Fanny Harville's Unschool Academy

Field Trip: New York City (Again)

2012-01-28T13:07:00.002-05:00

Last weekend we took a 4-day trip to New York City to visit my sister and N.'s sister, each of whom moved there in late 2011. This was N.'s second visit to the city (I wrote about the first here). It was cold and snowy and fun!

Although we arrived in the city by plane instead of by train as we did last time, there was still a significant train theme to our visit. We went to Gantry Plaza State Park in Queens, which is beautifully redesigned public space dominated by old gantries that once moved freight between trains and barges on the East River.

Of course we rode the subway all over and N. tracked our routes carefully.

And we went to the New York Transit Museum! N. loved all the old elevated and subway cars, especially the wooden ones.

Another theme of the weekend was, of course, architecture and old buildings. We went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art where N. wanted to see the Egyptian mummies and the Temple of Dendur, which we'd examined carefully last trip as well. He also wanted to see the Greek and Roman galleries this visit, and he was especially taken with this monumental column from the Temple of Artemis. He also spent some time viewing a Roman bedroom with architectural frescoes, the painted amphorae and bowls, and the marble sculptures of men and women from 100 B.C-100 A.D. At one point N. glimpsed the old arches from the original Victorian Gothic building that is at the core of the museum (though mostly obscured by the neoclassical facade and various additions) and was immensely excited. He vastly prefers the Victorian Gothic style (despite the fact that the original building was almost immediately out of style after it was built)!

[Photo by Graham Haber]

We visited the The Morgan Library, designed by Charles McKim in 1906 in the gilded robber-baron style N. admires. He loved the library's multi-tiered bookshelves and balconies (a guard showed N. where to peek through a crack in a pivoting shelf to see the hidden spiral staircases leading to the balconies) and he was interested in the books and manuscripts on display. He also really loved the new Renzo Piano-designed addition to the Morgan complex, and spent a lot of time looking at the model of the complex and the photos showing Piano's design process and the construction of the addition.

We took an exhilarating walk on the High Line in the snow and enjoyed the elevated perspective it offers on an array of interesting buildings.

And we rode the A train north and took a lovely snowy walk through Fort Tryon Park to The Cloisters. N. enjoyed seeing all the fragments of 12th-century buildings on display, especially all the plant motifs as in this column, which are much less common in the later Gothic buildings he's familiar with. We all swooned over the unicorn tapestries.

It was a rich trip!

"Careful. We don't want to learn from this."

2012-01-25T15:39:00.000-05:00

Someone has discovered Calvin & Hobbes! (And has been devouring the books non-stop.)

An Autobiography by Frank Lloyd Wright

2012-01-13T15:42:00.000-05:00

In December, Tim started reading An Autobiography (1943) by Frank Lloyd Wright to N. as the next text in the improvised biography/autobiography curriculum they've been pursuing together. This choice made a lot of sense since N. loves buildings and drawing and has long been a fan of some of Wright's most famous structures, such as Fallingwater and the Guggenheim Museum. But the book is challenging listening for him, not only because of Wright's nontraditional narrative style, which N. has been able to follow well enough. As much as N. admires some of his buildings, Wright's aesthetic was formed in vigorous opposition to the style N. absolutely loves: the Queen Anne house. So he has had to wrestle with the intellectual challenge of appreciating some but not all of the views of an inspiring man.

In his account of his childhood, Wright dismisses most of his formal education as having little impact on his learning or development:

But -- of the schooling itself? Not a thing he can remember!

A blank! Except colorful experiences that had nothing academic about them. Like dipping the gold braid hanging down the back of the pretty girl sitting in front into the ink-well of his school desk and drawing with it. Getting sent home in consequence (p. 36).

Instead, he credits Froebel's Gifts in his very young childhood, raucous play with friends (including running a printing press and lots of drawing), and summers of hard labor on his uncle's Wisconsin farm with truly forming him.

But the schooling! Trying to find traces of it in that growing experience ends in finding none. What became of it? Why did it contribute so little to this consciousness-of-existence that is "the boy"? It seems purely negative, and for that reason it may not have been positively harmful. Difficult for one to say. You can't let boys run wild while they are growing. They have to be roped and tied to something so that their parents can go about their business. What not a subbing post or -- school then? A youth must be slowed-up, held in hand. Caged -- yes -- mortified too. Broken to harness as colts are broken, or their would be nothing left but to make an "artist" of him. Send him to an Art Institute.

But certain episodes were harmful and remain so to this day (p. 37).

So, Wright doesn't denounce school, but he repeatedly describes his real learning taking place elsewhere. He matriculated at the University of Wisconsin at Madison to study engineering because he couldn't afford architectural school, thus escaping what he calls "the curse of 'architectural' education of that day in the United States with its false direction in culture and wrong emphasis on sentiment" (p. 52). He attended classes in the mornings and worked in the afternoons at the private engineering firm of the Dean of Engineering at the University; "it was with Professor Conover, in that practice of his, that the youth really learned the most" (p. 53).

His university classes frustrated him: "Mathematics excepted, there seemed little meaning in the studies" (p. 52). Wright criticizes his math professor for having "no feeling for the romance in his subject. A subject when rightly apprehended most romantic.... Is it unreasonable to suppose that a professor of mathematics should be a poet? Or a civil engineer be a creative composer of symphonies?" (p. 52). Similarly, he "yearned to read and write his own language -- yearned to speak it -- supremely well" but found his pompous English professor's minimal marks on his compositions worthless. Instead, on his own he read Carlyle, Plutarch, Ruskin, Morris, Shelley, Goethe, Blake, and Viollet-le-Duc. "But he doesn't know in the least what he read in the school course" (p. 53).

When he was eighteen, though he only had one semester remaining to complete his degree, Wright left the University and absconded to Chicago to seek a job in architecture. He repeatedly contrasted the "Doctrine" at the University with the "active contact with the soil" he'd had laboring on the farm (p. 57). His family strenuously objected, but he yearned to act, do, make -- now.

He now put "University" behind him; a boundless faith grown strong in him. A faith in what? He could not have told you. He got on the Northwestern train for Chicago -- the Eternal City of the West.

Here is the bravery of all life, in this tragic break with background, in this stand against the clear sky -- whatever fear, superfluous: This is my own earth! A song in the heart (p. 60).

Wright calls this sentimental even as he writes it, and almost sheepishly blames the Goethe he'd been reading for his romantic sense of purpose and urge for "action, again action and more action" (p. 58). But origin stories are always romances, and isn't that what we read autobiographies for?

When they see N.'s drawings and hear about his passion for old buildings, people often say to us, "Oh, he'll be an architect when he grows up." But unlike Wright's mother (who intended him for architecture from the cradle), we have no specific plans or expectations for N.'s career choices. Wright's story is valuable for N. because, like all the others Tim has read to him so far, it details the courage, hard work, passion, and contrariness required to live an inspired, true life, no matter what one's profession.

Game Time!

2012-01-01T14:23:00.001-05:00

We were fortunate enough to be able to avoid traveling for the holidays, which meant lots of time to play games old and new. N. doesn't initiate playing a lot of board and card games during our regular life, but the holidays have become associated with games, in part since he receives new games as gifts. So the past couple weeks we've been playing epic, multi-day bouts of Monopoly, as well as Yahtzee, Uno, Rush Hour, Battleship, and Parcheesi. I enjoy seeing how much better he is at the math and logic required for some of these games than he was a year ago. And N. had a great time playing games with his grandparents. It's fun to have moved beyond Candyland into the realm of games we can all enjoy.

The Nutcracker and an Un-Recital

2011-12-19T12:56:00.000-05:00

We had an arts-rich weekend! N. and I went to our fourth annual Nutcracker performance; the university arts conservatory in our city puts on an excellent production with an all-student cast, orchestra, and crew, and N. and I love it. Before our first Nutcracker, we read and reread this longish adaptation of Hoffman's tale, which is not the original (despite the author credit) but is fairly close to it in spirit while also being close to the plot of the traditional ballet, so N. could follow what was happening onstage. His favorite parts of the ballet include the party scene, the growing Christmas tree, the Snow Fairies, the Russian dancers, Mother Ginger, and the Sugarplum Fairy, not to mention all the music -- in other words, just about everything!

We go to one of the matinee performances, along with every other small child in the state, it seems, most of whom squirm, whisper, and sometimes even cry their way through the two hour show (some Nutcrackers are longer, but happily this production is streamlined and fast-paced!). Their reaction is understandable, if preventable; The Nutcracker is a fairly odd story, and seeing it acted out via ballet can be confusing if you don't know what is going on or aren't used to watching ballet. I think it is worth going because it can be a lovely visual representation of the magic of Christmas, but it is not worth the expensive tickets if your children aren't prepared to actually enjoy it. Here are my (fairly obvious!) tips for having a successful Nutcracker outing. Before you go:

Read aloud a good, detailed version of the story that bears a strong resemblance both to the original and to the stage version many times.
Listen to the music (full score, not the Suite) a lot and talk about which pieces go with which parts of the story.
Prepare your child for watching ballet by addressing questions such as "Why are the men wearing tights?"
Talk about proper concert-going behavior! Although no one expects classical-symphony-concert-level behavior from kids at The Nutcracker matinee, everyone pays a lot of money for tickets, so let's be sure they can all see and hear the performance.

After watching this performance, N. participated in another the next day. The students of N.'s piano teacher were invited to a party at a house in the country where they played the Christmas tunes they've all been learning on a gorgeous Steinway grand. It was a lovely, low-key un-recital focused on sharing music, punch and cookies, and after making music the kids all ran wild outside through the rest of the crisp, sunny afternoon.

N. was nervous beforehand, and in the days leading up to the event, the ragtime "Jingle Bells" and "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" pieces he was going to play completely fell apart. But he rose to the occasion, played beautifully, and really enjoyed performing (in fact he said he wished he'd been able to play more pieces!). It was fun to see all the kids so focused and intent as they played their holiday songs.

