Category Archives: homeschooling

List of free Kindle classic books

homeschooling

Today is Day 29 of 31 for 21.

Years ago, after hearing about a curriculum mentioned here and there, I finally checked out the Robinson curriculum myself.  I was expecting to find a computerized curriculum that the kids could do independently of adults, the kind of thing that I’m not a proponent of.  Imagine my surprise when I found guidelines to homeschooling that matched many of my own beliefs and an approach that appealed to me!  I’m too eclectic to take on all of anyone else’s program but I integrated some aspects of their approach and have maintained it until this day.

One aspect of the approach was to do the basics very well and not get distracted by lots of side subjects.  All kids have a mandatory daily reading time, and there is a list of recommended classic books that are suggested.   My kids use books of my choice for their mandatory reading; they choose their own reading material for their free reading.  I’ve used this list as a guideline for our kids, though I’ve also added in my own choices that are more contemporary but still good reading.

Today I found this online list of books suitable to the Robinson curriculum; I’ve loaded a number of the books in the past onto our Kindles via Project Gutenberg, which has a huge selection of free classic books available.  However, this list of links is for Amazon books and so it’s much faster to load the books.  Here’s the link – free classic Kindle books.

Some of these are loaded onto my Kindle to read with the younger kids or as read alouds; some are loaded for ds11 or dd13 onto their Kindles based on their individual levels.  I’ve loaded a couple for myself as well!

Avivah

Making math fun

homeschooling

Last year a friend who is amazing with doing art projects with her kids suggested we team up this year: she’d do art with our kids, I’d do math.  I loved the idea but told her it wouldn’t work since I don’t ‘do math’ with young kids, I just provide them with games to play together or play with them.

When it comes to making math fun while building familiarity with mathematical concepts, games rate at the top of my list for how to accomplish this goal.  I’ve written about my proclivity for games a number of times but it bears repeating because it’s so easy and valuable to integrate into your day.  Games are so helpful in developing the mind; don’t underestimate them because the child is having fun!

There are loads of games out there and I’ll share some that we have that we like:

  • Monopoly (regular and Jr. edition)
  • Rummikub (taught this to ds6 right after he turned five and it quickly became one of our favorites to play together)
  • Life
  • Sudoku (for the older kids),
  • Battleship
  • Sequence (this has a Jr. version that I no longer own)
  • Stratego
  • Rush Hour
  • chess
  • Amazing Labyrinth
  • Quarto
  • Quirkle
  • checkers
  • backgammon
  • assortment of card games (eg War can become multiplication, addition or subtraction)
  • games that build visual perceptions skills – eg Make ‘n Break

The list could go on and on this short list is of games that we have and use.  Mostly the kids play with each other though there’s usually an introductory period with a game in which I (or an older sibling) spend time teaching them how to play.  I tend to play with them more when the game is short and doesn’t require too much focus, since I usually have enough things going on that need my supervision that I can’t give a game my undivided attention.

I also have materials that I categorize as manipulatives:

  • pattern blocks
  • tangrams
  • geoboards
  • base ten blocks
  • cuisenaire rods
  • wrap ups
  • hundred number chart and tiles
  • teddy bear counters (three different sizes and six colors)
  • puzzles

I let the kids play with the manipulatives pretty freely and even without  instruction I’ve found they absorb concepts regarding numbers, order, size, matching.  For my kids, all the things on this list would be considered games since they voluntarily choose to play with these.  I was smiling to myself recently as I watched ds6 take out the hundred number chart and match the number tile to each square for fun, knowing how many people wouldn’t expect a child to choose something so seemingly academic on his own, but kids really don’t make distinctions between fun and learning at this age unless you teach them otherwise.

I also use them to demonstrate mathematical concepts in a hands-on way.  Sometimes I favor one manipulative over another; this year I’ve used the hundred number chart a lot and in past years hardly used it at all.  Recently I’ve hardly touched the cuisenaire rods but found the base ten blocks super helpful; in the past it was reversed.

