Family reading roundup: All about animals

Since our last reading roundup, Ashar has focused most of her reading time on animals. All sorts of animals.

These have, by far, been her three favorites. We read parts of the National Geographic Book of Mammals almost every night – having worked through the topics of whales, elephants, porpoises, hamsters … and we intersperse that with things like the True or False books, just to mix it up.

The reading level in the true or false books is probably slightly young for Ashar, while the writing in the National Geographic book is probably just slightly more advanced than she’s used to. I figure that balances out? All of these are definitely some of our favorite animal-learning resources!

She’s also been reading about Ripley’s Believe It or Not! after we visited their “Odditorium” in Atlantic City, N.J. (more on that to come tomorrow).

The rest of our family has very little to offer in terms of reading this week. Chris said he’s been “in browsing mode,” but not invested in any particular book, and I finished a regency romance called “Beloved Avenger.” I know, you’re amazed by our literary prowess, are you not?

So what’s your family reading this week?

22 Apr

A homemade skateboard from an old bookcase and used roller blades

While we were working to clean up our basement family room a bit earlier this month, Ashar found a no-longer-needed removable shelf from a cheap bookcase, and she had a brainstorm.

“I want to make my own skateboard!”

She has been playing with the board ever since, sliding it across the family room carpet, using it as a miniature see-saw, all sorts of things. We kept telling her that we’d have to figure out some “real” wheels if she wanted it to actually bear up to her weight, and I’d thought we’d scope out some yard sales a little later in the spring.

Well, remember our trip to the Salvation Army half-price sale earlier this week, where we found our pyramid-building kit for a dollar? Well, on the same trip, we found an old pair of roller blades with blue wheels – Ashar’s favorite color – also for the winning price of a buck. I looked them over, decided it would be doable to get the wheels out of the blade assembly, and we brought them home. (Homeschooling on the Cheap friends – may I recommend the Salvation Army store for MANY of your homeschooling projects? We <3 it!!) Today, Ashar comes upstairs with her hands FULL of tons of building materials. “What’s this?” I asked. “We’re going to make my skateboard!” she announced. Materials to make a homemade skateboard

So we set to work. Ashar fetched our biggest screwdriver, and I helped remove the wheels from the roller blades. The other main part I helped with involved the saw – I’m not THAT brave of a mom.

See the board at right? That’s our shelf. The smaller pieces sitting on it were cut from a thin piece the same length as the shelf; it was supposed to be a piece of the frame, to hide the “feet” of the bookcase or something. So Ashar marked the right size, I sawed the thin piece of wood, and she nailed the smaller pieces in place to serve as axles for our wheels.

Making a homemade skateboard out of recycled materials

See me at left, above? I’m explaining to Ashar how we can use either nails or screws, and having her test how the wheels spin with each method. We ended up using nails all around, in part because the particleboard wasn’t really “receptive” to a lot of our screwdriver efforts, but also because Ashar liked how the wheels spun on them. She also figured out the nail length – how long would they need to be in order to attach things the way she wanted without coming out the other side

The other two photos prove that we were at least marginally successful – Ashar’s skateboard DID hold her weight. Nails, though, don’t stay real well in crummy particleboard, so the wheels have a tendency to come out pretty easily. We just told her to be careful, and she was.

Our finished homemade skateboard

Ashar was pretty proud of her finished product! I was so proud of her for having an idea and working out how to see it through. (And her hammering skills are REALLY improving, and she even knows which kind of screwdriver is which. A few weeks ago, she didn’t know the difference between a nail and a screw!)

Stuffed animals get a ride on our homemade skateboard

Because of its lack of ability to keep all four wheels together consistently, Ashar decided her skateboard would make a better animal wagon for Winter, Atlantic and Lucy, her stuffed animals acquired this weekend. (THEIR story will make another post, maybe tomorrow; here’s a hint, they accompany Ashar’s new hoodie, seen in today’s photos!)

21 Apr

From homeschooled student to homeschooling mom: Going full circle, Part 2

As we start to settle in just slightly to our new “this is what learning is to us now” rhythm, I’ve been thinking a LOT lately about my own educational experiences. In some ways, I’m very different than Ashar – and that can be hard – but in a lot of ways, the more I think about it, the more I realize that if our personalities are different, well, our educational experiences have an awful lot in common! This was supposed to be the second half of the two-part event, but I realized well into it that it should be a trilogy; if you haven’t already, before reading today’s post about the first part of Ashar’s educational journey, please read this post to learn about MY educational background and how it influenced me, and follow today’s post up with a read of the conclusion here! It’s long, as was the first part, but I promise cute pictures and, hopefully, a better understanding of how we’ve found ourselves where we are!

Unschool Rules: Going Full Circle - From Homeschooled Student to Homeschooling Mom

Ashar was an incredibly easy-going baby and toddler. He was born while I was in my second semester of college and working full-time, so I consider this a complete sign that some higher order is looking out for me. I would truly not have made it if he’d been the kind of baby who didn’t sleep, who cried all the time, who hated to be left with a sitter.

In fact, Ashar was the opposite of all of that.

This was the baby who slept 12 to 14 hours a night, so much so that I took him to the doctor and said, “Are they supposed to do that?” (He thought I was nuts.)

This was the baby who had no problem leaving me to go to a sitter, which was good, because lacking the ability to afford actual daycare, Ashar spent a lot of time with friends and friends of friends and friends’ parents and friendly coworkers. No matter where I left him, he had a big smile when I dropped him off and an even bigger one when I picked him up.

I became a full-time single mom when Ashar was about a year old and his biological father and I split up, and even that didn’t seem to be “a big deal” to him. Not because he didn’t miss Josh – especially at first, I think he did – but he was truly resilient, and we were lucky to have some great friends in our lives who really filled the gap. (Funny story: I have a friend – ALSO named Josh, different guy, though – who is several years younger than me, and who I call my “little brother.” His parents were Ashar’s regular babysitters for quite a long time, and he doted on Ash as well. Ashar would get confused about the name, though, and when THIS Josh’s parents would take him along with them to their son’s soccer games at his Catholic high school, Ash’d run along the field yelling, “Daddy! Daddy!” I admit some slight delight in the awkwardness of this.)

