Comfort and Joy

We are all about comfort and joy around here, especially during the Christmas season. And that means everything from preparing whatever we want for Christmas Eve dinner, no matter how nontraditional, to letting the only man in our house wear his worn out, out of date, and too short sweat pants when friends come over, without so much as a whining complaint from the mommy of the house. The man loves those darn, comfy sweatpants, and Christmas ain't about clothes, no matter how much I enjoy them. I just can't get into the whole hustle and bustle of a stressed out, over-booked Christmas season. I am celebrating the birth of Christ, for goodness sake, and for me, I can do that much better without deadlines, maxed out credit cards, and exhausted and over-stimulated kids. Now that does not mean we are a bunch of couch potatoes during this season, and it certainly doesn't mean we are perfectly chill at all moments, never giving into stress and material temptation. We just try to stay focused on what really and truly matters, or rather, on what really and truly should matter to us. And this holiday season has been pretty joyous and super comfy. Even when we are learning about insects in our kindergarten class and wondering why our live ants haven't yet arrived, we are doing our best to cherish the moments.

And cherishing the moments during Christmas time usually comes with all sorts of school time festivities. I gotta be honest here and say this is one weakness of mine, remembering to incorporate seasonal celebrations and projects into our curriculum. I have to keep remembering that our curriculum was created to begin any time of year, which means it does not follow seasons, holidays, and all those fun childhood school time festivities found in public and private school settings.......so, it's up to the mamas to plan and follow through with the fun. Here's a little of what my kindergarten gal did to celebrate this holiday season (of course her little sisters also enjoyed the fun of some of these activities):

My daughter completed five days of sharing during her final week before school ended for Christmas break. She came up with one thing to give, share, or do for someone every day. Her sharing activities included donating some of her dolls and stuffed animals to a local charity and making sweet treats as a surprise for daddy. One of her strengths is gift giving and surprising, so she loved this week of sharing.

I also wanted her to have some kind of festive play date or event, something to give her the same kind of fun experience she would have in a classroom setting Christmas party if she attended a large school, so.....we had some friends over to decorate cookies.

Fun, sweet, sugary, and not even messy....not messy because we used snowflake, angel, snowman, and dove cookie cutters, which all make for cookies that can be decorated with all white icing and white sparkled sugar. We aren't afraid of messes around here, but it is nice to find a fun way to avoid food coloring when possible. We ordered pizza, the kids all decorated a plate of cookies, and then we finished off with a viewing of the classic Rudolph movie. Our kids had more wheat flour and sugar than they usually have in a week or maybe even a month, but hey, they had fun and they understand it was a special treat. I think it's so important that kids learn to appreciate special occasions and treats for what they are: special, once in a while gifts or indulgences, things to be thankful for and excited about because you don't see them all day and every day.

And then there is the Christmas and winter decorating. This year I realized that when we are decorating our home, we are also decorating our learning environment, so we made sure to make use of calendars, count down to Christmas displays, and seasonal manipulatives. Our favorite Christmas time addition to our house was a basket in our living room which holds our Christmas and winter storybooks, movies, and music. This helped to decorate our house for the season in a small way, while also reminding us to stop throughout our day and share a book or short movie with each other while the season matched up with the stories.

Add some of our favorite homemade spiced tea into the mix, and we had a pretty great season filled up with bunches of comfort and joy. Happy Birthday, Jesus!

We have all these great plans...

...and then life happens. My goodness, does it happen. We have plans and ideas and schedules and lists. We have homeschool group school days, and we have curriculum to follow, and we have play dates and projects, and children to get from point A to point B and back again. But we also have extended family whom we may want to visit and help out when there's a need, and we have nasty little germs that can cause fevers making their way into our house, and we have all sorts of other things mixing up our days like little girls who for whatever reason need some extra cuddle time or soon-to-be big girls with life lessons to be learned, and teeny little girls with a persistent little wish to be potty trained right away. And so, what happens is: we must choose to put aside lists and schedules (even though this really gets to me if I let it....like a nagging little voice in my head telling me that I need to follow my plans, I really, really need to....), or we push our kids to check off everything we thought we would do at a certain time, meanwhile, they don't get what they need, what is really good for their little hearts. It's a tough thing sometimes, to live in the world of Plan B, and tougher still for me to go into the crazy unknown of Plan C, but when I force myself to take a deep breath, evaluate our current situation, and move on to a new plan, then usually, not always, but usually, everyone wins around here. We see more smiles, more learning, and more growth in our relationships. And that is a little piece of greatness for our family.

