A Few of the Books

Dame never really adapted to regular school, and deals with a lot of chronic pain and fatigue. Last February she was missing so many days from not feeling well that we decided to let her come back home. This is equal parts delightful and exhausting for me, as I missed homeschooling very much but also don't have a lot to give after work (and Dame is not a person who prefers to work alone, so not much is done before I arrive home.)

What we do is about equal parts Ambleside Online (currently roughly based on Year 7) and um, let's call it unschooling but it's mostly Youtube videos and her designing her own fantasy universe in luxuriant detail. Deux also still enjoys fantasy worldbuilding (the "world in his head" has been a major presence in our life since he was very small indeed) only while Dame is aimed towards books in the end Deux builds RPGs, which we cannot possibly play as fast as he designs them. 

Although Deux is doing Running Start, his classes have still been entirely online and they do not appear to absorb much of his time (I assume he is passing when he gives me the parental permission sheet to sign up for the next quarter), so he and Dame have plenty of time for intense arguments about the logistics of their respective worlds and magical universes. Deux has the edge in physics and chemistry, but Dame probably knows more about habitats and zoology. Regardless, the discussion is always lively. 

For assigned school we are reading about the Middle Ages. The really long readings we tend to listen to on Librivox while we play video games. This is not a very impressive scholastic habit, but it keeps us going. And we are reading Ivanhoe (which I have never actually finished before), and Mark Twain's Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc and In Freedom's Cause this way. We tried Idylls of the King but the readers just didn't quite make epic poetry easy to follow, so I'm reading that one aloud, along with Molecules by Theodore Gray, Eric Sloane's Weather Book, and Julius Caesar in which we take parts. There are also a goodly number of books she reads on her own, one of which is a Chaucer adaptation while I am tackling the (translated) whole thing. I can't believe it's taken me this long to try Chaucer, he's really quite hilarious and snarky. 

I also do some reading of books I might like to try for the future. Next year I want to tweak her science to give maximum support to worldbuilding, so I am looking for books on anatomy (especially comparative animal anatomy), ecology and habitats. We already have The Way We Work by David Macaulay to get us started on anatomy. I read The Hidden Life of Trees  by Peter Wohlleben and absolutely loved it, but was a little saddened that it was (naturally) so strongly skewed to the species in his native Central European forest, where Douglas fir is an ill-adapted stranger. So now I am looking at a North American focused book called Forest Walking but it annoys me just a tad because it (reasonably enough) has a North American co-writer and I always find the way people interject things from the cowriter to be odd. But content-wise it is probably more what I am looking for, there's a great deal about things we might see on a walk around the neighborhood. 

Tardiness

Apparently the children (I can't really call them ducklings anymore, they are not short and fuzzy enough) are supposed to have an excuse slip from me to get out of being marked tardy should they, in fact, be tardy. I don't understand how this works. Surely if I am running so late they are tardy I am also too late to write four notes about it?

Duchess suggests I could create a preprinted sheet and then just check the appropriate box. Something like this, I suppose.

Dear Teacher:
Please excuse [Name] for being late for the following reason:

• The cat got in.

• The dog got out. 

• The cat and dog were locked in mortal combat.

• One of the wheelchairs broke down and we had to rearrange all the cars and which piece of equipment was in which car in a sequence so complicated I could not possibly reconstruct it. 

• A child who has survived a decade or more on this earth somehow forgot until we were actually in the car that shoes were an essential part of public attire. And also that the absence of food is a common cause of hunger pain.

• We passed through a field of time distortion on the way here.

• Nobody knows the trouble I seen.

• The next season of Grimm had to go back to the library today and therefore the parents had to stay up late to watch it. 

• Gremlins, most likely.

• My own abject failure to be a responsible adult. 

• Other:___________________________________________________________ 

Somehow I still feel like I'm missing something here.

Oddly, we were almost never tardy last year. We must be getting too slack.

Out of the Valley

The winter is a valley, with the solstice resting in darkness at the bottom. I always count backwards and forwards as we pull away from it. Now we have gotten as far from the solstice as early November. Soon we will have passed the three darkest months and climbed back out into the daylight.