Yet Another Train Museum: Roanoke, VA

2011-12-12T15:06:00.000-05:00

PRR GG1

For a couple years N. has longed to go the the Virginia Museum of Transportation in Roanoke, VA, so we took a day trip there Saturday. Although the collection was smaller than we expected, its stock was very clearly labelled (unlike that of the North Carolina Transportation Museum!) so we learned a lot. The museum collection includes two important engines that are the sole survivors of their classes, the J class and the A class. Both classes were built in Roanoke and were among the most powerful modern steam engines; they were the last steam engines in regular service in the United States (Norfolk & Western abandoned steam for diesel in 1960). Another gem in the collection is the iconic Pennsylvania Railroad GG1 electric locomotive, with streamlined sheath and paint scheme designed by Raymond Loewy in 1930s. The J and the GG1 might be our new family favorites!

We then proceeded to the O. Winston Link Museum, housed in the former N&W passenger station in Roanoke (built in 1904 and redesigned in the late 1940s by Raymond Loewy!). Link took incredible photos in the late 1950s of the soon to be defunct steam trains and life in the towns along the rail lines out of Roanoke. Some of these are collected in The Last Steam Railroad in America, a longtime favorite book of N's. (We'd also seen an exhibit of Link's photographs last year in a local museum; that show was the occasion for N's first movie, The General).

Another small gallery in the passenger station was devoted to the work of industrial designer Raymond Loewy, who is responsible for the look of so much of 20th-century American life, from Coke bottles, to trains, to Greyhound buses, to Studebakers, to the Exxon, Shell, Post Office, and Lucky Strike logos... We learned a lot and our interest was piqued enough to take a look at his autobiography Never Leave Well Enough Alone, for a possible text in Tim and N.'s autobiography curriculum!

Bonus reading: Wikipedia article about the GG1

Second-Grade Science at Home: Experiments and Stories

2011-12-08T00:00:00.000-05:00

For N.'s kindergarten and first-grade years, we took a very unschool approach to science, alert to all the ways small children build scientific knowledge through everyday experience and elaborating on concepts as they arose (for example, volume and displacement in bathtub play) while eschewing formal science lessons or experiments. N. learned science through play outdoors and in, gardening, long walks, butterfly and cloud study, plant- and animal-kingdom classification. Self-directed reading has been an important means of his science learning, from the concepts of physics and construction in David Macauley's Cathedral, Mill, and Castle, to the principles of engine mechanics in the many books we own about trains, to random topics such as simple machines that are explained so effectively in Macauley's The Way Things Work, to picture encyclopedias of insects, animals, and the planets.

Last year (first grade), Tim supplemented these unschool science experiences by reading aloud to N. the compelling narratives of scientific discovery in Uncle Tungsten and Madame Curie. These stories articulate the thrill as well as the grind of scientific pursuits, and together they offer a rich account of the history of chemistry from Humphry Davy onward.

Following their general trend toward more formal learning activities this year (though we continue to see science learning in all the ongoing unschool activities listed above), Tim and N. have been doing experiments from two workbooks several times a week. The books are Hands-On Earth Science and Hands-On Physical Science. We don't recommend these books: the experiments are not always clearly written, sometimes flawed in design, and occasionally even wrong (for example, suggesting that a cup full to the brim with water and ice cubes will overflow when the ice melts). The explanations of the concepts that the experiments demonstrate are extremely brief and unsatisfying. I'm sure there are much better books out there, but we happened to have these (bought cheap at a homeschool fair), so they've been using them as a first foray into home experiments. These experiments introduce or reinforce concepts that Tim and N. will want to (in some cases have already begun to) pursue in the future in greater depth as well as simply giving them practice in conducting experiments. Even when they don't produce the expected result, N. talks with Tim about experiment design and tries to puzzle out why they failed. Tim and N. choose experiments to try at random, so their exploration of scientific concepts through experimentation is fairly haphazard. They do an experiment when it appeals to them, which I think maximizes its learning potential. Rather than approach N.'s science learning more systematically (i.e. learning about foundational concepts and then building on them), we try through conversation to reinforce and make connections among the concepts they have explored because they seemed interesting. I hope that their next phase of at-home science experiments will move beyond simply reproducing experiments in a book to designing and executing their own experiments to explore scientific questions generated by N.

In addition to experiments, since Uncle Tungsten and Madame Curie were so effective as narrative science "textbooks," Tim has been reading to N. several days a week this semester from Joy Hakim's The Story of Science, beginning with the Greeks in the first volume. These books are written for children and N is really enjoying them. He has absorbed both history of science and abstract concepts from this reading.

So far then, our science curriculum has been made up of play & life + experiments & stories. Do you have any favorite books of science experiments or stories to recommend to us?

Synchronicity in Newport

2011-12-03T21:39:00.001-05:00

I had fun this morning reading a recent New York Times article to N. that I had "clipped" to my phone (I love the Instapaper app) to share with him over breakfast. In the article, "Plans for a Memorial Splits Newport's Old Guard," a disparate bunch of people of historic importance from 4 centuries collide in a surprising way, and N. has encountered them all recently in his various studies: Roger Williams, Edith Wharton, Doris Duke, and Maya Lin. The article describes how some wealthy residents of Newport disapprove of Maya Lin's commissioned design for a memorial to Doris Duke in a city park Duke developed in the 1970s. Other wealthy residents who'd hired Lin meet to plan their continuing support of her design in a house once owned by Edith Wharton. Lin says her design was in part inspired by the importance of public assembly to Rhode Island's founding father Roger Williams.

Over the past two weeks, N. and Tim have been reading about the founding of Jamestown and Plymouth, the Separatists and Pilgrims, and Roger Williams' role in the Rhode Island colony in A History of Us. Somewhere the other day N. and I encountered an image of Maya Lin and her cat, which led us to look up and discuss her Vietnam Veterans Memorial. N. has long been interested in Edith Wharton's various houses and he's pored over library books with photos of hers and other Gilded Age houses in Newport. And we've gawked repeatedly at "Doris," James B. Duke's private railcar named for his daughter, which is on display at the North Carolina Museum of Transportation.

N.'s mind was fairly blown as I proceeded through the article and read the casual references to each of these four figures. I enjoyed seeing him process this surprising historical remix. Such moments when our discrete tidbits of learning converge are so rich!

Betsy-Tacy for Boys

2011-11-20T23:30:00.000-05:00

In a recent blog post on the New York Times website noting the publication of The Betsy-Tacy Treasury (an omnibus reissue of the first 4 Betsy-Tacy books) Pamela Paul writes,

"A ramshackle four-story brownstone in mid-20th-century Manhattan. A Lower East Side tenement at the turn of the last century. The woods of Wisconsin in 1964.

These are just a few of the landscapes that female readers of children’s literature cling to well after they cease reading the books that introduced them. ('The Saturdays,' 'All-of-a-Kind Family' and 'Caddie Woodlawn'for those who somehow missed these greats.) But there may be no world that provokes such profound girlish longing as the bucolic century-old Minnesota of 'Betsy-Tacy.'" [italics mine]

I found myself irritated by Paul's assumption that the readership for the classics listed above is exclusively female and that thus only women look back on them fondly, because these are all books that my son loves and that we have read and reread aloud together with great pleasure. Some, like All-of-a-Kind Family or Betsy-Tacy are about girls, but in The Saturdays the two boys and two girls in the family take up equal space in the narrative. If we assume a fun, charming book like The Saturdays, with two engaging boys as central characters, is a "girls' book," we are shutting boy readers out of whole swaths of children's fiction thanks to our own gender biases about what girls and boys enjoy.

As feminists, Tim and I have always emphasized with N. the fundamental equality of men and women, boys and girls. Gender stereotypes that appear in our reading that imply essential differences in the abilities or interests of boys and girls never stand without critical comment from us. Boys can cry. Girls can fight. Some boys like dolls. Some girls don't ("Mom, I know," N. will say with impatience at my zillionth editorial comment to this effect!). As an extension of this, we have tried to avoid gender stereotyping in our selection of books to read to N. We don't assume that because he is a boy, he will be drawn to certain kinds of stories or bored by others. When we began reading chapter books aloud, I was thrilled to begin sharing some of my childhood favorites with N., such as the Betsy-Tacy books, The Railway Children, and The Five Little Peppers and it never occurred to me that he wouldn't love them too; I did not love these books because they were "girl books" and I was a girl, but because they were great stories and I loved to read. While I've looked to others for help generating a list of books with boys as heroes (because I read few such books myself as a child) my main goal in reading aloud with N. has been to share great stories with him, no matter the gender of the characters.

We make a mistake when we assume that children (or we ourselves, for that matter) need to identify with the hero or heroine of a book in order to have a meaningful encounter with it. Indeed, much of the pleasure of reading is in experiencing the unfamiliar, the strangeness of a book's world and its people, and our strong awareness as we read that these are not our lives or our selves. We read not only to find kindred spirits, or rather, when we read we find kindred spirits where we might not have expected them. We should beware of constructing boys as readers primarily interested in one kind of book or character so we don't deprive them of the opportunity to make connections with a diverse range of characters and types of stories.

As I've been thinking about all this, I asked N. why he liked the first four Betsy-Tacy books so much. I think his reply sums up everything I've been trying to articulate above: they're about "3 wild girls who can go out by themselves and have adventures!" We recommend them enthusiastically!

***
Bonus reading [updated link]: Other parents who read Betsy-Tacy to their boys, and also to a whole classroom of kids.

Letterboxing Redux

2011-11-14T11:47:00.001-05:00

The very first post I wrote on this blog in November 2008 was about our first letterboxing adventure. Since then we'd found about 20 boxes, but we hadn't hunted for any for the past year and a half. Looking over all the neat stamps in our log book revived N.'s interest in the activity, so we set out on a gorgeous Saturday morning to search in a lovely park. What I especially appreciate about letterboxing is the combination of purpose and wandering that it offers. On this outing we only found two of the five stamps we were looking for, but we had a wonderful time exploring the park, kicking through the fallen leaves, and soaking up the autumn sun.

