Conquering clutter... by living in the moment

I've been glancing through Apartment Therapy: The Eight Step Home Cure recently and found one of the author's comments really enlightening. Clutter isn't about stuff. It is about procrastination (or nostalgia, as Dan pointed out). It is about not living in the present.

His comments hit home because I clutter up much of my home in order to avoid reality. I could decide about the stuff on my counter today or put it off til tomorrow... or next week... or maybe it'll go away before I have to admit that I never used those lovely things I bought. I used to never clean my fridge because it felt like a slap in the face to realize that I had let food go bad. Now, I at least declutter my fridge once a week, admitting that I let some food go back but hoping that by being able to see what is in it, I may prevent future waste.

We have a lovely counter connecting our kitchen and dining room. Usually it is covered with unread mail, children's drawings to be filed, CDs to be uploaded, books to be read, and many other things. Feeling challenged to deal with clutter, and knowing that a clean counter makes me happy, I decided to attack it. It wasn't that hard. I put away the CDs. I recycled or shredded the mail. I dealt with the books. It wasn't really that bad.

Will I ever upload the CDs? I don't know. Maybe, but if I don't, I am no worse off than now.

Will I ever look at the counter? Definitely, dozens of times per day, and I feel happier and freer each time I look.

German as a foreign/second language

We're doing it! We're doing J's German School homework!

He can be in the advanced or beginner class. The advanced class includes children who spend the summer in Germany. The beginner class includes children who have never been exposed to German as a spoken language. He doesn't really fit into either group, as he understands way too much German to be a beginner and doesn't speak well enough to be advanced. We made a deal with the advanced teacher that J would try out her class for a month and then we'd reevaluate.

With that in mind, we really have to prepare for class. He can't just do spontaneous oral drills, we have to practice beforehand. We have to go over everything covered last class and preview everything he'll be doing the next class.

This discipline has been great. After looking for some sort of German curriculum to provide extra practice for the kids for a few years, we finally have one, preplanned and prepared for us. We have the discipline of class time and homework, and J has the reading skills necessary to do well with German in a spoken and written way.

We're still doing our own things to achieve my goal for German this year: that the children can understand stranger-produced German. We're reading books and listening to CD stories and music. We speak German in the afternoons after we've finished our other homeschool tasks for the day. This is the heart and lifeblood of our German learning. The German School and homework has just added the bones to keep things in place.

Crash and burned

I tried Sonlight last year and we crashed and burned.

I tried Ambleside Online during the summer and we crashed and burned.

I gave (used) KONOS a try this month and we (shock) crashed and burned.

We're doing really well in math and language arts with RightStart and the Writing Road to Reading. Neither is an extremely simple program and neither is hands-off on the teacher. If I can handle teaching two kids math, one child phonics, and one language arts with WRTR, why can't I handle another curriculum for the rest?

I think I figured out at least part of the problem last night.

When I started math, we did only math for a while. Actually, quite a while. We did only math for about nine months. Then, we added on phonics and language arts via WRTR/SWR.

As we've started new curricula, I haven't added things one at a time but instead threw everything into the mix at once. We didn't have any time to adjust our schedules, to sink our teeth into a new subject, to ask questions and enjoy. Instead, we started reading ten new books at a time and it was crazy. Very crazy, annoying, and frustrating.

This isn't how I work well.

Now, I'm going to do things differently, We're not going to do everything at once but do one thing at a time. I know narration is extremely important, so "narration" is going to be our only new subject for the month of October. Since I printed out "50 Famous Stories Retold" and already own a great copy of Aesop's fables, that is what we'll be doing this month, but we'll be reading at least one story and narrating it each day.

We'll see what November brings!

Week 2: Sept. 26 to 30

After a good start last week, I was somewhat reluctant to break up our week to visit a traveling Picasso exhibit, but since I had already RSVP'd, we went.

We added in a visit to a nearby Japanese Garden and picnicked in the park before entering the exhibit.

