Tag Archives: jewish homeschool

Kids puppet show

homeschooling,

I decided recently to change the way I’m posting to make it easier to categorize and for people to find in the archives.  I often hesitated to post about things that were happening because it made for too long a post when I put a bunch of things together, and then I ended up not posting about lots of things that were on my mind.  So if you’re wondering why I’ve changed the format and there are now several short posts in one day, that’s your answer! 

Tonight is the first night of Chanukah, and we’re having a homeschooling family of 10 that we met last year on a shopping trip to PA (we were both families of 9 then, and since had babies within three weeks of each other).  Since the first time we met (I mentioned it in passing the day we met them here on my blog), we’ve gotten together several times.  My kids are really looking forward to having them, and so am I, of course. 🙂 

My kids built a beautiful wooden puppet theatre several weeks ago, and have been working intensely on writing a puppet show (Chanuka theme), making the puppets, decorating the theatre and this last week, practicing for the show.  When they began, I had no idea how much effort they would be putting into it, but they’ve all put in hours to get ready for it. 

Tonight will be the first night they perform it, for our guests, and then tomorrow night my mom and dh’s parents will be here for the second show.  They want to invite another large family we’re friendly with to see it, so hopefully we can have them over for one afternoon this week.  I haven’t yet seen it – they expressly want me to be surprised, so they are practicing in the basement where I can’t hear them. They showed my husband the script and he thought it was great.  I’m looking forward to seeing the result of all their hard work!

Avivah

Great kids storybook

homeschooling,

The kids picked up a picture book at the library that I took a quick glance at and approved, but didn’t get to read until yesterday –  Cinder Edna, by Ellen Jackson.  It didn’t look like much by the cover (and you know what they say about judging a book by its cover – but I do it anyway), and I personally wouldn’t have picked it up without knowing what it was.  Fortunately, one of my kids chose it, and wow, what a great book!  You know a book is good when everyone in the family, including the parents, enjoy reading it!

It’s a modern day version of Cinderella; it portrays the typical Cinderella and simultaneously shows Cinder Edna, a spunky modern day girl who doesn’t complain about her life and instead uses her opportunities to better herself and takes responsibility for what she can.  I often tell my kids that they are the ones who choose their attitudes and thereby determine to a large degree how happy they are going to be in life, and this book highlights that message beautifully.  It’s very fun and had me laughing out loud when I read it to the kids.  Definitely put this on your list next time you’re at the library, and let me know if your family enjoys it as much as ours!

Avivah

Arboretum outing

homeschooling,

It’s been cold and wintery around here, but today was one of those perfect autumn days that are so beautiful that it almost takes your breath away.  Well, mine anyway.  I had to take dh to the train at noon, and as I got into my van, I happened to look up the street and see the incredibly striking yellow and scarlet leaves on the trees against the clear blue sky – it’s one of those sights that could be made into a picture.   I love the autumn.  As soon as I got back home, I told the kids to stop what they were doing so we could head to the arboretum to enjoy the day.

 I’ve only once taken my  kids to the arboretum and that was two years ago, despite a really nice one very close by.  My kids loved it and at that time, I wanted to make it a weekly outing and have the kids bring their nature notebooks to sketch the changes in the trees and plants they saw, ala Charlotte Mason.  Well, it never happened – it was a nice idea but somehow having to go out to see the trees and flowers was unappealing to me every time the kids reminded me of my idea.

Until today.  No, we didn’t bring notebooks, just ourselves.  There’s something powerful about taking kids into nature – different from playing in the typical backyard.  It awakens the senses in a way that’s hard to explain, and everyone becomes so relaxed and happy.  Even the baby stopped fussing and just looked around with wide eyes up into the sky and at the trees above.  

As I was watching them run all over, I thought about how lucky we are that we can take advantage of a day like this on the spur of the moment.  By the time most kids are home, the day is almost gone.  By tomorrow or the weekend, who’s to say the weather will still be like this?

