More dinosaurs for the win!

Remember my last post about how much of a hit the T-Rex earrings were? Well, they were. So much so that when they asked if I was interested in reviewing another set of earrings at a discount in exchange for my honest review, I jumped on it!  We got these cute Apatosaurus earrings in the mail this week and she spent no time wanting to try them on too. My son was excited to see them because this dinosaur was featured in the new Jurassic World movie.

I love their cute long necks and their little tails!  It didn't take long though for us to decide another cute way to wear them would be to mix-and-match them - T-Rex and Apatosaurus. My son says it looks like the T-Rex is chasing the Apatosaurus to attack him.  It started a conversation whether the T-Rex and the Apatosaurus lived in the same time period.  (They didn't - they were separated by 83 million years.  Homo sapiens are closer to the T-Rex on a timeline than T-Rex is to the Apatosaurus.  That doesn't stop it from being fun though!)

As much as I loved the T-Rex ones, I think these Apatosaurus ones may be my favorites. I love the color and I love the way they look on my ears.  (Yes, I made her let me try them on this time!)

Rawr! There's a T-Rex on the loose!

So I'm a bit of a science geek.  Maybe more than a bit of a science geek.  I'm an equal opportunity science geek too. Physical science, Biology, Chemistry...I love it all.  When I saw these adorable T-Rex earrings, I knew I had to have them.

Amazon Prime had them at my door in two days or less and I was super excited to open them up.  My excitement might have been a little bit contagious though since my youngest came running when I opened up the box they came in.  As soon as she saw the pretty white box, she claimed them as a gift for herself.

They're shiny and smooth and not too heavy.  I don't have to worry about them pulling down her ears and being uncomfortable.  The best thing about these earrings is that she's worn them for two weeks - day and night - and they still look just as cute as they did straight out of the box.  The "Rawr!" I hear every time I ask her if she still likes the earrings is pretty awesome too, I must admit.

I love that they're encouraging her to love science and be proud to show it. I might just have to order another pair.

Note: I received these earrings at a discount in exchange for an honest review.

When it rains, it pours

Imagine the following, if you will ....

It's raining. Not that nice, gentle, soul-filling rain.  I'm talking the rain so hard you can barely see your neighbor's house across the street.  Where you end up looking like a drowned rat.  And, because it's Texas, you can throw in some wind gusts of 30-40 mph just for good measure.  

Do you have that mental image now? I can't tell you how many times this has played out in my life.  Throw in an umbrella that flips inside out and some fighting with it - in the rain, of course, - and it's easy to see why I hate rain.  Or why I have sworn off umbrellas and usually just run through the rain, arriving at my destination soaked.

I was dubious when I was offered an umbrella to try in exchange for an honest review of it.  Here it is right after it arrived.

I fully expected to have another broken umbrella and move on with life.  It hasn't rain since I've received it yet, but I thought I had the perfect way to test this thing out without having the dreaded scene I described earlier.  See, Texas is known for wind and winter is filled with blustery days with high wind gusts.  I planned to wait until the next windy day, take it out, watch it break, and be done.

Isn't it pretty? And, because it's Texas, we have lush grass in January.

Imagine my surprise when it didn't break. I stood with it pointing to the sky.  I stood with it facing into the wind.  I even tried facing against the wind so it would blow up into the top of the umbrella.  It didn't break.  You can see how well built it's skeleton is here.

The icing on the proverbial cake and quite possibly even more my favorite part of this umbrella is that it opens with the push of a button.  Click the button, it pops up and open on its own instantly.  No fighting to get it open or clicked into place while you're getting rained on or a kid is pulling on your arm and whining about being wet.  Closing it is equally easy - push the same button and it collapses so all you have left to do is to close it.

Look how easy that is.  And that's was left-handed too. I'm sure doing it with my dominant hand would have been easier (and harder to video!).

If you'd like to get one and try it out for yourself, here's a link to do so (NOT an affiliate link). If you do try it out, I'd love to hear what you think of it too!

I only have one problem now: The kids love it as much as I do and have informed me that I'm going to have to buy one for each of them if I want to actually have one for myself.

Best laid plans and all that

Do you ever come up with this fantastic idea, but then life happens and your idea falls by the wayside?  Soon enough, you forget about it...until something sparks the memory and reminds you?  Well, that's what happened here!