Bonus reading: Atlasquest, where we find our clues. Letterboxing North America (lots of information, although the clues at this site seem less up-to-date). The Smithsonian article that is said to have introduced letterboxing to Americans.

Fun and Games: Puzzled by New York

2011-11-09T14:59:00.001-05:00

Tim's daughter Anne gave N. an amazing 4-D Cityscape New York City Puzzle for his birthday in late August and he's been diligently working away at it. He was thrilled to finally complete it last weekend (with some help from Grandma!).

It was a great gift because he loves New York, buildings, and miniatures. He had a wonderful time working on it and he really learned the layout of the city from the tactile process of laboriously fitting the pieces together.

First you have to put together the grid of the city. This was the most challenging and time-consuming part of the puzzle.

Then you add the buildings. The "fourth dimension" of the puzzle's title is time; the plastic buildings are numbered chronologically according to their date of construction and an accompanying timeline poster lists their names and dates as well. Naturally, N. loved this: history and buildings! He didn't start with Old City Hall and work his way towards the present when placing the buildings, however; he put them in as he happened to figure out where they went. But he still learned a lot about the history of the skyline and the buildings of New York.

And now that he's completed the puzzle, he spends a lot of time touching and looking at it, absorbing the shapes and outlines of the city.

Many children's museums and science museums have hands-on exhibits to foster tactile learning; such exhibits often seem to be less than effective or engaging for N. But I think the difference with this puzzle is that "fourth dimension," time. The time it took him to put the puzzle together and the time he has to come back to it again and again make it deeply engaging and productive as a learning experience.

****
Bonus reading: Here's an interesting meditation on the role of time in learning, by Lori at Camp Creek Blog.

Happy Birthday, Marie Curie!

2011-11-07T10:16:00.000-05:00

[Image source]

Today is Marie Curie's 144th birthday. Tim and N. loved reading Madame Curie, Eve Curie's biography of her mother together last spring! We recommend this book enthusiastically. N. was utterly absorbed by the story of Marie's childhood, her long years of hard work with Pierre isolating radium, and her navigation of the male scientific world. Tim and N. will mark her birthday by doing a science experiment this afternoon, and recalling their favorite parts of her life story.

Beginning French

2011-11-01T22:38:00.000-04:00

We've been talking about beginning to study a foreign language with N. for at least a year. We encouraged N. to focus on Spanish and had even arranged for him to have weekly tutorials this fall with his best friend next door, whose mom is a Spanish instructor and whose dad is from Spain. But he insisted on learning French, thanks to Eloise in Paris and his love of French cathedrals. I studied French for many years and nominally have a reading fluency in it, so I'm in charge of this portion of our curriculum. Last year I didn't do my job very well; we had a couple picture dictionaries from the library but only cursorily glanced through them. This year I've vowed to make our French study really happen.

First I ordered a textbook, Discovering French, because I recognized its authors from my own studies of French in 8-12 grades. I bought a used edition of the textbook and a new workbook, but as soon as they were delivered I knew I'd chosen poorly. The books are meant for older students in a formal classroom setting and the lessons depend on a DVD or CD that was not included. N. looked them over and was turned off by them; they seemed intimidating to us both.

Then I ordered a copy of Madeline in French, thinking we'd use familiar picture books as an entree into the language (although buying numerous picture books would quickly get expensive and our public library's French language children's fiction collection is minute -- again, a good argument for studying Spanish!). I had some vague notion that Madeline was originally written in French, but it was not. When the book arrived, I discovered the translation was tortuous and wrought with difficult tenses that I wasn't even sure how to pronounce. This was not going to serve our purpose, and I sent it back.

After fruitlessly trawling Amazon for beginning French texts oriented toward younger children and being unable to differentiate among them, I finally remembered that Charlotte Mason advocated French study (although modern CM adherents are not limited to French). I looked at Ambleside Online and found a useful informal collection and review of resources for foreign language study in homeschool settings. I chose a curriculum written by the Canadian Norma Allen specifically for homeschool use, and I bought a used copy of a French-English picture dictionary she recommends published by DK.

We've just begun using the first level of Allen's curriculum, called L'Art de Dire, which focuses on speaking rather than reading French and is geared for K-2nd graders (it includes downloadable MP3 files). What I especially like about Allen's approach is her encouragement to use the French you are studying every day throughout the day, not only in a discrete lesson context. At first I was a bit freaked out by this; I suddenly was all too aware of the insufficiency of my French fluency for actual everyday speech. The commitment it is going to require to teach my child French staggered me momentarily. But we're falling into French pretty easily so far and taking it slowly (or, I am taking it slowly anyway; N. is eating up French words!*). N. has been poring over the picture dictionary and reading the phonetic pronounciation guides quite well all on his own, so he's adding vocabulary faster than I am. I'm trying to use the words I hear him saying in simple sentences so he hears pronouns and verbs even though we haven't gotten them in Allen's lessons yet. Tim is getting in on the French too, though his pronunciation is atrocious; yesterday he had N. looking up the words for hard-boiled and scrambled eggs while he cooked lunch. I've been trying to make sure we spend an hour or so at least once a week concentrating on French, but the more we can scatter it throughout our lives, unschool-style, the more effective our learning will be. For this approach, using a homeschool-oriented text rather than one designed for conventional school is especially crucial (and I'd love to hear about more resources for learning French that have worked for other homeschoolers).

We know two families in town who are raising their children bilingually in French and English, so one of my eventual goals for this year is for N. and I to have some French conversations with them. It's exciting to put your knowledge in action. This morning after N. and I had a short conversation he shouted "Daddy, I'm speaking French!"
____________________
*Bonus reading: This absolutely incredible, thought-provoking essay and video about the experiences of the 3 Brooklyn-born children of Clifford J. Levy and Julie Dressner immersing themselves for 4 years in a Russian-language-only school in Moscow. It's a fascinating meditation on children and language learning, approaches to schooling, autonomy, and resilience.

Specializing

2011-10-21T12:15:00.000-04:00

Last night at supper N. saw Alan Richardson's book Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780-1832 (Cambridge: 1995) lying at the end of the dining room table where various things that various family members are reading tend to pile up.

"Mom," he announced, "I am never going to be interested in that book Literature, Education, and Romanticism because I specialize in the era from 1890-1910."

Daily Math Practice

2011-10-20T22:40:00.001-04:00

Daily math practice is part of the ritual of Tim and N.'s daily school time. Usually right after their read-aloud and follow-up research (currently this is Ida Tarbell's autobiography), N. does a short 5-problem set in a workbook I bought called Daily Math. Then Tim makes up a series of problems for N. to work, sometimes building on any mistakes he may have made in the Daily Math book. Earlier this fall, as you can see at right, they were working on sequences, adding, and subtraction. They also worked a lot on money recognition and money-related arithmetic. Lately N. has been doing a variety of types of problems: big addition and subtraction problems, word problems, simple algebra (solving for x).

The workbook made it easy to incorporate some formal math into the daily routine and gives a nice platform for further work. In addition it is giving N. some good practice in the conventions of typical math problems such as he will encounter when he takes the state-required annual standardized test. Test-taking is not a focus for us, but it seems good for N. to be exposed to and have the opportunity to practice reading and working problems. N. enjoys doing his math problems, and I like that Tim can tailor his additional daily problems to whatever N. is less confident in; earlier this fall, for example, that was coins/money. When he makes up word problems, Tim always uses people and places and objects from our life, to highlight the relevance of math in the real world. The variety of the problems also keeps N.'s interest. As you can see in the picture, Tim and N. correct the problems together. N. likes to report to me what his daily "score" in math is, and I remind him every day that making mistakes is how you learn! Our assessment so far is that while N. is academically unusual in some subjects, in math he is quite typical for his age. The second-grade Daily Math workbook is right at his current level.

The first two years of N's homeschooling our approach to math was very intuitive and organic. We did a bit of formal written practice of math but mostly talked math a lot and provided many opportunities for the play and creative problem-solving that encourages strong numeracy. We're building on that foundation this year with more formal problems, but we are still always on the look-out for ways to develop N.'s math facility beyond his daily math practice. I'm feeling good that we're helping N. build his math skills in a gently rigorous way while maintaining a positive attitude about math in general and especially about making mistakes and getting things wrong in order to learn. When you do a little math every day, it's easy to keep mistakes in their proper perspective.

An Ida Tarbell Curriculum

2011-10-05T00:00:00.000-04:00

[Source] Ida M. Tarbell

The Autobiography of S. S. McClure, which Tim read aloud to N. in September, led to the book that has been at the center of N.'s studies for the past couple weeks: All in the Day's Work: An Autobiography by Ida Tarbell (1939). Tarbell was an editor for McClure's Magazine, a biographer, and an influential muckracking journalist. Every day Tim (and sometimes N.) reads a portion of the book aloud, and then they follow up on subjects and ideas that arise in the day's reading.

For example, today they read in Tarbell's book about her knowledge of the United States' economic transition from farming to industry and about William McKinley, who attended the Poland Union Seminary in Ohio, where she was later a teacher, as well as her alma mater, Allegheny College. Then they read in both the Britannica and World Book Encyclopedias about McKinley's presidency. They also read about McKinley's era in A History of US, the excellent history set I bought for our homeschool this fall. Then they used the globe to find the territories the U.S. won or annexed in the Spanish-American War. Later N. told me very clearly about the role played by the U.S.S. Maine in the beginnings of this war. Tim and N. together wrote out the order of the military ranks from general to private. N. did some of the reading in the encyclopedias and history books aloud and explored the globe further.

Last week, they read in Tarbell's autobiography about her years as a student at Allegheny College. Then they looked up the Allegheny Mountains, looked at images of Bentley Hall at Allegheny College, and looked up Louis Agassiz and the Agassiz Glacier.