Except for us it was almost empty, which is something I’ve always found a hidden benefit of homeschooling.  We regularly get to go to places when it’s off season, quiet and no crowds to battle!  It’s so much more relaxing for me to be out with the kids when I don’t have to be hyperalert every minute about who is where.  It’s not only a big bonus to me, it’s a big bonus to my kids since it means they get to go on lots more trips than they would if they had to go during the hours everyone else is there. 🙂  

Avivah

Husbands deserve our time, too

homemaking, homeschooling, marriage,

Yesterday I took the kids on a trip to a railroad museum, and the first person I saw when we walked in was a woman I had met several months ago.  At that point, we had spent something like an hour talking, as she has a large family and was beginning homeschooling.  As soon as she saw me, she came over and hugged me, and I ask her how things were going with homeschooling.

She told me that she’s exhausted, that she’s homeschooling literally from 8 am to 10 pm (for 5 kids plus a toddler) seven days a week.  I suggested that she might have taken on an overly intensive curriculum (it is – I warned her about the strong likelihood for burnout when she told me she wanted to use it) and she might want to consider making some adaptations to take the pressure off herself.  But she reassured me that she loved learning with her kids in this way, and it was just hard because there was familial discord.  I asked what that meant.  It turns out that she and dh are having a hard time getting along, and the night before she told him she wanted him to move out.

Was this something recent, I was wondering? No, it’s been like that for four years and now she just can’t take it anymore.  He is too negative and needy of her time and she just can’t spend that kind of time with him because all her energy is going into homeschooling the kids.

I think that too often we as moms get so busy taking care of our homes and children that we forget what position in our lives the relationship with our husbands should be.  There is nothing more important than a strong relationship between husbands and wives, for the two spouses and for the children.  That relationship needs to be the priority, even above our children.  Do you know how secure it makes a child feel to live in a home and know his parents truly love and care for one another?  Especially in today’s climate where so many of his friends’ parents are divorcing, and he doesn’t have to worry that one day he’ll end up split between two homes.

I’ve heard too many wives make not such joking comments about their husbands being like another child to take care of.  Husbands do have needs, emotional and physical needs.  So do wives – that doesn’t make any of us child-like; it makes us human.  Marriage is about giving to the other person, not about demanding that someone else be what we want them to be and squeeze into a tiny corner of our life and hearts.  Minimizing our husbands because we’ve become caught up in the demands of our busy lives and expecting them to live an emotionally independent life isn’t reasonable.  It’s taking them for granted and being disrespectful and emotionally cruel.  When men expect this of women, we all rush to condemn them in outrage.  But when women complain of husbands who take up ‘too much’ of their time, other women cluck their tongues in sympathy and then go on to share their ‘jokes’ about their own impossibly needy husbands.

This woman had to leave our conversation rather suddenly before we had a chance to finish because her young child needed the bathroom.  What I wanted to tell her was, don’t make homeschooling your children more important than your husband.  Don’t make him feel like he doesn’t matter in his own home.  Yes, the reasons she chose to homeschool her children are important – I love homeschooling and am passionate about the many benefits, but even providing your children with those benefits doesn’t justify letting your marital relationship break down for lack of nurturing.

Avivah

Late readers

homeschooling,

When is the right age for a child to be taught to read?  I strongly believe that children learn something when they are ready, and not before, and that pushing before they are ready won’t help them be more ready.  My children have all independently taught themselves to read from the ages of 6 – 8, though some have taken to reading much more enthusiastically than others.

 Being that I love reading, you might expect me to be very disappointed that all of my kids don’t show equal excitement over reading.  But that’s not the case.  I expect all of my kids to love books, but I don’t expect them to love reading.  The visual learner clearly has a strong advantage when it comes to reading, and the child of mine who learned at the latest age was my auditory learner.  Even after she learned to read, she would periodically tell me that she hated reading, it was ‘boring’.  But she loved listening to me read out loud or to book on cd.  I recognized that her comprehension level was far higher than her reading ability, so the books she could read were so much below her interest that they really were boring.  So I waited for her reading level to catch up with her interest level, knowing that when she found something that she felt was worth reading, she would be motivated to read.