Anyway, Ashar was what I always considered to be above-average, especially in an intelligence sense. He would learn things quickly, and he seemed to really pay attention to things around him. (“Mom, picture moved. Why moved picture? Not moved picture!” So much for furniture rearranging with a toddler.)

Preschool and kindergarten

We spent a lot of time reading with Ashar, and by the time he went to preschool, he knew his letters and numbers and some basic sight words. He could write his name and some other things – though he was completely reluctant to settle on a dominant hand; he’d pick up the pencil with whatever hand was closer. He also didn’t write or read “right-side up” exclusively. The best way I can explain this is that he saw his name as one big “shape,” and he could make that shape either starting from the left and working to the right, or from the bottom and working to the top, or from the right and working to the left.

For about three years – from when Ashar was about a year and a half old until he was about four and a half – I dated a very nice guy named Jerry, and he and Ashar were very close. I actually credit him with Ashar’s early love of learning; he was the kind of guy who, not having a lot of experience with kids, treated Ash basically like a small “whole person,” meaning if he asked a question, Jerry would just answer it straight up, no dumbing it down. From Jerry, Ashar “inherited” a love of all sorts of music, especially percussion – Prince, David Byrne, Paul Simon, all of whom used tropical or African drumwork. He wasn’t the right “forever” person for us, but he’s a good person, and Ashar really cared for him a lot.

At this point, I have to take a moment and give a MAJOR shout-out to Chris. Chris and I had been coworkers since shortly after Ashar was born, and we’d become friends over the years. At the time I was going through my breakup with Jerry, Chris was my boss as well as one of my closest friends, and one night, he delivered a wonderfully-composed soliloquy telling me how much he truly cared about me AND Ash. Incredibly long story short, we started officially “dating” right at the start of Ashar’s final year of preschool, were engaged on Nov. 1, and were married six months later, a couple months after Ashar’s fifth birthday. By November of that year, 2005, when Ashar was in kindergarten, Chris had adopted him, and we were officially “The Ottos.” As you read the rest of this story, please know that I had no idea what I was getting Chris into, but he has stood by our family every day, in every way possible, and I could not do any of this without him. We actually got divorced in 2015… and still live together, because we are still a family.

Back to Ashar’s story… Chris and I talked a lot about the best moves for his future, and because he was doing so well in preschool, when it came time to enroll him in kindergarten, we thought a full-day program would be a better fit, so rather than enroll him in public school in our district, which only had half-day kindergarten, we enrolled him at the Lutheran school across town, which offered whole days. (This was among the reasons I was enrolled in private school in kindergarten myself, some years earlier!)

Well, Ashar loved it, in large part because of his excellent teacher and teacher’s aide. Those women were such a blessing; I can’t even imagine what Ashar’s educational outlook would have been without them. Ashar had a great year; he improved in reading, learned many math facts, made friends, and honestly enjoyed going to school every day. He played tee ball and soccer with the school’s intramural teams, and to this day he still talks about how fun soccer there was! He did have a few months of speech therapy, but didn’t seem to mind it, and our ability to understand his speech grew like crazy. (Ash had a really interesting “thing” of putting extra syllables at the beginnings of words, often “be.” My friend Amanda was “Be-manda.” A giraffe was a “be-jaffe.” If you spoke Ashar, it was no big deal, but strangers had a lot of trouble at first!)

One of Ashar’s papers from the beginning of his time in public school, which he started attending about a month and a half into first grade after a sudden “unenrollment” on our part from the private Lutheran school he’d attended for kindergarten.

First grade

Because of how well Ashar’s kindergarten experience went at private school, Chris and I decided to continue there for first grade. Within a month and a half, we had unenrolled Ash and registered him at our local public elementary school. This was the first place where things “just went wrong,” and 90% of this had nothing to do with Ash.

You see, it turns out that Ashar’s first-grade teacher lived next door to Ashar’s biological dad for decades as he was growing up. Never mind that we had parted as amicably as two teenagers with a kid could do. Never mind that, by this point, he had terminated his parental rights. And never mind that Ashar was visiting his grandparents, Josh’s parents, once a month or more. I was NOT viewed as a good mom, and Ashar was viewed as lacking in good role models and discipline. He went from being one of the top students in his kindergarten class in terms of participation to the kid who was “losing tickets” in the school’s behavior system almost daily for “misbehaviors” like giving a friend a hug. You know, does not keep hands to himself.

It got to the point that Ashar cried about going to school. He cried about doing his “homework.” And he just didn’t like anything any more, not even reading, because he’d been criticized for it at school.

We were quick to respond, and not just because of the money private school cost. We just wanted to find the right fit for Ash. After considering several options, we removed Ashar from private school and enrolled him in our district’s public school, which offered a small K-1 building, then a second- through fifth-grade building. His first-grade teacher there understood the situation and tried to work to build Ashar’s confidence back up. I’m not quite sure how, but Ashar tested behind the public school’s first-graders in reading and spent a marking period receiving remediation and reading support; by his second marking period in the public school district, though, he was back out of that program.

This year’s report cards were interesting. They were a real mix of Ashar being advanced, proficient, basic or below basic in his mastery level of various skills, and they included comments like “I am especially pleased with his progress in reading,” but also “Ashar does not always work to his ability and often needs encouragement.” At this point, I waved off that sort of remark as a casualty of the beginning of the year and didn’t think much of it.

Ashar filled out this “timeline” at the end of second grade; it was returned to him, along with his classmates, when they finished fifth grade. Notice he didn’t have anything to worry about at this point – and liked exclamation points!

Second grade

This year made us think, “Oh, public school was the right choice.” Ashar started reading at home again – and writing stories of his own, often with Chris. He’d dictate, and Chris would type; later, Chris’s dad, Ashar’s “Pappy John,” took the stories and provided fancy fonts and graphics for them and sent them back, which Ashar absolutely loved to no end.

Ashar’s grades were almost entirely advanced and proficient, and his teacher’s comments included things like “Ashar has done a super job this year! I am so proud of his writing that he’s been doing on his own at home!”

We were all pretty happy. We started, at this point, a pattern that would continue for a while… a good year, a rough year, a good year… and next up came a rough year.