Already it stays light until almost time to fix supper. I don't have to rush to walk the puppy the instant I get home from work. I am terrible at naming birds by their songs, but something is singing that wasn't a few weeks ago, that on a level below knowledge tells me that spring is coming.

After some more or less easy terrain, we will come to the mountain peak of the summer solstice when the days are so long that sleep is difficult and we seldom see the stars. And then down again.

Without homeschooling I feel a little adrift. DOB and I visited a used bookstore and I didn't know what to do with myself. For the past decade I've always been on the lookout for books for school. And homeschooling moms read the most interesting books and have the most interesting conversations. I hang out on the fringes of the conversation but it's not *my* conversation anymore. I'm not making plans for next term or next year. I'm not pondering how to ease a child through a rough spot. There's homework to help with, some (usually only Dot has any), but it's not at all the kind of work I would choose for them. 

I'm not even reading very discussable books at the moment. I'm tired and my brain is fried and Duchess and Deux always want me to try out their latest middle-grade fantasy series. 

I even tried doing a google search for people who weren't homeschooling but wished they were, but all I could find was advocacy articles on either side. And I am tired of people dividing themselves up into camps and shouting at each other. (Law is like that a bit, I guess, but on most cases and with most fellow practitioners we know there's weaknesses and strengths on both sides and our ultimate goal is to find resolution, not prove our moral superiority by the loudness and frequency of our speech.)

Truth be told, I do like practicing law. Even litigation. This past month I've had my first trial (a very small one) and first deposition. It's fun. And exhausting. It's hard to balance with coming home to a family but we are working to figure it out and hopefully DOB and I will be able to take turns being the exhausted one.

Winter Air

It's too late to start the new year with a grand new blogging resolution, so I can just make a post.

This has been a very wintry winter. Snow and ice and dry, harsh air. Colds and flus and ear infections. DOB regains strength, slowly. I do my first major motion and my first summary judgment motion and my first trial (rather anticlimactic that, the opposing party was in jail and didn't show up). Since the first of the year DOB has been slowly returning to his place in the office and it is a great relief to have him back. We've hired another attorney in the meantime to help with the workload and she may stay on, as we are supportive of a kids-in-school schedule.

The kids go to school and come home and play Legos and video games. I feel guilty about not making them go outside more, but at least their school is strong on recess. For Christmas DOB granted them moderated access to nearly all of his best Lego sets--Harry Potter and Pirates of the Caribbean and the like. We've rearranged the house to put our bedroom in the old schoolroom, and turn the master suite into a game room.

The kids are learning to take turns cooking supper, each according to their inclination, which means Dash and Duchess experiment with stir-fries and udon, Deux opens cans of beans, and Dot bakes potatoes and puts out the shredded cheese. Either way, we eat.

I miss homeschooling. I don't know what to do with myself in a used bookstore anymore. I've been on the hunt for school books for the past decade. Helping with homework is most definitely not the same thing.

Things are still tough, but happy. After the past year every day alive and together is its own little miracle.

Is there life after school?

I have from time to time seen people with grand "afterschooling" plans of all the great activities they do to enrich their children's lives after regular school is over.

After the first week and a half of school, I would laugh uproariously at such a concept, but I lack the energy. My afterschooling activities consist of trying to come up with enough calories to sustain everyone and trying to convince the relevant descendant either that doing homework will not kill them or that failing to get straight A+s will not kill them. That some people manage to do school and other things like sports and music fills me with awe. They do stuff at school, right? That's enough, right?

I'm sure it will all get easier once we are used to it, and once the aftermath of the car accident has sorted itself out, and once I've figured out the Holy Grail of easy breakfast and lunch that everyone will eat and survive to the next meal on. (I have my doubts that easy even exists after a certain critical mass-- basic sandwiches for four kids who eat two or three sandwiches each is a whole lot of sandwiches. And having them make their own means somehow coordinating the movements of four people through a confined space while all of them have very strong opinions on how everyone else should be moving.)

Right at this particular moment, though, Dot is listening to a book on CD, Duchess is reading a book for fun, and the boys are coloring pictures about life in medieval Europe. So maybe we're not doing so bad at enriching life after all.

The Horror!