Well, that’s what happened.  Several months ago, I checked out a library book called Seven From Heaven, a book for adults about the McCaughey septuplets.  Every time she had a chance, I found her reading this book.  But she still insisted that most books were boring.  This week, though, things have shifted.  I checked out a fiction kids novel, about 200 pages long, and my child (now 11) who claims she doesn’t like reading and isn’t good at, finished it within two days.  This morning, she was halfway through another book by the same author, and had a pile of several other books on her lap while she read, that she planned to read next, and was very excited about them all.  I jokingly asked her, “Aren’t you the one who hates to read because it’s boring?!” 

My kinesthetic learner enjoys non fiction books about areas that interest him, like sports history and investing, and has often spent hours at a time engrossed in a book.  Even when the vocabulary is so unfamiliar that he has to work hard to figure out the concepts (like the time he was reading about different technical ways to finance the purchase of real estate), he isn’t discouraged.  At the same time, he has trouble with the assigned fiction reading in high school and usually can’t tell you what he read after he finishes the assignment.  Does that make him a bad reader?  Of course not – people usually don’t easily spend time on an activity that has no intrinsic value or interest to them. 

Why am I sharing this with you?  Because it’s too easy as parents to get caught up in our child’s accomplishments, or lack of accomplishments, and forget that every child has his own internal timeline that will determine what he does and when he does it.  By recognizing that kids are different, and accepting that they progress in various areas at different times, we can save ourselves and our children alot of heartache.  

Avivah 

Time management and the big rocks

homemaking, homeschooling,

Today was the first day of school for my oldest son – the first official school day in seven years!  He started high school today, and I definitely have mixed emotions about it.  On one hand, I know he will do really well, but on the other hand, it feels like something is missing when he’s not around. 

With his school day being so extremely long, it means that his personal schedule has to change to adapt to his new needs, and I’m now easing everyone else into his sleeping/waking schedule so that they can still see him when he’s around.  If I don’t, he’ll leave before they wake up and get home when they are heading for bed. 

 I also need to change our family chore schedules since he won’t be around for the things he’s currently slotted for.  I find that basic schedules for our daily routine really help keep us all on track and helps us have a more relaxed feeling about our time, since we all know that there’s time for everything and the important things will get done. 

 I was actually talking to a relative about this last night.  She told me “I don’t know how you do all that you do.”  I told her that I find Stephen Covey’s visual demonstration of filling a container with large rocks, small rocks, gravel, sand, and water very helpful.  If you first put in the largest items, and then put in each additional item according to it’s size (ie, largest to smallest), you will get a lot more in than if you haphazardly put in whatever your hand happens to touch first, and you will ensure that the biggest things always fit in. 

 It’s the same thing with our time and priorities.  All of us have the really important things that we need to do – our ‘big rocks’.  And there are plenty of little things that we can fill our days with that don’t really matter much (that would be the sand and water) that could be fit around other things.  What happens when we just do whatever we want to do without assigning priorities to our activities?  Usually, the big rocks don’t get put in – we end up not doing the most important things that really matter the most, because we don’t have time for it – we’ve filled up our containers with the small stuff.

What I try to do is assess what my personal big rocks are – my husband, my children, their education, regular meals and chores to keep our home running smoothly – and schedule in time for those things.  For example, I make sure to hit all the academics with my kids first thing in the day, because I know that if I take care of everything else first, the day would be over and I would never get around to working with them on the academic stuff!  All the other things I need to do I schedule for later in the day.

Avivah

The girls’ baking business

homeschooling,

People have sometimes asked me (and the girls) about what kind of business my daughters have, and how old they are.

One is 12.5, and the other will be 11 in August. They have been cooking and baking for five years, so despite being relatively young, they know their way around the kitchen!

