Who are you and Why do you seek me?

Sarah turned 9 (!!!) on Friday. On Saturday we had a wizard birthday party, turning the livingroom into a wizard's study, decorating spell bags and wizard's hats, setting up a potions lab, and leading the kids through a wizard adventure/scavenger hunt. The kids seemed to have a great time, and I had a *wonderful* time setting up the wizard study (and covering the walls in wizardy quotes like the one above). Sarah got wonderful piles of books, some great board games and art supplies, and lots of outdoor toys and equipment.

Last week we finished up this round of our focus on folk tales and mythology (we made it all the way through the _Lady of 10,000 Names_ book of goddess stories and _The Story of Religion_, but only about halfway through the _Gods, Goddesses, and Monsters_ book -- I suspect we'll be taking it out of the library again sometime soon -- they were all awesome). This week we're back to focusing on math for our theme -- doing the projects we never got around to during our last pass through with the _Math Alive_ books, reading _How Much?_ (a gorgeous picture book on different types of marketplaces around the world -- I loved the way the artwork draws you right into the scene, feeling as if you're surrounded by the scents and sounds of the market), bits of _Science in Ancient Egypt_, _Science in Ancient Mesopotamia_, and _The Secret Life of Math_ (my favorite so far -- it leads the reader through an examination of the question of why math has existed in such similar ways in civilizations so far apart in space and time -- we've done tally sticks, kept tallies on "animal skin" scrolls (actually brown paper bags), and I think next we're making Incan quipus (knotted strings used for keeping count)).

We're outside a lot right now -- learning badminton, playing soccer, taking walks in the neighborhood, doing a little gardening -- and generally leaving more time than usual open to the whims of the moment. It doesn't work well for us to leave our whole days like that -- we just drift too much, and we're both disappointed when the end of the day comes and we haven't gotten around to any of the things we'd meant to do -- but it feels nice and summery to leave our afternoons open for spontaneity.

Life skills we've focused on so far, this week:
* making fruit salad
* choosing ripe fruit at the store
* phone skills
* letter writing skills
* map reading skills
* using the toaster oven
* making change and estimating the final bill when you're shopping
* meditation (we've tried out mindfulness meditation, breathwork, chanting, and guided visualization)

We've also read Greek myths, Chinese myths, African myths, Indian myths, and read an awesome book _The Story of Religion_ which gives a really nice perspective on the history of religion and decent if simple descriptions of many of the religions practiced today.

And now we go into gonzo birthday-prep! Tomorrow Sarah turns 9 and we've got a whole day out planned together, and on Saturday she and a few of her friends are going to be transformed into wizards, thanks to various crafts inspired by a couple wizard books we've got, and the adventure Joe's been writing for them. Sunday, we sleep. Or maybe the ice weasels come.

Happy June! We're completing the shift over to our summer way of being, today. In my head, I just refer to it as our summer semester, because that's just the way I see the world. Growing up, my sister and I would make ourselves Daily Plan lists most summer days -- making sure we got in everything we wanted to -- and I think of this as a version of that. There are all these cool things to do and learn and see, each summer. If we don't maintain some sort of basic structure, we wind up missing out on so much, because the days just drift on by! (I suspect this is similar to the reason I like having all my stuff *out* instead of packed neatly away in shelves and drawers -- if it's not out where I can see it, I forget it's even there)

We've shifted our solo time (when I've got unfettered computer time and she's got free run of the TV) until after we play school -- it used to be first thing in the morning, but it was too easy to just drift until half the day was gone, that way. We've also restructured our playschool part of the day, a little, and made our practice work a more consistent part of the day. Sarah has a very low tolerance for frustration, and while it bothers her that she isn't better at writing or spelling or certain types of drawing, she's refused any offers or suggestions I've made to work on those skills. I've gone back and forth over it, but I think learning to push past frustration is too important a skill, I don't think it's serving her well for me to let this go. So I've asked her to pick one of those skills every day, and spend 15 minutes on them. At the same time, I'll be spending 15 minutes working on a skill that frustrates me (probably songwriting or learning how to create harmonies -- it's so very frustrating that those don't come more easily to me).

Our focus, this summer, is life skills (for Sarah: cooking, gardening, making change, bike riding, etc. For me: basic woodworking, gardening, home repair, time management, music skills, budgeting skills), although we're still picking a theme every month. We've also each designed a badge for ourselves to work on -- mine is a music badge, hers is a bravery badge (she gave me permission to talk to my mom-friends about this, but asked me not to discuss it with any of her friends). And, honestly, we'll still have the usual basic curriculum going on in the background.

