All Things Hold Together

The 36th Carnival of Homeschooling is up at Why Homeschool.

Stop by and check out what others in the homeschool blogging community have to say this week. The theme is Labor Day.

That reminds me of a funny Labor Day story. On Friday, I did a little lesson on Labor Day using the materials on About Homeschool. I told them the story of Peter McGuire and how bad the factory conditions were at that time.

After we were finished, one of the boys asked, “Why do people get the day off?”

The other added, “Yeah. It would make more sense if they had to work a 12 hour day in a factory to see how good they have it!”

That’s not exactly what I expected them to get from the lesson!

Today, I made some really neat play dough for the boys. It was pretty easy. Mix 1 cup of corn starch, 2 cups of baking soda, and 1 1/4 cups of water in a sauce pan. Over medium heat, continue to cook and stir.

It starts out like the consistency of milk. It seems like it is taking forever, then all of the sudden, it thickens to the consistency of white glue. Within seconds, it becomes like instant mashed potatoes. At this point, I heated and stirred for another minute. I poured it out onto the counter, where it is supposed to be kneaded, but it was too hot. I let it cool a bit, then kneaded it.

The dough can be colored with food coloring, which we did, or used white and then painted when dry. It takes 24-48 hours to dry. It has not been that long, so I can’t vouch for what it looks like when done, but I was told the creations can be finished with a sealant or clear nail polish. This is supposed to be good for making pins or magnets.

I will update you with how they came out. The most important thing was that the boys were busy and having fun!

I just found the best use ever of Wikimedia: Wikimedia Cookbook. What a brilliant idea.

I found it while searching for an apple oat muffin recipe.

I decided that healthy muffins would make a great Sunday breakfast. Saturday has been pancake day, since the beginning of time. Monday through Friday is cereal (or peanut butter toast for Jokey sometimes) day. I wanted something else for Sunday. Something good, yummy, wholesome, and easy to make before church. (We go to an 11:15 service, so I can still handle baking something. We are so not morning people.) I bought some organic oats and locally grown early red apples I am dying to use. I’ll let you know how it turns out and link to the recipe if it is good.

Update: I ended up making the muffins and they turned out great. The weird thing is, I cannot find the recipe on the Wikimedia Cookbook now.

Here it is, with my changes:

Apple Raisin Oat Muffins

1 1/2 c. whole wheat flour (or 1 c. white flour and 1/2 c. wheat)
1 1/2 c. rolled oats
1 Tbsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 c. brown sugar (or 1/4 c. brown, 1/4 c. white. I used all brown)
1 whole egg
1 c. milk (2% is fine)
1/3 c. vegetable oil
2 c. grated apples (a food processor works great for this)
2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg (I do not like nutmeg, so I only used a small sprinkle)
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 c. raisins

Preheat oven to 425 degrees F.
Grease muffin pans with butter or cooking spray.
In a large bowl, mix flour, oats, baking powder, and baking soda.
In another bowl combine remaining ingredients.
Add wet ingredients to the dry. Mix until just combined. Using your hands works well, but is messy. As will all muffin recipes, do not overmix!
Fill muffin cups 2/3 full (or a little more - these are dense and do not rise a lot).
Place on top rack of oven and reduce temperature to 375 degrees F.
Rotate pan after 10 minutes; check for doneness after 15 minutes.
Muffins usually take 20 -25 minutes.
Allow to cool for 2 minutes before removing from pan.

The Carnival of Homeschooling is up at Category Five. The post starts off with an interesting research presentation about weather conditions along the Trail of Tears. It ends with a round-up of homeschool blogging posts.
Be sure to check it out.

Saturday, there was a column in The Columbus Dispatch written by a mom who does not think she has what it takes to homeschool.

“I don’t think I have what it takes: the patience of a saint, an organizational style not based on procrastination and the ability to find a No. 2 pencil with an eraser anywhere in the house.”

Oh no! I don’t have any of those things either. I guess I shouldn’t be homeschooling. No one told me that I had to have the patience of a saint. I fail that one. And no procrastination? Gee, I fail that one, too. I wonder how we got through the first year. And pencils readily available at all times? There were days that the kids had to do their work in crayon!

“I couldn’t teach my kids and retain my sanity, too.”

I’m supposed to have my sanity?!?

What I want to know is why these prerequisites were not told to me by the Vermont Department of Education?

And I just had to laugh at her notion that the kids have to get up early to do homeschool. One of the reasons I wanted to homeschool is that my kids hated getting up for school. They are up by 7:00 now, but when they are teens, I bet that they will really benefit from the extra sleep.