While we had a great and successful year last year homeschooling, my plans to blog about it fell apart.  I kept meaning to sit down and write things down and share what we were doing, but distractions kept happening and it was May before I knew it!  

And here we are.  Let's try this again, shall we?

Preparing for the Logic Stage

As I've mentioned before, we follow a classical education model.  In this model, education is divided into 3 stages: Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric.  As children become capable of deeper, higher-level thinking, they move from learning facts, to analyzing information, and then to expressing themselves.

We have been in Grammar stage until this year.  My goal has been to introduce Lily and Noah to as many different topics as I could.  We've stressed memorization of poems, math facts, science vocabulary, and grammar.  I've exposed them to age appropriate works of great literature, like Odysseus, Beowulf, and Shakespeare.  As I've mentioned before, I've tried to give them a broad base of knowledge and lots of "hooks" for information that we will encounter again or in more depth in the future.

I have taken most of the responsibility for choosing curriculum that I think is rigorous and works well for us, for choosing subjects that we will learn, and for setting the timing.  This hasn't always been successful and has been a learning experience for us both, especially in the beginning.  During our first year of homeschooling, for example, I selected that I thought would be an excellent choice for grammar.  When I would get that book off the shelf, my school-loving girl Lily cried. Every. single. day.  She couldn't put in to words what was wrong with the book or why she didn't like it, but she hated it.  I put it in my discard pile and looked around for a new book that I thought would work.  Fortunately, I tried another program and it was much more successful.  It worked so well for us that we remained with that series until the end of last year.

The second stage is the Logic stage.  This is the stage where children are capable of abstract thought and can begin to analyze arguments and this is where Lily starts school this year.  Because she's transitioning to a place where she's expected to be more responsible for her learning, I decided this would be a good time to start giving her more responsibility how she learns it as well.

I started by writing out all of my plans for what I thought we should cover this year.  I had ideas for materials already, but I was curious what Lily thought of them so I packed up all of my plans, ideas, and materials and invited Lily to come with me for a "planning session."  We left her younger siblings at home and went to Starbucks.  I treated her to a hot chocolate and I laid out every single plan I had.  I let her look through everything and I asked for her input.

To begin with she just stared at me.  Then she started to open up.  She told me that she liked X about her grammar program, but didn't like Y.  As we talked more, I had to "put my money where my mouth was."  She decided she wanted to switch grammar programs.  I could have insisted that we stayed with what I had planned to use; instead, together we brainstormed, read descriptions, and chose the program that we're now using.  Other things, like math, she wanted to leave just as they were.

After all was said and done, Lily and I had very similar ideas about what she should learn this year.  She was surprisingly harder on herself than I would have been and I spent part of the time gently pulling her back from her expectations for herself.  She commented to me, "If I'm going to be a logic stage student now, I should expect to do more work!"  She asked to add in a computer programming class and to try another Minecraft Homeschooling class.

As we left Starbucks, she told me that she never thought that she would get to pick what she learns.  She asked me if we were going to do this every year now.  (We are.)

But what about SOCIALIZATION?!

One of the first questions I'm always asked about homeschooling is about socialization.

What people seem to forget is that it was practically yesterday in this nation's history that we switched from homeschooling to public schooling.  Prior to 1642, there were no regulations about what children should learn, how they should learn, or when they should be done with their education.  The 1642 law simply asserted that parents teach their children to read the Bible and to understand the tenets of their faith.  By 1647, the Massachusetts Bay Colony required towns with a population of more than 50 people to hire teachers to instruct students in reading and writing.  Towns with populations over 100 people were also instructed to teach grammar.  This law marked a huge shift in education in our country: it gave the assertion that the government had the right to decide what constituted a minimum of an education and to require the building of schools and hiring of teachers.

Historian Lawrence Cremin says

What sources indicate is that schooling went not anywhere and everywhere, not only in schoolrooms, but in kitchens, manses, churches, meeting housese, sheds erected in fields, and shops erected in towns; that pupils were taught by parents, tutors, clergymen, lay readers, preceptors, physicians, lawyers, artisans, and shopkeepers; and that most teaching proceeded on an individual basis.