Having these activities around and using them on a regular basis have helped out kids develop a sense of math being fun and relevant.  Making games and learning activities the focus in the early years rather than workbooks is also a good reminder for us as parents that learning should be enjoyable and make sense.  Math is logical and interesting; giving our kids a chance to experience that from the early years takes away a lot of the fear and intimidation that have unfortunately become the experience of so many kids regarding math.

Avivah

How long does it really take to learn something?

homeschooling, parenting

Today is Day 20 of 31 for 21.


Grab This Button

A few days ago I was at the park and I met a teacher of one of my daughters last year.  She told me she had seen dd13 at a community event a day or two before and she looked wonderful, and then asked how homeschooling was going.

I told her it was great, life feels much more enjoyable and it’s very gratifying to see how much she’s learning in such a short time.  In the six weeks since school officially started, three of those weeks were vacation days because of the holidays.  So in school they’re still reviewing skills based concepts from last year.  Meanwhile, in that same period of time when we also had lots of breaks for the holidays, dd has completed 3/4 of a year of math and is set to finish the next 1/4 in another week.

I said something about how efficient personalized learning can be, and her teacher agreed with me.  Then she told me something that I found stunning.  She teaches English in the upper elementary grades and said that what she teaches the girls could be taught one on one in two weeks.  I asked her to be sure I was understanding correctly: “That’s hard for me to believe.  You’re saying in two weeks you can teach what it would take you a year to teach in school?”  And she corrected me: “No, in two weeks of personal tutoring I can teach what it takes me three years to teach in school!”

I’m telling you, the conversations I have with teachers are the most affirming of homeschooling!

Today a blog reader sent me a TED talk that reminded me of this conversation.

The talk is called The First 20 Hours – How to Learn Anything, and the premise discussed was that learning a skill and being able to be functional takes about 20 hours.  This reminds me of an assertion by John Holt, that he could teach all of elementary math to a motivated middle schooler in a small number of hours.  (It’s been years since I read this book and think it was close to twenty hours but don’t remember specifically – if you know what I’m referring to, please share the specifics in the comments section and I’ll edit the post.)

The speaker outlines four steps for acquiring knowledge, which I thought was valuable :

  1. . Break down the skill to its main components.
  2. Learn enough to self-correct – learn enough that you can practice and correct yourself as you go along.
  3. Remove barriers to practice – eg distractions.
  4. Practice for at least twenty hours – stick with it long enough to see results and don’t allow yourself to get frustrated by feeling stupid.

To me this reinforces my belief that learning doesn’t need to be made intimidatingly difficult or complicated.  Thinking about learning something new in 20 hours takes a lot of fear out of the process and makes learning even more exciting.  My dd13 and ds11 watched this with me, and as soon as it was over, one looked at the other and said, “So what new thing are you going to learn?”  Dd told me she’d like to learn to draw more – my husband sporadically gives her lessons but she’d like something more regular – I did some quick online research and found some great resources for her that I’ll show her in the morning!

Avivah

Planning your week based on your higher values

homemaking, homeschooling, parenting, personal development

I’ve been thinking about different aspects of time and life management lately, precipitated by a discussion with a man who is starting his own business, in addition to a full time supervisory position at work.  I asked him about how he’s finding time to start a new business when he comes home exhausted after a long day,  and he pointed to the bulletin board in his office that was separated into four equal quarters.  He was about to explain when I nodded and told him I understood.

I was really grateful for this reminder of a principle that is so important but I’ve let it slide out of my life.  That’s the principle of organizing your life around what is known as the four quadrants.  (This is some of Steven Covey’s teaching, who is one of the two most insightful and far reaching authors I have read.)  I thought this was too complicated for a blog post but I briefly explained it to dd17 who has already started implementing it and has been finding it very helpful.

In short, every activity in life can be categorized in one of four quadrants.  The first quadrant is for things that are urgent and important.  The second quadrant is for things that are important and not urgent.  The third quadrant is for things that are urgent and not important. And the fourth quadrant is for things that are not urgent and not important.

You have no choice but to spend time in Quadrant 1 (Q1 from now on).  These are things that can’t be ignored, serious issues that leave you no choice but to deal with them.  Crisis falls into this quadrant.

