Terrible/Perfect

Grade the Second

Hi there!

Big Kid is in the 2nd grade this year, age-wise. I'm having a good homeschooling year so far, though Baby is an extremely poor sleeper, so we're off to a slower start than I'd like. I kind of want to take pictures of my house and show them to people, it looks so horrific. Between the insanity of buying the house, moving in mid-to-late June and trying to manage life with an intensely busy crawling infant that doesn't sleep and a surly tornado of a four year-old my home it's all a total disaster. Truly. I remind myself that it's such a short-lived phase, this Baby thing. And it's hard to not just fully enjoy the third and definitely very last baby. He's a big ol' treat. Om nom nom nom.

This year Big Kid has a nice mix: she's attending a program for academically talented students one day per week, and then the rest of the week we do fairly loose, ecelectic homeschooling.

Arright.

MATH:

Dreambox Learning: This is her sole curriculum. I have the niggling feeling that I should add in some pen and paper math, but I like the approach this program takes (it's aligned with the Common Core and builds to conceptual mastery) and, most importantly, she is extremely motivated to use it (I let her go until she wants to quit, which is never until at least an hour). She is working on 3rd and 4th grade maths simultaneously. 

LANGUAGE ARTS:

Writing Skills, Grade 4 and Language Arts. Grade 4 (Flash Kids): I picked these two books up at Barnes and Noble out of desperation. I just wasn't sure what to buy. I need some structure to help her learn to write, and she needs to learn grammar skills, and they actually seem like really solid workbooks. Whew! I like that she has inherited my teeny tiny handwriting:

Vocabulary from Classical Roots 4: A good friend is beginning something similar this year with her homeschooling 10 year-old, and I agree with her that roots-based vocabulary seems like it would be useful throughout life. This hasn't actually come in yet, but I plan to begin next week. 16 lessons, probably one semester.

Manuscript Review/Intro to Cursive: She wants cursive. Okay.

Independent reading: Chapter books with a very simple reading log.

SCIENCE:

R.E.A.L. Science Odyssey Life Level 1: It was difficult for me to decide between Life Level 1 (1st-4th grade) and Biology 2 (5th-8th grade). She needs the younger curriculum in terms of her technical skills (lab reports and so forth) but the older one in terms of interest and comprehension, so I opted to go with the curriculum that she can do independently. Fortunately the curriculum is designed to be adapted to the learner, so we will err towards more supplements (additonal books, documentaries, and projects) rather than less, and also do science daily. This also includes a nature journal.

The Story of Science by Joy Hakim: I like this series. I'm sure we'll come back to the history of science many times, but for now this series is one way to go a bit deeper with science.

HISTORY:

We're doing a unit on the Victorian Era! I felt like I was increasingly piling her up with curricula, and that is absolutely not the tone I want homeschooling to have for our family. I just chucked the history curriculum in favor of a unit study that will communicate a ton of history. This particular era is unbelievably rich. Here's my random brainstorming list from last night:

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Lewis Carroll

Bronte sisters

Dickens

Brownings

Gilbert & Sullivan

Wilde/Importance of Earnest

Darwin

Thoreau

Dickinson

Whitman

Emerson

Twain

Arthur Conan Doyle

Robert Louis Stevenson

Yeats

Christina Rossetti

Industrial revolution

Child labor

Electricity

Marie curie

Photography – Daguerre, Talbot

Railroads

Civil war

Oregon Trail

Tchaikovsky

Holy hell! Nutso. Note the Britain/U.S. divide there. I do like comparisons. Cover one area, move to another area in the same time frame...how different they are! Like, Beatrix Potter was writing her books, Tchaikovsky was writing ballets, and people were moving to Oregon all at the same time. Doesn't that seem kind of weird? I think I'll stick to the British side of things first. So far we're especially enjoying the series Victorian Farm. We'll cook and listen to music and stuff. Woo hoo!

MUSIC:

This is a first for us! I'm stoked. I bought an electric keyboard, and we will work on beginning piano, ear traning and music theory (using Progressive Theory for Young Beginners). I also want to do some music history, but I haven't thought it through yet.

ART:

An art history and art technique combo with Discovering Great Artists.

I am also going to try to teach drawing (Art for Kids: Drawing?) because she seems very motivated to learn to draw better, but I really don't want to kill it for her, so it will happen on an "only if she's totally into it" basis.