I promised myself that I would *never* do this, but I did. I couldn't stop myself. The twins were complaining, yet again, about the fact that they were expected to work on the exact same math page at the same time, not to mention having to write down some of the answers instead of doing it all orally.

Finally, I blurted out, "You know, in regular school, the kids all have to do the same math page. Twenty or thirty of them."

Dash: "They do? Not at the same time, though?"

"Yes, at the same time."

Dot: "Well, not the same page."

"OK, technically not, but copies of the same page. And they have to write in all the answers by themselves."

Dash: "I never, ever want to go to regular school."

Overflow

We are observing the inevitable February Slump this year by taking things a little slower in school . . . spreading three weeks out over four . . . just enough to allow for those mornings when getting out of bed doesn't seem to be an option. (Although, in the usual perversity of things, if I let the children know that the next day is off school, they will be up hours before dawn, though I can barely get them up by eight-thirty on a school day.)

Mostly school is going quite well. Deux and Duchess are doing Year 5 of Ambleside Online, which is pretty much awesome. But AO is in the process of revamping their science selections (I am *so* excited about what we'll be doing in future years) and Year 5 hasn't been revised yet. When my students kept complaining that their anatomy book was too easy--not a common complaint with AO selections--I decided to try to find something else.

We wound up with The Way We Work by David Macaulay, which they tackled with enthusiasm based on their affection for The Way Things Work, which Deux took to bed with him for many years. It was a good thing they were enthusiastic, because much of it was over my head, especially with the biochemistry up front. But with the help of some Kahn Academy videos, we made it through and are on to large body systems which are a little easier to envision.

Still, just reading and sketching was a little dry, so I was happy to come across an old human biology experiments book at the library sale rack--one of those older ones that dates from the days when any determined youngster with a garage and the dangerous chemicals readily available at his neighborhood hardware store could unlock the mysteries of the universe. So now we have some supplemental experiments to do.

To go with breathing, I thought we could start with a simple experiment that involved exhaling through a tube into an inverted jug filled with water. The idea was that your breath would force out the water and then, by measuring how much empty space you created, you could estimate your lung capacity. This sounded like fun. And it was. Especially when I ignored the, "Do this in the kitchen sink" instructions and the water fleeing the force of Duchess's lungs erupted over the counter, dirty dishes, and floor.

"And this, children," I said, "Is why your mother is a lawyer, not a scientist."

Deux, with the reflex of young students, asked, "Then why do you make *us* study science?"

"Because it is awesome," I said. And he didn't argue.

Here With You

We have started school again, with all the attendant fun and drama. Sometimes we have those frameable moments when everyone is eagerly sketching leaves in their nature notebooks to the music of Brahms, and sometimes it's just plain hard work and you can  do one more line, and sometimes the majority of the participants are wailing in despair (usually because everybody else is making so much noise).

One thing I have learned in five years of this is that it is all the good stuff. Ambleside Schools International has an inspiring series of videos, one phrase from which echoes in my mind through every day: "It is good to be me here with you."

It may be that our lesson today is not so much about odd versus even numbers and more about putting your mind back to your work despite the fact that your brother has the audacity to breathe audibly, but I am here to help you learn both.

It may be that you only get three words on the page after fifteen minutes of tears, but those three words represent a battle bravely fought and won against fear, perfectionism, and a brain that takes things in much faster than it can get them out.

It may be that we are still practicing three-letter words when I thought we would be reading novels, but we are weaving day by day the links between sight and sound and movement and one day that weaving will be strong enough to hold the torrent of ideas you will need it for.

The written lesson plan matters, but the unwritten lesson plan matters more. And that is the plan that says: Here, today, we will do the best we can with what we have; we will give it everything we have in us; we will grow in what we need today.

It is good.

ETA: Why yes, it is the fifth day of school and I am winding up eating brownies straight from the pan. They're good, too.

Finis

We finished school.

I'm proud of us. Last year we crashed and burned at the end of June with a month left. We had lost too much time moving, and when DOB's mysterious malady (let's be alliterative if we can't get a diagnosis) struck again in May without warning, it all just got to be too much.