The second quadrant is super powerful but the most neglected.  The more time you spend here, the less time you need to spend in Q1.  This is the quadrant of planning, reflection, spiritual growth, personal renewal – eating well, exercise, meditating.  The kind of things you never manage to find time to do because you’re too busy and one day you’ll get around to it.

The third and fourth quadrant are time wasters.  Q3 is filled with things that seem important because they’re so urgent and that’s why it takes up so much of our time.  Phones ringing, people knocking at the door or insisting they need something from us leave us feeling that this is a really important thing to do right now.  But they aren’t.

Q4 is non important, non urgent activities – time wasting activities that people overuse with the stated purpose being to relax from their stressful lives.  If it’s a meaningful relaxing activity that leaves you feeling recharged, it goes in Q2.  If it’s mind numbing and excessive, you’re looking at Q4.

So the first thing you need to do is assess what roles you play in your life, what activities they involve, and determine where each of these items are on the quadrants. The first two quadrants are where you want to spend most of your time but most people are spending the majority of their time in Q1 and Q3, the urgency quadrants.  We live in an urgency culture.  We can get addicted to the feeling or urgency because it makes us feel important to be so busy.  The problem is that urgency and importance aren’t the same, so all of this activity can leave a person feeling empty.

The goal is to move towards spending more time in Q2 – this is where quality of life comes from.  Where does the time to do that come from?  Q3 and Q4, the quadrants that will suck out all your life energy and leave you with nothing to show for it.  The more time you spend in Q2, the smaller the number of burning items in Q1 will become.  The man I mentioned at the beginning of the post told me when he first took this job, everything was urgent, rush, rush, rush.  After a month of putting practices based on these principles into place, things were running in a much calmer way.

Categorizing your activities is individual – an activity that one person experiences in one way can be experienced totally differently by someone else.

I used some of my resting time the day after my accident to do some quadrant planning.  I’d been thinking about it since last week and was planning to find a chunk of time to do some uninterrupted thinking so I took my opportunity when it presented itself!  After some reflection and writing, I took out my planner and scheduled in the Q1 and Q2 activities for the week.  This is the idea behind something I wrote about a long time ago, putting in the big rocks first.  (You’ll have to look it up if you’re interested.  :))

After you write down your important quality of life type activities for the week, then you schedule everything else around that.  You can spend your days doing little things that need to be done all day long, and get to the end of a day feeling as if you have nothing to show for your efforts.  When you prioritize your activities and execute around them, you can get lots of the smaller things done in between the big things and at the end of the day feel a sense of satisfaction that you’ve done things that really mattered to you.

Though I’ve just started doing this again, it’s been really good.  Even when things happen to throw off my time schedule that would have previously left me extremely frustrated, I still had a clear idea of what was my priority for the day and that kept me focused even when everything else about my day changed.  I made time for some deep thinking, time to write out some of my values and priorities, time to spend with my mom, time to speak to a relative in the US who I rarely talk to (great aunt).  I got all my homeschooling paperwork written up.  I went through 2000 digital photos on my camera and chose out about 10% to print out; I haven’t printed out photos in over two years though our family enjoys being able to look at albums to remember our experiences.  Now I can delete everything from my camera.  (Getting rid of clutter is a Q2 activity.)

My house wasn’t clean at the end of the day, since physically I’m more limited than usual right now.  I like when things look neat, but I was still able to feel a sense of accomplishment because the things that really mattered to me (and these will be different for each person) things it’s so easy to be too busy for – were done.

This is an incredibly powerful way to live life if done consistently.  I hope I haven’t made it seem to obvious in my effort to simplify a lot of material.  Please let me know if this sounds helpful to you!

Avivah

Need to submit application for homeschool permit – again…

aliyah, homeschooling

Today is Day 3 of 31 for 21 – a month long blogging effort to raise awareness of Down syndrome.  You can check out other bloggers participating here.

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I got a call from the Ministry of Education earlier this week, notifying me that I need to resubmit my application for a permit to homeschool.  Despite having sent it five months ago, calling the office it was sent to and not only confirming its receipt but asking if there were any other legal things I needed to take care of and being told I had done all I needed to – apparently my paperwork just sat there. Now I need to start over with someone else.