Adventures in Cartooning by James Sturm: Yes. Yes! Comics. Good.

P.E.:

Ballet class. Yoga videos. Runnin' around.

I think that's it! Good year. Yay. I'm glad we're doing this (and, if you're wondering, Little Kid is in preschool this year in a big way, so I'm off the hook...and miss her terribly).

This is only a test

"...for I have often observed that resignation is never so perfect as when the blessing denied begins to lose somewhat of its value in our estimation."

-Mr. Collins

The time came, sort of, to have a go at something I've thought about for years now: something extra for the kid.

This desire (on my part) put her squarely, for the first time in her wee little life, in the path of testing. In this case, the entrance test for Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, a program that appears to consist of testing for testing's sake on the one hand* and some pretty neat-looking distance classes on the other (this is the one I had in mind for her).

The test itself, called the School and College Ability Test (SCAT), is a two-part, timed test measuring verbal and quantitative performance via analogies and mathematical inequalities. For Johns Hopkins' gifted program, applicants take an above-grade version of the test. 2nd graders take the test designed for 3rd-6th graders, and so forth. In order to qualify to take the test a child needs to have already scored in the 95th percentile or above on another standardized test (a parent can sign a waiver if the child is homeschooled and hasn't been tested before, which is what I did).

She's still in 1st grade, and she'd never taken a test in her life, but dragons!Someplace fun to plug in that enormous bookish energy! There didn't seem to be anything but the test fee to lose, so I signed a waiver saying that I thought she'd probably perform well, and picked a date.

I tried to skirt the whole purpose leading up to it: it's just a thing! No big deal! There's a class online I think you'd really enjoy, but they want to make sure it won't be too hard! NO BIGGIE! We'll get a burrito afterward! :D :D :D

But she was up three times the night before, climbing into my bed and tossing and turning for hours. When we arrived at the test center, located in a strip mall 40 minutes away, she was white as a sheet and completely zoned out. As adults entered the closed room with its banks of testing computers partitioned by cubicle walls, the women at the desk instructed them to leave all of their belongings in padlocked lockers in the waiting area, waved a metal detector over their bodies, had them turn out their pockets and lift up their pant legs. I had my girl go pee, try to take a drink, take a deep breath. When she went to sign in, she forgot how to spell her name. At the end it went "...iaiaia." 

I should have turned around right there, and taken us all out for lunch. But we'd taken the trip, paid for the test, so, like a jackass, I thought she ought to have a go.

I could see her through the testing window, the lone child in a room full of testing grown-ups, staring at the screen twirling huge hanks of her hair around her hand, laying her head down on the desk in front of the computer, tapping her pencil on her head and looking up at the ceiling. She ran out of time. The two of us signed her out for her 10 minute break, which she spent staring zombie-like into space and only half-hearing me, then we signed her back in for the math. This time she squirmed in her chair, lifted up onto her knees, then stood on the floor, then turned around and draped over the back, twisting side to side. Again, the clock beat her.

We left and got a milkshake.

As I drove home, pondering the extraordinary performance anxiety I'd just witnessed, I felt everything I'd pinned my hopes on for my firstborn's education evaporate. If she can't test, that's it. Game over. No distance classes, no district gifted services in elementary school, no gifted middle school, no...any of it. It broke my heart.

A couple of days later we got the test results. She didn't qualify for the class. But she got really, really close. As a 1st grader, among a cohort of 2nd and 3rd graders that had already scored in the 95th percentile or above on tests at their schools, on a scaled test designed to challenge 3rd-6th graders and cause those 2nd-3rd grade test-acers' scores to spread out, she was in the 60th percentile. And she was thisclose to puking while she took it.

Putting it that way, the whole thing suddenly seemed really funny. Some person in Maryland knows that a child with my daughter's name scored in the 60th percentile on a timed series of analogies and inequalities. They didn't see the seven year-old so wigged out by the idea of a T-E-S-T, no matter how much she was assured it didn't matter to anything but a comparative literature class she might like, that she stayed up half the night and, on the day of, lost her stuff. They also didn't get to see the kid that I have no doubt would tear it up in a comparative literature class about dragons.

The whole thing: gifted education, all of it, lost much of its patina.