Ashar wrote us this letter at the start of third grade. He certainly did have an attention to certain details – like “and 3:18 we go home.” Unfortunately, it seemed like he’d missed some other details.

Third grade

I’m not sure exactly how it started. Well, maybe it was the headaches Ashar started complaining of. Maybe it was the first marking period note on Ashar’s report card: “I am looking forward to discussing Ashar’s progress with you at our conference.”

Either way, this ended up being one of those years. Ashar kept saying that his head hurt – but not like a headache. He said his head would bother him, and then he wouldn’t know what was going on. He was irritable in class when it happened, and never seemed to feel quite “right,” even at home. Homework was a total fight, day after day. We saw the eye doctor… no vision problems.

Then Ashar saw the pediatrician, who tested several factors and eventually sent us for an EEG; he thought it was possible that Ashar was having micro-seizures, in which he’d “blank out” for a few moments, then be disoriented and uncomfortable after the seizure was over. Talk about scary. Ashar handled the test admirably well, and thank goodness, no seizure disorder. But we were back to square one, and the school was starting to get, let’s just say, a little impatient.

Their next step was to have Ashar observed during class. The school district’s perception was that Ashar was on task about 40% of the time, compared with a classmate who stayed on task about 92% of the time. This was when we first heard attention-deficit disorder mentioned, but the counselor was quick to say he could not make that call, so it was back to the pediatrician.

Several “surveys” later, we ended up with an ADHD diagnosis, and the idea that what Ashar was describing as his head “bothering” him might be an attempt on his part to describe his struggle to focus. I still have no idea if that’s really the case or not, but we started the ADHD medication process, a long ordeal, and by the end of third grade, we’d come to at least a modicum of normalcy. Ashar didn’t love school, but he didn’t hate it either, and we’d made it through the year with, again, a mix of grades across the board.

This was probably the first year where Chris and I truly thought Ashar might not pass. In fact, we were, at this point, a little bit OK with that. But as I mentioned, the grades were basically acceptable, and instead we met with the district and tried to map out a strategy for fourth grade; it was at this point that homeschooling first came up as a thought, as did a return to a private school of some sort, because we knew we couldn’t take another year like this!

Ashar wrote this essay about Vincent Price – his favorite actor – in fourth grade. Not too many fourth-graders would pick that, huh? He did a great job, in large part because he was interested in his topic and encouraged by his teacher.

Fourth grade

As per our pattern, this ended up being a GREAT year with what I consider Ashar’s best-ever teacher. “Miss O” was patient, kind, loving, organized, understanding… every good thing you could want. She really cared about Ashar as a person, and Ashar just blossomed with that kind of treatment.

His grades, all year, were entirely proficient and advanced academically. Report-card comments included things like “Ashar is off to a great start… he pays attention during lessons, works cooperatively with other students and follows all school and classroom rules.” Later, it was “Ashar has progressed wonderfully… he is a well mannered and respectful child who is a joy to have in class. He should be very pleased with his report card.”

This was the Ashar we wanted the school district to see… the one we knew. The one who loved to learn; the one who was more than the sum of his generally mediocre test scores and sometimes erratic behavior.

We truly believed then – as we do now – that Ashar is gifted, that he can and will excel if planted in the right soil, that he wants to succeed.

Thankfully, Miss O. believed the same thing, and we had a truly amazing year. Ashar worked on all sorts of projects, learned to write in cursive and even scored highly on our wonderful state-mandated tests, the PSSAs. (Sarcasm intentional.) Homework wasn’t a picnic, but it wasn’t the fight that it had been in third grade, and if we did have a bad night, it was no problem at all to stop before things got out of hand and send in a quick note to the teacher, who had no problems letting it go without actual punishment.

At this point, we thought, OK, any issues earlier were from ADHD and now that we know how to work well with Ashar, things will be fine! We were incredibly hopeful about the next year, which would be Ashar’s last in elementary school, and Ashar at this point said he loved his school, so … off to the next grade she went!

Fifth grade, part 1

Well, then fifth grade happened. Fifth grade was interesting. It was not a totally bad year. Ashar loved his teacher and did well on a lot of his assignments and group projects. Homework, though, was a train wreck. A fight every night. Tears (and not just from Ash.)

Early in the year, it became really clear to Chris and to me that Ashar wasn’t “acting his age.” I don’t mean in a bad way, necessarily. But for all that he was 10 at the start of the year chronologically, in every way that we could figure, he was closer to about 8 years old. His interests, his physical size, even his dentition (he had only lost maybe a handful of baby teeth at this point!) Certainly his maturity level and ability to make decisions and plan for large tasks weren’t at grade level.

He continued to struggle with reading when tested, especially with comprehension – which seemed weird to us, because he was reading things at home like issues of National Geographic, adult nonfiction library books on gardening and birdwatching, and all sorts of other things, and discussing them intelligently. He clearly could read, but he was just all over the place with it!

The teacher (who, again, really liked Ashar) said, “Oh, lots of kids start fifth grade this way; just wait, he’ll be fine after Christmas break, they really mature a lot.”

At this point, we’re thinking: OK, in another year, middle school… really? Really? And that’s when we started to look outside the school district for ideas about what was really going on in Ashar’s world.

That’s where I’m going to leave our story for now… but I hope to bring us “up to date” within the next week or so. I didn’t realize how hard telling this story would be on me, if you want to know the truth; I feel like I’m reliving some of our family’s hardest times, and I’m going to need to handle the “crisis” part, which is yet to come, on another day for my own sanity!

Thank you so much for reading this far. I can’t wait to share the rest of our story!

19 Apr

Our scrapbook: The one where we made the pyramids, a cake and our own bowling alley

Homeschooler cake-baking

Here’s a look at just a few of the fun things we’ve done this week, all involving “stuff we’ve made.”

Ashar with her cake

First off, Ashar made and iced a cake! It was a boxed mix and packaged vanilla icing, but she did it all on her own and then chose how she wanted to decorate it! (It tasted pretty good… I’m not a big cake fan, but I was impressed.)

Ashar with her cake

Then Ashar had a great idea… she wanted to make our own bowling game. (Out of recyclables… kind of a theme with us.)