Another day Tim and N. read in Tarbell's book about women's suffrage and followed that up with further reading in the encyclopedia and A Story of US about the suffrage movement and about Victoria C. Woodhull, the first woman to run for president of the U.S. N. wrote up a math problem to figure out the year in which Tarbell reached age 70.

Tarbell writes compellingly about so many interesting aspects of American culture from the 1870s up to WWI, which happens to be an era that fascinates N. Her autobiography is giving Tim and N. very rich days of learning together.

Field Trip: Biltmore!

2011-09-26T17:10:00.005-04:00

N. and I recently visited Biltmore, the 1895 Vanderbilt estate outside Asheville, NC. N. has had the guidebook practically memorized for years, so he was thrilled to be able to tour the grand house in person. It was interesting to tour a site that N. already knew so much about, and to compare our experience of it with the expectations we'd formed from the guidebook. For example, he was fascinated by the asymmetrical floor plan (hard to get a sense of this from a book), some rooms were even more beautiful than they had appeared in photos, and we were both unprepared for the house's spectacular mountain setting. We loved being able to wander through Frederick Law Olmsted's various landscape designs, to enjoy the contrasts between the European-style formal gardens and the Central Park-style rambles.

The house was crowded with visitors, so we couldn't linger in each room as much as N. wanted. He comforted himself with plans for what he would be sure to do and look at on a repeat visit next year.

The occasion of our trip was the discounted admission price offered as part of the annual "homeschool festival" the Estate stages. So after touring the house and grounds, we went to the farm barns for the "homeschool festival," where artisans showed children how to dye, card, and spin alpaca fiber; how to wash clothes by hand; how to weave baskets from white oak fibers; blacksmithing; weaving; quilting; etc. N. enjoyed these demonstrations and the accompanying activities, although next year he might decide to focus solely on the house, grounds, and gardens.

The Biltmore Estate, which is still owned by Vanderbilt descendants, is a slick operation designed to maximize the visitor's expenditures. Not only is the regular admission incredibly expensive, but there are premium tours available for additional fees, as well as expensive food and shopping on site. We talked a bit on the trip about the sources of the Vanderbilt money that originally made such an estate possible; when we toured the servants' quarters we talked about the relationships between the rich and the working classes. N.'s love of architecture is both ahistorical and context-based; that is, he loves buildings as pure aesthetic objects, but he is also very interested in the history in which they are situated. In all our tours of fancy houses and our study of Gilded Age architecture, I try to resist the glamorization of the rich that can be so easy to indulge while at the same time not damping N.'s innocent pleasure in the beauty of grand old buildings.

Reading Log

2011-09-21T23:42:00.000-04:00

In May I collected a few of those summer reading forms that local bookstores and the public library give out to encourage kids to read. I was curious to see if N. might be motivated to read 10 books from start to finish in order to earn a free book or a library prize. But he most emphatically was not! I explained the programs, but he simply wasn't at all interested. He likes to read in his own non-linear way, which does not lend itself to completing a summer reading form. And ultimately I don't mind that he rejected the programs; I am happy that he reads because he enjoys it, not in order to win a prize.

So, because I like making lists and keeping records, in May I started a log of N.'s daily reading (pictured at left) to replace the summer reading forms. N. always reads for 30-60 minutes in bed before breakfast, so his reading has been easy to track. While I record our read-aloud chapter books at Listography, I thought pen and notebook would be the easiest format for a daily silent-reading log. There are no prizes, but it pleases me to be able to look over the log and see all the reading N. does.

Once More to Lake Superior

2011-09-15T11:32:00.001-04:00

While our summer began with two weeks of new experiences as we traveled in England, we spent the rest of the season going to favorite places we've visited again and again. We went to the Southeast Old Thresher's Reunion to ogle old tractors for the third summer in a row. We went to the National Building Museum in Washington D.C. for the second time. We went to the North Carolina Transportation Museum. And we ended the summer with a return to the familiar shores of Lake Superior for our annual summer sojourn in Duluth, Minnesota, where Tim and I grew up. For three years now, we've been spending about a month there in the summer, enjoying the lake, parks, creeks, museums, old buildings, trains, ships, and harbor, as well as catching up with family and friends.

As we made the rounds of all our favorite Duluth places, I thought about the pleasures of repetition, especially for children. It seems common for adults to continually search out new experiences, so I've been glad to be reminded by my son that repeating a beloved book or experience is also very satisfying. For N., going to England was no more wonderful than going to Duluth; both trips were equally rich for him.

And of course repetition is a crucial learning technique. Every time we go to the train museum in Duluth, we revisit our favorite engines and relearn their histories, as well as noticing new things we'd missed on earlier visits. Enforced repetition through learning drills can be dull and thus counterproductive, but it's easy to take advantage of my son's natural love of repetition in order to learn. He's not bored by doing something he loves for the millionth time! The biggest challenge as a parent is to cultivate patience and rediscover the child's pleasure of repetition.

Further Thoughts on Non-Linear Reading

2011-09-06T22:27:00.001-04:00

Since I recently wrote about N.'s nonlinear reading, his habit of dipping in favorite books again and again, I was especially struck by Lev Grossman's meditation on the codex and nonlinear reading in Sunday's New York Times Book Review:

The codex is built for nonlinear reading — not the way a Web surfer does it, aimlessly questing from document to document, but the way a deep reader does it, navigating the network of internal connections that exists within a single rich document like a novel. Indeed, the codex isn’t just another format, it’s the one for which the novel is optimized. The contemporary novel’s dense, layered language took root and grew in the codex, and it demands the kind of navigation that only the codex provides. Imagine trying to negotiate the nested, echoing labyrinth of David Mitchell’s "Cloud Atlas" if it were transcribed onto a scroll. It couldn’t be done.

God knows, there was great literature before there was the codex, and should it pass away, there will be great literature after it. But if we stop reading on paper, we should keep in mind what we’re sacrificing: that nonlinear experience, which is unique to the codex. You don’t get it from any other medium — not movies, or TV, or music or video games. The codex won out over the scroll because it did what good technologies are supposed to do: It gave readers a power they never had before, power over the flow of their own reading experience.

In the past week as I've begun my fall semester literature classes, I've been coaching my students on how to read a novel since many of them find the long, dense works of the eighteenth century challenging. I love Grossman's idea here that true novel reading is not simply getting through to the end (that's what seems so daunting to students) but navigating the connections between pages, moving from Robinson Crusoe's island, back to his father's warnings, forward to his relations with Friday, back to his relations with Xury. I might say that so much of college literature teaching (mine, anyway!) is leading linear-reading students through nonlinear reading, helping them discover a text's "network of internal connections." And I see in N's nonlinear reading evidence of Grossman's claim that novel readers have a unique control of the text; N. revels in the "power over the flow of [his] own reading experience" as he moves among his favorite chapters in his favorite books.

The Autobiography of S. S. McClure

2011-09-05T17:11:00.000-04:00

Tim has had great success reading biographies and autobiographies aloud to N. This reading is a central part of their morning "school" time. In the past year they've read Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi, the fictionalized autobiographical works of James Herriot, Oliver Sacks' Uncle Tungsten, and Madame Curie, learning so much history, science, and life wisdom along the way. They've begun this second-grade year with The Autobiography of S. S. McClure, ghost-written by Willa Cather in 1912. It's a wonderfully written, thoroughly compelling, rags-to-riches story of an Irish immigrant who became a powerful publisher in early twentieth-century America.

One of the notable traits of young Samuel McClure was his absolute thirst for knowledge. His simply loved learning and adored going to school; he did whatever he could to be able to attend. I think boys in today's rather anti-intellectual boy culture, even those who love learning like N., can benefit from hearing the stories of boys like McClure who crave learning and who become important men because of that learning.

Book Browsing

2011-09-01T20:08:00.003-04:00

Last week, N. and Tim formally began their second-grade studies together. It's a high-tide time of year at our house. After a busy summer with lots of travel and little structure, N. craves a return to routine. He celebrated his seventh birthday recently, his friends returned to school, and I began my fall semester; all this signals the start of the school year to him. He was eager to dive back into more formal studies, and I'll write here soon about what he and Tim are working on.

Meanwhile, to get ready for the school year, we recently undertook a major reorganization of our home library. Now that N. is reading, and given his particular approach to reading right now, I wanted our books to be very accessible to him, easy to browse. The precarious piles on the floor of my study were neither. So we got a bunch more IVAR shelves from Ikea and dug in. The adult books are now in groupings by nation or discipline (British, American, History, Religion) and all the literature groups are in chronological order (Chaucer to Ian McEwen, for example). I rearranged books in double rows on some shelves, with the books likely to be more interesting to a child reader in the front and the more scholarly books (such as The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice) behind. Obviously my fantasy career is librarian! Look, I even have a library-style Kik-Step stool, acquired from a local thrift store -- I've always wanted one!

Most importantly, I set up a group of shelves (pictured) for all the books I've been accumulating for N. at the awesome used book store in town. One shelf has a double row of books that he can read when he is older, and the lower shelves are full of books to read now, arranged alphabetically by author for easy access. He also keeps a bunch of favorites in a bookcase in his room.

Though this project was disruptive and chaotic, now our shelves look so orderly and browsable! I feel that we've accomplished a crucial "preparation of the environment" (to use Montessori terms) for the next stage of N.'s learning. I look forward to seeing what he discovers on the shelves.

Reading Update: Dipping In or Reading Through?