We had a really good talk afterward. I came clean about the concept of gifted education, and what that means (and does not mean). We talked about the Johns Hopkins program and how the test works, why they have kids take it, what might be some other ways of making sure kids were ready for the content. We talked about the gifted program in her school district, and the fact that testing for entrance happens soon: only a few short months down the road, in the fall. We talked about test anxiety. I said I was sorry that she had such a stressful experience. And I asked her: do you have any interest in trying to do this stuff?

She does. She wants to take the district's test (two, if she gets that far). She also says she's not going to be terribly disappointed if she doesn't qualify. That's fantastic.

Having had that experience, seeing the gestalt of a testing, tested child, having in hand a number that is essentially useless in its ability to speak to that whole little person and her real capabilities, shamed, humbled and liberated me.

It just doesn't matter that much. A class about dragons, or a day-long pull-out program for high-scoring kids in the district, aren't by definition sparkling, magical learning experiences. She's not going to be one of those kids that really needs to go to college super early or anything. She's homeschooled, which means she can go through math at her own pace, do a bunch of logic puzzles and spend half her day reading.

I think I'd become convinced that by getting services through the district or another institution that someone was going to help me figure out how to deal with her: with the sensitivity, anxiety, sleep troubles. Someone would put her arm around my shoulder and demystify asynchronous development.

Not only is that unrealistic, we're already finding relief and solutions in far more accessible places. She's active and engaged in scouting, trying out cross country running, and loves church, all activities that almost any kid can do, and that stretch her in important ways. She has a gaggle of dear, sweet, bright, strong little friends, book lovers to a girl, none of whom she met in a gifted program. She could certainly use the academic stimulation, but she needs fun, friends, exercise, healthy food, chances to serve, and unwavering parental love even more. No test required.

I'm sorry I put her through that, but I'm actually not sorry it didn't work out well. I'm glad I understand something of the limits of that kind of test and the information it provides. And I'm glad she's willing to have another go, a little down the road. She's not super invested, and neither am I. Everything's in its right place.

*This is an abomination. I had a look at some forums about the SCAT test, and I never. ever. want to be the parent that puts my child through numerous cognitive batteries and posts her full scores on the internet.

And now she knows

I was in the car with the kids today, waiting at the bank drive through, when it came up. She had been sitting back there reading her current book of choice, Howl's Moving Castle, but paused to hold it up.

"This isn't really normal, is it."

"What's not normal?"

"Well...kids my age, reading books like this."

Well, then. Here we are.

I've known my daughter is gifted since she was very little. In cool, sober retrospect, it was pretty obvious from around age two. 

I hate the term, I hate so much about my gnarled journey trying to figure out if I'm delusional or feeding something in my own ego, I hate that it feels impossible to talk about the increasingly obvious signs that my kid has special needs with homeschooling parents or educators who might have some insight into how to work with her and support her, because yes, intelligence does not appear to be fixed, everyone has gifts and talents, and yes, your kid is smart and weird and wonderful, too, and no, mine isn't riding a bike without training wheels yet and yes, she runs like a dork. 

But as much as I've fretted over whether and why and how to seek some friendly aid from folks who might be able to provide a word of camaraderie or advice, I hadn't really thought about how to talk to her about that particular uniqueness. We've never praised her for being "smart." I had no idea up until today that she was aware of any difference between herself and other kids in that regard. But, apparently, at least in the simple terms of a very little girl holding a big fat book, she is. She wasn't proud, she wasn't asking for affirmation, it was just a simple question in the form of a statement.

Is this normal?

I said all that I could think to say:

"No, reading chapter books like that at your age is not really typical."

I didn't tell her about grade level equivalents or Lexile measures, although as her educator I know where she is comfortable (just shy of Pride and Prejudice). She doesn't need to know any of that stuff.

What she does need to know, I think, at some point, is that it's okay to feel weird. And it's okay and real that feeling weird can stem from having a bit more cognitive processing speed and power than is typical (this doesn't mean that most people can't or won't acquire the same or more knowledge or make the same or better connections...and it doesn't hold any special value).

I have no idea what our conversations around this are going to look like. But I guess we're going to have them.