 I approached the exhibit lightheartedly and told the big kids to pick out a favorite picture in each room to look at. We didn't do more than just glance at any but the favorites, and for once, I appreciated the pictures I saw and wasn't begging to leave by the end. I think I'll use my new museum method when I go with adults in the future.

The girls loved the water and especially the water skater bugs at the Japanese Garden.

Monday, Thursday, and Friday were our only structured school days this week now that BSF is back in session, but we still got a lot done. J is cruising along in his Writing Road to Reading notebook.

Great writing, J, but it looks like we need to correct a sentence.

The challenges this week involved teaching A to read. I generally don't want to push early reading, but A would be a lot happier at church if she could read, so we're doing basic phonics for a few minutes twice a day. The challenge was involving her in J's WRTR lesson. At first she resisted, since in the past she was allowed to play outside during that time. By Friday, things were much improved. She listened in (phonetic awareness) and played with pattern blocks.

Making cinnamon raisin bagels.

M shook things up today during naptime by putting her own "sunblock" on. (It was really Daddy's shoe polish. Whoops.)

"I thought it was sunblock, Mommy!"

Loving all the learning

We had finished math and spelling, the intensive parts of our day, and it was time to move onto narration. During narration, I read a passage aloud to J from Aesop's Fables and he tells me back, in his own words, what has happened.

There was only one problem: I couldn't find John. He wasn't in his block hideout or out in the (miniscule) yard. I found him on M's toddler bed, reading a book about animals in National Parks.

"J, time to shut the book! Narration time!"

"OK Mommy. Do you know about the rattlesnake? It has button-like shakers in the back that it moves around if it knows a person is close by. The sound scares people away." He went told me detail after detail about rattlesnakes. Couldn't we just move onto narration time?

Whoops! I almost missed out on one of the most enthusiastic narrations of the day because I was so excited about doing a "real" narration.

Week 1: September 21 to 24

We had two and a half days of school today after returning from our trip Tuesday and starting BSF on Wednesday.

It seems like the way to be a happy homeschooler (for me, at least), is to start small, with the basics, and add things on as we go, so that is what we did.

A has her own math to do now as it is going swimmingly. We play lots of games and do half of a lesson per day. I started her off in RightStart A, but soon found out she had learned too much from listening in to J's lessons for that to be a good fit. RightStart B works well as long as I don't drag out the lessons.

Additionally, A worked hard building some swooping patterns.

Her hard work paid off with a beautiful bridge pattern of her own design.

M set up her own working, sorting the colored pieces from a Montessori trinomial cube.

J had plenty to do as we quizzed the first sixty or so works from The Writing Road to Reading and continued in RightStart C. We finally started the geometric drawing portion, which was the part that convinced me not to switch to Singapore. As expected, he loves it.

Friday morning, as I started A's math lesson, I told J it was free play time.

"Can I please do the next math page? Please?" he begged. I gave in. Who can resist such a request?

We ended our week with the first day, for us, of German school, and we're geared up and excited about speaking more German at home again after a lot of laziness on my part over the summer.

Home from the Tetons, starting a new school year

We just got back from our family trip to Grand Tetons National Park.

Our reward for driving off at 8 am: a stunning Tetons view.

I've seen a lot of parks, but this was my first time there. We had a home base at Jackson Lake Lodge due to Dan's work but the kids and I were able to play everyday while Dan was at his conference. My favorite part of the week was seeing a moose for the first time in my life. We prayed to see one and were given one eating right next to the street! We started keeping Nature Journals during our trip and tried to draw bisons. Apparently, a "still" bison actually moves a lot, so we resorted to drawing flowers and grasses.

Now that we're back, and learning isn't getting in the way of homeschooling, we're getting back into gear with respect to homeschooling. We're going to give KONOS a month's trial since I really want to use a curriculum that facilitates my children learning together. We'll also read through the Mr. Q Science book as a science spine. Otherwise, our curriculum isn't much changed from last year, with The Writing Road to Reading replacing it's knock-off, Spell to Write and Read and Anna doing her own math this year.