So this week we checked off our assignments on our lesson plan, but not all of our songs, and not all of our science experiments. We'll have fun revisiting some of those things later. We added an extra history project in, something that interests my Kindergarten student. It's not part of the curriculum package we purchased, but goodness, she is learning from it like crazy. We had a couple school days, after a spur of the moment road trip, at the kids' great-grandmother's house, sitting in her kitchen with cups of spiced tea and workbooks. And we had some of our lessons on the couch one day, while my Kindergarten girl sat next to me on one side, a piano bench pulled up in front of her for her worksheets and supplies, while my older preschooler cuddled up to my other side, sick with a fever. My Kindergarten girl practiced reading (and using a strong, clear voice) by sitting on a stool in the bathroom, reading a picture book to my two year-old who was sitting on the potty, trying to prove she is done with diapers. We did have school with our friends in our homeschool group twice this last week, and we did have our organized classroom time at home a few times this week, too, but when it didn't happen, we didn't panic. We made it work. I am so proud of my little ones for being adaptable when the time is right for adapting. They are learning to work as a team, and that makes me happy, while being so good for them.

And now as we get back to our routine and to our little homeschool classroom, we are thankful for that space and for the comfort and stability we find there. We love our little blackboard, especially the colored chalk, goodness my kid loves the colored chalk. We are using the board more now to display her current history project and also her reading accomplishments. She just loves checking off her accomplishments and then seeing them up on the board every day. And I bet she will love that even more come Monday, after having a break from the lists and checks. There's nothing like a break from something to give you a renewed excitement for it when it is time to go back to work.

So we are thankful for the last few weeks. God is taking good care of us. We have survived the flu with hardly any symptoms, other than a fever. And while we are trying our best to be a house that shares, we are so thankful to say we haven't been sharing viruses with each other at this point. Praise God!

Thankful.

We are thankful this week, and I do hope it lasts. I hope we remain aware and focused on and vocal about how grateful our family is to have each other and also to have the opportunity to spend so many hours of the day at home with our kiddos. Wow, really?....kiddos?....I've always thought that was cheesy to call kids kiddos, but apparently, motherhood or possibly late twenty-hood has made me cheesy. Whatever, there are worse things I could be turning into. Like too serious, now that is something I hope to never be, though I have been accused of that many a time. But that's a whole other tangent.

So while we had a week of giving thanks and listing blessings we are happy to have, we also had a busy, busy quick little week that passed by so very, very terribly fast that we didn't get to each and every one of our fabulous celebrating Thanksgiving homeschool plans. We did many of them, oh yes we did write blessings on construction paper turkey feathers and read about the pilgrims and work harvest puzzles, but there were so many good intentions that we passed on by. And I am sad to say that it was the best of my well-thought out super mama plans that we did not get to. We were going to bake cookies for first responders and drop them off, while my little darlings wore their freshly pressed pumpkin shirts, but the week went by, and we left the baking goods in their canisters and jars on the shelf...untouched. We were going to write thank you notes to friends and family, telling them "thanks" for all of the abstract gifts we get from them, since we usually only write thank you notes for concrete materials gifts, but we did not. And the list of grand ideas goes on and on. And while I do feel pretty down about not thanking firefighters for what they do for our community throughout the year and for not helping my kindergarten daughter write a thank you note to her great-grandpa for helping her mama learn to love the piano so that now she can learn from me, well, I am going to try to turn my defeated frown upside down and teach my kids that sometimes we fail. Sometimes we make plans, and we change them. And sometimes, we are too busy doing things that don't matter as much as the things we are forgetting to do, and we can work to change that. And I am going to teach them that we can show our thanks any day of the year, not only on Thanksgiving, though that doesn't mean we shouldn't enjoy that special set-aside day of feasting and thanking. But all other days can also be filled up with gratitude in some form or another. So we are going to bake and thank-you note this week. Yes we are. And we are going to pray some thanks. Because that is simple and good and peaceful, and that matters.