And the best thing I can think of, what I wish I had had when I was coming up and feeling like I was riding a strange and lonely wave, is just to let her know, if she tells me she feels weird, that yes, some people are weird in that way, but that I'm weird just like that, too. And so are other members of her family. And many of our friends. And other kids, too, here and all around the world, that she can connect with, if she likes.

Typical? In certain ways, no. Not at all. Normal? Who is, or was, or ever will be?

Sweet girl, you just have to figure out which freak flag you were born under, and fly it.

Oh, snap!

The big kid asked for a Snap Circuits kit over a year ago, but they're not exactly cheap, and we weren't sure it would be of any interest to her once she actually got into the box, so she never got any. She was thrilled to learn that we could check a kit out from the district's homeschool resource library, and has enjoyed her borrowed kits quite a bit these last weeks.

Then I saw this one at Goodwill and nabbed it for a cool $6. This is basically the Snap Circuits "Extreme" (ha!) 750 kit although it's a slightly older kit that appears to have been produced for Radio Shack and has a couple of minor differences. All of the parts work and the kit is complete except for the computer interface software, which she isn't ready for and it sounds like to company will replace for free if she was, so no big deal. If she maintains interest we might expand her kit at Christmas. The Snap Rover looks pretty cool. Yesterday she made a low frequency oscillator that sounded like robotic rain on the one hand, and a bit like a fart on the other once she replaced the resistor and pushed the slider bar all the way to the right, so we're probably in for the long haul.

Her dad and I spent a good half an hour last night figuring out precisely where all the parts are supposed to fit in the tray, which means we're soul mates.

I'm considering ordering the student guide, but probably not unless she continues to be excited about making circuits for some time. No need to ruin a perfectly good hands-on experience with electronics. Just for fun I requested a few resources from the library about electricity and Nikola Tesla, who I personally find fascinating. Just a little easygoing, spontaneous summer science.

I would be a complete liar if I said I didn't hope this portends well for Mindstorms in our future. Those look amazing.

Slowly, slowly, slowly

Both of my kids are pretty weird, but the younger of the two is definitely an odd duck. I have had well-meaning friends and family make some disheartening comments about her development, from casual observations that she seems really young, to noting that she's not doing things many other children her age can do, to a pretty open concern that stops just shy of wondering aloud if she's maybe not quite right.

By this age my child was out of diapers.

By this age my child knew her colors.

You're brave; it would worry me if my child wasn't willing to sit through a book by now.

So on.

But despite the unwelcome pressure I have been a champion of not-worrying. I've been a freaking gladiator. I burned my first kid pretty badly with an overly intense focus on her development. I expected too much, didn't respect her timeline and permitted my ego a seat at the table.

I learned my lesson: watch for serious aberration (developmental checklists are easy to find and will tell you exactly what to look for; you can also ask a child's pediatrician), offer plenty of positive, fun enrichment without attaching the strings of your own ego to it, and then freaking let go. Every child deserves to be allowed to unfold at her own particular pace.

The second kid has benefited enormously from my mistakes with my first. She has experienced a kind of benign neglect. You don't want to read board books? That's cool. You're back in diapers? Damn, that sucks for me and your dad but you do what you gotta do. 

Most of all, though, I try to ignore the things other people say and believe in her. I've peeked at the milestones to make sure I'm not in denial about a serious problem, and finding nothing to worry me there and getting the tumbs-up from her pediatrician I am free to believe she's just fine. She's on her own schedule and anyone who has a problem with that can sod off.  

I had a good conversation with a friend today though that made me pause a bit. I'm dealing with intense sibling rivalry right now, which is partially a result of having enormously high expectations for the big kid and pretty low, relaxed expectations for the little one, among other differences in parenting, and it's created bad blood. My belief is that the right answer is to relax about the older kid, not tighten up on the little one. Sure, the preschooler gets more of what she asks for and doesn't hear "no" as often, which I need to be mindful about, but overall she's pleasant to be around. I think we actually found a really nice groove discipline wise with the younger child.

But in the midst of all this easygoing relaxation I may have given her brain short shrift. I haven't spent time with her at all in that regard. I've just loved her and fawned over her and read her books (once she wanted to sit through them).

Lately, though, she's wanted her turn at the table to do "math" and "letters", and I will admit that I thought she was nowhere near ready for that kind of thing.

