Whew.

Annika just came down the stairs asking, "did you know Emma is asleep on the stairs?"

I had to answer that I didn't. The last I knew of Emma, she was in her room for saying that she doesn't like me because I made her wash the chocolate Popsicle off of her face.

Annika was concerned with none of that. She was trying to get a great big box downstairs so she and her friends could color on it. Her next sentence was, "it's okay though, I got the box still."

Gotta love the one-track, six-year-old mind.

Beast Academy + Perfectionist = ?

Most of my kids are perfectionists. Learning comes fairly easily to them so they tend to be very reluctant to try new things that they might not be really good at from the get go. I don't want them growing up fearing things they perceive as difficult so I try to give them little bites of challenging topics. The most recent thing that I've found to torture, um, challenge Sam is Beast Academy, by the same people that wrote The Art of Problem Solving.

I knew he would love the comic book format and that the work would not be easy for him. He has been steadily working through Math-U-See since first grade and is really good at the straight-forward format. I also know that Sam, more than any of my other kids, shuts down if things get too hard. I need to be aware of all of these potential pitfalls and help Sam work around them without making things too easy. So how do I do it?

1. We do Beast Academy first. That way I know he's just had breakfast, a break, and sleep so any grumpiness is not from external factors. Although I have been known to send a truly struggling child to get a quick drink of water or to wash his face just to get away for a minute or two.

2. I work with Sam, or whoever is being challenged. They each have their own spots at the desk but for hard stuff they sit across from me so I can watch. Is Sam reaching the end of his rope? Is Harry fidgeting more than normal? I monitor it and either end the session or send him for a drink.

3. I give hints as appropriate. I won't give answers but after I see the child working for a few minutes (exactly how many changes with who or what they're doing) without making progress I'll ask them if they want a little hint. And I'll make sure that the hint is enough to get them going again.

4. We keep the sessions relatively short. Where I might be inclined to have the child do the entire section, I'll keep it to three or four problems. We might come back to it later in the day, but most likely the next day.

5. We keep it light. I use a lot of humor to pull Sam away from the edge if things are going bad. This goes for all of my kids and a lot of different situations we find ourselves in. If I'm trying to get them to tell me a narration on Black Beauty and I want to know where the Black rode to, I might say, "He rode to the moon, right?" It breaks the tension and helps him get the real answer out a little bit easier.

I want to challenge my kids, not torment them (although if you ask them I don't think they'd see the difference). So I set them up to succeed. It's not that different than what any parent would do, these are just things I've noticed after working with Sam for years and watching how he thinks. If I were to tell him to sit at his desk and work on the section by himself he'd sit there crying for an hour never asking for help and just thinking about how he can't do the work he needs to. This gives him a chance to grow in knowledge and confidence and really, it doesn't get much better than that.

Quick! You have One Minute...

to talk coherently about homeschooling.

What do you say?

Me? I start off with the general disclaimer, I'm a homeschooler, not all homeschoolers. I do what works for my family, it's up to you for your family.

Then I talk about structure: The continuum of unschooler to completel school-at-home(r)

Third: We don't lock our kids in basements. We're actually pretty busy (Plus we live in California, there are no basements here.)

After that? A few things that I like about homeschooling. An anecdote or two about how sweet it is to see the kids learning together. An impressive thing that happened this week (hopefully there was one). Yes, it's bragging, but only for five seconds.

Finally...I love homeschooling, I breathe homeschooling, and sometimes even dream homeschooling. So there's no way to cover the topic in one minute. Call if you have questions.


So, what glaring mistakes have I made? What did I leave out or put in? How would you do it?

Next Year: The Annika Chronicles

I've been putting this off for a bit. Curriculum has been chosen, plans are set, and things are moving along. Harry will be in 6th, Sam in 4th, and Annika in 2nd grade. Emma will be a preschooler again. (She has another year before she's eligible for school. I'm hoping she'll still be happy to be a preschooler for one more year.)

Among the regular plain-old changes that advancing a grade brings is another, bigger change. Annika went to our neighborhood school for kindergarten and loved it. And by 'loved' I mean cried-if-she-missed-a-day, begged-to-go-on-Saturday loved it. She had a blast and met a group of girls she is still friends with. To say that she wasn't super-thrilled about coming home from school is an understatement. I naively thought it would get better as the year went on and it has to an extent. She has both loved and done well at her charter school, where she goes to one day each week for fun classes. She has taken cooking, arts & crafts, Greek & Latin Roots and other fun things. She also begged to take a math class toward the end of the year and I'm pretty sure it was at least partly because it reminded her of school.

Annika is chaos embodied. She has to be doing something all hours of the day. She gets up much earlier than the rest of us and wreaks havoc early in the morning. As a consequence of that though, she generally goes to bed easily and I can breathe. I originally sent her to school to get a break from this chaos and to preserve a relationship that was, quite frankly, fraying at the edges. I didn't want that to happen at the age of five, so kindergarten came at a good time.

Partly because of the chaos and partly because of my own deficiencies, we never got into a groove this year. You know, where things go relatively smoothly and you realize that "hey, there's a lot of great learning happening here!" That's not to say that learning didn't happen, it was just more disjointed than I'm comfortable with. And next year with Harry in middle school...eek. I need the groove and organization and all of that.

So I've decided to try to put Annika back in school. The wrinkle here is that I'm not going to put her into the school she went to for kindergarten. I'm trying to put her into the school her best friend goes to. I know the principal there and some of the teachers. I think it's a decent school. Not as good as home, but that's life. If all hell breaks loose and things go poorly I know that I can pull her out, but for now the plan is for her to go to school there through elementary.

And because I made this decision and the universe is kind of cruel like that, we had an absolutely fabulous day of learning today. Nothing like that to set your mind spinning again. So, what curriculum is my second-grader going to use next year? Whatever the school has (and a bunch of stuff that I have, just don't tell Annika).