So when considering our week of plans both kept and skipped, I came up with the thought that what we need to strive for in our homeschooling house here is less separation between school time and non-school time. I mean, my kids are always learning, and I am always mothering, which includes teaching. I think when I try to have school time and then regular time, then things get a little off balance and a little more clutter enters our lives. Of course, we can and should have set apart time for school, BUT that doesn't mean my mothering mode is turned off during those hours, and it certainly doesn't mean my child's learning mode is turned off after her lesson plan is worked through for the day. Maybe a little more balance will help us make realistic plans and then follow through with them. Maybe if we aren't switching back and forth between our roles, but rather being ourselves a little more comfortably and completely at all times, then this great thing called homeschooling can become even greater for us. We'll just see. That is, of course, after I figure out a way to make that very abstract concept a concrete one. Hmm.

Five senses later, and I am not smarter than a kindergartener.

So we learned about the five main senses last week in our little home school. And I'm not just typing the word "we" to be cute or supportive of my daughter's learning. No, I am saying we learned about the five senses, because I learned at least half as much as my daughter did. After discussing the basics about how our bodies were created to work, focusing on our sight, hearing, sense of smell, sense of touch, and sense of taste, we then completed some fun little exercises and activities for each sense. This was a unit study, so we had the full week to incorporate and learn about senses, while also learning the basic subjects for her school level.

 

 



Of course, we enjoyed cups and cups of tea this week, because, well, that's just what we do around here when you have three little girls and a pretty china tea set, and because trying various teas turned out to be a great way to use all of our senses. 

Our schoolroom/playroom back wall. Decal from etsy. Shelf from my favorite consignment shop in my old hometown, and tea set was a Christmas gift to girls from an aunt and uncle.

 

 

 

 

It all went so well, my little girl was a good listener, and then, the questions began. My kid wanted to know things this week, lots of things.

What color is the cochlea? And what kind of fluid is in the cochlea? Why does a sea shell sound like the ocean when you hold it to your ear? Why does your eye make water? How do eyes work? How do glasses work? 

And the list goes on. Being a mother of little ones, I am pretty accustomed to oodles of questions coming from my kids' mouths, but these questions, well, they just made me feel a little less intelligent and a little ill-prepared, since I am teacher-mom now. But the questions and my lack of solid answers made me laugh, and they also made me grateful, so grateful that we had the time to stop and find answers to her questions when she wanted to learn. I had a general idea of the answers to a few of these questions, but the other few, well, I was lost on those. And general ideas are not at all sufficient when trying to explain things in a simple, clear manner. So I reached for a bag of books we had checked out from the children's section of our public library on how our bodies work, and wouldn't you know, there were answers to my daughter's questions, and they were written and illustrated for kids. Best books ever, at least best books ever on that day and in that moment. Wow, was I glad we ventured away from the fairy tale and classic storybook sections my oldest and I like to spend our time in to grab some books from the non-fiction children's section. Otherwise, we never would have learned that the "ocean" sound coming from a sea shell held over your ear, is actually the sound of ambient noise and even your own blood flowing. Well, that was a little heartbreaking to me, I gotta say. Not that I thought the sound was actually a magical piece of ocean music hidden away in the shell, BUT I at least thought it had some cool scientific explanation, you know, something sea shell specific. But I guess the sound of your own blood flowing is kind of a cool scientific explanation. Bubble bursting, but cool.

One other little bit of information we learned this week, was something about my sweet little kindergarten girl. Well, I guess we already knew it, but we learned a good way to use it. So, my oldest is a big fan of good smells. She doesn't cuddle with a blanket or stuffed animal when she is tired, she sniffs it. And she loves to talk about how good things smell and what different things smell like. So, on our focus on sense of smell day, I brought my favorite new candle into our classroom and you know what the kid did, she smiled the whole day, only taking a break from her work to take a big whiff of the warm smelling air. I love her. And yes, we are going to make a candle part of our routine. Who knew getting her in a better learning mood was as simple as getting her some glasses (there will be a future post on this...I have so much to share on her glasses) and lighting a candle! I would have done those two things WAY back had I figured them out. Oh, the drama we could have been spared. But, live and learn, and then apply.