But today we did some old preschool activities that I did with her sister years back, and damned if she didn't figure them all out. So we pulled out the Unifix cubes and did a little one-to-one counting, some stacking and sorting and whatnot. She hung with it and we had a great time.

Then she made a long line of cubes and said it was her "freight train", so I went and got her book and together we went through and made a Unifix model of Donald Crews' beautiful rainbow Freight Train and ran it through a toilet paper tube tunnel, over a trestle made of Unifix cubes, past a Unifix city, through darkness and daylight and then off the end of the table when it was time for the train to get gone, gone, gone. 

It was rad.

I'm so sorry, kid. Just because you're not winning the developmental derby doesn't mean you're not ready to go somewhere.

Let's roll.

Dealt with dance, now Dealing with Dragons

WHOOSH! And like that, we're out the other side of the late spring push. Recital costumes, for several weeks trollishly guarded in their garment bags in the front closet, are now in the dress-up box.

I've also pretty much locked down what the big kid's learning plan for the 2012-2013 year will be, and finally feel less worked up about it. I have a meeting with her consulting teacher this week, and then we're done and I can forget about it until September.

This summer she will continue to move along in math, and read independently, have read alouds and listen to audiobooks. We also have some family camping trips planned in national parks that offer Junior Ranger programs, and I hope to visit a few more close-by sites for a smackerel of very casual outdoor learning. Everything else will wait until fall.

I switched up her language arts plan to something much simpler. She's just entering first grade; simple is still the name of the game. We'll begin Language Lessons for the Very Young in the fall, but the bulk of her language arts hours will be devoted to independent reading. We'll also do some periodic responsive work (we'll have to come up with some projects, which shouldn't be too hard) but nothing complicated. A diorama or something similar every now and again should do it.

Right now she's reading the first book in the Guardians of Ga'Hoole series. I'm not sure if she'll want to read any more of those (there are twelve of them!; also, that Scholastic site is the most helpful thing ever in terms of finding books your kid might like and feel comfortable reading). If so, great, but if not I've checked out a bunch of books that feature dragons.

Here's the list I've pulled together so far:

Dragon Slippers by Jessica Day George

Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher by Bruce Colville 

Dealing with Dragons by Patricia Wrede

I'm also throwing in The Neverending Story by Michael Ende because Falcor is a dragon and HELL YES.

We'll get through those and see where she's at interest-wise. It's really fun putting a list like this together. Just one unifying idea and a HUGE field of good-quality, appropriate chapter book choices.

Her "owls" list was much harder.

*Ironically, I never wanted to read most of these kinds of books as a kid, and still kind of feel my hackles go up when characters have names like Ayliannagwyyn Jaydahla Forsythiantaurine. "AT LEAST ONE MAIN CHARACTER IN THIS STORY IS GOING TO BE GINGER," I think. My sister is a book wizard and consumed (and I think maybe still consumes?**) novels about witty, sword-wielding maidens with auburn hair and the dragons they loved and/or slayed like they were going out of style, but I could never really hang with them. Either a book jams its fist into my soul or I'm closing it up***. True story: I couldn't sleep in a hotel one time and all there was to read was my mom's Kindle. She likes thrillers and that sort of thing, Stephen King and whatnot, and after trying two books I ended up reading the introduction to the Oxford English Dictionary. I take zero pride in that. It makes it difficult for me to find fiction that I enjoy, which sucks, and has had a much more serious impact on the books I'm willing to read to my kids than I care to admit. Not cool, but there it is.

**My sister also reads excellent books, often, she just has a general sort of need to gorge herself on the printed word. 

***I will say unequivocally that good writing, soul-fist-jamming writing, is not confined to straight fiction. You know what Slaughterhouse-Five is? Science fiction. I am no genre-hater.

A sweet haul

We went and got a bunch of good, good stuff from the district's homeschool resource center today. I felt like a highway bandit, walking out with 18 items I'll be able to keep for a full year. Some of it I'm celebrating not needing to buy myself or use my district curriculum allowance on, and some of it I'm not sure we'll use, but I have the summer to look through everything and try things out.

Teaching Textbooks looks like a clear winner for our family. It's a complete CD-ROM-based math curriculum with some impressive features. She did the first lesson this afternoon and the second one right before dinner when I told my husband I wanted to show him her new math curriculum and she insisted on showing him herself. I actually think she likes it. Like, like likes it. In about 50 lessons she's going to hit multiplication so it's by no means a sure deal, but I'm enthused by her enthusiasm.