2011-07-27T02:21:00.002-04:00

Reading Paddington Helps Out on a car trip

As I have written before, I was convinced by John Holt's Learning All the Time and the Finnish kindergarten model that in a text-rich environment N. would learn to read without any explicit instruction in reading. So we have not taught N. to read with formal reading lessons, computer reading games, worksheets, etc. We have a lot of books and we read to him all the time, and that's all. But as an English professor who is passionate about reading, I have struggled to be patient as he made his own way in his own time through the stages of his independent journey toward literacy. N. loves books, has known the alphabet since about 3 1/2 years old, has long been able to read individual words on signs, newspapers, etc., and was reading Dick and Jane a year ago at nearly 6 years old. I assumed that after Dick and Jane, N. would move on to the other "easy reader" books that I carefully strewed about, but he was uninterested and often actively rejected them. Instead, all this past year he's spent a lot of time looking at more difficult favorite picture and chapter books. I was never sure how much he was reading these or whether he was simply looking at the illustrations (probably some of both), but I now believe this was a kind of silent reading practice as he immersed himself in favorite books we've read to him over and over. Every morning he spent long stretches of time "looking at books." He could read familiar picture books aloud if asked to but didn't like doing so, and he didn't want to read new unfamiliar books by himself, so we didn't push either. We didn't want to make reading a site of conflict or negative associations. I managed to keep my impatience to myself, but nonetheless I had a specific model of what it looked like for a child to be a fluent reader, namely independently reading unfamiliar books, and I wondered (however unfairly) when I would see my now nearly 7-year-old son conform to that model.

Then in May 2011, N.'s independent reading suddenly took off. He no longer said he was "looking at books" in the morning but that he was "reading books" and would we please stop interrupting him. I discovered while reading aloud The BFG that he had read ahead several chapters. One morning he read 3 chapters of Henry Huggins. Another morning he read a chapter of Russell and Elisa; another he read a chapter of The Indian in the Cupboard. I was elated! We bought three new Paddington books in England and in the last few days of our trip he was devouring Paddington Here and Now (listed reading level: grades 3-5) on the train, subway, and airplane. Now he reads at least a chapter of some book or other every morning: Pooh, Thomas the Train, Pippi Longstocking, Rufus M., The Tough Winter, The Time Garden. Most of these are books I've read aloud to him at least once before, but now that I know he's reading this challenging material, I am less obsessed with whether he's reading unfamiliar books (although I am still perplexed by his randomly reading single chapters in the middle of unfamiliar books). I recognize that dipping in to these favorite books all by himself is an incredibly rich experience for him.

N.'s mode of reading -- "dipping in," I'm calling it, randomly reading a chapter in a new book or looking for a favorite chapter somewhere in a book, reading it, and then repeating the process with a different book -- surprises and intrigues me. My model of "proper" reading is linear; you start at the beginning and read through to the end! In coming to terms with the difference between my model and N.'s current mode of reading, I remembered that one of my favorite eighteenth-century writers, the very learned Samuel Johnson, excoriated pedants who demanded linear reading.

In James Boswell's Life of Johnson (published in 1791) he describes Johnson's reaction to an instructor's advice that his pupil "read to the end of whatever books he should begin:"

'This is surely strange advice; you may as well resolve that whatever men you happen to get acquainted with, you are to keep to them for life. A book may be good for nothing; or there may be only one thing in it worth knowing; are we to read it all through?' (Life of Johnson p. 1304)

On another occasion a friend asked Johnson his opinion of a recent and much admired book. "I have looked into it" said Johnson. "What," said his friend, "Have you not read it through?" According to Boswell, "Johnson, offended at being thus pressed, and so obliged to own his cursory mode of reading, answered tartly, 'No, Sir, do you read books through?'" (Life of Johnson p. 520).

Johnson also believed strongly that both children and adults should read what captures their attention. "A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good" (Life of Johnson p. 303-4). "He said, that for general improvement, a man should read whatever his immediate inclination prompts him to, though to be sure, if a man has a science to learn, he must regularly and resolutely advance. He added, 'what we read with inclination makes a much stronger impression. If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention; so there is but one half to be employed on what we read'" (Life of Johnson p. 747). Johnson makes the important distinction that when one is learning a particular discipline (a "science" of any sort, including literature) one must read methodically through the major works in the field, but he describes so poignantly the wasted mental effort of trying to focus the mind on required reading. He goes so far as to say that you must seize the precious moment when your attention is captured, no matter what: "He said, 'if a man begins to read in the middle of a book, and feels an inclination to go on, let him not quit it, to go to the beginning. He may, perhaps, not feel again the inclination'" (p. 747). Johnson, like other eighteenth-century writers on education (Locke, Maria Edgeworth), believed strongly in the pedagogical efficacy of the chance encounter. There is something about coming upon an idea or book by chance that makes us especially receptive to learning.

For children (or rather, boys, the subject of Johnson and Boswell's conversations about reading and education; although Johnson appreciated and encouraged learned women writers, he does not as far as I know comment on girls' education), Johnson advocates free-range reading:

I am always for getting a boy forward in his learning; for that is a sure good. I would let him at first read any English book which happens to engage his attention; because you have done a great deal when you have brought him to have entertainment from a book. He'll get better books afterwards. (Life of Johnson p. 1020).

Again he acknowledges that eventually one must read deeply to be a true scholar, but Johnson maintains that dipping in to books can have particular benefits for the child learner: 'Snatches of reading (said he,) will not make a Bentley or a Clarke. They are, however, in a certain degree advantageous. I would put a child into a library (where no unfit books are) and let him read at his choice. A child should not be discouraged from reading anything that he takes a liking to, from a notion that it is above his reach. If that be the case, the child will soon find it out and desist; if not, he of course gains from the instruction; which is so much the more likely to come, from the inclination with which he takes up the study.' (Life p. 1080).

I love it that Johnson imagines a child encountering something too difficult as he browses a library, and that for Johnson this can only be good for him. In fact, to bring this all back to N., I suspect that difficulty is at least in part behind N.'s dipping in to books, that he wants to read silently at our read-aloud level but can't yet sustain it beyond a chapter or two. Perhaps as he gains confidence and facility he will read a chapter book through. Or perhaps he'll remain like Samuel Johnson, dipping in to books as the inclination strikes him. N. could do worse than follow Johnson!

Sharing Music

2011-07-25T00:00:00.000-04:00

N. has been taking piano lessons with a fabulous teacher since late September 2010 and he's really been enjoying it and has learned a lot. We wanted him to take lessons because we thought he would like it and because being able to make music is so life-enriching over the long term. One of the the true joys of music is to share it with others, whether by making music with other musicians or by playing for willing listeners. N. has recently had some great experiences making music with and for others and I never expected he would do either so early in his study of the piano.

Unlike Suzuki strings instruction, for example, where children play "Twinkle, Twinkle" with other beginning violinists, I think piano instruction tends to be solitary. But one of N.'s really good friends is learning to play violin and when he and N. get together to play with Legos, blocks, etc., they end up jamming together, just improvising on the piano and violin, listening to each other and trying to match tones or moods. They are not self-conscious and play together with freedom and joy, having fun creating sound together without caring about the product. I love it that they both love music and without any adult intervention they've figured out that they can share that with each other.

We recently visited friends in Minneapolis and N. got to participate in a slightly more sophisticated electric-keyboard-and-electric-guitar jam session. N. played some of the ragtime and blues tunes he's learned this year, calling out the left-hand chords to our guitarist friend who improvised licks as they went along. N. loved it and I think our friend had fun too. It was interesting to see N. experiencing these tunes (which are some of his favorites) in a new way as he played them with our friend.

One of the many things I love about N.'s teacher is that she doesn't hold student recitals. I suppose there's a time and place for recitals, but I think a recital would have been counterproductive for N. this year. Instead he's had a lot of fun playing spontaneously for friends and family. He always volunteers (we never make him do it!) because he really likes the pieces he plays and loves sharing them with our guests. He plays with a lot of verve and skill for a beginner and I think he enjoys the surprised and positive response this elicits from his listeners. In playing for friends, the emphasis is on the fun of sharing a favorite piece of music rather than on the perfection and performance that might be the focus of a recital.

When we began N's piano lessons, I primarily imagined the benefits for N. of learning the instrument. Recently I was reminded, however, that music isn't just for him, but a means through which he can give joy to others. We've been visiting his elderly paternal grandmother in the care facility to which she has moved, and N. gives her great pleasure by playing for her on an electric keyboard we'd brought along. On another visit, his grandma was listening to a resident play an organ in the common area, and both women encouraged N. to try it. Both women had a wonderful time showing him how the instrument worked and listening to him play. I was so grateful to N.'s piano teacher for all she's done during the past year to give N. the means to make his grandma and her fellow resident smile. Here's a bit of the moment I captured on my phone:

An Afternoon at the Train Museum

2011-07-01T00:27:00.001-04:00

N. at the museum in 2009

N. at the museum in 2011

Last week N. and I went to the North Carolina Transportation Museum in Spencer, NC. We went there two years ago and it was fun to see how much N. remembered from that visit. The museum is on the old maintenance yards for the Southern Railway; there is a cool round house, repair shops, turntable, lots of engines, and a short train ride available.

As a museum, it is woefully underfunded and underdeveloped; there are missing explanatory signs and aging exhibits that are just beginning to be replaced. It also does a poor job "interpreting" the era. I was struck by the sea of white faces in all the old photos of the workers at the Spencer works and wondered what role African-Americans played in the rail history of that area. But the museum is entirely mum on the issue of race relations.

Despite the fact that it was difficult to learn as much as we would have liked to about the development of railways in the South from this museum, N. enjoyed seeing lots of magnificent train engines, which was really the main attraction anyway!

Field Trip: England! Part 4: Drawings

2011-06-17T10:58:00.004-04:00

drawing a cathedral while riding the train!

Because N. loves to draw daily, we take art supplies with us when we travel. For our trip to England (Part 1, 2, 3), I refreshed his "drawing bag" with new markers, colored pencils, and sketchbook. It was interesting to see how the trip showed up in the drawings he made while we travelled. Of course there were trains, cathedrals, and airplanes...

Do you see the arrow that's just been shot out of the castle? Love it!

This picture of "ruins" was a new type of drawing for N. He made it after we spent a morning walking the ancient city walls of York.