Their business is pretty small at this point, but I think it’s good to encourage my kids in their business ideas. It builds a confidence that they can follow through on their ideas and be successful. They offer a rotating menu of cakes and side dishes available for pick up every Friday. Regular customers are on their email list (they set up a business email account just for that) and get a message about that week’s selection at the beginning of the week, and have until Weds. night to finalize their orders. They did some paid advertising in a local supplement that comes out twice a month a couple of weeks ago for the first time, and were quite disappointed that there was no response, since it seemed like a lot of money to spend for no results. I told them that advertising doesn’t usually pay off until people see it a number of times; I don’t know if I will encourage them to continue advertising because they could easily spend the bulk of their profits on it, without any definite payoff. That’s a hard thing for kids this age! They also once made colorful flyers which were distributed by a friend who works in an office close by (she offered since she thought it was a service her co-workers would appreciate). There was also no response to that (though I met someone from that office in line at Baskin Robbins a couple of weeks ago who said she had heard all about us)!

So their business has come from word of mouth, and that’s a gradual process. I think they have mixed feelings about the amount of business they have – it’s exciting but a lot of work for them on the weeks they have lots of orders, and kind of a relief on the weeks that there are very few orders. I do regularly meet people in the community who tell me they heard that my girls are very good cooks, so I guess the word is slowly getting around!

This week my house was smelling delicious – cheesecakes (marble, vanilla, and non dairy), quiche, lasagna, and spinach cheese casserole were some of the things on their list of offerings. This week their schedule was a bit different than usual, so they have pickups today instead of Friday. Fortunately, there is only order left that needs to be picked up – it takes up my fridge and freezer space so I’m happy when it’s in their customers hands!

Avivah

Keeping the house in order – with kids around

homemaking, homeschooling,

“Have you managed to train your kids to keep the house tidy as they go? ”

The house stays in reasonable condition if I stay on top of things and make sure everyone does what they’re supposed to do when they’re supposed to do it. The last couple of weeks I’ve been mentally very preoccupied with a business project I’ve been working on, and when I don’t actively manage, things don’t run as well as usual. So things don’t look as good in that scenario as they should.

I don’t spend much time daily on regular cleaning. I aim for a generally orderly home, not spotless, and your standards might be much higher than mine. Usually if someone were to come in to my house, they would find most of the main floor (living room, dining room, kitchen) in process, because those are constantly in use, since that’s where we spend our time all day long.

What I do is the following: morning chores for 15 minutes – this means wiping down the breakfast table and washing dishes for the child whose turn it is, and three times a week the kids do the bathrooms, 2 kids for each bathroom. There is also a quick pickup of the main floor, I usually have my 4 yo or 6 yo sweep all of the main floor. Whoever I feel like nabbing takes out the garbage.

Sporadically, I give them rags and have the younger kids wipe down the walls, which can get grimy over time with fingerprints. I expect them to pick up their bedrooms before they come downstairs in the morning (but honestly, what isn’t regularly inspected isn’t regularly done – so I often send them back up to finish what should have been done earlier:)) Before dinner, I usually have another quick pick up. The kids take turns during the week doing breakfast and dinner dishes (I cook and do lunch dishes, also Saturday and Sunday dishes). I do picking up and putting away through the day, I don’t really schedule that in or think about it – for example, if I see the stove top needs to be wiped down, I just do it. Some people find it more helpful to have schedules for all of the necessary tasks, but I tend to feel overly burdened by lots of schedules.

I don’t do laundry daily. This doesn’t work for me, since it seems there’s always laundry waiting to be put away in that situation. All the laundry is done on Sunday (though often it drags through to Monday if the loads aren’t moved through promptly enough). My two oldest (ds13, dd12) alternate weeks for doing laundry, the younger kids are responsible for bringing the dirty clothes to the basement. I sort the clean stuff into piles (often grabbing a work buddy but just as often not). Then for several hours on Sunday evening, there is a pile of clothes on the couch that steadily grows, and I send each child to their room two or three times with their stuff to put away. (I put it on the couch because I won’t allow it to stay there; the problem with clean laundry is it’s very easy to just shove it to the side and it builds up in clean piles in the spare room.)

