Teacher Notes

This week I had a sobering experience of reading back through my homeschooling posts from this year.  I saw a common theme of feeling disappointed.  So this week my goal was to not be disappointing.  I’m sick of being frustrated with myself.  That was soooo last week.

This week went really well.  We’re getting a good routine, although it still manages to get interrupted.  I’m fighting a bad cold, and that’s been tough to push through.  I’ve postponed some of our read alouds due to the fact that I have very little voice with which to read.

Silje’s really enjoys writing, like her mama, and loves all the starters that she’s getting in the Sonlight language arts this year.  She has a great imagination, but we’re still working on spelling, and when she’s lost in her creative thought she forgets things like punctuation, capitalization, etc.  (Also…like her mama.)  So I’m really trying to work with her on proofreading and not rushing so much.  She has been complaining a bit when I need her for seat work or I give her chores because if it were up to her she would just read all day long.  While I like her reading, that’s not the only thing to life.  O, if my childhood self could just hear me now.

We had a breakthrough with David this week.  On Tuesday we went to chess club at the library, and usually what happens is 5 minutes before I have to take him to choir practice, I give him a bit of a warning to wrap up what he’s doing in his current game.  Normally he plays until the very last second, and leaves quite begrudgingly.  I normally pick out his books for him for the next week.  The last few weeks I’ve been trying to get him to spend at least 5 minutes picking out books in the stacks, to which he replies “It’s all boring.”

Well, this week, when he got his 5 minute warning to wrap up his game, he looked at his partner and said “I have to go!  I only have 5 minute to pick out some books!”  He rushed through the aisles picking out a wide range of books to look at from math books to chess books, to paintball books.  He was so excited to get a fresh batch for the week that he didn’t want to risk just having mom’s choice available.

It’s when I confirmed that the glasses are helping.  Being able to see is all the difference!

I’ve been reading through a book I ordered directly after Mom’s Night Out last week.  We’ve been going over character development in our kids in my support group, which has been very bad for my curriculum splurging habit.  However, after seeing this book, I knew we could use it.  It’s called “Laying Down the Rails” and it’s produced by a company specializing in Charlotte Mason style education.

Charlotte Mason was an educator, and a contemporary of Charles Dickens.  Her methods feed largely off of the classical method, but she puts a lot of stress on nature study and being outdoors, from what I gather, as well as the “whole books” way of learning as opposed to snippets of processed information from textbooks.

Anyway, it’s a study guide to Charlotte Mason’s guide to teaching children good habits that they will use their whole lifetime.  From physical habits to bathing to spiritual habits like prayer.  The intellectual habits was the part that intrigued me the most as she talks about teaching your child to be in the habit of paying attention, and managing thoughts.  The theme behind the book is the idea of railroad tracks.  As decision making seems to be one of the most difficult things in our life, the idea is to not set your child onto adulthood in a car where they need to decide how fast, how slow, turn left, turn right.  On a train, you can relax in a seat, read a paper, talk to some friends, and arrive in peace.  The idea is to establish healthy habits in our kids now, so that when they are grown, a disciplined life is automatic, and not difficult.  It intrigued me.

Actually there’s about 60 habits looked at in the book, and she suggests spending 4-6 weeks as a family developing each habit one by one.  Some of the habits on the list that pop out to me are: courtesy, order, diligence, patience, attention, observation, remembering, imagining, finishing, use of time, personal initiative, truthfulness, usefulness…

There’s a lot in there that would be good for the kids as well as the adults.  I asked Knut if we could go through the book together this winter, so we’d be on the same page in dealing with the kids, and he was all on board, except he wants to wait until the Fall rush has passed.  Harvest is over, but both he and I are fighting bad colds, and he needs to get the wood done for the winter, the gardens winterized, and still has work on the farm to do during the day.  We’re hoping in a month or so to start discussing it together, but until then, I’ve started at least browsing some pages that I think will really help me with the kids during our homeschooling time.  OK, so I’ve read 3 chapters already.  It’s good stuff.  It’s giving me some great tools, and good things to think about.