So to finish this year, to *finish* the work we set out to do, on top of starting a business and all the rest of life ongoing, well, that's really something. And considering that this year saw the twins doing formal lessons for the first time, thus doubling the student body, that's really, really something. In a dramatic denouement, my red planning binder collapsed under the strain on the next to last day.

I am neither in the all-life-is-learning camp, nor in the just-school-all-year-round camp. I like to have a goal, and then I like to take a break. (Sure, all of life is learning, but there are days in life when one binge-reads fantasy novels or lies on the grass by the lake, and I don't intend to try to quantify what exactly is being learned.) I might take breaks through the year if I lived in a different climate, but the Pacific Northwest was crafted for the specific purpose of having summer break.

Some days I've probably pushed too hard at getting done for getting done's sake, but I think most of the time we've managed to stay in the moment and learning. Some days we cut our losses. The twins didn't get a lot of math this year, but I'm rather ambivalent about formal math that young. Some days we didn't do a lot of writing, but we always did some. We read some great books together.

One principle I am coming to believe in is that, if you don't have a lot of time and energy, focus what you do have on something challenging. It's better to do two tough books than five easy books. I hope to keep that in mind planning for next year.

I'm especially proud of the way Duchess and Deux have stepped up to doing their own work on their own steam. And I'm enjoying the way Dot and Dash revel in the stories we've read together.

DOB is doing a little better this summer--the whatever-it-is is still lurking in the shadows, but a careful balance of rest, exercise, air conditioning and protein seems to be keeping it at bay. He hasn't had to give up driving yet, at least. I'm hoping to pick up the pace at work a bit--I haven't quite been making the 15 hours I hope to work yet, although I'm finally increasing my billable hours as we get things better organized and more handed off to our assistants. As usual, there is way too much to cram into summer vacation.

And, of course, it's time to start planning for next year . . .

A Random Number of Updates of Moderate Length

Doing fun things on the weekend has never been something we are very good at. I grew up on a farm, where weekends were for doing farm things, so I never got used to it. Anyway, doing fun stuff generally requires a surplus supply of a couple of basic things like time, money, and energy. So our weekends consist of DOB sleeping on Saturday while I do work and keep the kids quiet, and then me resting on Sunday afternoon while he (and sometimes a designated pusher) goes to the Y to get in a lot of workout and therapy.

BUT we managed one fun weekend this month. Bookworm and Rocketboy took me and the kids to the Science Center to see the Pompeii exhibit before it leaves the US. We also naturally used the opportunity to aim lasers, fly to the moon, visit butterflies, and all the other stuff science museums were for. Though by far the most memorable item was the presentation with liquid nitrogen which led to lots of further discussions on the point at which various materials melt or condense.

Then on Sunday DOB took all the kids to the Y and paid for them to go in so they could swim, too, not just wait on the sidelines. And they got ice cream. They were beyond thrilled.

That was a brutal Monday. I don't think we'll have fun again for awhile.

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After avoiding medicine for the better part of a decade, I finally decided to go in for a checkup. The nurse noted that my sinuses looked bad. Well, I suppose they feel bad, too, I just try not to think about it. This is my standard approach to illness. It is not without reason, as my experience is that no proposed remedy (standard or natural) makes me feel any different. Or any substance at all, really. My body just lumbers along, doing its thing, without much regard to what is thrown at it, though it tends to put up a protest at lack of food.

So far the sinus remedies are living up to expectation. Except now that I've noticed my sinuses hurt, it bothers me more. Ignoring them was also a lot cheaper.

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We have four more weeks of school. Four. more. weeks. It should be five, but we're going to squish it into four, because we have to finish before Duchess's birthday. At least we should be able to come respectably close to finishing this year, unlike last year when nearly everything got tossed to the wind.

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Although we are not a lot of fun, we have reinstituted our summer tradition of Tuesday Movie Nights and so far have seen National Velvet, Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone, and a somewhat debatable Kidnapped. I'm happy to report that we have produced four children who cannot help but point out all the ways the movie deviates from the book. (Though they were pretty happy with Harry Potter.) Part of this tradition is popsicles. I'm thinking I might want to branch out a little bit from my standard mushy-banana-and-peaches combo, so maybe I'll try some of these.