When I feel more serious attention is needed to their rooms, on occasional Sunday mornings I gather everyone and tell them we need to get things back in order – I find that things tend to pile up over time. I hate clutter. Hate, hate, hate. I take a garbage bag or two of things to the Goodwill almost every week – yesterday I took four bags. I can’t figure out how I regularly have so many things to pass on, since I’m not an excessive shopper or accumulator in any way. I have seven kids and limited space, and don’t feel I can afford the luxury of keeping things around that aren’t being used, if I want to keep a reasonably tidy house. Cleaning around lots of stuff is just too hard, and there’s plenty of stuff left to clean around even with my constant decluttering. For me, decluttering is an ongoing process.

So to sum up, I spend maybe half an hour daily on home maintenance; what’s most important for me is to use the systems I’ve put into place and remembering that it’s because I have those systems that things run smoothly. Sometimes things seem to just happen on their own, and I forget to give myself credit for creating and maintaining that environment, and then I lapse and don’t do the necessary maintenance. Times like that are actually helpful, though, because it reminds me that the house running smoothly is happening because I’m there to make sure it happens.

Avivah

Schedule getting back to normal

homemaking, homeschooling,

I’m back! I’ve really missed blogging these last few days; I feel like I have so much I want to write about!

So why wasn’t I blogging if I wanted to? Well, two weeks ago, I was asked to be a contestant in a motivational speech contest being held at my Toastmasters club, which was scheduled for tonight. I told him I really didn’t have any interest in competition, but I would be happy to speak – but also that I was really, really busy, and didn’t know when I would make the time to prepare. (Not that I usually prepare much before I speak, but for a contest I felt I should.)

Anyway, the first week and a half was so busy that I couldn’t even think about it. These last few days, I have been feeling really pressured at the idea of speaking, getting more and more pressured as the contest was coming closer, and my opportunities to prepare were quickly disappearing. And every time I thought about writing something on my blog, I felt guilty that I wasn’t using the time instead to prepare my speech, so I didn’t blog or prepare. 🙂 Finally, I thought of what I wanted to speak about at 5 pm today – and the contest started at 7. No, that’s really not ideal. 🙂 Anyway, I quickly typed out some thoughts, and tried to put them together into something coherent. The goal I had for myself was to give a good speech that would offer value to the audience, it wasn’t about winning at all – just not humiliating myself next to the other two speakers, who put weeks of preparation and practice into their speeches. I’m glad to say the speech was quite good, even though I didn’t win; I was pleased with how well it went over. I got some very nice feedback from a professional speaker in the audience.

And I’m even more glad that the contest is over and I can go back to blogging and other things without any feelings of guilt!

To update you:

We reupholstered all seven chairs (we got eight, but in the business of bringing them all in from the van to the house, as well as all the groceries from our huge shopping trip, it apparently was left outside – and someone driving by must have thought it was being given away), and then went on to reupholster a three piece bench set in matching fabric. We were working on them Wed/Thurs. nights, and then on Friday. It was a very big job, but they all look great (dh insisted on taking before and after pics of the benches, he was really sorry I hadn’t taken of the chairs before they were done because it was such a huge difference). It was very empowering for the kids to see how their effort resulted in something that substantially enhanced the look of the room. I would love to post the pics for you to vicariously enjoy, but haven’t yet learned how to post pics on a blog. Probably like everything else computer related, not a big deal when you can have someone show you, but since there’s no one to show me, and figuring it out for myself hasn’t yet made it’s way onto the list of things I want to spend time on, you’ll just have to take my word for it that the chairs and benches all look very nice! It works out well that one chair was taken, actually, since otherwise it would be too crowded around the table. As I said, it is a large table, but the new chairs are 1.5 the width of the old ones, so we don’t gain as much seating space as we would have if we kept all the old chairs. The benches are great – they really maximize space. We have a bench that will fit three youngish kids, and one that fits two kids or one adult, so that compensates for the wider chairs and leaves us with the same amount of seating we would have had with the narrower.