There were 18 “pins” and some interesting rules, like if you knocked over the biggest one, you got a bonus equal to five times the number of pins you had knocked down. No spares – one shot per frame – and bonus points were given for shot creativity (but those “didn’t really count,” Ashar said.) She, Chris and I played this for quite a while!

Making a homemade bowling game

Finally, we SUPER lucked out at half-price day at the Salvation Army. (Does that make me sound really cheap? If so, I hope in a good way!) There was a kit with everything you needed to make a model pyramid out of foam… originally $2, on sale for $1. Completely unused. Guess who took that home with them?!

Foam pyramid kit

She worked on this for probably close to an hour last night; then, today, she found a word search puzzle in a book she has about deserts, read all sorts of accompanying facts about them, and then started making a PowerPoint about Egyptian history, complete with pyramid background template.

Talk about good fun at all the right prices… this is my kind of week!

17 Apr

Super science with stuff around the house

Amazing day today – and it really didn’t even kick off until 2 p.m., when I got home from an in-office shift for my part-time job!

When I got home, Ashar greeted me with a hot cup of tea she’d made me; the dishwasher was running – because she needed a small plate to use to microwave her lunch – and, while she’d dropped a plate earlier and it had broken, she’d cleaned it all up and calmly told me about it!

(At this point, I’m thinking perhaps I’m in the Twilight Zone… this is super-nice, but a little surprising!)

Baking and icing a cake as a homeschool project

Next, Ashar decides – and I’m not even sure how this came up – that she wants to bake a cake. More on this to come tomorrow, but she did it almost entirely herself, icing and decorating and all. Wait’ll you see the finished product – it turned out super-cool.

THEN she tells me she’s going to put away the dishes, and so she does.

After that, I went to tae kwon do class, she hung out at home for a while, and while I was gone, Chris came home from work. And that’s where the fun really kicks in.

As someone – cough, me – might have possibly forgotten to put the pork in the slow cooker this morning, we didn’t have the planned menu for dinner. Instead, Ashar microwaved some packaged noodles and cheese for herself, and I had a light snack of string cheese and fruit before heading to my class. Well, when Chris comes home, not having a specific meal ready to go, he digs into his treat from the grocery store – fried chicken. Ashar even tried some, probably a first for her, and was kind of middle-of-the-road on it. But, when she saw Chris eating the meat off the chicken bones, well, that was interesting.

Well, bless Chris… he goes, “Hey, my dinner is turning into a biology lesson in here.” He had started to explain to Ashar, by breaking open one of the bones, that birds’ bones are often hollow inside so they can be light enough to allow for wing-flapping and flying. (You can read more about that here.)

Well, then Ashar goes, “Hey, I have a bone… I have the wishbone from the turkey, and we made it bendy. Can we make these bones bendy?” Well, into a jar with vinegar two of the bones go, and from there, things kind of took off.

First of all, Ashar wanted to know if the chicken bones would do the same thing her turkey wishbone did, so we Googled it. Up comes “Science Bob,” who apparently is a pretty well known “science performer,” having been on things like Jimmy Kimmel Live and what have you. He has a version of the “rubber bone” experiment.

Well, we start reading via Science Bob, and I really like his style – it’s not just, “Hey, kids, here’s a neat thing to do,” but he really explains WHY the bone starts to bend and gives you ideas on how to go from a demonstration to an experiment. (Do differently sized bones become bendy at different times? That’s one Ashar’s working on – her two from Chris’s dinner are wildly different in size. She made a good hypothesis and everything.)

Then, I start clicking around on Science Bob’s site and get a huge list of science experiments you can do right at home. Ashar decided that we HAD to try to clean pennies with vinegar. (Science Bob, by the way, DEFINITELY wins for “favorite resource this week.” I might have a mom-crush on him.)

Cleaning pennies with household items

Check out that before-and-after! All you need is about a quarter-cup of vinegar, a small bowl (not glass), and a teaspoon of salt. Once you’ve mixed the salt and vinegar, add the pennies – and really watch them. You’ll see the copper oxide (the thing that makes them dark and grungy-looking) begin to disappear almost right away.

Well, Science Bob’s version of this keeps going, and so did ours. After several rounds of pennies, we did, as he suggests, try putting some household hardware – nuts and bolts – into the vinegar solution. Try it – you’ll be amazed. The metal attracts the copper that’s been leached out of the pennies, and the shiny silver will change to a coppery-black color!

Science experiment discoloring washers

At right is what our washers looked like when we started. We left the one on the right alone, but we put the one at left into the vinegar-salt mixture after we’d “cleaned” our pennies, and that’s what happened! Even more amazingly, after we’d left it there for some time, you could see what we believe was the salt forming almost a “halo” over the washer in the bowl. It was pretty phenomenal! Ashar also experimented by pouring salt directly onto some of the hardware, to see the effect that might have.

Making a lava lamp in a glass as a homeschool science experiment

Finally – because by this time it was about 10:45 at night, and Mom was getting pretty beat! – we decided to make lava in a cup. This is a density experiment – first, you fill a cup about 2/3 full with water; then, you add about 5 drops of food coloring, if you’d like, just to jazz it up, and finally you pour in about a quarter-cup of vegetable oil. Ashar noticed right away how it separated and the oil rose to the top.

The fun part, though, is that you next dump in about a teaspoon of salt. That’s heavier than the oil, so it sinks through it into the water, carrying little bits of oil along with it; then, when the salt dissolves in the water, the oil pops back up, and you get a sort of a lava-lamp effect.

Our first attempt at this didn’t work as well; we used a HUGE plastic tumbler, and Ashar believes (and I agree) that there was too much water for it to really be a dramatic “bubbling” effect. Next, we tried a smaller glass, and this worked a good bit better; you can see some of our “bubbling” at right.

We also tried pouring in sugar to see if it would work the same way, but as the sugar was a bit lighter, it didn’t tend to sink down through the oil as well. We also talked about saturation – when the salt or sugar would not dissolve in the water any more, then no “bubbles” happened, and we’d have to start fresh.

Finally, we tried a very small juice glass, with no food coloring, and that bubbled pretty fast! (Not nearly as pretty, though.)