I’m annoyed that this hasn’t been handled properly and it puts me under last minute pressure. The new guidelines are more intrusive and demanding than the prior list, which was still much more than I was ever expected to provide in the US.  Edited to add: After a 90 minute conversation with an experienced homeschooling mom , I’ve learned there haven’t been changes in the homeschooling law, despite what I was told – and I now have a clear idea of what I need to provide and what I don’t.  Basically it’s the same stuff that I was told before – philosophy of educational beliefs/reasons for homeschooling, curriculum (or my explanation of what we do) and evaluation methods.  Much less than what she’s saying is legally necessary. Thanks to our talk, I plan to challenge these false assertions and will only be submitting what the law states is necessary.  I understand they want to be sure that responsible people are ensuring the education of their children in a responsible way, but I don’t believe you can’t legislate responsibility.  People who are going to be responsible are going to do it anyway, and people who abuse their kids or use them as drug runners are going to do that no matter what oversight you try to impose on them.  Demands like these just place a burden on responsible parents, create more paperwork for those working in the department of education and it’s a shame since with all of that it won’t improve the end result.  Actually, I think it will make people feel less inclined to report their homeschooling.

Here’s a list of what I need to submit by registered mail, nothing else will be accepted – immediately (edited to add – don’t take this as legally valid since I’ve learned after posting this that it’s not):

At the top of the page – date in full, address and phone number

  • Details of children – names, national identification numbers, birthdates, grade levels; parents education level and occupations
  • Reasons for homeschooling
  • Educational plan, activities and means of evaluation
  • Detailed explanation of how social needs will be met (this is in bold)
  • Daily schedule
  • Details of adult doing homeschooling
  • authorization from school or proof of child’s school registration
  • Photocopy of both parents’ national identity numbers with details of children
  • Signature of both parents

All of this needs to be submitted by registered mail, and at the bottom is the reminder that you need to submit this for every child each year.  If you leave anything out, there is a bolded reminder that your application won’t be accepted.

Don’t ask me why your child has to be registered in school in order to homeschool.  I asked the local representative a month ago when he told me I needed this and he told me that’s just how it is – I don’t understand the logic.  Whatever.  I keep thinking of those early homeschooling families in the US and what they went through to get the good laws we have in the US.  I relate to the pioneer part but I don’t have the energy to advocate for changes in the law.  The day after I was told about this I went to the school to speak to their principals from last year and the secretaries to verify their status.  Don’t think that was a warm and fuzzy experience.  Now I have to go back and get written documention from them?  Oh joy.

What these guidelines are asking for is documentation of schooling, not learning.  Education and schooling aren’t the same, not by a long shot.  You can sit in school for years of your life and not learn much.  Schools can document all of the above but don’t have to account for if real learning is happening or if healthy social skills are being learned.  Conversely, you can have no academic plan or set times for each topic and have a home in which learning is happening non-stop!

After all of the above paperwork is processed, then they have to come to my home for a visit and check out whatever it is that they check out.  I don’t know, that we have light and running water?

I’ll keep you posted when I finally get this piece of paper! And I’ll try not to think about the fact that I have to start this all over again in the spring.

Avivah

A sample day in our homeschooling life

homeschooling

Today is Day 2 of 31 for 21 – a month long blogging effort to raise awareness of Down syndrome.  You can check out other bloggers participating here.

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I really enjoyed the holidays but it’s so nice to be getting back to our regular routine!  It took a couple of weeks to ease from the summer into our homeschooling schedule.  We hardly had a chance for it to feel like a routine before the holidays came along.  I’ve spent this week getting back into our homeschooling routine, and the first two days of the week felt like herding cats.  But we’re getting there – by the beginning of next week I expect to be back to normal.

I thought I’d share about what homeschooling looked like today. Not because it was impressive or unusual or because we covered an astonishing amount of material.  It wasn’t and we didn’t.  That’s why I thought I’d share – because it’s a simple and minimally scripted day.

It’s so hard to remember these details at the end of a day and I know I’ve left things out but I’ll share what I can remember.