It's going to be wonderful to step out of that subject almost completely (the program appears to be truly capable of teaching without parent involvement given a child who is developmentally ready for the material). I'll just hover a short distance away awaiting any cries for help. So far everything is very do-able for her (and we'll stop and step back if it becomes not do-able), but she DOES NOT like getting problems wrong. She didn't miss any problems on her second lesson, but on the first she missed one and made me go back and reset that problem so she could re-do it. Perfectionism is not fun. But, she is who she is, and if 21/22 makes her world go all wobbly, so it goes.

The Literature Pockets were a nice find. We are mostly likely going to do a social studies curriculum next year after all, which will be a Western-heavy survey of the ancient world. This project book on Greek and Roman myths will be fun to work adjacent to that.

We picked up a huge Snap Circuits kit and expansion set, which is something the kid has been asking for for about a year. It was lovely to just grab it off the shelves, check it out and take it home. She begged me to let her do it all morning, and then worked through a bunch of circuits in the afternoon while listening to A Wrinkle in Time on audiobook. She took a break to read the Bruce Colville Romeo and Juliet then went right back into it until dinner time. When the kid found out she gets to keep the Snap Circuits for an entire year I swear she was close to exploding. HUGE grin. It was awesome. We had dinner, played a couple of rounds of Sum Swamp, read some Harry Potter, and called it a night.

It was such a good, good day. Much more akin to how things were in the past. In recent weeks I have experienced overwhelming doubt about the entire home learning project. She had become disengaged and it was flat out unpleasant to be together so intensively. It was painful to go from the sense that I couldn't stop my child from learning to the sense that I was having to force her to learn, but I'm enormously optimistic that it was just a rough patch rather than a metamorphosis. 

I think the key piece in all of this is that she needs me to keep the materials coming. I always did that in the past and it worked beautifully. If she has a steady supply of brain food in the form of new books, new music, new films, and new ideas, she positively flourishes. It's out of control and beautiful. If I expect her to go out and forage for herself (by idly telling her to "pick out some books" at the library, or waiting for her to pick up on some new thread of interest rather than being highly responsive to her casual lines of inquiry), she shrivels up and doesn't want to do anything but watch My Little Pony.

Keep that fire burning, Casey Jones!

In which I come to love Big Brother

Things are going to work pretty differently around here next year. I'm hitching our wagon to the local school district's homeschool support program, partly because things didn't go so hot around here last year without structure and outside accountability, and partly because the kid wants to spend more time around other kids. This way she can take a couple of classes on a school campus and see how that feels. But it means changes, some pretty sizable ones, beginning with the requirement I need to satisfy in the next couple of weeks to write up a learning plan and syllabi for the subjects I'm teaching at home. Those documents need to cover the entire 2012-2013 school year.

I'm a big-picture person, so planning that far out doesn't hang me up, but I also tend to make long terms plans and then not follow through with them. Then some distance into that long term I look back at the plan and go "Huh. It's interesting that I thought I would do all of that." Hence the need for the bureaucratic hand on the shoulder. Freedom actually does not suit me at all. I'm finding it quite refreshing to be able to admit that.

But having made the decision to go through the district, I find myself doing rather a lot of hand-wringing about academics lately. Someone wants to know what we're going to do! And I don't rightly know! What do we do about math? Now that she's been a fluent reader for nearly a year, how can I work with her beyond saying "go read for an hour"? 

Fortunately this switch means I now have access to certificated educators tasked with helping parents like me put together a solid school year for a kid. Not only has it been hard for us to float untethered to an institution in terms of having someplace to go and someone to answer to, but I'm simply not sure what's appropriate for her.

Go read for an hour, I say.

Okay, she says.

....

Now make a diorama?

I have no idea.

KHAAAAAAAAN!

A friend recommended Khan Academy for math practice for the big kid, so we tried it out. Naturally after our two weeks of internecine tablework warfare she loves it. (Thank you, Ms.B!)