Field Trip: England! Part 3: Museums

2011-06-13T21:25:00.003-04:00

N. loves to draw and is generally interested in art and is even familiar with the work of some specific artists, but he has often been overwhelmed by traditional art museums and unable to tolerate spending much time in them. He can't articulate why this is so, but perhaps his strong interest in the visual makes museums too stimulating. We've been careful not to push museum visits when we travel, which is a bit hard for Tim and me because we love spending hours wandering through museums! When we travelled to New York in March, however, we all happily spent several hours at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the Egypt rooms, the Temple of Dendur, in the musical instrument collection, and a bit in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French painting galleries. The objects attracted N. more than the paintings, but I was glad he wanted to look at a few paintings.

National Gallery, London

On our recent trip to England (Part 1, Part 2), we went to a few museums but with low expectations; because the art museums in London are generally free, we could leave right away if we wanted to without feeling that we'd wasted money on admission fees. Wandering in Trafalgar Square, we decided to go in the National Gallery primarily because we thought N. would enjoy the architecture of the building, which he did. But he was arrested by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English paintings and some of the French post-Impressionists as well, so we spent a really rich hour or more looking at the paintings in a couple galleries and talking about them. The paintings that especially grabbed him were:

Gainsborough: his lovely pictures of his daughters -- N. was intrigued that the latter is unfinished and loved looking for the bare outlines of a cat on the girl's lap
Joseph Wright of Derby: we talked a lot about "An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump" -- N.'s first observation about the painting was the smoothness of its surface and he wondered how the painter achieved that; we made connections to some of the science history N. studied earlier this year (what is a vacuum, when did people figure out what was in "air"); could we tell what the artist's view of the scientific experiment might be?; Wright's use of strong light/dark contrasts
J.M.W. Turner: N. was really struck by his luminous skies and seas and his strong brushstrokes, and enjoyed the contrast of these paintings with his earlier, more conventional paintings of ships. I thought N. would like "Rails, Steam, and Speed -- The Great Western Railway" but he dismissed it out of hand as not detailed enough for his taste and "too abstract!"
Degas: a brief look at his dancers
Seurat: N. was very taken with Seurat's pointillism method, and also very interested in the tiny studies that are hung alongside the large paintings. It was interesting to think about how the artist prepared to make the full-sized painting via the studies.
Renoir: N. liked "The Umbrellas" -- so much packed into this picture!
Van Gogh: Tim pointed out "Sunflowers" and mentioned the high auction price of the various versions, but N. was interested in "A Wheatfield with Cypresses" because of its swirling sky; he commented on the difference between this painting and the smooth surface of Wright's.

The V&A

Another day we went to the Victoria & Albert Museum. I was excited to take N. there because it is such a fabulously Victorian building, plus he likes the work of William Morris, so I wanted him to see the Morris, Gamble, and Poynter cafe in the museum. This is a museum of objects, so I thought N. would enjoy whatever we saw there; even so I was pleasantly surprised by our experience. I was disappointed that the fashion and textile rooms (my favorites) were closed, but we went to the Architecture Gallery. We got there via the Glass exhibits, and I was surprised that N. was so intrigued by the cases of jars and vases (I assumed we'd walk right through this room to get to our destination). He spent a long time looking at the glass, and liked guessing the time period in which the objects were made.

When we finally got to the Architecture room we discovered that in addition to drawings and floor plans, it consisted of models of famous buildings. N. was in heaven! He loves models, miniatures, dollhouses, etc., I presume because with a model he can grasp the building in its totality. There was an amazing huge cross-section drawing of St. Paul's Cathedral hanging on the wall that we all admired as well. We spent a lot of time in this gallery!

Then we went to a few of the nineteenth-century galleries (full of Gothic revival stuff, which N. loves and I despise), where N. found a model of another of his favorite buildings, the 1851 Crystal Palace, as well as paintings, drawings, and plans for it. Very exciting! And there was a children's room nearby where he played with acrylic blocks to build his own Crystal Palace.

Another day we went to a different museum run by the V&A: The Museum of Childhood. This museum displays collections of toys from the late 16th century to the present, as well as some clothes. To supplement the cases of objects, there are some related playthings that children can use (without this, I think it would be hard for a kid to look at all these objects and not be able to play with them!), such as rocking horses near a case of various old rocking horses, or a model train layout that you could make run for 20 p. N.'s favorite things here were the model train sets and the doll houses. We had a really lovely afternoon there.

One day we went briefly to the British Museum, but only to see three things: the Great Court that was built in 2000 over the Reading Room, the Reading Room itself (which turned out to be closed for the installation of an exhibition), and the Elgin Marbles. There is so much to see in the British Museum and it was quite crowded, so we decided to save a more extensive exploration of it for another trip. The Parthenon was also one of the earliest buildings N. got really interested in; he likes its form, it led him to learn column and capital styles, and he's fascinated by its history of neglect and partial destruction. So most of his interest in the Parthenon frieze and pediment sculptures was related to their damage. He wanted to hear over and over again about the Parthenon being used by the Turks in the 17th century as an ammunition depot, and to figure out what was damaged by the munitions explosion and what was damaged by the passage of time. He's also perplexed by the problem of whether these sculptures should be in England at all. I tried to draw his attention somewhat to the quality of the sculptures themselves and to their ritualistic significance for the Greeks, but it was hard for him to look at them outside the context of their later history.

When we walked across the Millennium Bridge one day, we popped in to the Tate Modern so N. could see how the Bankside power station had been repurposed as a museum. Again we decided to save the exploration of the galleries for another trip.

On the last day of our trip we went to the Museum of London, which again is full of lots of models; N. especially liked the models of Roman Londinium. We all were wowed by the preserved sections of the Roman city walls around which the museum is built. You can learn a lot about the history of London here, (although I personally don't absorb information terribly well in this format). This museum was really crowded the day we were there because it was a bank holiday, but N. was so happy to see a model of Old St. Paul's Cathedral as well as a famous painting of the Great Fire. N. would have liked to linger longer in the Museum of London but I found the crowds oppressive. In this case I was the one feeling overwhelmed by the museum and needing to leave!

I hadn't expected museum visits (beyond the London Transport Museum and the National Rail Museum, of course) to play such a big role in our trip but I was pleasantly surprised by how much N. enjoyed London's museums.

The Butterflies Are Back

2011-06-08T12:01:00.000-04:00

We're excited to see the butterflies back in our front garden. Last fall Tim and N. spent a lot of time identifying and learning about butterflies, and I am pleased to see how much N. remembers from this. He really enjoys observing them. This morning while we breakfasted on the patio we watched a trio of what N. informed me were silver-spotted skippers breakfast on the bee balm.

Field Trip: England! Part 2: Cathedrals

2011-06-06T16:28:00.001-04:00

"Railway termini and hotels are to the nineteenth century what monasteries and cathedrals were to the thirteenth century." -- Building News, 1875 (quoted in Discovering London Railway Stations by Oliver Green, p. 37)

As it happens, in addition to trains one of N.'s major passions is old buildings, especially cathedrals and churches, so this was another major focus of our recent trip to England. St. Paul's Cathedral was one of the first buildings I noticed N. get interested in, back in 2009, so we were all excited to tour it together. N. cares about every bit of information related to the history of St. Paul's: the earlier Norman cathedral on the site, the toppling of its tower in the 16th century, Cromwell's stabling of horses in it during the Interregnum, the Great Fire that destroyed it, Sir Christopher Wren's various designs for the current building, its escape from damage during the Blitz... N. noticed new details of the building's exterior that he didn't know about and he hadn't known much about its interior, so he enjoyed seeing it. And we climbed hundreds of steps to the interior gallery around the dome (the "Whispering Gallery"), the exterior gallery around the dome (the "Stone Gallery") and even a little balcony up at the base of the spire (the "Golden Gallery," which was pretty scary!). We got great perspectives on the building and beautiful views of the city.

After touring St. Paul's, we wandered around the City to see some of the other churches Wren designed after the Great Fire. Many of these were severely damaged in and most gradually rebuilt after World War II, so we admired Wren's inventiveness while also pondering the traumas of the Fire and the war (N. has something of a morbid fascination with both). These churches were all new to N., and he asked that we find a book about Wren's career so he can learn more about his City churches at home.

Another of N.'s favorites has long been St. Martin-in-the-Fields, designed by the Wren disciple James Gibbs, so he was excited to see that church as well. Again, seeing the interior and other sides of the church (besides the main front pictured here) was really exciting for N.

We also spent part of an afternoon at Westminster Abbey. We wandered through the building and then were lucky enough to sit in the nave while the choir rehearsed for an evening concert. N. had not studied this building a lot in advance and is now interested in learning more about it. At one point a verger asked N. if he spoke English and if he'd like to do a "Children's Trail." We didn't really know what he was referring to (although now that I've looked it up on the Abbey's website, it looks potentially interesting) and N. was offended! "Why didn't he know that I just want to look at the building?" he asked us repeatedly. Tourist sites have to walk a fine line between providing basic information to ignorant visitors and excessively mediating those visitors' experience of the site; their material for children tends to do the latter (in my experience), providing "treasure hunts," etc. that construct the child visitor as someone who must be distracted from the site itself and entertained, who won't be interested in the site without this entertainment. Even material for adults runs this risk. I like to get a leaflet or paper guide when I visit a site or museum, but I absolutely never get the audio guides. I like to experience things on my own and look up additional information later rather than have my experience of a site or a work of art shaped by an audio guide.

Anyway, the rest of our England itinerary after our London stay was structured by cathedrals. We went to York Minster, Lincoln Cathedral, and Ely Cathedral, as well as King's College Chapel (not a cathedral, obviously, but an exquisite example of fan vaulting). At York, we learned a lot about cathedral construction from an interesting exhibit in the crypt showing excavated remains of the Roman and Norman buildings on the site. At both Lincoln and Ely, we paid particular attention to the clear differences between the Norman, Early English Gothic, and Decorated Gothic parts of the buildings. This was a real revelation to N. Even though he'd been really interested in this element of cathedral construction (that is, the differences in architectural style in different periods) from the start of his cathedral obsession, he seemed to appreciate and understand these differences in a whole new way after seeing them up close.