Ashar could have worked on these all night, but I had to rescue my salt container, which was nearing emptiness. (And we’re almost two weeks out from our next grocery trip!) After using all this kitchen stuff for our impromptu “science lab,” I reloaded the dishwasher, realized it was already full (again) and got out the detergent.

You know what’s coming, right?

Ashar watches me and says, “Oh, I didn’t put any of that stuff in when I did the dishes earlier. Will that matter?”

::Cue Twilight Zone music, doo de doo doo, doo de doo doo::

15 Apr

Grocery day, menu planning and taco night

I know I promised Part 2 of my mini-series on going full circle from homeschooled student to homeschooling mom. But it’s 11:55 p.m., I’m exhausted, and that post isn’t even STARTED, nor the photos scanned, nor… anything else. So, in the interest of actually getting some sleep, I told my husband I was making a last-minute substitution. His response? “You’re talking to a guy who’s delayed MANY of his Part 2s.” I love being married to a fellow blogger!

Today was our biweekly grocery trip – and by grocery trip, I mean “choreographed production involving a menu plan for the next two weeks, a large list, two stores, tons of coupons, three family members, a calculator, a system for bagging and a partridge in a pear tree.” This is our “works for us” routine, now, and I forget how weird it is until the checkout lady looks at me like, “How much of a mess do you people make with your 30-pack of paper towels, and why do you have 70 pounds of cat litter?”

This was actually a very light trip – between both stores, we were under $240 total, which is really good, budgetarily speaking. And Ashar was willing to come and help, which was also great. Generally our routine is that Chris pushes the cart and manages the list (and the crossing off of things on it); I handle tallying up our expenditures on the calculator using a rounded-to-the-nearest-quarter, military-like precision sytem, and I also juggle the not-yet-used coupons; and, if we’re joined by Mom or Ashar, that person holds the used coupons. If we have FOUR people, a miracle beyond expression, then I don’t have to hold (or subsequently drop) the unused coupons, either.

Ashar was a big help today, even doing some math in her head for us at one store to see what we spent and if it would be enough to use our “$10 off your $35 purchase” coupon. And, in another piece of great news, she was hungry. That’s a big deal; Ashar is actually so underweight that she’s in the first percentile – meaning, if you found 100 kids with her same birthday, she would be the thinnest for her height. Every time. So when she wants to eat something… we make it happen. Exactly the opposite of our own grocery-store strategy, which is never to go when we’re hungry!

Ashar with her tacos

Her request on our menu plan for tonight was tacos, so we put ground beef on the list and were ready to roll with it. When we got to the store, however, she goes, “Oooh, can we look at the fish?” She picked out some wild-caught sockeye salmon, and she says, “I want this on my taco!” And then she looks at shrimp and says, “Do we have shrimp at home? Can I have shrimp on my taco?” In the cart goes the $6 filet of fish, and I make a mental note to revise the other recipe that called for our frozen shrimp!

We normally don’t have a side dish with our tacos, but Chris is incredibly smart, and he says, “What about some rice as a side dish?” So I find a simple box of organic rice pilaf, and into the cart that goes as well.

We get home, and we all work together to make dinner. For the finished product, Ashar layered into her stand-and-stuff taco shell (a BIG requirement for her, on taco night) the following, from the bottom up:

Cheese
Ground beef
Rice pilaf
Salmon
Shrimp
More cheese

(Privately I thought: This sounds gross. Chris says he thought it sounded really good.) The end result was that Ashar ate the entire thing, and even had some extra shrimp and salmon on the side.

Tacos with a lot of seafood

I’ll take that any day. Yay for tacos, for much more adventurous eating than Ashar used to do, and for the chance to spend even the “boring” parts of the day together as a family!

14 Apr

From homeschooled student to homeschooling mom: Going full circle, Part 1

As we start to settle in just slightly to our new “this is what learning is to us now” rhythm, I’ve been thinking a LOT lately about my own educational experiences. In some ways, I’m very different than Ashar – and that can be hard – but in a lot of ways, the more I think about it, the more I realize that if our personalities are different, well, our educational experiences have an awful lot in common! This will be a three-part event; today’s post, which I warn you is LONG, talks about my educational background; the next part (read it here) talks about the beginning of Ashar’s educational journey; and the last part (read it here) shows what led up to our decision to homeschool, specifically in the incredibly relaxed style we’ve chosen. I’ve had a lot of new followers and commenters recently, and I hope this will tell you a bit more about who we are and how we got here. Plus, there are some pretty embarrassing pictures of me as a kid, if that’s more incentive.

Unschool Rules: Going Full Circle - From Homeschooled Student to Homeschooling Mom

Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Joan who loved to learn.

Her parents helped her learn to read, write and even do simple math while she was still very young. She went to a wonderful private K-12 school for kindergarten, starting a year early, and by the end of kindergarten, she’d already done all of the first-grade math and reading lessons. So the next year, Joan, who was 5 years old, took her seat in the small school with the second-grade class.

Life was great (well, except that the desk was just a little big), and Joan loved the experience of learning and talking with all the older kids. Her babysitters, two sisters in high school, would take her “upstairs” to the upper school and let her recite math facts and spell “big” words to the older students. No one at this school seemed to think she was weird, at least not in a bad way; in fact, everyone knew her and took a little extra care with her, since she weighed approximately 10 pounds less than her full backpack of textbooks.

The school closed at the end of the little girl’s second-grade year, though, and her parents took her to the local public elementary school, thinking they might be more equipped with programs for little girls who liked to read and do math problems – a LOT. But there, the officials promptly said, “She can’t be in our third grade… she’s 6 years old!”

Joan’s parents, to use a non-fairy-tale phrase, “pitched a fit.” Being good fit-pitchers and wonderful parents, well, into the third grade Joan went. (The desk was now more than LITTLE big.) In life-changingly good news, though, Joan also went into the approval and testing process for the district’s gifted program. There, she met THE most influential person on her life, outside her family – Ms. Cindy Snyder, gifted support teacher extraordinaire, who would take Joan and many other “delightful cherubs” from the third grade all the way through high school graduation in the gifted seminar program.