The site gives virtual badges for activity on the site (watching tutorial videos, gaining proficiency in skills, and so forth) and (I already knew this about her) she is incredibly motivated by that sort of thing (unsurprisingly she also loves Girl Scouts). It's nowhere near as graphically engaging as the Web Rangers program she adores, but so far she is showing that same drive to fill up progress bars, light up proficiency stars, and generally be rewarded with visual representations of progress and completion.

I'm not sure how I feel about that. In my Master in Teaching program (which I didn't finish, I don't want to misrepresent myself here) we joked about "gold stars", or external motivators, because they are thought by some to be detrimental in the long term (the ideal being "intrinsic" motivation, or doing something for its own sake, to please and satisfy oneself). In this context I don't know. With those progress bars lighting up her eyes she's been happy to blast through multiple digit arithmetic with borrowing and carrying (taught to her in a crash course on a crumpled slip of paper when she called her dad over to ask how a person might subtract one three digit number from another) when single digits on paper foam her up into high melodrama.

She's a funny and frustrating one, our kid. 

But hey-she's not one moment "behind". And it's almost summer. We have plenty of time to find the shoe that fits. That I will be thankful for without reservation.

Let's try this again

"I HAAAAATE math!" is a phrase I'm hearing a lot right now.

Sigh.

We didn't do math at all this year. And I mean at all. All year. I have no good excuse. I didn't like the curriculum. I wasn't sure what I was doing. I felt unsure of myself. That's about it. But two weeks ago we climbed back up on the horse I hitched up in front of the saloon back in September, and are probably going to make up for the lost year this summer (she's old enough that she's developmentally ready for second grade math or higher; the first grade math facts, however, do need to be learned).

I simply wasn't prepared for the fight she'd put up. She's funny about it; everything just goes sloooooooooowly. She's fighting the sit-down work by dragging her feet and making everything take twice as long as it needs to. Twirling the pencil in her hair and staring off into space.

That resistance threw my whole perception of homeschooling and what we're doing with this project into turmoil. I had a Plan for next year: highly structured classical education! She was going to love it! But the last two weeks going from months of the most laissez faire of unschooling scenarios (read: she had mastered reading and I wasn't sure how to teach math, so I couldn't be bothered to do anything at all) to "We're doing math EVERY DAY!" have been a bit rough. No sea legs whatsoever, on anyone...and we need to add more subjects next year. 

Overall it has felt like there is zero interest or fire in her. All she wants to do is play with her toys, pick fights with her sister, loop around on her swing. I felt that if we were going to fight, and she had come to hate learning and academic work, there was no point to keeping her home. If she was going to complain about the work and drag her feet and dumb herself down and wish she was outside on the swing, she could do that just fine in a public school. 

Blehhhhhh. FAIL.

Fortunately I had the brains to consider that what's working for some families that we know (one particular kid apparently eats packaged curricula with a spoon, loves it, zooms through and asks for more) is not necessarily what's going to work for us. I thought a bit about how we've learned in the past, and decided to turn the damn car around and head back there.

I asked the kid what she'd like to learn about, and first she said "Owls." We started collecting materials for an owl unit, and then a couple of days later I asked again what interested her, and she breathed, (shyly, for reasons unknown), "I would looooove to study more Shakespeare."

AHOY THAR, MATEY!

Shakespeare, my friends, is easily a year's worth of unit study. Worth a year, too. More, even. We'll probably do it now then come back 'round to it when she's older. Shakespeare's cultural impact has been massive. One might even say Biblical.

Oh, and would you look at that: PBS has an amazing trove of resources for educators teaching Shakespeare.

Siiiiiiigh.

A happy sigh, this time.

She can learn new words, make art, study history, read books, sing songs, copy and recite poems, compare films, listen to operas, watch ballet, all cradled in the arms of the Bard. 

We will still be doing math (EVERY DAY), as well as using a science curriculum (which she has loved in the past...my fingers are crossed), but I'm going to try to fit almost all of the skill-building she needs to do into this unit study context. I predict that in a very short while my sweet one will be back to her delightfully, unstoppably curious self. She will happily sing her own tune...but maybe not so happily follow the bouncing ball.

There is no shame in spending a month, or a summer, or a year in pursuit of deep understanding of a single subject. No shame in tying the life and works of Leonard Bernstein to Shakespeare via West Side Story, nor in adding to our vocabulary those everyday words that Shakespeare coined for his plays.

Nope. None at all.