We start tomorrow with “official” homeschooling.  I thought it would be fun to let grandparents, et alia, follow along, so there is a new page (you should see it at the top under the title) devoted entirely to Lucy’s little projects, my lesson plans, the books were’re reading, and the like.

Before you get too excited about it though, remember that Lucy is only two.  So “homeschooling” at this point is going to focus on a letter a week (with themed books, crafts, snacks, etc.), a saint or two a week, and lots of playing and being two.  But I’m hoping that getting an early start on the structure (!) of organized (!) home learning will pay off when we get to quadratic equations and the like in a couple of years (kidding, only Craig thinks that will really happen).

So check out the new page, there promises to be plenty of cuteness oozing from it in the weeks to come.

Elizabeth Foss uses this quote from Edith Stein in her book:

“The soul of a woman must therefore be expansive and open to all human beings; it must be quiet so that no small weak flame will be extinguished by stormy winds; warm so as not to benumb fragile buds; clear, so that no vermin will settle in dark corners and recesses; self contained, so that no invasions from without can impede the inner life; empty of itself, in order that extraeneous life may have room in it; finally, mistress of itself and also of its body, so that the entire person is readily at the disposal of every call.”

–Essays on Woman, 132-133 (In Real Learning, 210-211)

That should be an aide to personal growth goal setting…

We are experimenting to see how long we can survive without air conditioning. I’m shooting for Memorial Day. (We will get a respite on Mother’s Day, since Craig’s parents are coming over and I’m not going to impose this penance on anyone else!) We didn’t use it last month, and our electric bill was less than 1/3 of what it had been. We’ve been spending lots of time outside (in the shade mostly!) and leaving the house open for the breeze. It’s not terrible, just a little uncomfortable, and I have a new appreciation for those little breaths of cool air!

One benefit of being outside so much is all the nature we get to see in our own back yard. We found a frog in the laundry closet! Here is a pic, and we have a video of it making its escape, as well, but it’s too big to post at the moment. These are the sort of things I am really, really looking forward to with homeschooling.

My book list on the side has been updated. I’m on a homeschooling binge at the moment, re-reading Elizabeth Foss’s wonderful book, as well as a couple of new ones Craig decided to order from Amazon rather than get from interlibrary loan.

Our seniors are done with school, and we will be, too, at the end of the month. I just have one quiz and exams left to make!! This is all very exciting, and coupled with the encouraging homeschooling reading, is giving me back some of the energy I’ve been lacking lately.

Here are a few more pictures of the girls doing what they do.

Samantha attempting to eat grass.

Lucy drawing.  The Easter eggs she made at Grandma’s months ago have been recycled into Easter season decorations (on the wall behind her).  Most of them have now been removed and the stickers rearranged again (and again).

Lucy’s block house.

Samantha is teething like a mad woman and enjoys the pieces of Lucy’s puzzle.

Cutting play-doh

Clearly, it’s been a busy week.  : )

Someday I want to live (and think, and write…) like this.  Elizabeth Foss was one of my first introductions to homeschooling, and I’m re-reading her book right now.  I have a hard time even imagining the sort of faith and love she lives everyday.

“Adults have taken it for granted that children are sensible only to gaudy objects, bright colors, and shrill sounds, and they make use of these to attract a child’s attention.  We have all noticed how children are attracted by songs, by the tolling of bells, by flags fluttering in the wind, by brilliant lights, and so forth.  But these violent attractions are external and transitory, and can be more of a distraction than boon.  We might make the comparison with our own way of acting.  If we are busy reading an interesting book and suddenly hear a loud band passing by in the street, we get up and go to the window to see what is happening.  If we were to see someone act in this way, we would hardly conclude that men are particularly attracted by loud sounds.  And yet we make this conclusion about little children.  The fact that a strong, external stimulus catches a child’s attention is merely incidental and has no real relation with the inner life of the child which is responsible for his development.  We can perceive evidence of a child’s inner life in the way he immerses himself in the fixed contemplation of minute things that are of no concern to us.   But one who is attracted by the smallness of an object and focuses his attention upon it does so, not because it has made a striking impression upon him, but simply because his contemplation of it is an expression of an affectionate understanding.”

-Maria Montessori, The Secret of Childhood

“Our attitude towards the newborn child should not be one of compassion but rather of reverence before the mystery of creation, that a spiritual being has been confined within limits perceptible to us.”

“But if in the child are to be found the makings of the man, it is in the child also that the future welfare of the race is to be found”

-Maria Montessori, The Secret of Childhood

I often find myself amazed that the great respect and awe Montessori had for the child.  This respect informs and underpins her whole philosophy of growth and learning, which I like more and more as I read through it.  I’m looking forward to implementing some of these attitudes into my homeschooling over the next few years (although much of her work applies more to child-rearing than “schooling” – good thing I don’t have to draw a clear line between the two!)