Right before going on our trip, N. and I read a slew of books on Ely Cathedral from my university library and gleaned an account of Oliver Cromwell storming into the Cathedral in the middle of a service in 1643 and driving out the congregation (the cathedral was then closed for 20 years); this incited in N. a dread fascination with Cromwell that first started when N. learned of Cromwell's abuse of Old St. Paul's Cathedral and reappeared every time we learned the fate of an ecclesiastic building during the Interregnum. I think we'll be studying both Cromwell and William the Conqueror (the other hero-villain whose name was inescapable in the histories of English cathedrals) in the coming months. At any rate I certainly felt the need after this trip to brush up on my Norman and medieval English history. N. has asked that we get books on Lincoln, York, and Westminster Cathedrals to follow up on what we viewed.

This portion of our trip was thus a stimulating combination of seeing cathedrals N. has long loved and seeing new others that prompted the desire (of all of us!) to learn more. Regardless of what more we may learn after this trip, seeing the cathedrals in all their massiveness, pondering the feats of their engineering, helped us grasp their worldly function as monuments to church power and authority in the middle ages. We had the incredible privilege to hear Evensong at Lincoln, Ely, and King's College; the ethereal sounds of the English boy choirs highlighted for us the cathedrals' ongoing spiritual function. Even as nonbelievers, we were transfixed by the beauty of thunderous organ and soaring voices.

Field Trip: England! Part 1: Trains

2011-06-03T07:00:00.002-04:00

We've just returned from a two-week trip to England. I was granted tenure in the past year and my book was published last week (hooray!), so in part this trip was a celebration of having passed these important milestones in my career. Although Tim and I traveled to England a lot while I was in the earlier stages of research for the book, we hadn't been since N. was born. And N. is (like his parents) quite the Anglophile. N. will be seven at the end of the summer, which might seem a bit young for such a trip; rather than worry about whether he is old enough to remember the trip later, however, we decided to go now while so many of his interests -- trains, architecture, history -- can be explored deeply in England. He's really fun to travel with right now and he enjoys being with us; who can guarantee that either will be true when he is older?

We were really proud of how N. handled the trip. Although he said he was nervous in the days leading up to our departure, he dealt so well with the changes in routine, the overwhelming new sensory experiences of travel, the food, etc. We tried to make room for occasional down time -- playing in parks, drawing, reading -- but for the most part he was on the go all day with us for two straight weeks, walking everywhere, interacting with almost no kids, and he had a great time. We were relieved and pleased.

N. and Duchess of Hamilton at the NRM

So, one focus of the trip was trains. We spent six days in London and of course took the Tube everywhere, which N. loved. One day we rode the Jubilee line and got out at every stop between Westminster and Canary Wharf to see the new architect-designed stations. We visited many of London's train stations: St. Pancras, King's Cross, Waterloo, Victoria, Marylebone. We spent an afternoon at the wonderful London Transport Museum in Covent Garden where we climbed on old subway cars and buses and learned all about the history of the Underground, pre-Underground modes of transport, buses, and trains into London. We bought three excellent books in the museum shop that we've been reading since our day at the museum that have extended what N. learned there.

After London, we rode trains to York, Lincoln, Ely, and Cambridge. N. loved every single train ride, pronouncing them all "so luxurious." In York we spent a full day at the fabulous National Railway Museum where we saw many famous engines N. had studied in his beloved train books and in general reinforced and extended what N. had already learned about the history of steam power and railways. He loved this place so much!

We took a day trip from the Yorkshire town of Pickering to Whitby, a port on the North Sea, on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, a "heritage" rail service on the old Whitby and Pickering Railway which opened for passenger service on May 26, 1836. We happened to ride the line (in vintage 1930s coaches pulled by a steam engine!) on May 26th, its 175th anniversary. It was so exciting to see the steam engine pull into the station! And rattling slowly along the old track gave us an idea of how early train travel differed from that of today, as well as giving us a beautiful and leisurely view of the Yorkshire countryside (a place N. has special affection for because of his love of James Herriot's books).

N.'s love of trains has been a cornerstone of his learning for the past three years (at least!) and we feel fortunate that we have been able to build on this passion so that he got so much out of his encounters with trains on this trip.

A First Grade Year in Chapter Books

2011-06-02T12:24:00.000-04:00

Here's a list of the chapter books that Tim and I have read to N. from June 1, 2010 through May 31, 2011, in the order in which we read them. (I posted last year's list here.) We love reading aloud!

This list does not include picture books, which we still read to him occasionally (though less than in earlier years) and which he reads himself. This list does not include books we've reread from previous years, although rereading is also a significant element in N.'s relationship with books; N. loves to hear favorite chapters from favorite books repeated. As I have written before, although N. reads fluently now, most of his literary experience is still through read-alouds. Indeed, listening to us read aloud constitutes a major portion of his daily learning.

I am always looking for recommendations and suggestions. Tell us what to read next! I am especially always on the lookout for books about nice boys. (Thanks to mouseprints at Thick and Thin Things for an excellent list that we are looking forward to exploring!)

Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain (read by T.)
Return to Gone-Away by Elizabeth Enright
The Giraffe, The Pelly, and Me by Roald Dahl
Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder
The Moffats by Eleanor Estes
The Middle Moffat by Eleanor Estes
Rufus M. by Eleanor Estes
On the Banks of Plum Creek by Laura Ingalls Wilder
The Moffat Museum by Eleanor Estes
Magic or Not by Edward Eager
Pippi Goes on Board by Astrid Lindgren
Pinky Pye by Eleanor Estes
The Borrowers by Mary Norton
Seven-Day Magic by Edward Eager
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (did not finish)
All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot (read by T.)
The Chrysler Building: Creating a New York Icon Day by Day by D. Stravitz (read by T.)
By the Shores of Silver Lake by Laura Ingalls Wilder
The Time Garden by Edward Eager
The Borrowers Afield by Mary Norton (did not finish)
The Story of a Cat by Emile de la Bedollierre (did not finish)
Pippi in the South Seas by Astrid Lindgren
All of a Kind Family by Sidney Taylor
All Things Bright and Beautiful by James Herriot (read by T.)
The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder
All Things Wise and Wonderful by James Herriot (read by T.)
The Well-Wishers by Edward Eager
Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie
The Children of Noisy Village by Astrid Lindgren
Happy Times at Noisy Village by Astrid Lindgren
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
The Lord God Made Them All by James Herriot (read by T.)
The Saturdays by Elizabeth Enright
The Four Story Mistake by Elizabeth Enright
Every Living Thing by James Herriot (read by T.)
Then There Were Five by Elizabeth Enright
Spiderweb for Two by Elizabeth Enright
Five Children and It by E. Nesbit
Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks (read by T.)
The Phoenix and the Carpet by E. Nesbit
The Alley by Eleanor Estes
The Witch Family by Eleanor Estes
Stalky & Co. By Rudyard Kipling (first chapter only)
Matilda by Roald Dahl
Madame Curie by Eve Curie (read by T.)
The BFG by Roald Dahl
Henry Huggins by Beverley Cleary

They've Gone About As Far as They Can Go

2011-05-16T09:21:00.001-04:00

The university arts conservatory in our city recently put on a spectacular student production of Oklahoma! We'd been preparing for it by listening to the original Broadway soundtrack nonstop for the past ~~700 years~~ few months and N. loved the music. He was really excited for the performance, his first theater experience (not counting ballet and modern dance). The production goal was to reproduce the original performance from 1943 to the letter, including the original choreography, set design, etc. The principals even flew to New York to meet with the original performers who are still living.

I am not generally a big fan of musicals, but this was an incredible experience and it was so fun to share it with N., who just beamed at all his favorite songs. We splurged on good seats only a few rows from the stage, and he was completely absorbed in the whole three-hour show. He's been poring over the program ever since, and asked for the sheet music so he can learn to play the songs on the piano. This was a fabulous introduction to the magic of theater!

Unschool Record-Keeping

2011-05-09T22:53:00.001-04:00

Our state requires very little record-keeping of homeschoolers; we have to record attendance (!) and preserve (but not report) the results of a yearly nationally administered standardized test of our choosing. That's it. I'd like, however, to keep more extensive track of what N. is learning. This blog is one way to do that, along with reading lists and paper files of his number and writing exercises. But I wanted a daily record too. During N.'s kindergarten year, Tim experimented with keeping a log of the day's activities, topics of conversation, and ideas explored in a running Word document but his standards for this were too high and it quickly became a burden to craft a daily narrative report each evening; the log was abandoned. We needed to come up with a simple and efficient method.

We don't organize the day's activities by traditional academic subjects because we like to stress the interconnected nature of learning, that one learning experience can encompass history, math, reading, social studies, etc., so the homeschool record notebooks you can buy with subject categories wouldn't work for us. I liked Melissa Wiley's "Rule of Six" as a way of thinking categorically about a day's learning without being bound by arbitrary academic subject distinctions so in September I made up a notebook (above picture, left) of pages with five categories cribbed from Melissa: "Meaningful Work, Imaginative Play, Living Books, Ideas to Ponder and Discuss, Encounters With Beauty." Tim dutifully wrote in the notebook every day, so it was successful in the sense that it actually got used. But he chafed at the categories, which sounded cool (to me) but did not organically arise from our family rhythms. So in January I gave up on that format and offered a small, plain notebook instead; now he happily makes a quick daily list (above picture, right) without any fancy categories. For example:

Wed. April 27, 2011

Chapter in Madame Curie, "Four Years in a Shed" about the isolation of radium
drawing
writing sentences about the Curies
reading aloud
Proper and common nouns discussed and demonstrated
tornado warnings -- talked about twisters
piano practice
long walk

The moral of the story is: simple is better (for us), and other people's systems, neat though they are, are just that -- other people's.