Miscellaneous

We've had another power outage already. I'm getting closer to prepared. His Majesty brought by an emergency stash of firewood, which the ducklings had put away in about five minutes flat. (Let's just say an emergency supply is a lot more fun to stack than an entire winter's.) I bought some lovely glass gallon dispensers for water storage, although we haven't gotten the taps tightened enough to actually put water in them. Still, closer.

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I have totally messed up with Harry Potter. I let Duchess read the first four books and told her she could read the last three when she was thirteen. Only as soon as she had read them, Deux had to, also. (And since they are by far the thickest books he has ever attempted and finished, I wasn't going to stop him.) Then they wanted to get them on CD to share with the twins.

But . . . Duchess will be 13 before everyone else. And they'll all be clamoring for it. Oh dear. I should have doled them out one a year for everybody or something. DOB has insisted that it's what we'll do with the movies.

Meanwhile, our house has been turned into Hogwarts and sorted into houses (stuffed animals included).

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We are almost finished with our first term of school. I am always astounded that we actually do this: we set out a plan and we stick to it, come hell or high water. I'm not sure where this is coming from, honestly, because I never really thought I could be that consistent. The big kids and I have finished reading A Midsummer Night's Dream together, Duchess with the graphic novel version. We're almost to the end of Robinson Crusoe, which started slow but has definitely picked up the pace with the arrival of cannibals. (In our curriculum discussion boards, people are always expressing concerns about the maturity of content as the years progress--in my experience, there is nothing to excite an interest in history and literature like mature content.) We also had due encounters with witch-burning, pirates, and battles of all sorts.

Teaching the twins is very different from the big kids--they take to listening and telling back the stories much more readily and pick up on the ideas very easily, but their progress in basic skills is more slow and steady. I'm not used to having to actually teach basic reading and math, so it's a change. Kind of fun, though.

Teaching everybody at once is usually totally insane.

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Maybe if I think of four more items by tomorrow I can turn this into a quick takes Friday. But I probably won't.

Dead Letter Office

Eight years ago, as an excited parent of a toddler, I carefully researched and purchased some magnetic letters that would be the absolute best resource for teaching phonics. The right size, the right shape, the right letter frequency, the right color combinations.

That child hated phonics and reading lessons and taught herself to read by memorizing story books. The next one loved phonics and taught himself to read off cereal boxes and flyers before I got around to giving him any reading lessons. (And then lost all interest and devoted himself to game design.) The magnetic letters got used to make roads and free-form sculptures on the fridge.

But the twins have arrived at school age still needing a little nudge to start reading. (Due largely, I suspect, to having no motivation thanks to always having older siblings handy to read to them.) At last, I thought, I shall put these magnets to their intended use. I had a carefully-prepared word building lesson ready to go for the first day of school.

Instead of a reading lesson, we had a ten-minute meltdown over the ravages done to the game laid out on the fridge front. Apparently it wasn't phonics materials I bought, it was the foundation for an entire game world.

I'm printing out letters on cardstock.

Also inadequate in my first grade plans: too many stories about farm animals and butterflies, not enough big cats, thus inadvertently but inexcusably favoring the twin who likes farm animals over the twin who likes ferocious predators. I have accordingly moved the fable of the Lion and the Mouse and Kipling's "How the Leopard Got His Spots" up in the schedule.

A Lack of Milestones

It's been one of my cardinal rules that school is optional until age 6.

It's easy to stick to this rule when you have children who, like Duchess and Deux, teach themselves to read by age five. Or if you have smaller ones who beg to be included in what the big kids are doing.

But Dot and Dash are not interested. Oh, they could read, if they had a mind to. They can tell you the sounds in a word, and if you sit them down to it and ask them to read off the letters in a word they can figure out what it says, and if you show them the word in one spot on the page they can see it in another. But the task interests them not a smidge. They know how to spell their own names, and how to spell Garfield. They check out stacks and stacks of books from the library and sit poring over the pictures for hours. But they do not want lessons.

Reading is such a nice, tangible milestone. It's like sleeping through the night and potty training. It feels good to announce that your child has reached the mark, and of course they should all do it a little ahead of time.