I realized that, while I don't separate these things out from "real life" all that often, and I don't make a big deal about it to Sarah, I actually do have a curriculum for her. It was reading Guerrilla Learning, recently, that brought it to my conscious attention. The author writes about learning in context, arguing that that's one of the greatest strengths of homeschooling. I started thinking about the context of our home life, our local environment, the activities and ideas that run constantly in the background because of my interests or Joe's interests, and started noticing patterns. Out of curiosity I made a list, just to see what our unwritten curriculum would look like, written down:

* earth science and life science (gardening, nature journals, hudson river ecosystem, environmental activism, health, nutrition)
* history/geography/polisci (current events, early US history, our family history, NY history, biographies, history of science, political activism)
* world culture (folktales, mythology, comparative religion, nutritional anthropology, world folk music)
* communication (philosophy, great books discussions, family magazine, short stories, writing comic books, family meetings)
* math (constant board games and logic puzzles running in the background, aside from Sarah's personal interest in math)

I think I like our curriculum. I think I'm okay with making it an intentional choice, making a conscious effort to bring in more activities that tie into the subjects we're already "studying".

This week was a remarkably social one -- seeing friends on Monday, hosting Fairy Scouts on Tuesday, volunteering at GSE on Wednesday, hanging out with a couple homeschool friends on Thursday while their mom recovers from surgery.

At Fairy Scouts we finally finished reading A Wrinkle In Time together, and spent some time decorating tshirts and bags.

We're still working our way through the book on Goddesses -- today was the story of Oshun, a Goddess of the Yoruba, so we read about Africa in our other book on myths (Gods, Goddesses, and Monsters, I think it's called), and pulled out our two student atlases, learning a little about the geography, climate, and political history of Africa (and about the idea of Pangaea and the possibility that the Great Rift Valley will become a new sea in a couple million years). We couldn't find our copy of Children Like Me but I'm hoping we'll come across it as we tidy up, this weekend, to take a look and see if they've got an entry for Nigeria -- or, failing that, another West African country. The narration is going pretty well, when we remember to do it -- she's alternating between oral narration (usually telling Joe about our day as soon as he walks in the door) and an art approach -- sketching out a few drawing that she'd use to illustrate it if we wrote a book about what we learned that day. So far she's pretty uninterested in the idea of written narration.

We've been working our way through the Daria DVDs and, when we'd finished watching the last movie, Sarah was pretty frustrated that there wasn't any more. She suggested we tell them they should make more episodes and I agreed, but I also told her that some people, when they wish their favorite shows would make more, or different kinds of, episodes, make up their own episodes -- either in their own heads, or written down in story form. I asked her what kind of episode she'd like to see and we plotted it out together.

The story won't actually work out feeling like an episode, I don't think. It'll be more like a follow-up movie, set over the course of the first semester of Daria's freshman year. And we've gotta make some changes, I think, to keep it from feeling too Gilmore Girls-ish. But the outline is really solid. It's a story I would really enjoy reading, I think. It's a story I *will* really enjoy reading, once we're done writing it. I really like my life. :)

Last weekend we went to a family party, where a couple folks asked me what my plans were for next year, and whether we're considering putting Sarah in a conventional school. I said no, that we're going to continue doing more or less what we've been doing, and added that Sarah and I are having a lot of fun the way things are. One of my cousins commented how rare it is to hear parents say that, that they're having fun with their kids. I'm feeling really lucky, that I'm able to say that.

I can't believe it's been a month since I was last here. It's especially hard to believe because I look back at my last entry and have no idea what we've done since then. Reading about gods and goddesses, about planets, doing math... Hosting a gathering for IDEA and having some great conversations about the nature of learning, talking about whether there's anything everyone should learn, and what "should" means in this context (required, encouraged, or some other option). We're also talking a whole lot about human biology, and reproduction, and puberty. Oh -- she's been writing some lyrics, and last night we wrote the outline of a story, together.

We've shifted into a new way of playing school together -- adding some solo-reading time for Sarah to our old routine of story time and project/lesson time, and making a concerted effort to do some narration every day we play school. Right now it varies from day to day, whether she chooses to narrate by talking with me or Joe about what she read, or to draw a picture or write a few sentences based on what she and I did together. (and then, at dinner, Joe and I often narrate something we read or learned, that day, and maybe model drawing connections between different things we're learning, or talk about what questions it brought up for us)

We're also each picking one or two goals for the month. Hers are making new friends and improving her drawing. My goal is improving my music-making skills.

Our newest themes are fantasy, early US history, and math. So even though I'd consider myths to fall more under comparative religion or world culture than under fantasy, we're taking the opportunity to finish up the great collection of books of myths we took out of the library last month, and using the National Geographic Student Atlas and UNICEF's Children Just Like Me to follow up -- so today we read about Greek myths, then read a little about Greece (and Europe in general) in the Atlas, and Sarah's solo reading was about the life of a boy who lives on the island of Crete.

The other main thing we're doing right now is working on some lifestyle changes -- meditation, movement, practicing some cognitive behavioral techniques for managing stress -- that should help her manage the trip through pre-adolescence a little more easily, I hope.

I'm struggling a little, right now, with how best to support her. She gets so frustrated about writing and spelling. It obviously bothers her that it doesn't come more easily, but when I've suggested practicing 10 minutes a day, she vetos that idea. Right now my plan is to leave the offer out there, and to talk with her about my own frustration when things don't come easily to me, but I'm not sure whether that's the right approach. I'll give it a couple weeks, and then reconsider the situation.