Real Kindergarten

We have three daughters, the oldest is a kindergarten student this year, a real one. We're homeschooling her, and so far so great. I anticipated a little questioning coming into the picture every now and then, you know, like at the end of a particularly taxing and dramatic day I might just feel the need to sit in a chair with a pile of research on homeschooling and frantically read through the findings yet again, while asking myself something along the lines of :Is this really the right choice? Did she have a hard day because of me? Would she have had a better day in a classroom full of peers? But, that just hasn't happened. And we are a couple months in. I am pretty green at the whole organized teaching- my- own- kid deal at this point, and so there are many days when I feel like I need to do extra homework and preparation, and I may change my mind about supplemental activities and enrichment additions, and at times I'll get frustrated with my daughter and, more often, with myself, but I'm feeling right now that I am not going to change my mind about one thing: this is the best choice for our family right now. My husband and I are pretty darn certain that this is a great choice for our kids and for their future.

So here we are a-homeschooling. We've got one student this year, while the other two are in preschool. Of course, I am a big believer in the idea that your kids are always your students, even when they are toddling around or getting their preschool on, but you know what I mean, probably. We have one real life school kid. You know the type: sitting down in a school room to do some reading, riting, and rithmatic. She is our oldest, our careful child, our bookwork. I am so in love with the amazing differences in my children. It is so fun to see their individuality and to help them grow into their own unique interests. That said, it is a pretty helpful plan that our oldest tends to want to be taught, thrives with organization, and could sit with a notebook and pen, or especially, with a chapter book in her hands all day. And I mean it, the kid could sit with a book all the day long. So as I work my way through the lesson plans in the curriculum we use and add in some of my own plans, I have a pretty patient and helpful pupil. Now next year when our second born reaches kindergarten....well, suffice to say, we're all in for a fun ride! But for now, we are learning in a quiet, calm environment. It is so amazing to see my child learn, to be there to help her discover the world around her, and to make sure that each moment of our schooling is put to great use. And I especially am a fan of the idea that if there is something my kid wants to learn about, well, heck, let's just look it up and learn about it right then, when she is curious and ready to learn something.

And not only is it cool to see my kindergarten student's knowledge grow, but it has also been great for me as a mother, and for her as a small human, to see her begin to blossom socially. I want her to learn to speak to and in front of people of all ages in many different settings and situations. We are working towards strong and useful social skills, as we have entered the world of homeschooling, homeschooling groups, and various sorts of traditional learning. By the by, I like to refer to certain styles of homeschooling as traditional because people have been learning from home for years, really years, as in lots of them...I especially like to reference and consider the way people learned in, say, England, a couple hundred years ago. I mean, a tutor in the home teaching students multiple languages, nature in the natural world, arithmatic, art, music, and all sorts of important, useful, and fanciful subject matter was what you'd want to have for your children. And it's pretty neat (at least to a geeky Mama like me), to think that when schooling at home was the norm in a certain society, social skills were valued more than perhaps any other time, perhaps even to a fault. Well, that was a little tangent, but sometimes I do that. What I'm saying here is that socialization is not just something that can be attained in a big classroom, and in our little classroom environment, we are doing what we do to develop ladies who know how to act, but also who know how to speak for themselves and for others who can't.

Since most of the blogs I like tend to include photos, I'm going to try to include one more often than not. So, here's our pic. I mentioned above that my kindergarten daughter appreciates organization. She gets a kick out of matching boxes with a place for everything and everything in the proper place, especially when it can be turned the proper way and placed in a way that makes the room all the more pretty. So.....one of the first things we had to do when working on a place to learn when at home was to turn our playroom into a school room, while still keeping it a playroom. With the help of a talented and super-hard working home organizer/friend, we purged the heck out of some toys, seriously we gave away or sold 90% of our toys (major plus that we know the crazy amount of toys we had are hopefully now enjoyed by kids who truly love them), and then sorted and placed our remaining favorite toys on the shelf in our playroom. That means.....what for it.....all the toys are off the floor now. No toys are on the floor in our house, or at least they aren't when they are put away in their place when not in use. It's a wonderful thing.The kids play with toys so much more now that they actually know what they have and can see it, and all of the parts to a given toy can be found when they want them. They no longer play just by pulling toys out on the floor and then leaving them. Now they play with them, really play. And we have labels on the toy containers, which I know is pretty common, but let me just say I really appreciate the labels because.....wait for it.....my kids are reading them, or at least learning to. Pretty cool. So now we have a school room, which contains a closet full of toys ready to be taken down, one set at a time when serious learning time has ended for the day and toy time resumes. Our playroom/schoolroom closet makes us happy. Note: The random green paint on the wall was a daddy/daughter experiment. It has since been replaced by blackboard paint, with only a little green left for us to touch up with blue. But they had fun with the big ol' green stripe while it lasted.