As of this week, all the local schools are now in session. Today I was musing to myself about how very contented with life I felt, with homeschooling particularly. Suddenly I feel like I’m reclaiming the quality of my life again, and it’s just the first week!
This morning we enjoyed a family breakfast once everyone was dressed and ready to start their day. Ds11 made eggs for each person while ds7 chopped cucumbers and ds6 chopped tomatoes for a salad (salad for breakfast – very Israeli of me, isn’t it?). This was so much nicer than rushing to get sandwiches prepared for the day and searching for this one’s shoes and that one’s permission slip and rush, rush, rush. I often looked around at other parents rushing to take their little children to school in the morning, rushing to pick them up, rushing, rushing, rushing….and I wondered, are other people also thinking that this feels insane, do they wish they had an alternative?
It’s amazing to see the kids’ interest and even excitement about learning shooting up – each morning they tell me what they want to learn about that day and I try to follow through with that. This has been a wonderful way to segue from the school mindset they were in. I mentioned in a recent post that I’ve been using amazing programs from Discovery Education that I’m accessing via a trial subscription for educators that are so engaging and informative. (It’s so good that I just purchased access for the year, there are loads more resources than what I’ve had time for so far – if you’re interested you can get 60% off the direct purchase price by buying through Homeschool Buyer’s Coop, which is free to join. I don’t invest in many things so you know that I’m excited about this!) The visual presentations have been a really good hook to get the kids interested in a topic and then we go into more depth.
For example, we watched a kids program about famous people – this particular one was about Galileo. I followed this up with ds11 and dd12 with learning about his book, Galileo’s Dialogue, and understanding his theory about the universe more fully. It’s interesting how many famous people suffered terribly for their beliefs and many didn’t enjoy the golden place in history when alive that they had after death. We then learned about space, the universe, black holes (dd connected this to past reading of a Wrinkle In Time) and lots of other fascinating things, none of which have been topics that I’ve explored much in the past. When dh took the kids on an evening hike yesterday, ds11 took along the binoculars, since he had learned that the strength of Galileo’s telescope that he built was about the same as a pair of binoculars and he wanted to see what was viewable in the skies at night. (Of course for years I had a telescope in my garage in the US and no one had any interest in it – probably because I never opened up any topics relating to its use!)
It’s fascinating how so many things tie together, and I love seeing the kids beginning to make connections – this morning ds4 excitedly brought me a book we’d never read before with a page about the first man to fly and an illustration of the early airplane, and said, “We learned about this!” (He recognized the airplane from our learning about Orville and Wilbur Wright.)
The mother of a former classmate of ds7 called yesterday to find out why he wasn’t in school, and when I said he was homeschooling she caught me by surprise with her immediate response about how she’s always wished she could do that since she thinks it’s the ideal! This is an atypical response for an Israeli (at least I thought it was), and she told me she did parenting classes in Israel based on Gordon Neufeld’s approach so homeschooling was very much in line with this. It was nice to find a like-minded mom, and then when I went to the park just an hour later I had another nice conversation with another Israeli mother. After her initial disbelief that I was keeping a four year old home (then I told her I was keeping them all home), she went on to tell me all the problems with schools and why what I was doing was such a good thing. Far from the negativity I’ve been anticipating.
In the US I had just two negative conversations out of probably hundreds of conversations about homeschooling (notably both of those were newly married young adults without children). Despite years of positive, even glowing feedback at times, here in Israel I’ve minimized and even avoided discussing our plans to homeschool, thinking that with Israeli society having such an emphasis on the collective group over the individual that my days of pleasant conversations were probably over. These conversations reminded me of something I often told homeschooling parents, that how you present yourself very much affects the response you get. People may not have experience with it, they may think it’s crazy and they’d never want to do it, but if they have a willingness to hear another person’s perspective, you can have a respectful and positive discussion.
So it’s nice to be back in the proverbial saddle; I’ve had some anxiety regarding this decision but that has been fading away pretty quickly once we got started and were able to once again experience the quality of a homeschooling life. I’m really grateful.
Avivah
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