We should really have picked new themes last week, but we seem to have decided to let the old ones roll over, and just added some extra math to the plan.

The Math Alive books from the library have been a huge hit -- there's one on how math is used in building, another on math in a variety of scientific fields, and so on. The only downside to the books is that Sarah wants to do each of the hands-on projects *immediately*, and I don't always have all the supplies available. I've convinced her to wait and do them all at once, next week, once I've gathered the stuff we need. She also wants to see me do all the Calculation Station math problems even if the math itself is a little above her head, so I wind up doing a whole lot of calculations in my head. Not always easy to shake awake all those old math skills when we're cuddled up cozy under the blankets, reading together!

We've also been doing business math. She decided to sell lemonade at the craft fair, and so we talked about how to price things -- starting by looking at the cost of supplies, then considering how much profit she wanted to make vs. how much people are likely to be willing to pay for a cup of lemonade. We've been doing other practical math, too -- measuring things, making maps, collecting data and then making graphs or pie charts or venn diagrams.

Since she wants to be doing more math problems that *feel* like math to her, as well, we've settled on Singapore math 2B after playing with their assessment tests together for a bit. I've heard really good things about Miquon as a supplement to Singapore, but can't seem to figure out which books to order. Maybe I'll take another look at it this week.

Besides math stuff, this week we talked about letter writing, about what goes into a formal letter or an informal letter, and how to form a paragraph. Sarah started working on a letter to my sister and will probably finish it up this week when we sit down for more writing time.

This week was also incredibly social. Monday morning we went to the homeschool gathering at the library (I was surprised to see so many friends there, as the previous times we'd gone we knew almost no one), then Fiber Arts, and then joined friends at their library for a storytime and an opportunity to play with a vintage typewriter! Tuesday I dropped Sarah off at K's house for fairy scouts. Thursday I dropped Sarah off at Joe's office for Take Your Daughter To Work day. And Friday was the craft fair, a long and wonderful day in the park with friends. It inspired me to try again to persuade Sarah to try out going down to homeschool soccer on Wednesday. Even if she decides not to play, I think it sounds like a wonderful day for hanging out with friends.

Oh, and then yesterday was G's birthday party, so we had another long day with different friends.

Sarah's birthday is coming up so soon. I can't believe she's going to be nine! She's just gone through two huge growth spurts, and I can feel her gearing up for another one. I feel as if I'm going to turn around and find a young lady in my house.

Wow, it's a long time since I've posted here. We've been quietly busy.

We followed up our under-the-sea month with some more time at an aquarium (Camden, this time -- it's the first time we'd made it there, and I can see why it's so popular, despite the distance and circuitous route we had to take to get there).

We picked up two nice bags full of books at a used bookstore in Montclair, and we've been doing a lot of reading, going through our new books as well as returning to old favorites.

I've been reading Wrinkle In Time aloud at Fairy Scouts, and we had a lot of fun reading bits of The Universe together -- particularly the What-If bits that talk about what sorts of aliens might thrive on different planets (appropriate, given our regular alien-of-the-week club!).

This week we've been tracking our nutrition using the worksheet provided by the USDA. Mostly -- and no surprise here! -- confirming that we need to work on Sarah's veggie intake. It's also confirmed our recent decision to be a little more careful about sugar intake.

I picked up a few books on puberty and Sarah's been working her way through them, mostly on her own. She particularly liked the American Girl book on the care and keeping of your emotions.

We've been getting into Montclair a lot in the afternoons. Sarah comes with me when I volunteer at GSE, and she enjoys examining all the organizational charts, pretending to be the CEO of her own company (drawing and then X-ing out the employees as she fires them!). Afterwards we walk over to the used bookstore, or up to the fair trade tea shop or library.

I'd like to be getting into the city more, as the weather gets even more beautiful, maybe coordinating field trips with small groups of friends. We still haven't made it to the Met for our gods-and-goddesses visit. Maybe next week.

Today we're doing a math assessment test together, to help us choose our next math book -- Sarah's been asking for more math, and while she and Joe continue to do their math adventures together regularly, I'm thinking I'd also like to pick up some books for us to work through together, during our playschool time in the morning.

It makes me sad that so few people read this. That's not a request for comments -- it's more that so many relatives love to hear about what Sarah's doing or ask questions about homeschooling in general or our approach in particular, but even when I send them the link, I know most of them never come over to read the journal. It's a shame -- it would give them a much better sense of her weeks, and it would be a great place to start a conversation with her about what she's been up to. She and I have been talking a lot, recently, about how to start conversations (she often comments that she wants to talk to people more, but can't think of anything to say). My advice: any time you're going to see someone, spend a few minutes beforehand thinking of a funny/interesting story you can tell, one interesting thing you've learned/read recently, a specific question you can ask about something you know they've done recently, and at least one upcoming plan of your own you can talk about. I used to do that, myself -- maybe I should start doing it again...