Seminar was great – and Joan still loved to learn. She would get a little bored, though, especially during her third-grade math class, and it seemed like most of the other kids didn’t exactly find her “cute” in this school. Honestly, they probably found her a little incredibly annoying, because she just HAD to answer every. Single. Question. She also liked to do worksheets, so if the teacher didn’t assign one for homework, sometimes Joan would remind her, just in case she’d forgotten.

Joan had officially entered the territory of “weird.”

By the middle of fourth grade, the math teacher decided to talk to Joan’s parents. It turned out Joan was a bit of a problem in class. Oh, she got the right answers… but she wasn’t really paying attention; she’d sit in class but work on something four chapters ahead. And if that didn’t interest her… she’d grab a book from her bookbag and read it. The math teacher (who really did like Joan) suggested that maybe homeschooling would be a good option, so that Joan could (a) work at her own pace and (b) not be a totally horrible example for the rest of the class.

When Joan started fifth grade, it was at her kitchen table. She worked at the family candy business with her mom, did the math problems her dad left on the chalkboard before he went to work each morning, begged for – and received – enough workbooks for approximately the entire student population of Pennsylvania; and read just about every book her local library had to offer. Her family became friends with a fellow homeschooling family, and Joan spent a couple days each week at their home, learning with her new friend Laura, while Laura came to Joan’s house on a couple other days.

Papier-mache homeschooling project

It was great. They went on field trips and even learned about veterinary medicine from Laura’s dad, who operated a veterinary clinic on their property. They spent a crazy amount of time outside and made huge papier-mache models of landforms.

Huge model of landforms as a homeschooling project

On a ship in North Carolina

Sixth grade passed in much the same way – no middle-school drama, just fun, friendship (although at this point Joan and Laura DID start to fight like sisters!) and even a joint “education vacation” to North Carolina. And because of Pennsylvania’s homeschooling laws, the school district had to allow Joan to come to the school building for gifted seminar twice a week. That was awesome!!

Joan’s mom and dad were pretty “traditional” homeschoolers; she had assignments to do in each subject, tests and quizzes, the whole works. The thing was, Joan liked it. She liked quizzes and tests and assignments and projects (in theory if not always in practice.) She liked that she could play computer games for “school” and walk in the woods for “gym” and visit a pond for “science.” (She didn’t like, always, that EVERYTHING counted for school. “Hang out with a new friend? That’s called social skills!” Even then, Joan didn’t like the documentation game!)

In seventh grade, to try a new challenge, the family picked up the Calvert School curriculum to use with Joan. This was great – all the material came in a huge box, with books and teacher’s manuals and tests and quizzes and … workbooks!! As Joan prepared to go into tougher subjects like architecture and biology, it was nice for her parents to know that the answers and her lessons were already provided, yet they could continue to “do their own thing,” too.

Joan loved this setup – except for art history and architecture, which she actually had to study and which she consequently didn’t get straight A’s in. I know, dear reader. The agony. The horror.

Things changed suddenly, though, on Oct. 31, 1993, two months into Joan’s seventh-grade year. Her father, who’d had open-heart surgery two years before Joan was born, suffered another heart attack, this one claiming his life right before his daughter’s 11th birthday.

Suddenly, high school math and science looked awfully daunting to Joan’s mom. She was – and is to this day – an incredibly smart lady, but she took business math in school, because “that’s what girls did.” Not algebra, not trigonometry, not calculus. Those had been Dad’s territory. Now, after a lot of thought, the plan became for Joan to finish out seventh grade at home and then return to public school for eighth grade and beyond.

It wasn’t perfect. (In fact, eighth grade was like something you’d write a book about. A miserable book.) Joan was “weird” again – AND new – AND 12 years old when her classmates were 14, sometimes 15. Talk about an awkward stage.

Thankfully, Joan kept going to gifted seminar, and she made some pretty good friends. In fact, it was this year that she met her adulthood best friend, Nina, as well as a fun group of guys – Phil, Chris, Justin, Mike and Brett – who adopted her as their token girl. All of these people remain her friends to this day, which is amazing when you consider that Joan was still a little incredibly annoying to be around at this point. (And still liked to answer every. Single. Question.)

To be honest, school was still kind of boring for Joan, even into high school, but she found some things that kept her going. She joined the band(s), sang in the musical, and took advanced math classes. She kept going to gifted seminar, where Ms. Snyder became much more of a counselor and confidant than a “teacher” in the old sense of the word. Joan skipped homeroom most days to hang out in the computer lab and write really excruciatingly bad poetry.

She also skipped school more than a few days to … well, to do anything else. She got a job, a car, and, in June of 1999, a diploma – salutatorian, with her best friend Phil taking the valedictorian spot. It wasn’t homeschooling, but it worked out pretty OK, and while Joan was still “weird,” she’d found some people who didn’t mind; who were weird themselves; and who all kind of worked together to smooth out each other’s rough edges. Her mom and her favorite teachers were INCREDIBLY supportive, too.

When it came time for college, Joan applied for, oh, about everywhere. She was accepted at several schools – including one that was a little out of her price range – but ended up staying at home and commuting to York College, a school about 15 minutes from her home, because of a combination of good scholarships, great math program and cheap cost of living.

College was sort of what Joan had been waiting for her whole life – a chance to study what she really wanted, to dig as deep as possible into math, which she hoped to make a career out of, and to meet other people who liked what she liked. Joan worked incredibly hard to finish college – especially because she worked a full-time job the whole time, and, in even bigger news, because she gave birth to her son, Ashar, in March of her freshman year.

But in May of 2002, Joan proudly walked across the stage as an honors graduate in mathematics, even receiving the department’s highest honor. Joan applied to work in some pretty crazy places (think guys in black suits and codes that need to be broken), but in a case of the universe showing its sense of humor, it turned out that the best fit was for Joan to keep working at her college job at the local newspaper, where she had been promoted to the night editing desk, revising stories and laying out the pages for each day’s edition. In fact, Joan stayed at the same company, working full-time in a variety of editing positions, until December of 2011. It’s there that the rest of our story … Ashar’s story… really takes off…

To be continued…

12 Apr

Random bits of learning and inspiration

We went to Ikea yesterday and, among a few other odds and ends, picked up a roll of drawing paper for Ashar, who likes to make Big Things.

