8:20 am Come downstairs to get my coffee before school begins. Jeff is reading Harry Potter to the boys. My whole body aches because of our new vigorous exercise campaign. I must look weak because Zach says, “Can we build our new Lego kits today instead of doing Bible study? I just can’t sit here anymore and listen to boring reading stuff.” 8:30-9:15 Jeff works with Ezra on his cool, new Lego pirate set. I drink more coffee while watching... Read more
A long runway. I can’t stop thinking about it. We had breakfast yesterday with dear friends in DC. We were joined by their housemates, one of whom was homeschooled K-12. He was holding his newborn when I asked him to describe his experience of homeschooling. He said, “My parents gave me a long runway.” A long runway. Even before I could process what that phrase might fully mean, it hit me hard. It nearly made me cry. A long runway.... Read more
…When building a Lego kit, is it a problem if you have pieces left over at the end? Hope not. We just finished our first LEGO kit ever. (I decided to call it fine motor development and count it as homeschool. See how easy it is to homeschool?) Anyhoo, there are more than a dozen pieces that we couldn’t figure out how to use. What do you do with all of those extra pieces? They came with the kit, they’re... Read more
I thought that when we started to homeschool, the boys would finally feel like they got enough time with their parents. Instead, it seems to have increased their desire to spend every waking moment with us – especially for Zach. When my parents asked the boys this week what they liked most about homeschool, Zach said that he couldn’t think of anything. Then his face lit up and he smiled at me, and I was sure that he was going... Read more
I spent some time yesterday looking over my list of objectives for the year, and it’s clear that if I’m going to meet even half of them, I’m going to have to add objectives to the list -things I can cross off more easily. I use this technique all of the time: To my list of things to accomplish for the day, I add things that weren’t on the original list, but things I have already done, just so I can cross them... Read more
What’s the difference between homeschool and “real school,” as the kids like to call it? Real school has school vacation. Not so our homeschool. Since we now only manage to get in about an hour of school a day, we are never going to meet the list of objectives I have for the year unless we keep right on schooling through school vacations and summer. When I saw that the Museum of Natural History in DC had an exhibit on... Read more
Jenny told me not to tell anyone. “Seriously,” my sister chastised me tonight. “I know you like to write about what a bad education you got, but you can’t tell anyone that. There’s no excuse for not knowing that.” The that in question was the fact that I didn’t know until last year that there were no humans alive while the dinosaurs roamed the earth. I learned it last year from Zach’s seven-year-old friend. Zach and Ezra call him The Scientist... Read more
We left Cambridge yesterday and drove to DC to celebrate Christmas with my family. As of this afternoon (Christmas eve), Jeff is officially not working so I invited him to be a guest blogger. Go easy on him, he’s not had coffee this afternoon. It’s tempting to take this opportunity to suck up. Right? Here goes… If you’ve read her blog more than once, you may have been impressed by Tara’s little homeschool blog. If you’re impressed, I am doubly... Read more
Why hasn’t every school teacher and principal and child psychologist read Spark? Why hasn’t every parent? Why didn’t the president get on TV and tell us about it? Okay, I know that we have all known for a long time that exercise is critical for, well, for almost everything. But I never saw it all laid out so concisely and convincingly. Spark does that. Remember all of the executive functions that I wrote about in Ellen Galinsky’s excellent book Mind... Read more
Was planning to write a long post on the effects of exercise on ADHD, anxiety, depression, and aging. But I’m pooped. And it’s not just me. The boys put themselves to sleep while I was still downstairs with dinner guests tonight. They didn’t get a whole lot of school done with dad while I was at the hotel. But they did go swimming, play football in the snow, have an hour of occupational therapy and jump from couch to couch... Read more
The Homeschool Chronicles
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