I started the day by reading a new book to the younger boys.  After we finished the book I davened with ds4, then with ds6 (they do different things), then reread the new book to all the boys again.  After that I made breakfast and while we ate, I talked to them about the plan for the day.  The kids said they wanted to learn about penguins, and ds7 told me about a handout from his teacher in school of a polar bear and a penguin in the Arctic.  I told him that penguins and polar bears actually live on different sides of the world and don’t encounter each other in nature, which prompted them to ask what land animal is the natural predator of a penguin.  I asked them for their ideas on this, and told them we’d look it up later to see if they were right.

We cleaned up from breakfast and the older kids sat down with their math.  I sat down with ds4 and ds6 with a hundred number chart and we found some interesting patterns.  We read some poems of Robert Louis Stevenson (A Child’s Garden of Verses), then read several stories from Nach (Prophets) about Eliyahu and Elisha.  We read some parsha as well, then ds7 listened to two portions of the parsha leined aloud while he followed along.

Yirmiyahu at some point watched his daily pictures and words on the computer that is part of an early reading program that we started for him very recently.  Ds4 and ds6 enjoy watching this with him; it’s fun and relaxed for them all.   He watches it for five minutes in the morning and five minutes in the evening (if I remember).  He and I both prefer physical flashcards; I’d love to print out cards and laminate them but don’t have a printer or a laminator, and doing this here will be an expensive project so for now I’m sticking to the program and the cards I already bought.

One of the kids told me he wanted to learn about crocodiles, not penguins, which reminded me about a two minute National Geographic clip I had seen of a jaguar stalking a caiman.  So I showed it to them, and after we discussed it told them we’d have to save more crocodile learning for another day since the penguins were requested first. 🙂 Ds7 read three Hebrew storybooks aloud to us (me, ds4 and ds6) while we snuggled on the couch.

Ds4 and ds6 spent an hour playing with blocks and Lincoln Logs; they’re in the middle of building some kind of city.  I’m glad we rearranged our home so we now have a playroom, because I can leave their creations like this out for a while and give them a chance to finish them.  I wanted ds7 to do his math then, but he was resistant, telling me he doesn’t know how to do it.  I realized he was intimidated by the questions on his lesson for the day – I only introduced subtraction with carrying in two digit problems the lesson before the holidays and he needed a refresher before taking on three digit problems.  I asked him to take out his base ten blocks to demonstrate but decided against showing him again since I felt his focus wasn’t there and it would be better to take a break from math for a while.

Dd12 came in to ask me about some questions on measuring angles.  I’m happy to say that in the few weeks since we started homeschooling, despite all the breaks for the holidays, she’s covered almost a half a year of math.  I’d like her to do two years of math this year to get her back up to the level she was on before she went to school.  Amazingly enough she managed to stay in the higher math class during that time.  While I explained the angle questions, I put on a short math video (from the Discovery Education subscription that I have) for ds7 about subtraction with borrowing.  I’ve never used any math videos and was impressed with how clearly it was presented.

I just showed him 15 minutes of the 50 minute clip that was relevant to him.  It was obvious as I sat next to him watching that he understood the concept.  So I got out his notebook and wrote out about fifteen new questions for him, starting with a few two digit questions and then the rest three digits like the ones from his lesson that he thought were too hard for him.  It’s not worth directly challenging something so small as this; better to show than to tell.  He very quickly did all of the questions without any mistakes.

By now it was time to make lunch so I looked in the fridge to decide what to make.  I took out a large container of cooked chickpeas, threw them in with the onions I had peeled and diced right after breakfast (thinking I’d use them for something!), then added a package of ground meat, sauce and spices – this is how I cook, making up things along the way.  I started a pot of rice cooking to go with the stew, and added carrots to the purple and green cabbage I had chopped a couple of days before, then mixed in the last of the homemade dill dip and lunch was on its way!

While the food was cooking, I put on a video about animal life in the Antarctic to follow up on the penguin discussion from earlier in the day.  This is geared to upper elementary and high school aged kids but our little kids enjoy these kind of programs – I always tell them if it doesn’t interest them they don’t have to watch.  The older kids had finished their work for the day and we all watched together.  Everyone except dd13, who is glued to her Kindle thanks to the library books I checked out for her a couple of days ago.  (This is her extra reading and doesn’t count for her school reading – she could easily rack up six hours a day of reading.)

