Homeschooling Works!

Okay, so can we have a praise God moment? 

Each week at the end of karate class, the entire class says, “I promise to respect my parents.  I promise to listen to my teachers.  I promise to never misuse my karate.”   It is our karate oath.  Last week, our sensei gave the class a homework assignment.  We were asked to write the karate oath on a sheet of paper and bring it to class. 

Yesterday afternoon, I sat down with Captain Chaos, my six-year-old daughter, and asked her to recite the karate oath.  She did.  Then I gave her a piece of paper and a pencil, and helped her write her oath.  Please allow me to qualify “help.”  She did all the work.  I sat next to her, kept her focused, and guided her on “w” and “y," two letters that still give her trouble. This was a big test of her abilities.  Some of you do know, but most of you do not, that Captain Chaos had a stroke when she was four months old.  There was damage to both hemispheres.  Her left side was affected harder than her right, but there are muscle loss/motor control issues with her right hand.  For both physical and cognitive developmental reasons, we decided to hold our daughter back from first grade one year, and focus on three primary goals during this kindergarten year.  One was to teach her how to add.  The second was to teach her how to read.  The third was to teach her how to write. And yesterday she wrote:

This is a “Thank you, God!” moment.  This is an enormous achievement that is the result of years of prayer, therapy, hard work, and love.  This is the first time that our daughter sat down and wrote a sentence, let alone three.  My wife and I cannot help but remember looking at a very young girl on life support and wondering what the future would hold.  We looked at the Captain’s efforts yesterday and saw a blessing from above.  Thank you, thank you, thank you, God!

We know that as dedicated as our local school might be, they were not capable of giving the Captain the attention that she needed to get to this developmental milestone.    Our family has been blessed abundantly, and the ability to homeschool is one of those blessings.    Let’s all remain vigilant and work to keep homeschooling available to everyone.   

Homeschooling works! 

(An unsolicited addendum:  This is Linda, Arby's very devious blogging partner.  I love, love, love this post.  And I wanted some Hip Homeschool Moms to get a chance to read this amazing homeschool moment from one of the hippest homeschool dads I know.  Sooo...sorry, Arby.  You're now an honorary member of the Hip Homeschool (Mom) Hop.  I voted you in.)

The 2011 MPE Homeschooling Convention: They Survived Our Appearance

The Boss didn’t mean to insult the Alpha & Omega sales representatives when she stood in the middle of the vendor’s hall at the Midwest Parent Educator’s annual homeschool convention and enthusiastically announced, “I finally figured why I hate your curriculum!”  I couldn’t help but laugh.  Her energy and enthusiasm was genuine, as was the smile on her face.  The sales rep looked like she had been slapped.  I was reading through their Communication Lifepac in search of the perfect curriculum for teaching a speech class when my wife made her announcement.   Her complaint wasn’t based on the content of A & O’s curriculum, merely the fact that the Lifepac series comes in a series of large, thin pamphlet-style books that would easily get lost in our house.  We have a hard time keeping track of large, heavy text books.  This explanation did little to erase the look of polite distaste on the saleslady’s face, who replied, “It does come in a box,” before she wandered off to the far end of her display to patiently await her next customer while I complimented my wife on her tact and diplomacy.

“But I meant it as a criticism of ourselves!” she protested.

This was pretty much a standard date for us.  We walked through the vendor’s hall hand-in-hand, oblivious to the crowds around us as we talked about homeschooling, the children, and our teaching goals while sharing astute observations about the displays, such as Levi and the Levites were famous pants makers.  Our oldest son, General Mayhem, was watching his two younger siblings, and we were but a phone call away from any potential problems.  There were only three phone calls yesterday, but no emergency rooms bills, and the police weren’t waiting on the door step when we arrived home.  I’d say that was a good date.  We had a lot of fun.

I’m always amused by the sales techniques used in these vendor halls.  There is a large segment of the publishing world that targets Christian homeschoolers by using the words “from a Christian perspective” as often as possible during a presentation.   Yesterday’s winner was the woman selling her state geography “from a Christian perspective” curriculum.   The geopolitical information in her geography workbooks was rather factual in nature, but that didn’t dissuade her from pointing out that Indiana became a state on December 11, 1816, from a Christian perspective.  Because, you know, from a secular perspective it happened in the 1820’s. 

The highlight of the afternoon was meeting a woman named Carol Barnier.  She was an extremely funny lady who was selling a pair of books that she had written about teaching highly distractible children: How to Get Your Child Off the Refrigerator and on to Learning and If I’m Diapering a Watermelon, Then Where’d I Leave the Baby?   There was a picture on her table of a young boy reading a book inside of a clothes dryer.  That caught our attention.   We have a child who would do that.  Well, two, actually.    We stood and talked about one clear fact, parents who do not have highly distractible children simply do not understand what life is like for those of us who do.  Those calm, polite, cooperative children who sit silently in church next to their parents and keep themselves occupied during services?  Yeah, we don’t have one of those.  And we never will.  We have the children who ask in that unnaturally loud and clear voice that a child can only produce in the middle of our pastor’s sermon, “Is he finished talking yet?”  Carol encouraged the Boss to add a comment to a contest on the Sizzle Bop Blog.  It was the “I Never Thought I’d Say THAT!” contest, and Carol truly enjoyed my wife’s all-time favorite sentence that she never thought she’d say to her children, “Take the fork out of your butt!”   You need to read the entries in that contest here.   She also enjoyed hearing about the day I looked out the kitchen window to see Captain Chaos pushing a chicken in her baby swing while our middle child, Major Havoc, pushed a chicken down our yellow wavy slide.  Chickens don’t like wavy slides.    They hit the first hump and those little wings are flapping hard, desperately searching for enough lift to escape the maniacally laughing eight year old.  