My typical day doesn’t include as much TV as her imagined one did, but I am willing to bet that hers wouldn’t either. At least after the first week. There are days, though…

If you are thinking about homeschooling, don’t believe the myth that you need to be a perfectly patient and organized mother or that you have to get up early and undergo a rigorously scheduled day of book work. True, some families fit that description. I do not know any of them, but they do exist I am told.

In my family, we view homeschooling as a way of life. Learning happens all of the time, not just during set hours. We do have certain written work that must get done during the year, but it gets done when it gets done. Why spend a beautiful sunny day doing book work when there will be plenty of rainy or snowy days that we will not mind staying in?

A lot of what we do for “school” is done on a whim based on what we want to do. The subjects that are more structured, like math, they devour when they are in the right mood. They might work through two weeks of math in a single sitting and then not touch it for another week or two. That’s okay. That is why we homeschool.

You might not like the unstructured way we do it either. It might seem too unordered. That’s okay, too. It’s your home; it’s your family; it’s your homeschool. Do it your way!

Just don’t get too attached to your sanity!

(Hat Tip: Homeschool Buzz)

The other day another homeschooling mom I know made a comment about “Christian homeschoolers,” that she did not understand them. You had to hear the inflection in her voice to really know what she was saying, but it was not good. She has a picture in her head of the rigid schedule, the all-day memorizing of scripture, the shut-ins who cut themselves off from the rest of the world.

I felt kind of uncomfortable. I am a Christian homeschooling parent. Should I say something? Should I call her on her prejudices?

I decided not to because I am not one of the weird ones that she was thinking of. I just happen to be Christian and homeschool, but I am not one of those “Christian homeschoolers” that she is talking about. I don’t even use Christian curriculum.

Then later that night, I was reviewing the Learning Language Arts Through Literature book, so I would know what we were going to be doing. I noticed that the first passage was about God and the Bible. Ha! I guess I do use a Christian curriculum!

And Switched-on Schoolhouse, which we are using for math is from Alpha Omega Publications - a Christian curriculum publisher.

I began thinking about how I did not notice that before. I guess it’s because God is such a part of our life that a passage in a book that talks about God and the Bible does not jump right out at me or strike me as strange.

We read the Bible. We pray together. We discuss things through the lens of a Christian world view. We use Christian curriculum. I guess we are “Christian homeschoolers.”

The problem was that I was prejudging other Christian homeschoolers. I also had this stereotype in my head of families who shelter their kids from the world. I know we are different than that. Partly because we have not always been Christians, or homeschoolers for that matter, and partly because that’s not where God is leading us.

The truth is, if I had been a Christian before my kids went to school, I probably would have sheltered them a while longer, too.

I also know that there are as many different kinds of Christian homeschooling families as there are Christian homeschool families. Some choose to use a strict schedule. Some unschool. Some use an entire curriculum that is Christian. Some use secular materials. Some choose to keep their kids sheltered from the ways of the world until they are older. Some are out in the world early on. Each family needs to decide what works best for them and God leads each family down a unique path.

It was wrong for me to fall into the trap of judging other Christian homeschoolers by a negative stereotype created by people who are hostile to our values and way of life. I am sorry for that.

The next time I speak to this homeschooling mom, I will let her know that we are Christian homeschoolers.

What’s your nerd score? The score is the percentage of test-takers who scored lower (less nerdy) than you. I scored 81. That’s right, I am 81% nerd.

What does this mean? Your nerdiness is: High-Level Nerd. You are definitely MIT material, apply now!!!

I know that it is just another stupid internet quiz, but to a former math and science nerd, who was once a rising star in the UVM Physics Department (albeit very briefly), turned stay-at-home mom with no outlet for her math genius other than to try and produce a new generation of math nerds, it is great to have someone call me “MIT material,” even if it is just an automatically generated response from an on-line quiz.

So, how nerdy are you? Take the quiz and report back via comments.

(Hat Tip: O’DonnellWeb)

This week’s Carnival of Homeschooling is up at Patricia Ann’s Pollywog Creek Porch. Stop on by and enjoy a mosquito infested tour of the Florida Everglades, while browsing links to some of the best posts the homeschool blogging community has to offer. (And I’m not just saying that because I have a post in there!)

I just realized that I have not done a crafty post in a really long time. By far, the fall and winter months are the time when I do the most crafting, but I still do crafts during the summer.