Over lunch – it was past 2 pm by now –  I read them an encyclopedia article about penguins and that officially wrapped up penguins for the day.  After lunch I took a couple of the boys with me to do some shopping.  We were going to have a playdate with friends but by the time we got back it was late in the afternoon.  So instead, so we set out for the library. They enjoyed choosing their books and sitting in the library and reading books that we weren’t checking out.  We came home and while we got dinner ready, the boys took out their books from the library and sat down to read them.  After we had dinner, dh put the boys to bed (I know he finished a read aloud with ds11 tonight but I’m not sure what stories the younger boys got).

What’s really interesting is how each day is so different from another, while still having the same basic schedule.  Yesterday we did lots of Hebrew language, learned about human digestion and then the digestion of carnivorous plants, ds7 read some books in English aloud, they did a lot of drawing (dh gave dd a drawing lesson earlier this week so she’s been practicing drawing the perceptions that he taught her), hours of playing with blocks, and friends were over to play.  So many ways to enjoy life together!

Avivah

Homeschooling – finding time to do it all?

homeschooling, parenting

>>How do you maintain your energy, keep the laundry, home, and kitchen in order, make sure everyone is occupied with educational things, and maintain your mental health for the sake of your children?  I hope I don’t sound too negative, just wondering how you “pull it off”?<<

I’ll tell you right off the bat that a huge part of this answer is about attitude and expectations.  I see that those who think that every bit of information has to be taught in a traditional school format tend to have much more stress than those who believe that learning is something that happens naturally. My academic focus is on the skills of reading and writing (in Hebrew and English) and math.  Once they have strong skills in these areas, I know they’ll be able to learn anything.  I either integrate other topics like history and science into our reading or treat it as extracurricular.  This trust in a child’s desire to learn and in the natural learning process takes a lot of pressure off.

An acquaintance with 14 children called a couple of weeks ago and upon learning I was homeschooling, asked me several times, “But when do you get anything done?  When do you rest?”  I find homeschooling easier than having kids in school but it certainly takes effort!  A general plan for the day helps me get things done in a way that feels balanced to me.

I do a load of laundry before I go to sleep.  As soon as I wake up, I hang that load and put another one in.  The little kids are always awake by now and they play together while I’m doing this.  Then I make breakfast and everyone eats together. By the time we’re finished, the next load is ready and I hang that out.  Then if necessary I put another load in the washer.  I wash the dishes and neaten up the living room/dining room and kitchen and ask the kids to make their beds and put their dirty clothes in the hamper and pajamas away.  After the house is in order, our official homeschooling time begins.  This is around 9 am.

By about 12 – 1 pm, I’m wrapping up my active involvement with the kids’ learning though of course I continue to be involved with them when the academics are officially done!  And of course the learning continues beyond this time, too!  I hang out the next load of laundry and start to make lunch around then, and my goal is to have lunch ready about 1:30 – 2 pm.  We sit down to lunch together and afterwards, this is when I rest if I’m feeling like I need it.  Sometimes I ask the older kids to keep an eye on the younger ones, but often I have quiet time for everyone in the family and the older kids can read quietly while the younger kids and I nap.  After about an hour, we have time for friends and outdoor play.  Then we do a quick pick up of the house, have dinner together, get ready for bed and have bedtime readalouds.  That’s our day in a nutshell!

I’ve found it works best for me to dedicate the morning hours to homeschooling, and that means I’m not available for other things.  Not cleaning, not errands, not cooking, not anything else.  I don’t answer the phone in the mornings (unless it’s one of my older kids calling), I try to schedule appointments either very early in the morning or  later in the day, and I stay off the computer.  The computer can be a big time suck because you can get on to check one email and before you know it you’re checking this and then reading that and then it’s an hour later with your kids getting restless because you’re not present for them.