But, they can't *all* do it ahead of time. And it really doesn't matter, nor does it say anything about how smart they are. There are plenty of other interesting things to do with your time when you are five, especially if you have a twin who is ready to put on a cape and go out to adventures in the backyard while the big kids are busy at school.

They memorize poetry and Bible verses by the yard. They listen to Longfellow and Bunyan and Kipling with evident comprehension. They can tell you the plot of any Narnia book at length. They can add and subtract up to seven without even a glance at their fingers. They ask questions and give explanations during science lessons that floor me. But they don't read.

At least not that I've caught them.

I promised no required lessons until the fall after they turn six, and I'm sticking to it. Their desire to mimic the big kids is more than satisfied by doing a maze every morning. On rainy mornings this fall they'll sit down and we will do the work and they will read.

Well, that's my theory. Or, you know, maybe they'll be illiterate all their lives and curse my theories.

Teachable Moments

For the last few game nights with the kids, we've been playing a role playing game I developed--basically a very streamlined version of GURPS set in the Olympics. They are all loving it, and the twins have finally overcome their fear of combat and were enthusiastically taking actions to take down a hungry cougar. Dot (a lizard) decided to jump on his tail to distract him, while Dash (a child) started digging frantically (he has been very fond of his shovel) and found several pails of water (why not? it was a beach and we are always losing pails there), which he then used to hit the cougar on the nose. This involves a lot of rolling and counting up dice, and taking away hit points when they are injured, and adding them on when they find healing herbs, so besides being a lesson in natural history and divergent thinking, it's a great math activity.

The next day, Dash was sitting more-or-less quietly while I read out loud to the older kids, until I noticed what he had drawing. On both sides of two sheets of paper, he had drawn recognizable scenes of his four favorite Magic: The Gathering characters and was conducting duels between them.

We may have the world's geekiest preschool curriculum.

Most Excellent Books about the Middle Ages

The Zoomlians are studying the Middle Ages, and they are posting all sorts of cool projects and fun links.

I appreciate these, because we are studying the Middle Ages, too, and I am not very good on the fun projects end of things. In fact, my idea of a good project is one the kids think of themselves and do without consulting me. And clean up afterwards. I am going to try to do the stained glass one, though. And I may point out the helms to them as it might fall into the do-it-yourself category.

What I (unsurprisingly) do better at is books. So, at Wendy's request, here are some of the books about the Middle Ages we have loved the most, or that I expect we will enjoy when we get there. Most of these selections come from Ambleside Online, which is our primary curriculum source.

The Little Duke: This is an old book, but it is definitely worth the occasionally dense language and slow start. It's based on the life of Richard I, Duke of Normandy--great grandfather to William the Conqueror and grandson to Rollo the Viking. The story of an eight year old boy navigating a confusing and dangerous world of warrior and Christian ethics, gruff allies and flattering enemies. It's got a lot of food for thought and discussion and a good bit of adventure.This is the book the ducklings scream in protest when I announce we have come to the end of the chapter.

Our Island Story: This is actually a full history of England for children, but we are reading the Medieval kings this year. I think what I love about this book is that it was actually written for the reason we want the ducklings to study history at this age: to understand more about human beings, and to think long and hard about what it means to be human, what makes a hero, a good king or a bad one, and to begin to develop nuance and recognize the complexities of human existence and choices. It's heavy on the interesting people and even the legendary stories.

Castle and Cathedral: Because, you know, it's David Macaulay and therefore awesome. Nobody is better on how things were built and why. Also, there are movie versions which are wonderful.

The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood: You have to get the real one, by Howard Pyle, and it better be unabridged. (I got cheated on that once.) If you want to listen to someone who can really roll the language out and sing the drinking songs, the Blackstone Audiobooks reader is awesome. Yes, it's pure fantasy of the Middle Ages and meant to be. Sometimes the legends are the most important part of history; as Chesterton once observed, the legends were written by the hundred sane people in the village, the history was written by the one crank. If Pyle works for you, then you could go on to his other medieval books, like King Arthur and his Knights, and Otto of the Silver Hand.

The Door in the Wall: We haven't started this yet, but it's one I remember enjoying very much as a child. It's about a boy who wants to be a knight but must find another path to greatness when he loses the use of his legs.