It wasn't until 1918 that compulsory education came to every state in the U.S., which means that this idea of needing public schools is less than 100 years old.  In her book The Well-Adjusted Child: The Social Benefits of Homeschooling, Rachel Gathercole explains that grouping kids by age in one place to learn was done by necessity and convenience so that "material could be taught in a standardized rather than an individualized manner."  Now we've suddenly come to hold schools as the gold standard and develop the idea that school is so synonymous with childhood that any derivation is detrimental and lacking - even if they don't matter for socialization.  All in less than 100 years.

So why doesn't school matter for socialization?

Socialization at school isn't always the best sort of socialization; students in a classroom are surrounded by other peers who are also novices learning social cues just like they are.  Thomas Smedley, in his master's thesis "The Socialization of Homeschool Children," described two sorts of socialization that occur.  He found that children in classrooms participate in horizontal socialization - socializing only with groups of individuals who are similar to themselves in age and often by socioeconomic status since children who live in the same areas generally attend the same schools.  Spending 6-8 hours a day with children who are the same age and who share a similar background does not give wide opportunity for children to be socialized and lead to pressures to conform to their peer group.

In addition, children in public schools spend large amounts of time in groups supervised by few adults.  One teacher might have 35 students. I did when I taught!  Three or four adults might be charged with supervising an entire cafeteria room of children during lunch.  This allows negative socialization to happen as much as positive - peer pressure happens, cliques form, and fights (both physical and emotional) happen.  As a teacher, I've witnessed students made fun of because they were wearing the wrong brand of clothes.  I've seen 7th graders crowd around a peer who was pregnant and talk about how lucky she was to be having a baby.  I've walked into an empty bathroom to see an 8th grader making out with a 6th grader.  I've overheard boys making bets on who would be the first to kiss a girl or cop a feel.  And I've seen a child beaten and bloodied while waiting for school to start because he didn't want to join a gang.

In contrast to these issues with horizontal socialization, Smedley found that children who are homeschooled have more opportunity for vertical socialization - socializing with groups of individuals who are older than they are.  They are no longer learning social cues from other novices, but have the chance to learn social cues from a variety of ages and expertise.

Also, kids who homeschool are only "separate" during school hours.  Outside of school hours, they have the same opportunities for extra-curricular activities and interactions that their public schooled friends have, like Scouts, swim team, or dance lessons.  It quickly becomes obvious how silly the idea is that homeschoolers don't have the chance for to interact with their peers.  

One of the benefits to homeschooling, for us, is that we're able to finish our work 3-4 hours a day.  That leaves us an extra 2-3 hours a day for socialization before most kids are even out of school!  Last year we participated in a multi-age coop.  We joined in park groups, soccer groups, and field trip groups for homeschoolers.  In none of those groups were my kids segregated into peer groups; however, in each of those groups over the last year I saw my children help others and I saw my children be helped by others.  We played and worked along side children from many different parts of town and from many different backgrounds.  It's amazing how many issues with groups of children naturally become an non-issue when parents are there to oversee the behavior of their children (and intervene when necessary).  We also delivered Meals on Wheels which helped them develop relationships with a number of house-bound elderly members of our community.  

Because of the explosion of homeschoolers in the last few years, it is very easy to connect with other children who have similar interests.  There are so many homeschool offerings where we live that I could book our entire schedule so that we never had a moment of free time to actually do the school that we are supposed to be home for.  Just a few of the homeschool group activities that are available in my area:  a weekly game club, Minecraft group, dance/martial arts/gymnastics classes,  ASL/French/Spanish lessons, tennis/soccer groups, science club, LEGO classes, art/drama classes, and chess club.  

Students who are homeschooled also don't miss out on "teenage rites of passage" either.  This one may have been true decades ago, but it's certainly not true for today's homeschoolers!  Homeschoolers have the choice of going to prom.  Walking across a stage for graduation.  They can even attend community college (at least in Texas) and take dual-credit classes just like a public school student.

Longitudinal studies show that homeschoolers are doing just fine when it comes to socialization.  They are more than twice as likely to be involved in civic affairs and exercise their right to vote.  They are more likely to volunteer and participate in community service activities as well.  And study after study has shown that they are more likely to graduate from college and just as likely to attend graduate school so homeschooling was not detrimental to their educational goals either.

