often attribute malice or disinterest to the gangly tweens and teens with the earbuds in and the cool scowl on their faces, and we don't look further to see the tender, thoughtful souls beneath.
Living with a sweetheart of a 12-year-old who's now wearing men's shoes and is about to outgrow his aunt by height, I know firsthand that appearances can be deceiving and that the warmest hearts can beat beneath the pulled-up hoodies of adolescence.
Leading up to Christmas Eve, Mikko had been making jokes about staying up all night to ambush Santa. He thinks
Danny Gonzalez's take on the movie The Santa Clause is hilarious, and he bought
the single of Danny's song where he states his intention of murdering Santa so he can take over.
Wishing you and your family all the best
this year and always!
In the category of
Things No One Asked Me For, I bring you a
family Mad Lib to act out. Wondering what family activity to settle into on Christmas Eve? Trying to head off political arguments when relatives are over? Break out
this little giggle starter.
I was inspired by Jimmy Fallon's
Mad Lib Theater and thought:
We definitely all need this in our very own living rooms. Because this is not just any
Mad Libs. This is a DRAMA. Stand up! Emote! Bellow to the back of the theater!
Print the doc out from this link.
Breastfeeding the third and final nursling
After eleven years of breastfeeding three babies, with part of a year off for one pregnancy, I have officially weaned: myself, my babies, my body. I no longer lactate. I have no nurslings. I am done with my breastfeeding time.
Of course, this is bittersweet. I thought a lot about what I did and didn't want to do to commemorate this change in my life. I didn't want to know when the exact last nursing was, for instance. Karsten petered off around age three and a half, and I let that be vague in my mind. I didn't want to know:
This is how it ends. I didn't want to worry it wasn't the bestest nursing session ever or wonder if it would repeat. I don't know when the last time was, and that's fine by me.
I might as well have put it on my calendar. I turned 40 and
immediately fell into a funk about who I was and how little I'd accomplished with my life. Maybe it was the contemplation of (unattended) school reunions when I could see on Facebook that former classmates were now doctors, lawyers, nurses, professors, scientists, and successful business owners. Maybe it was
watching blogging disintegrate after I'd poured more than a decade of myself into it. Maybe it was all those unfinished and unpublished manuscripts hidden but not forgotten across various hard drives. Maybe it was that my husband had slowly, as we added each new child to our family, taken over more and more of
our mom-and-pop business to where it was mostly pop.
I started assessing who I was and what I had done with my four decades on this earth. I saw a lot of titles that were currently in the past — student, blogger, musician, writer, business owner, leader, friend — and not much to speak of from the present: mother, wife, homeschool parent. Mother is not an exclusive title. There's no glory there, particularly if you feel like you're
not doing much special and are average at best. Wife is easy when you're
married to Sam, believe me. I didn't feel like I was pulling my weight there. And I'm sure everyone homeschools more assiduously than I do. We are at heart lackadaisical. Throw in some learning disabilities we've been navigating, and it's prime territory for fretting I'm
not doing enough or the right things.
Before I had my first child 12 years ago, I worried about how I would balance my need for quiet alone time with the care of a baby. I have my skepticism toward those personality tests that purport to tell you who you are for all time, but I will say that every time I've taken one,
the slider is always the full way over toward introversion. There are few people I feel wholly comfortable around, people I can sit in a room with and feel my batteries recharging rather than draining. By the time I had Mikko, I was down to one: my husband. How would a child fit into this system?
As it turns out, things were fine — for a while. Babies don't require a lot of back-and-forth. You can
still have your thoughts while cooing their direction, nursing in long moments of stillness, changing diapers and giving baths.
It's more once they talk that you have to weigh how your conversational styles mesh. Do they enjoy long pauses? What toddler or preschooler does? Do they need time away from YOU? Very few little kids would voluntarily choose so.
I was lamenting fruit flies on Twitter several years ago, and
Teacher Tom stepped in to save me.
Seattle had decreed that all food and yard waste needed to go in the compost bin rather than the garbage. This was a change I could get behind as an eco-friendly ideal.
But the small kitchen waste bin the city handed out for collecting our kitchen scraps had two distinct problems: The smell of rotting food seeped out into our kitchen, and fruit flies gathered to feast. It didn't seem to matter how often we emptied the little container, and we even bought a
fancier one with a locking lid and filter, with no accompanying improvement.
I'm going to talk about health and food here. I am not a medical professional, nor do I play one on this blog. Please consult a medical professional before diagnosing or treating any conditions you may have.
It started, or so I thought, with persistent ingrown hairs. They were
red bumps in my bikini line that often grew swollen and painful, but every search result told me to be more careful about shaving and to try warm compresses. No matter that I barely ever shaved the area, I took it as fact that these were just a nuisance, even as they grew larger and numerous.
Then I had an
open wound on my stomach. It was during hot weather, so I wrote it off as some sort of reaction to the heat and sweat. I felt embarrassed, really, that apparently my stomach folds weren't letting in adequate ventilation, and pledged to keep the area drier.
Then I got a small open sore in one armpit. That sent me Googling.
I didn't have a knee-jerk reason for wounds in my armpit, even tiny ones like this.
It was that small sore that connected all the disparate symptoms. I didn't have ingrown hairs and severe heat rash and mystery sores. I had an
autoinflammatory skin condition known as hidradenitis suppurativa, which I will abbreviate as HS for ease of reading. (You're welcome.)
HS was initially considered to be an inflammation of the sweat glands that caused leaking wounds (hence the mouthful of a name, if you want to consider the root etymology of hidra/sweat + aden/gland + itis/inflammation + suppurativa/weeping). It's now more accurately considered to be obstruction of the hair follicles, but tomato-scientific-jargon-tomahto. Whatever the internal workings, externally HS presents as
painful swollen cysts that ultimately break to the surface and expel pus and blood, recurrent open wounds, and resulting scar tissue. To avoid traumatizing you further, I won't post any photos, but feel free to do an image search if you haven't eaten recently.
Here's a fun game you can use to help your kids practice their math facts, such as addition or the multiplication tables. They probably won't ever notice they're doing drills!
First, have them make some flashcards. You don't need anything special for this, just whatever paper you have around. We folded ours in half lengthwise and then fourths the other way. I think. Just do whatever looks good. I won't check.
Have your kids copy out a selection of math facts at their skill level. If you have a printed version, they can copy from that. Otherwise, you can write some out or dictate if they can't figure it out on their own. Have them print one side with just the problem and the reverse with the whole dealio or just the answer. Don't worry about how messy or goofy the writing is. As long as you can all decipher it, you're good to go.
I'm Lauren Wayne, writer and natural parent. I embrace attached parenting with an emphasis toward green living. 