Just so I don’t have to change the blog name to “Homeschool Mama,” here is a quick crafty post.

I had this thin box lying around that an AOL trial CD came in, so I thought I would jazz it up a bit. I got out a bunch of wrapping paper samples that I had torn out of catalogs and taught the boys how to decoupage. They tried the technique out on empty cereal boxes.

The way I like to decoupage is simple. I use Mod Podge in the matte finish. Basically, I make sure the surface is clean and if it is really slick, I might rough it up with sand paper. With a paint brush, I apply a thin coat of Mod Podge to the object and to the back of the paper I am sticking on. I place the paper onto the object and then I smooth out the paper using the same brush, applying more Mod Podge if necessary to hold down the edges. I repeat until the object is covered. When it is finished, I cover the whole thing with another layer of Mod Podge. Do not worry how it looks at this point; the Mod Podge will dry clear.

This process may need to be done in sections so that the object has a surface to rest on while drying. If you coat the whole thing at once, you won’t be able to put it down! If you do it in sections, you may need to do additional final coats to get the desired look.

This brings me to reason #347 why I love to homeschool: every crafty mama should get the chance to spend the afternoon teaching her sons how to decoupage.

I tentatively plan to start school on Monday. I wanted to have a school calendar with 36 weeks in order to accommodate the Learning Language Arts Through Literature (LLATL) program (which has 36 weekly lessons) and make it easier to map out targets to make sure we finish everything we need to do by the time the other kids in the neighborhood are out of school for summer next year.

Thirty-six weeks works well because it breaks into four 9-week quarters, three 12-week trimesters, or two 18-week semesters. This gives me lots of options for how to organize the material. (And yes, I am a math geek.)

I sat down this weekend and sketched out a plan for the year, so I could stay on track. I am trying to be less rigid with the schedule in terms of what day and time things need to be done, but I wanted to see what needs to be done each quarter in order to finish by the end of the public school year.

We are starting on August 28 and running through June 8 (the week before the school lets out). We are taking a week off for Thanksgiving, two weeks for Christmas, one week in February/March (when the school does), and one week in April (when the school does).

Last year we took off from Thanksgiving to New Year’s, but that was too much time off. This year we will continue with language arts, science, and math during the last week in November and the first two weeks in December, but we will probably focus on Christmas gifts and crafts and the meaning of the season in place of the social studies subjects.

Instead of buying a planner like I did last year, I decided to make my own in a three-ring binder. I used a hard cover one with a clear pocket in front and I painted a picture to put in it to personalize my binder.

Then I thought about what kind of features I liked in my planner last year and what new ones I might want. I printed out a year at a glance page to outline targets in each subject by quarter, month, or trimester, depending on subject; a book log for each child; month calendars for each month; weekly lesson plan pages; and a weekly activity schedule to list standing appointments, practices, etc. I also printed out a copy of the public school calendar from the school district’s website and a copy of each child’s curriculum that I submitted to the state, for reference. I hole punched all of these and put them in my binder along with some loose-leaf paper for notes and stuff.

I marked the monthly calendars with holidays and quarter end dates. These I will also use to keep track of what we do/need to do, but I want to wait until we start. I have found that setting a schedule does not work as well as settling into a schedule that works for us does.

The big thing I did was set up the year-at-a-glance page. I took each book that I included in the curriculum and divided it into sections. LLATL is set up with 36 lessons, so I planned on one per week. One of the science books we are using is in three sections, so I planned on one per trimester. For other books that were not set up in a particular way, I just divided the pages into four parts, one for each quarter. The four sections were not always equal because I wanted to make sure we ended in a logical place. This is meant to be a guideline so that we can finish everything that needs to be reported to the state by the time summer comes. I do not want the disruption of the neighborhood kids while we are trying to wrap up our portfolios.

All of the planner pages I used I was able to find on the Microsoft Works program we have. A helpful hint for anyone who wants to buy a copy of Microsoft Office. You can buy Works cheaply (we paid like $40) and then buy the Office upgrade. (At least you could on the upgrade we bought. See package to make sure that the upgrade works with Works.) This is an inexpensive alternative to purchasing the full version of Office and is totally legitimate. Another bonus is that in the end, you have Office and Works. Works has lots of cool templates for household management.

Of course if you really wanted to save money, you would use open source software like my husband does on his computer.

If you don’t have Works or another program with templates, you can find free planner pages on the web with a quick search. For the non-search savvy, here is one I found at The Homeschool Mom and one from Donna Young.