We ran a length of it the size of our kitchen table, and she used it today to work with Chris on her “Laser Wars” comic strip, something she likes to draw and make up stories about occasionally.

The funny thing is, it wasn’t until AFTER she created the Laser Wars idea a few weeks ago that we found out about this, which is now Ashar’s favorite thing ever. (Mom and Dad like it pretty well, too.)

Meanwhile, she peeled the plastic wrapper off the paper and spent probably a half-hour playing with that, turning it into a hand puppet, a ghost, a vacuum and more. She really surprised me; one thing she turned it into was a cat brush, and she goes, “The hair sticks to the plastic because of static electricity!” Who knew that she knew that?

In other news today, Ashar made herself both breakfast AND lunch AND a snack (all microwavable or ready-to-eat stuff, but still!) and she did her own laundry. That’s a huge self-sufficiency win for us!

She’s also discovered a new online game, Howrse, thanks to an 11-year-old fellow blogger, aka The Girl Named Jack, daughter of Jessica of Bohemian Bowmans.

And she’s talked Chris and I into letting her buy a Nintendo 3DS system, using a combination of her birthday money and the proceeds from selling her old Gameboy Advance. Much like she did with the hamster, she’s worked out all the prices for the things she wants and made a good case for when and how she’ll use it, and we feel pretty confident she’ll be responsible about it, so tomorrow might be the day we go pick it up.

The funny thing is, we’re not really “video game people” very much – this might be the first time, EVER, that we’ll own what’s considered a current system – but Ashar really enjoys a few particular styles of games, and even more, she loves when she can play them against her friends, which I hear is one of the cool parts about the DS series.

Anyone have any game recommendations for us? She wants to get some kind of Mario Kart, and one of the Nintendogs games (have I mentioned she loves animals, both real and virtual?) and I’d love to see her pick up something mildly brain-stimulating. Does Tetris or Dr. Mario or anything like that even exist any more? That’s my sort of thing! So, suggestions are welcomed.

10 Apr

Our scrapbook: Fun and learning this week

Here are 10 of the many random bits of learning and life going on in our world recently. What’s new in YOUR life?

Homeschool chalk art drawing

1. Inspired by a “design” I made by not power-washing my back step too well, Ashar decided to create some chalk art on the stoop. She traced my power-washing line and expanded on it to get the dragon you see above. His friend, another dragon, lives on our front walk, complete with mouth full of fire.

2. Ashar wrote to the City of York via their online form today, telling them her suggestion from last month for what she’d like to see at Kiwanis Lake.

Here’s what she told them: “I am 12 years old and my family and I go to the Kiwanis Lake. I really like seeing all the birds. I came up with an idea for you to put animal feed dispensers for people to feed the birds down at Kiwanis Lake because the sign say no waterfowl feeding and some people ignore the sign. So if you provide food for the people to feed the birds what’s right for them to eat, then it will be better for the birds. You could make money that way and get a lot more people at Kiwanis Lake. It will let younger kids be able to feed the birds what’s right for them to eat.”

Ashar and our goldendoodle, Coby

3. Ashar still absolutely loves the Phantom of the Opera, and we found our CDs of the Broadway cast recording. Here, she decided to camp out on the living room floor and listen to the full album – complete with sleeping bag – after 4-H last week. She pulled the dog’s blanket over next to her, but he decided he’d rather lay on her lap.

4. We heard from Makedo, the company that provided the connectors that went into our recycled stegosaurus and the idea behind it. They asked for more photos and are considering featuring our story on their blog in the next few weeks!

5. Chris and Ashar took a day recently to get out and explore some new places in York County. They headed up along the Susquehanna River, near Brunner Island, and although it was a little cold, they enjoyed the scenery. Here’s Ashar at the river (funny face because she’s chilly).

Ashar at the lake

They also found an old tree stump, and Chris taught Ashar how to count the rings. This tree was around when the Declaration of Independence was signed, I believe they figured out! (It was definitely more than 200 years old.)

Tree with flower

Ashar took this picture – after she gave the tree a flower. She’s neat that way – very respectful of nature!

6. Today, Ashar’s friend Danny came up to hang out for a while. They were talking and laughing, and Danny noticed our piano. “I take piano lessons every week,” he said. “Can I play it?”

So he sits down and plays this song from memory – and not bad, either! I told him he can come play any time; he has a keyboard, but not a full-size one. I did that for many years, so I figure he can entertain us and practice here any time he wants!

Well, he went home, and Ashar sat down at the piano and starts playing. Kid has never had a lesson, other than bits and pieces of “these are the keys of the piano” in public school this year and last, and hearing me talk about things as I play. And what she plays sounds GOOD! I’m not saying she’s a piano virtuoso. But she had an ear for what sounded good and what was dissonant, and she adjusted accordingly.

THEN, she says, “That’s my song that’s in my head. I’m going to write it down.” And she writes the words to her song – which she says is a theme to the Hunger Games. We haven’t seen the movie yet, though I’ll probably take her. She and I have both read and enjoyed the books and I’m hearing OK things about the film.

Anyway, she ends up writing these song lyrics down, and they’re good. They fit the theme of the film, and they fit her melody. Well, hello, music lover. I like this.

Acrylic abstract painting

7. Ashar and I have been working together on this acrylic-on-canvas painting. She has loved to paint for several years, and has been experimenting more and more with different techniques.

To make this one, Ashar took a Sharpie to the blank white canvas and outlined the five shapes you see here in color. She and I painted those using the acrylics, then let it dry. Two days later, we went back and colored in the background using black acrylic to better offset the colors.

Now we just need to find somewhere to display it. Her bedroom and playroom are already quite a bit of an art gallery. Our wall space is becoming limited!

8. We’re still working our way through a couple sixth-grade math workbooks, at a rate of about a page every other day. Today was probably our best example yet of Ashar being willing to try her best and to really care about whether she understood the pages or not.

What really surprises me are the number of math concepts she truly doesn’t know. I’m not talking about math “facts.” I’m talking about things like knowing (or, in her case, not knowing) that 16 times 2 is the same as 16 plus 16. In fact, I am planning a future Top Ten Tuesday post on “10 concepts you and your child should know about math in the real world,” based on that theme.