There were other fun moments, including a phone call to the Customer Service Department of Rainbow Resources after their cashier at the convention conducted my entire purchase while talking about Facebook on her cell phone with a friend.  The woman never once said a word to me, and only indicated who was next in line to make a purchase by pointing a finger.  I used my cell phone to call customer service, standing a few feet away from the cashier while she continued her rudeness with another customer.  The customer service rep was angry, and immediately put me in touch with her supervisor, who was so shocked and surprised that she found it difficult to find the right words to apologize.  I simply thanked her for listening.  She assured me that she would address this breech of courtesy as soon as possible.  

The Boss and I had a great afternoon at the convention, laughing, enjoying each other’s company, and searching for curriculum for next year.  That’s the way homeschooling should be.  

The Logic and Priorities of the Teacher's Unions: More Reasons NOT to Give Them Control of YOUR Children

Home Spun Comics - Learning to Read

You can find more of Cristina's comics at Home Spun Juggling.

What Do They Know? What Do You Think They Know?

When I told my daughter, Captain Chaos, that it was time to start her schoolwork, she responded with great energy. 

“I know what we can do!” she exclaimed as she ran off to her pink plastic milk crate filled with books. 

She bypassed our entire standard curriculum and returned with a School Zone kindergarten workbook, one of those books you can find on the shelves at your local Wal*mart.   We worked on a page that asked the young girl to correctly identify the order of events pictured by writing a 1, 2, or 3 under each picture. 

The first three pictures showed a boy ordering a hamburger off of a menu at a restaurant.  She correctly identified the order of events: read the menu, deliver the food, and eat the hamburger.  Then we came to the second series of pictures.  You can see by her answers her idea of the correct order of events, and no amount of questioning or suggesting could shake her belief that the dog first sat on its bone, then dug up the bone, and then returned it to its master.   Her six-year-old logic was unshakeable.

Page two was marginally better. 

At the bottom of the page she quickly ordered the events pictured from baby to girl to woman.  No problems.  But building a snowman?  As you can see, she put the pictures in perfect reverse order.  

“Captain, what is the first thing you have to do if you are going to make a snowman?” I asked her.

She pointed to the first picture.  “Make a big snowball!” she exclaimed.

“Okay, but before you make a big snowball, there is something you have to do first,” I coached.

She pointed to the snowman’s face in the second picture.  “You need to get a carrot for the snowman’s nose, you goofy-head!” she replied, lovingly patient with my ignorance.

What could I have been thinking?     

Several attempts at leading her though the correct order of events failed.  I know a lost cause when I see one, so I let the girl run off to play while I put away the workbook and collected the rest of her lessons. 

Why was it so easy for her to identify the order of operations in two sets of pictures but be completely clueless about the other two?  The answer came to me when she pointed to the snowman.  We don’t get much snow here.  In her entire lifetime, we’ve only built one snowman.    She understands that people grow up from babies to children to adults.  Her doll play along with her own development and her relationship to adults shows her that.  She also eats in restaurants.  But neither of our dogs digs holes to bury bones.  They eat them, growling the entire time at our chickens who try to steal a beef knuckle for their own enjoyment.  The process of a dog burying a bone simply isn’t in her knowledge base, so the pictures made absolutely no sense to her.  And I couldn’t explain it in a manner that made sense.

I know.  I’m a goofy-head.

It’s easy to forget that our children have a knowledge base from which they operate.  It’s equally easy to assume that they understand something that we’ve known for so long that we forget when we learned it.  Dogs bury bones.  That’s a “fact.”  It doesn’t matter that I’ve never seen a dog bury a bone outside of “Butch” from Tom & Jerry.  I’ve been told they do from countless sources.  This made me wonder, how often do we make assumptions about our children’s knowledge base that turn out to be untrue? 

What have you learned about what your child does and does not know, and how did you learn it?

Home Spun Comic #15 - Stealth Teaching

I'm certain every homeschooling parent can identify with this early comic from Cristina's collection. 

You can find more of Cristina's comics at Home Spun Juggling.

Homeschooling Gone Haywire

The reading comprehension worksheet had a heartwarming story.

Annie Sullivan had a hard life.  She grew up alone and very poor.  Anne had trouble with her eyes, too.  She could not see well.

One day after Annie grew up, a family called her.  They needed help with their daughter.  Their little girl’s name was Helen Keller.  Helen needed a teacher.

Helen could not see.  She could not hear, either.  She felt scared and alone.  Annie wanted to help Helen.  She wanted to be able to talk to her.

The worksheet went on to explain how sitting next to a water pump one day, Annie taught Helen the word “water.”  It was the break-through that allowed Annie to teach Helen how to communicate. 

At the end of the reading passage there were four multiple choice questions to test my young reader’s comprehension abilities.  And then there was the one fill-in-the-blank question.  How well did my young reader connect with the content of the reading excerpt? 

With all the empathy that an eight year old boy could muster, Major Havoc wrote:

A time when it was hard to learn something new was not to fart at the dinner table.

He really captured the emotional scope of the story, didn’t he?

Sigh.

We’ll try again tomorrow.