The Sword in the Tree: I wouldn't do this as a read-aloud, but it is a well-done early chapter book of knightly adventures.

The Apple and the Arrow: A very nice story of William Tell. We actually read this a couple of years ago, when we were studying Switzerland, but it fits nicely in the Middle Ages, too, especially if you feel the whole knights-and-nobility thing has gotten overplayed.

As for the twins, mostly they just tag along. They are fond of fairy tales and picture books about King Arthur and his knights.

The Universe

We do poetry regularly for school, which consists of reading poetry. This is one of the kids' favorite things, perhaps because they are not required to do anything but listen, but they do really seem to enjoy poetry itself. This term's poet was Walter de la Mare, who wrote mystical, evocative poems on themes that mostly appeal to children. We read this one today and it seemed the perfect description of their world:

The Universe
by Walter de la Mare
 
I heard a little child beneath the stars
        Talk as he ran along
To some sweet riddle in his mind that seemed
        A-tiptoe into song.

In his dark eyes lay a wild universe,--
        Wild forests, peaks, and crests;
Angels and fairies, giants, wolves and he
        Were that world's only guests.

Elsewhere was home and mother, his warm bed:--
        Now, only God alone
Could, armed with all His power and wisdom, make
        Earths richer than his own.

O Man! -- thy dreams, thy passions, hopes, desires!--
        He in his pity keep
A homely bed where love may lull a child's
        Fond Universe asleep!

Snarky Things I Don't Say on Homeschool Forums

OP: I'm wondering what to do for my fourth grader since we can't afford a reading curriculum. Could she just . . . read books?

Response: Of course! Your library is full of many great books for free, like Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, Stuart Little, Junie B. Jones . . .

SQOC: OK, sorry, while I agree wholeheartedly on your basic theory, I'm going to have to cite you for a Class B Felonious Confusion of Great Literature With Tripe.

What I do with my summer vacation

Bookworm is somewhat at loose ends until college starts in the fall, so she offered to come over and help me with organizational things. I organize much better if there is another adult person in the house, ready to tell me, "Yes, throw it away!" (unlike the children who inevitably think of thirty new uses for it.) Also, Bookworm is an engineer, and therefore was able to figure out how to combine two old, odd-shaped bookcases into one bookcase the right shape for the space--and also how to stabilize it so it would not fall over. This involved using my hand saw and the end of  a board we found lying around and the edge of the porch and my foot. (I used my bad foot so if it got injured things would not be significantly worse.) So, now I have--at no extra cost--a school shelf that is actually deep enough to hold school-type materials, which makes me very, very happy.

In the meantime, the kids were busy with the pool, specifically with filling the entire pool with dirt, rocks, and bicycles.  They like to do that kind of thing.

More Snarky Things I Don't Say on Homeschool Forums

OP: Why do my friends and relatives make these snarky remarks about how I'm "super mom"? Just because I keep a clean house, feed my family healthy food, get up early, enjoy homeschooling and have a great marriage. I still struggle just as much as anyone.

SQOC: Well, I don't know about your friends, but now I hate you, too.

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OP: I've been using (XYZ religious curriculum) but I want something that is more Bible-based. Like would have all of history and science taken from the Bible.

SQOC: Has it occurred to you that the Bible was written before the last 2000 years of history and scientific discoveries? How, exactly, do you think this is going to work?

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OP: I've been reading (Old Book) but I'd really like something that comes from a more Biblical worldview.

SQOC: You do realize that when  you say "Biblical Worldview" you mean "precise alignment with the theological trends of a small group of modern North American Christians," right?

How Oral Math Can Go Wrong

QOC (reading from the math page): There are six teaspoons in a set. How many are in two sets?

Deux: 120.

QOC: I mean in the real world, not in your world (in his world, all amounts are automatically ten times greater).

Deux: I did answer in the real world. Oh--did you mean sixteen?

QOC: No, not sixteen. Six. Six teaspoons.

Deux: Right, two sets of sixty spoons is 120.

QOC: Oh. Teaspoons. As in these (holding up teaspoon). Six of these in a set. How many in two sets?

Deux. Oh. Twelve.