I have absolutely nothing wrong with parents who choose to send their children to public/private/charter school.  The only point I hope to make is that homeschoolers as a whole are not sheltered and secluded kids to feel sorry for.  They do not have long-term issues fitting in with society and they have just as much of a chance to be happy, successful, well-adjusted adults as their friends who attend public, private, or charter schools.

Sure, you might run into an oddball homeschooler here or there, but let me let you in on a secret:  I run into plenty of oddball public schoolers too.  That's the beauty of individuality and what keeps life interesting.

(To read more about the history of compulsory education in America, check out this article.  To read a longitudinal study of homeschooled adults, check out this article.)

How's your memory (work)?

One of the tenets of classical education is memory work: memorization and recitation.  In the grammar stage (up to 5th grade), you are encouraged to explore, discover, and memorize.  Those who support classical education will tell you that the child doesn't even need to fully understand what they are memorizing; that comes later on as children mature and become analytical.  They claim the more facts and poems that you can expose a child to and have them memorize, the more mental pegs form in a child's brain to "hang" information on when they hear it again later.

It sounded like a challenging lofty goal, especially when I thought back to my days of memorization and recitation in school.  When I thought of doing memory work with Lily, the phrase "drill and kill" kept popping up in my head.  I remembered days of stomping to linking verbs, chanting preposition lists, reciting multiplication facts, and repeating definitions over and over again.  Honestly, it sounded awful.  And boring.  As a new homeschooler, I half-heartedly jumped in and decided I was willing to give memory work a try, but I was also just as willing to throw it out the window the minute I felt it no longer worked for us.  To tell the truth, there was a part of me that was hoping it wouldn't work so I could confidently throw it out and tell myself that I knew better.

What a difference perspective and attitude make.  I came into this from an adult's perspective.  Memory work was nothing more than a chore to be completed...an assignment to be finished quickly so that we could move on to something more fun.  As it turned out, Lily had never read the memo that memory work was drudgery and something to dread.  She loved memorizing things.  And she was good at it.  She devoured every poem and list that I could find and eagerly asked for more.  She randomly rattled off her new knowledge to anyone who would listen, each time as obviously proud of herself for remembering it as the time before.  Her confidence grew as she committed longer and longer passages to memory.  Lily viewed it with the same enthusiasm, excitement, and eagerness as she did everything else.

We've continued with memory work, although some years have been better than others.  Last year was one of those years I wish we'd done better.  I thought I found the perfect program that would give us weekly memory work for history, science, Latin, geography, math, and English.  It was perfect for us in the beginning.  Both Lily and Noah quickly learned the definition of a preposition and could list off every preposition (among other things).  I'd often hear them racing one another to see who could say them faster.  A few months later, we encountered prepositions in grammar.  They already had those mental pegs from their memory work so it was a piece of cake for them.

As the year progressed, winter came and we got sick.While we were sick, memory work was the last thing on my list.  Then the February blues hit.  I tried to go back and pick it up as spring came, but now I felt pressure to try to catch up to where we should have been.  The kids were discouraged.  I was discouraged.  Our attitude and perspective had changed...and it was set aside to collect dust.

After talking with Lily, we are ready to dive back in to memory work this year with the excitement and enthusiasm that we lost.  I've revamped our memory work so that it fits us and I'm using it as a starting point.  Week numbers are marked out; who cares if it takes us more (or less!) time than the book thinks it should.  Memory work does not have a finish line.  It is not a means to an end.  It's a process and just one more tool in our toolbox.

Earlier this summer, I read an article about the importance of memory work.  The author pointed out that our children are memorizing things every moment of every day.  Silly jokes they hear from their friends.  Commercial jingles on the television.  The newest Lady Gaga song from the radio.  Pop culture, mass media, and their peers will fill a child's mind if given the chance.  There certainly is a spot for those so a child grows to understand their own culture, but we are doing them a disservice if we don't give them a chance to fill their mind with more than that.  We can make the choice to fill their minds with names and places and facts, which creates mental pegs upon which new information can later be added.  And we can fill their minds with poetry, which increases vocabulary, helps teach complex language patterns, fills the mind with beautiful language.

Given those options, the choice seems simple.