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?"
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!
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!
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.
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.
Alrik has decided that it's time he broke into the glamorous world of YouTubing. He has done so with aplomb, with the release of his own channel, DitDoo's World.
DitDoo is what his baby brother inexplicably started calling him when he learned to talk, and we stuck with it. Karsten has strong opinions about things like what your favorite color is or how to pronounce your name, and we've found there's no point in arguing with him.
Anyway, DitDoo's World has everything fabulous a 6-year-old can offer, to wit:
Journal entries featuring illustrations of adorable dreams
Inventions like the wearable phone glove and paper-tube robot arms,
which the world will be clamoring for as soon as these vids goes viral
DitDoo the author's own books, self-illustrated and self-published with love
It's time for my annual roundup of coupons and deals sent to me by my affiliate partners. These are companies I support and recommend and whose savings I'd like to pass along to you for your holiday shopping! If you shop through my links, it costs you nothing extra and I get a little reward from the company to support my blogging. Thank you!
It's time for my annual roundup of coupons and deals sent to me by my affiliate partners. These are companies I support and recommend and whose savings I'd like to pass along to you for your holiday shopping! If you shop through my links, it costs you nothing extra and I get a little reward from the company to support my blogging. Thank you!
KiwiCo: Science & art project subscriptions for ages 3 to teen
KiwiCo offers four different hands-on subscription models for little kids on up through big ones. And you can try it out for your kids or gift a subscription at a substantial savings right now:
It's time for my annual roundup of coupons and deals sent to me by my affiliate partners. These are companies I support and recommend and whose savings I'd like to pass along to you for your holiday shopping! If you shop through my links, it costs you nothing extra and I get a little reward from the company to support my blogging. Thank you!
Green Kid Crafts' Black Friday deals start now!
Use coupon code BLACK17 to take 70% off the first month of any subscription.
And coupon code BFGET40 will get you a whooping 40% off any single Discovery Box!
It happens every time I travel, and it happened again this summer. Inevitably I rub up against people who make me start questioning if my kids are learning enough, or the right things.
Sometimes it's the traditionally homeschooling mom who proudly declares how many grade levels above the norm her kids tested.
Sometimes it's the well-meaning relatives who quiz my kids on math problems and spelling and state capitals.
I don't have anything concrete to boast about. I've got three loving, respectful, curious kids, but somehow that's not anything specific to point to.
Mikko keeps surprising me by being ten years old. How did that happen? People asked what grade the kids were going into, and I was astonished to calculate that he's going to be a fifth-grader. Fifth grade! He's nearly in (imaginary) junior high.
What do we have to show for it? He was slow to read. I had to unclench from expectations there and let him learn at his own pace. I intermittently fretted, read a lot about natural learning, worried about dyslexia, gave in to occasional bursts of worksheets and primers that annoyed and frustrated him. In the end, he was, as in all things, determinedly himself. Just the other day, he bemusedly remarked that once you learn to read, you can't turn it off, and your brain just reads everything that scrolls past it. Yup, I agreed, feeling that wave of relief that he had come this far, mostly on his own and despite my anxieties.
I recently took a quiz on "What Kind of Homeschooler Are You?" posted by my friend Jennifer on Facebook as found on the blog Eclectic Homeschooling. My results were mostly what I expected — high emphasis on natural, child-led learning and a low emphasis on "school at home."
But what I was even more interested in was finding out if my kids agreed with my philosophy on learning. After all, how could I believe in child-led learning if my children didn't think that was a worthy goal? That's kind of a head-scratcher, isn't it? But I do think I'd adapt our unschooling approach to be more schooly if that's what our kids needed from us.
So, I had 9-year-old Mikko take the quiz, going through each question with him to be sure I understood his point of view. Our results were as follows. Mine is the first number, and Mikko's is the second. I've rearranged them into descending order to make it easier to scan.
I had a dentist appointment the other day, and they went hog wild with the sucker tool. My mouth was as dry as the Serengeti, and soon my tongue was nothing but a pendulous husk in my mouth.
I flashed back to my school days when I would deliberately leave my mouth slightly open for as long as I could stand so that my tongue would dry out. I'd try to wait until it was as dry as possible and then I'd close it and enjoy the strange sensation of cotton-ball tongue — a seemingly foreign object — then let it gradually wick up moisture again and return to its moist, plump self.
Sometimes I fear I'm not schooly enough for this unschooling thing to work. This is a common worry among homeschooling types — am I doing enough? Are my kids learning the right things? Would school be doing much better for them?
I see myself as a Type B personality, so I'm naturally laissez-faire. While I think Type A unschoolers have to push themselves to relax, I feel I need occasional nudges into scheduling and activities to make sure we do something.
(This post is not at all sponsored, by the way. I signed up for the free trial but then let it lapse, because I'm awesome like that. I'm just talking about the single lesson's worth of use I've gotten out of it so far, and this isn't meant as a straight-up review.)
A story: My old church supported several Karen refugee families from Myanmar. The Karen are a Christian and Buddhist ethnic minority group in Myanmar (Burma) who were forced from their homes, their villages destroyed, and fled from violence and ethnic cleansing in a Burmese civil war into hiding in the surrounding jungles. Not the pretty Jungle Book jungles but mountainous ones that grow cold and inhospitable, with little food to forage.
The fortunate ones were able to cross the border into Thai refugee camps. The very fortunate ones were able to make their way from Thailand to settle in other nations, such as the Karen community in the south Seattle area. This was not their wish, though. They miss their homes desperately and find it hard to adjust to a new life in a new land where they're definite minorities. As one woman said in an interview with CNN: "[I]f the situation in Burma changes, I hope to go back to my country."
Here's the part of this experience that has stuck with me for years now. A group of internally displaced Karen people still running and hiding in the mountain forests wrote our church for assistance. We raised money regularly to try to get supplies to them and sent words of support and encouragement. In this letter back to us, they asked in particular for one thing: a bone saw. They had been performing amputations on horribly injured members of their community with whatever sharp implements they had to hand. They wanted a bone saw to ease the process.
THAT is what a refugee is. It's a person who's thankful for a bone saw. It's a person whose current greatest wish is an appropriate instrument to perform major surgery in the open air of a jungle as they're running for their lives.
I'm Lauren Wayne, writer and natural parent. I embrace attached parenting with an emphasis toward green living.
Riding the rails with my husband, Crackerdog Sam, and our hobo kids, Mikko Lint Picker (born June 2007), Alrik Irontrousers (born May 2011), and Karsten (born October 2014). Trying every day to parent intentionally and with grace.
I'm Lauren Wayne, writer and natural parent. I embrace attached parenting with an emphasis toward green living. 