I took the kids on a tour of the State House yesterday, where we got to sit in on a session of the Senate, and were able to see where the House of Representatives meet. It was a lot of interesting info, but something that’s I’ve noticed that is unfortunately very common is this: the tour guides, who know they are talking to children and presumably are used to talking to children (especially since in the 4th grade in our state is when these topics come up in public schools and a lot of groups that age come through), don’t speak appropriately for their audience. There are very interesting things to learn, but they speak too fast, use vocabulary that is too high, and try to cram too much information into the tour instead of giving the kids more time to look around and absorb what they are learning. My kids have a very strong vocabulary, and they are interested in lots of things, but a tour like this is, frankly, a turn off to learning. To my kids’ massive gratitude, I told the tour guide that I wouldn’t be staying for the entire program- after an hour and thirty minutes, I felt I had enough (and I knew they had)! I told her that they needed a chance to take in some of what they learned and that we would have to come back at a separate time to do the second part.

Then an hour after getting home from the above, we spent the afternoon at a homeschooling gathering, getting home late in the afternoon and rushed to get dinner on time. First thing this morning, two dds went to a class at the science center, which they enjoyed. Every week used to be filled with days like this, doing trips, activities, lessons, getting together with friends – but now it’s an exception. Personally, I’m glad everyone has enjoyed what we’ve done in the last two days, but I really enjoy the days more when everyone is home together and there isn’t such a fractured, rush-from-here-to-there feel about it all. I used to do a lot of trips and activities for the kids, and every year, I gear down. And every year just gets better and better, as I cut out more and more of the extraneous stuff that doesn’t contribute much to the quality of our days. It’s simply more sane. The pace of life today is so fast that I think parents need to make a very conscious effort to change that, or they will get swept up by it all.

I ended up writing most of this and then interrupted myself because I had a chance to talk with my mom (for quite a while), which was very nice. But now I’m really ready for some sleep and I’ll have to get back with all of you tomorrow. 🙂

Avivah

Our algebra curriculum choice

homeschooling,

After lots of mind numbing review (to me, anyway), I finally decided what algebra program to buy for ds. He was working on a pre-algebra text that neither of us were happy with, though it’s a popular choice. I decided to skip him up to algebra, since he was halfway though pre-algebra – it didn’t seem fair to start him at the beginning of another text, but with most programs, it’s really difficult to start in the middle.

The new program arrived yesterday, and I hope it will be a good fit for him. There are so many choices, and honestly, reading algebra books to figure out which is better just wasn’t much fun for me. Neither was reading endless reviews online of the various different choices a relaxing way to spend my time. It’s great to have so many choices, but in a way, it just makes it so much harder than it used to be – there used to be two or three main math programs, and you just had to choose the one you disliked the least. With so many choices now, it leaves you feeling you can match your child’s personality perfectly and should make the effort to spend as much time as necessary until you find the perfect match. That feeling isn’t productive after a certain point, and I definitely reached that point. So what I told ds, after all my exhaustive reviews, is that this is the program and that’s it. It’s a good program, I’ve done all the research into it I’m going to do, and if he doesn’t love it, well – he doesn’t have to love it. He just has to do it. 🙂

For those of you homeschooling older kids, and who may be interested, what I chose was Teaching Textbooks. I like texts that are written to be read by the child, and are user friendly for them. This seemed to have a pleasant, non intimidating tone to it. They also have cds available to supplement the main text, and the cds have lectures for each lesson. You don’t need to use them, but it’s nice to have to help a child help himself when he gets stuck on something. It’s not cheap, but then again, most textbooks at this level aren’t! (The book on it’s own is $80, including shipping; it’s over $100 more with the cds.)

Avivah