As a math major, I feel like I’m pretty well positioned to say, “OK, this is something you JUST use in school or a technical job” versus “OK, this is an idea you need to be able to grasp to function in the world.” Specifically, I feel like this would help me outline some of the areas in which I can encourage Ashar and maybe be pretty overt about trying to talk openly about them.

I also think there are a lot of “almost unschoolers” out there who really get hung up on the subject of math, and I’d love to be able to provide some clarity and some ability to relax; you know, “If you kids understand how to make change and how to price-compare at the grocery store, stop worrying!” That sort of thing.

Do you think this would be helpful?

9. Back to art… one of my favorite mediums is collage, using magazine words and pictures. I’ve made hundreds, probably, mostly dealing with words and phrases that really speak to me. I’ve sold a few, given others as gifts, decorated our house with others. (One was my wedding gift to Chris!)

So, the other day, while trying to clean the house, I found a bunch of magazines ready for the recycling bin, and I thought, “Hey, this is something I can do with Sarah!”

Enjoy Action, Be Fearless collage art

She decided it was like a poem: “Enjoy action. Be fearless!” So she wrote that down and also made a PowerPoint slideshow with that same saying on various backgrounds. This can be a GREAT low-cost activity that’s creative – and will really teach you about what your kids like! (Can you tell Ashar likes animals and the color blue?)

10. We’re watching two PBS specials this evening about the Titanic. During one break, Ashar asked me, “Mom, were any of our ancestors on the Titanic? You should go to ancestry.com and find out.”

Well, it turns out you CAN search the known records of the Titanic via their site – for free! (Here’s the link.) No records that seemed like they were from my mom’s family, or my dad’s; that said, while I was there, I got suckered into looking at 1930 Census records for both of my parents’ families, which was kind of neat!

Not sure about my husband’s forbears on the Titanic. They were certainly travelers, but we don’t have any “family legends” to that effect, so they’d be distant relatives at best.

***

So there you have it, 10 ways we’ve been learning and doing in the past week or so, our week in review! It’s weird; until I sat down to write this out, I was thinking, “We haven’t done much lately.” Turns out, we’ve done a lot, and it’s been awfully fun.

09 Apr

Titanic: Ship of Dreams

Titanic breaking in half

See that famous ship? That’s ALMOST how our Sunday night ended up – going down fast into a watery abyss.

Let’s rewind, shall we? About four months ago, as part of my continuing efforts to get our credit-card debt paid down, I took our cable package down one level. Saved close to $20 a month, and no noticeable loss of usefulness. Great, right?

About a week and a half ago, Ashar received the April National Geographic, featuring the Titanic (in honor of it being the 100th anniversary of the sinking) and found an ad for the huge two-hour special about the crash, featuring James Cameron, on the National Geographic Channel on TV. She marked it on our calendar and everything. We were told, during Easter dinner, that we would all have to watch quietly, so she could hear every word.

About an hour before it was to start, Ashar went to watch one of the “prequel” shows, about another ocean liner disaster.

About two minutes after that, huge tears were rolling down her face, as the TV cruelly told her, “You do not have access to this channel.” Cue Intense Mom Panic.

About two minutes after THAT, I was on the live chat with Comcast’s tech support, only to be told (and I later found out from a friend who works there, that this is not the case), that it would take 12 to 24 hours to get access to a new channel, even if I paid for the upgrade immediately.

Thankfully, we scraped together a plan. I put out the SOS on Facebook, seeking someone with a higher cable budget than mine to tape the show, and my great friend Steph was our lifeboat. (STEPH, YOU ARE AN ANGEL. BLESSINGS ON YOU.) Chris, meanwhile, opted for the immediate distraction, rearranging the deck chairs, if you will, and asked Ashar if it would help make it up to her if we all went to see Titanic (the movie) in 3D. Thankfully, Ashar’s answer was yes, and the three of us headed to the movies for the next three hours, watching the fictionalized version of the wreck almost in real time.

We’d talked in advance with Ashar that this was a “grown-up movie” in some places, and she was incredibly mature about it. Moreso, I think, than the teenagers a few rows behind us! Meanwhile, while Ashar was a little weepy at a few spots, I was a total waterworks. Afterward, Ashar says, “Mom, I think you were crying at the one part.” I said, “Why don’t you just ask what parts I wasn’t crying at? I cried when they got on the stinking boat!”

So, around 12:30 in the morning, we finally got home, had a fairly quick discussion about what was fiction and what was non-fiction about the movie we’d seen, and everyone was off to bed. (Hence, no end-of-day Sunday blog post for me!) Steph dropped off the tape this afternoon, and we plan to watch it as soon as we’re all home for the command performance.

Meanwhile, the other big news from yesterday was also ship-related; we went to visit our friend Jim Lewin, owner of The York Emporium, because he’d let us know Saturday that he’d found a replica copy of the New York Times about the Titanic sinking for Sarah. We picked that up… and we also picked up a sailboat for $16 and change.

Model ship

I’ve always wanted a sailboat… not so much always wanted one on my mantel, but it kind of looks good. At least the colors match! And Ashar just loves it. She found similar models online selling for MUCH more, so she’s convinced she got a great deal. (Next up: She wants to get and build this Revell RMS Titanic model kit… thankfully, she likes this reasonably priced one, and not the $2,000 one!)

Finally, just for fun: Our family project earlier in the day Sunday was to try to bring some much-needed organization to the main floor of our house. We really, really needed a place to put our books, and thankfully, my mom found a bookcase she no longer needed in her room, and we’ve place it alongside the sofa, where it’s supposed to pull double duty as an end table and as a “save Joan’s piano from having books piled all over it all the time” piece of furniture.

The Titanic books and newspapers occupy a place of honor on the bottom left. Unfortunately, Huggles, our three-legged tiny cat, also wants to occupy that place of honor, and Mr. Bill, our 17-pound Baby Huey of a cat, wants to displace Huggles using any means possible, including “overflowing his belly off the top shelf onto him.”

Cats on bookshelf

BIG CAT, DEAD AHEAD!