So I just finished The Long Loneliness which is a kind of autobiography Dorthy Day wrote back in the fifties.  I highly recommend it, first of all.  The first section about her early life is fascinating, the section about the birth of her daughter is moving (and should be required reading for mothers), and her depiction of Peter Maurin, who practically drove her to start the Catholic Worker movement, left me wondering why he hasn’t been canonized yet.  There will be much, much more on The Long Loneliness as I re-read it in the coming months, but we started looking again at Maurin’s Easy Essays, and here is one for a taste.  I suspect a similar feeling of unconnectedness to my experience in the world is what has caused me to drift away from my interest in formalized theology.  (No offence intended, studiers of formalized theology, it’s just that I have found God more easily in my garden than in Aquinas lately.)

BLOWING THE DYNAMITE

There are schools of thought which encourage children be fed by having several different foods (including dessert!) set before them at the beginning of a meal, and the child will naturally choose the foods which his body happens to need at the moment (and not necessarily dessert).  The thought is that a small child, not yet driven by mere routine, not having been taught simply to finish his plate, is still connected to voice of her body.  We haven’t implemented this totally into Lucy’s world, but we don’t force her to make a “happy plate” either.

I bring this up not because of our eating habits, but because of what I’ve been seeing from Lucy the last day or so.  She is coming down with a head cold, and last night the girl who never goes to bed without screaming curled up next to me saying, “I going to sleep.”  Then she let me get up and leave the room and went to sleep without a snuggly parent.  Unheard of.

This morning she slept late and even when she woke up, didn’t want to get out of bed but claimed, “I going to sleep.”  And she laid there for close to an hour by herself.  My rambuncious two-year-old does not spend extra time in bed.  But today, she recognized that what her body needed most was rest, and made sure she got it.  

So I guess my job now is to stay out of the way in hopes that she will keep being able to respond to her body’s cues like this when she’s five, and fifteen, and thirty-five.  And maybe along the way I can learn a little from her (and Samantha) about listening to my body well, and trusting what I hear.

Allow me a lenghty quote, and a few (less lenghty) comments. ? Is it me, or does anyone else wonder why it is taking so many Americans so long to realize some of the things Montessori mentions below? ? (More on this later – I think I can combine some of my readings!)

“But let us think, for a moment, of the many peoples of the world who live at different cultural levels from our own. ? In the matter of child rearing, almost all of these seem to be more enlightened than ourselves–with all our Western ultramodern ideals. ? (more…)

Craig stumbled on an interesting article the other day about the damage screen time (TV, computer, etc.) can do to the developing brain.? You can read the rest of the article here, but I’d like to share just the conclusion for its insights:

“We human beings are a strange bunch. We grind up grains that appeal to a dog’s extremely sensitive sense of taste and press these into shapes resembling cartoon bones. Then we package these cartoon bones in colorful boxes that appeal to human adults because dogs would never do such a thing. The same is true of babies. Babies would never buy Baby Einstein videos. They are too busy playing and learning from the real world. The real consumers of Baby Einstein products are not babies. The real target is parents and grandparents who want their little darlings to be the next Einstein. I’m quite sure that Baby Einstein products are well produced, colorful and captivating. But the medium is the message, not the program flashing on the screen. I prefer to squish peas in my mashed potatoes, thank you.”

-“Just Say NO to Baby Einstein”
By Michael Mendizza

His main point is that the real world is a much better educator for a child than anything PBS can dream up, but there are so many places to go with this!? First of all, it does say something about a society that views intelligence as a commodity.? We all want to get ahead, and we want our children to get ahead in their turn, and the best way to do that is for them to go to college, preferably on scholarship so we don’t have to pay for it, so we had better have them well prepared for preschool.? I want my kids to read early as much as the next parent, but because I want them to be able to enjoy books and grow from their own ability to investigate what interests them in these books, and if they end up at the top of the class, that is only lagniappe.

More importantly, the difference in Lucy, our two-year-old, between a TV-full day and a TV-free day is dramatic, at least in those little details we mothers tend to notice.? Like tantrums.? It would seem that less TV = fewer tantrums.? And as easy as it is for me to get work done while she sits mesmerized by hours of Elmo and friends, at the same time it is disappointing to realize that she is not interacting, or really acting at all, but mostly absorbing flashing lights.? (Sometime I will write about how close the “interactive” shows are to Ray Bradbury’s vision in Farenheit 451, but not today.)? Maybe it would be better for that load of laundry to stay unfolded if it means she gets to spend more time painting, playing with bread dough, or running outside.

So, for the time being, our TV has taken up residence in the bottom of our bedroom closet, and in the newly-cleaned out space next to its dark screen, Lucy has established a new place to hide and pretend.