I try to limit my personal computer time to the evenings when the younger kids are in bed.  I tend to stay up too late; I’m working on getting to sleep earlier but this is an ongoing challenge for me.  It’s much easier now that the oldest kids aren’t home and I’m optimistic that as we get back into our rhythm that this will improve; having teens who stay up late shifted everyone’s sleep schedule later.  Getting enough sleep is critical to our physical health and emotional functioning; we all know that but most of us still don’t make this a priority!  

Being able to get to sleep earlier and have time for the things we need to do also depends on our ability to say ‘no’.  We can’t do it all, and we have to guard our energy so it’s available for what is most important to us.  For me, this means cutting down on things that I would like to do and being honest with myself that when I go outside of these parameters, someone is going to be compromised – and it’s usually myself.  It also means valuing my energy and recognizing my needs as at least as important as the needs of everyone else.

Time for myself is critical, and I think I’m like most mothers in that I don’t allot enough to this.  I enjoy spending time with the kids and don’t usually feel I need to get away.  But I still appreciate time with other women.  For the past few months I’ve been attending a weekly lecture that I’ve really enjoyed, but that’s unfortunately ending next week.  I attend periodic social activities and when the kids have play dates or I take them to the park, it’s often a nice opportunity for me to chat with other moms.  For a while this spring/summer I was making regular time once a week to get out by myself, but I didn’t maintain that and now that dh is back (after four months away) I’m not feeling it’s as critical.  Dh usually takes care of the bedtime routine so that gives me a break every evening that I really appreciate.

As you can see, you don’t have to be Superwoman to homeschool. What you do have to do is be willing to prioritize and use your energies toward what is most important for you.

Avivah

Trip to Madatech Science Center

aliyah, homeschooling

Last week we went to Madatech, a science center in Haifa.  It’s the kind of place I like to take the kids but like most of the museums, zoos, etc here, it’s pricey – entrance fees are 70 shekels ($20) for a child, 90 shekels ($25) for an adult – and when you add that to the bus fares to get here, we’re looking at almost $200 for a visit to a science center just for five kids!  So when I learned that there would be free admission to science museums across the country in honor of annual Science Night, we took the opportunity!  We spent about 140 shekels ($40) on transportation getting to Haifa, so it was a relatively frugal evening of fun.

This was our first trip since the older kids aren’t living at home full-time and we felt like a very small family with just six kids.  Different but nice.

They have a great outdoor area in which scientific principles are demonstrated in a hands-on way.  Below is the pulley area – ds7 is pulling on a boat with a single pulley, next to it is a boat with a double pulley- they then determine which is easier to pull.

e - boat pulley e - boat pulley 2

Here is a fun structure showing the power of a lever.  A globe with people sitting inside is pulled at two different points by the lever.  Our family in the globe:

globe pulley 1 globe pulley 2

Pulling the lever from different places:

globe pulley 3 globe pulley 4

We waited on line for forty minutes for this but thought it would be worth the experience for the kids.  This is a pedal controlled helicopter, almost like a ride at an amusement park but more labor intensive – how fast you go depends on how much you can pedal.

Ds7 went first.

heli 1 heli 2

Then ds4.

heli 3

Then ds6.

heli 4

As we were getting ready to exit the outdoor area, we bumped into a homeschooling family we know.  They have a daughter the same age as dd12; the two of them met for the first time for about three minutes on our trip to Kfar Kedem, a week later they came to the homeschooling park meet that I arranged in Karmiel, then they saw each other at the NBN picnic last month and here they got to spend more time together.  There aren’t many homeschooling families with girls her age and each time they meet has given them a chance to get to know each other a bit more.  By now they seem quite friendly and comfortable with each other!

There were crowds in just about every room, but when we got inside we found a quiet room with displays of birds and animals.

madatech 1

And then another quiet spot in the lego room.  After a short time, ds4 and ds7 opted to go with dd12 and ds11 to different parts of the museum, but ds6 was content to spent a long, long time building here.  The volunteer in the room watched him building carefully for a long time and finally came over and told me, “You have a future engineer there.”  I smiled and said, “Maybe.”  (The idea has already occurred to me.)  She said she expected me to say he would be a rabbi.  I told her that there’s no reason he can’t be both.

lego 2

Ds7 and ds4, watching a toy advance along a wire near the ceiling.

lego 1

Push the button and see how the inside of a car looks when the motor starts running.

madatech 2

Dd and ds11 had a fantastic time exploring the museum together.  They told me they wished they had an entire day to spend there. They sped through the exhibits so they could see as much as possible and would have loved more time to understand each one.  We met them again at the end – below they are in a car on a slanted track, where they are suddenly plunged down and stopped abruptly.  Here they are just after strapping in.

madatech 3

There was a room dedicated to the inventions of Leonarda da Vinci. We didn’t spend much time on it then because there was so much to see and do, but now we’ve used the trip as a springboard for learning about da Vinci and his inventions.  Very fascinating stuff.

It was a long, long day. We left Karmiel at about 3:30, got to the museum at 5 pm and stayed until they closed at 10 pm.  From there we had a local bus back to the central bus station, then a bus to Karmiel.

On Haifa bus to central bus station:

bus home

Our trip got longer when the bus to Karmiel broke down on the highway.  Ds11 and dd12 thought this was fun since they got off the bus and got to walk around outside at midnight along the side of the highway.  Memories.  🙂  I stayed in the bus with the younger four sleeping boys and we woke them up to transfer them when the new bus finally arrived over 30 minutes later.  We got home at 12:30 am and were greeted by ds14, who had come home for his school vacation while we were gone.

My husband doesn’t usually get to go with us on outings like this and it was really nice that this time he was able to get off work early to go with us.  It was such a wonderful trip!

Avivah

Against expert’s advice – 13 year old genius pulled from special ed classes shines

homeschooling, parenting

A friend who is an inclusion specialist sent me links for the following videos with the comment that this makes a powerful case for unschooling.  Featured is a thirteen year old boy who was autistic, supposedly would never talk and couldn’t learn, whose parents despite their fear went against the advice of the experts, and pulled their son out of special education classes, noting that the longer he was there the more he was fading away.  Instead, they tried a different approach – to let him explore his passion.  And he’s now on track to win a Nobel Prize

Check out this link to read more!  It includes an interview of him with 60 Minutes as well as a Ted Talk that he gave.  Parents have such a strong sense of who our kids are and what they need, but it’s easy to discount that when people who are trained specialists tell us we’re wrong.  These parents talk about the fear they had of doing something against the ‘experts’ advice’ but by listening to their inner voice, they freed their child to become who he was able to be.

Avivah

 

 

Top ten mistakes when raising bilingual children – article

aliyah, homeschooling

Eventually I’m going to finish writing my post on my thoughts on teaching kids Hebrew if you’re a native English speaker homeschooling in Israel. Eventually.  That seems like everything in my life lately….I get to things but it’s all taking longer than I would like.  Especially when I keep having more and more things to say about that topic!

One of the more relaxing things I’ve been recently spending time learning about lately is early literacy and how that intersects when there are two languages you want to teach your child.  I just found this website and though I’ve only looked at it briefly so far, it seems to have a lot of interesting information that I’m sure will be helpful to those of you who want to raise bilingual children.

On this site, they list the ten mistakes parents make when raising bilingual children (in this context when they say ‘raising’ they mean the aspect of teaching your child a language):

“- Don’t teach — make it fun and natural.
– Don’t make a big deal of the languages — but do explain the usage.
– Don’t correct — just repeat the words correctly.
– Don’t ask your child to “show off,” — but praise him if he volunteers.
– Don’t mix languages yourself — a consistent language system provides structure, predictability, and security. This in turn promotes learning.
– Don’t rely on recordings — speak or sing to your baby directly and intently.
– Don’t be shy — use your language in public even if you sometimes feel embarrassed.
– Don’t make abrupt changes to your child’s language environment — go slow and explain what’s happening.
– Don’t wait to expose your child to a second or third language — the earlier your child starts, the easier it will be for everyone.
– Don’t wait! We really mean it! If not now, probably never.


But Do: praise, encourage, and have fun! “

This fits in nicely with my views on education, in that I strongly feel that education of whatever topic matter should be interesting and relevant to the child, low pressure, the approach used should be as integrated and natural as possible and above all, keep it enjoyable!

Avivah