Madame Curie

2011-04-26T15:47:00.003-04:00

Marie Sklodowska Curie [Image Source]

In his memoir Uncle Tungsten, Oliver Sacks writes of his boyhood love of Eve Curie's 1937 biography of her mother Marie Curie. [Sacks tells a lovely story of giving a lecture in which he mentioned his devotion to Curie's book and seeing an elderly lady nodding and smiling in the audience. She introduced herself to him afterwards as Eve Curie and autographed his battered childhood copy of her book.] Since N. loved Uncle Tungsten, he and Tim decided to read Madame Curie together. As with Uncle Tungsten and the books of James Herriot, N. is riveted by the detailed account of life in an earlier era, and especially by the drive and passion Sklodowska Curie had for her study. While Sacks' narrative describes an early passion for chemistry that later subsided in favor of neuroscience, Curie's is a story of lifelong tenacity and absolute dedication to scientific discovery.

N. continues to absorb the broad outlines of the history of science from these biographies, along with some specific facts about chemistry and physics (although of course some of the science is too complicated for him to understand fully). We do many other more age-appropriate reading and learning activities with N., but we are pleased that our improvised curriculum has so far also included challenging works such as Uncle Tungsten, Madame Curie, the books of James Herriot, the King James Bible, and the Odyssey as they have crossed our path. In the original New York Times review, Charles Poore called Madame Curie "a biography that stirs the heart and the mind by a fine counterpoint of sense and sensibility, a great story superbly told." Even if some of the "great story" of Marie Curie is beyond N.'s comprehension, I think it is an excellent experience for him to encounter it not in a simpler children's version but in the "superbly told" narrative that so gripped the world when it was first published.

Screen Free

2011-04-15T15:55:00.000-04:00

The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood promotes "Screen Free Week" April 14-24th to encourage families to evaluate their electronic media habits. So I'm taking this opportunity to write about our TV, electronic games, computer/internet, and movie habits. If your habits and beliefs regarding electronic media are different than ours (and they likely are), please note that I am not critiquing your approach but describing ours.

We're extremists about TV; there's no other way to put it. N. has never watched TV. I don't watch TV. We have a satellite so that Tim can watch the Minnesota Vikings and occasional Twins games, which is the extent of his TV viewing. So TV is not part of what Holly at Unschool Days calls our "family culture." Tim and I are simply not interested in TV ourselves, and we don't think TV offers anything to our six-year-old right now that he can't get in richer, better form elsewhere. I won't rehearse here all the reasons suggested by child advocates for limiting young children's exposure to TV; you are likely familiar with them. Our top concern (among others) is with the aggressive marketing of a specific, gender-restrictive vision of childhood in order to sell stuff to kids. The world of TV does not align with our values.

Most of our friends with kids regard our zero-tolerance policy towards TV as if it is a heroic act of parenting that they admire but could never achieve (at least that's what they say to us; privately they might well think we are totalitarian zealots!). But it is actually much, much easier never to turn on the TV in the first place than it is to negotiate limits with a child who has developed a TV habit. Just don't start!

It is easy for us to maintain a TV-free home because that's our family culture. But what about all the TV outside our four walls? We always sit away from TVs in restaurants, airports, the dentist's office, etc. (TVs are so ubiquitous!). When N. plays at a friend's house, we tell the child and parents that N. isn't allowed to watch TV, movies, or play video games, and even if people think we are crazy they've adhered to this because they know it matters to us. The result is that the kids always have lots of fun doing all the other things kids do together. When a friend has turned to screen entertainment, N. has, of his own accord, left the room to play with other toys or hang out with his friend's parent (he loves talking with adults!). I only recently learned that this was how he deals with his neighbor-friend's occasional screen time, and I was so proud of N. for having the fortitude to stick with our rule.

I think this fortitude is one of the great side-effects of our TV policy. I grew up all but TV-free and I experienced my parents' restriction of TV as part of their larger 1970s-inflected program to resist mindlessly conforming to mainstream American culture, an approach I was very proud of. I internalized their commitment to living their values as part of my identity, and I see N.'s ability to walk away from TV as a sign that he is internalizing this commitment too.

All this is not to say that we will never watch a single moment of TV in N.'s entire childhood. We taped a couple of speedskating races (2-3 minutes long) during the Winter Olympics and watched them together and N. has watched an occasional Twins at-bat with Tim. I have very fond memories of watching The Cosby Show with my family as an older child so I recognize that watching TV together as a family can be fun, though I can't imagine there will ever be another such sweet and wholesome show! In the meantime, who even has time to watch TV?

I have an implacable prejudice against electronic games of all sorts. It makes me sad to see kids playing DS games while out and about, utterly absorbed in their own world and missing entirely the real world in which they are nominally moving. Multi-player online games strike me as a poor facsimile of real social interaction. I don't believe that supposedly educational electronic games are particularly effective. I don't understand why you'd want to play a simulacrum of a sport on a Wii instead of actually going bowling or playing tennis. I am convinced by the argument that violent video games are detrimental to players' humanity, and I think boys are especially susceptible to this. I was not convinced by Steven Johnson's apologia for video games in Everything Bad is Good For You. [In addition, I don't play Angry Birds or anything else on my iphone, I don't let my son play with my iphone, and I carefully monitor my own use of it so I don't fall into the habit of constantly checking my phone.] So, we are unabashed in our absolute restriction of electronic games.

Computers and the internet can be good homeschool resources but we are nonetheless wary of giving the computer a prominent role in our daily life. We always look things up in books first (we have two awesome encyclopedia sets) and we use the internet as a supplement rather than a primary source. Partly this is just to reinforce bookish habits over screens. We feel that we interact with each other more through book research and we feel somewhat passive and isolated when using the computer. I haven't read Nicholas Carr's The Shallows yet, but I am very sympathetic to his claim that the habits of mind fostered by the internet may be antithetical to deep concentration and sustained thought. N. doesn't use the computer/internet himself at all and has expressed no interest in doing so. We don't use reading or math programs on the computer because I don't think they provide anything he can't get from paper methods. At some later point in his education we'll certainly work on learning how to do effective internet research, to navigate and evaluate resources (a skill my conventionally educated, supposedly computer literate college students sorely lack!) but there's no rush for him to acquire these skills. Until then, there is much reading, learning, and playing to be done away from the computer. In fact, I could benefit from spending a lot less of my work day staring at my computer!

N. before entering the theater to see The General.

All these restrictions may sound so... restrictive, as if we spend all our time policing what N. is exposed to. But we think of our role as curators. We want to present a rich selection of material that is fun, interesting, thought-provoking, and consistent with our values; for us, electronic media is only going to be a very small element of that selection.

By limiting N.'s exposure to electronica we actually give them more power. He's not visually jaded. Because I watched very little TV as a kid, I found movies exciting, overwhelming, and sometimes unbearably frightening. Film is a powerful medium! And while Tim and I watch no TV together, we absolutely love movies and watch at least one almost every weekend. Until recently, N. had never seen a movie or DVD. We wanted him to have the awesome experience of seeing his first movie on a big screen, so we were waiting for the right opportunity to present itself. In March, a local museum showed Buster Keaton's 1927 classic silent film "The General" complete with live piano accompaniment. It's about a man and his beloved steam engine! What could be more perfect for N.'s first movie? He absolutely loved it, and it was so fun to share his huge laughs at all the train stunts.

Is our largely screen-free life inconsistent with the philosophy of unschooling? Some people would certainly say that it is. As I have written before, we define "unschool" for our family in a more limited way than some do. We work with N. to follow his interests, but we also offer guidance. By curating N.'s media experiences, we are able to offer powerful visual encounters that are consistent with our values and meaningful to N.

Greens 2011

2011-04-12T15:17:00.000-04:00

We've started our annual kale harvest! N. loves helping with processing the greens we grow over the winter, stuffing freezer bags with blanched, cooled kale, weighing and labeling each bag, and popping them in the freezer. As I wrote last year, he takes over more of the process each year. I was surprised by how excited he was to do the greens with me; although he was outside playing, he insisted on coming in to do his part.

Our greens are a funny reminder that you don't always know what will become a meaningful family tradition. We grow kale because it is easy, it suits our climate, and we love to eat it almost daily. I did not set out to create a significant ritual out of our spring greens, but it seems that's what has happened!

Art Class

2011-04-03T22:54:00.003-04:00

N. drew this at home, not in his art class!

Since N. loves drawing so much, I thought he might enjoy taking an art class for homeschoolers at a local arts center housed in an old textile factory (old building -- an added bonus!) so I proposed it in February. His initial reaction, of course, was that this was the worst idea he had ever heard of. He told me he already knew how to draw, he didn't want to do other kinds of art, he didn't want to have a teacher or do what the teacher told him to do. And if he did take a class, all he wanted to learn about was drawing people and perspective drawing, two areas he wants to improve on in his drawing.

I said the usual things in response: it might be fun, you'll meet other homeschool kids, you'll learn new things, if you don't like it after the first class you don't have to continue. He agreed to give it a try. N. said he was nervous in the days leading up to the first class, and I couldn't really allay his concerns since I didn't know what the class would be like. Although I had phoned to make sure the class wasn't going to be a bunch of cookie-cutter "projects," I didn't know the teacher's name, how many students there were, or even where in the building the classroom was.

When the day came N. put an unusual degree of care into choosing his clothes, as I remember doing for the first day of school as a child myself. He pondered bringing samples of his drawings with him to show the teacher, for he wanted her to see what he liked to draw (he ended up not bringing anything because the task of choosing something representative was too daunting!). He was still nervous, but excited too.

Tim and I were nervous too, as I suppose parents are when they send their children to kindergarten on the first day. This was one of those iconic moments of parent-child separation that we have mostly avoided so far. Because N. never went to preschool, summer camp, or taken any other classes, this was his first group instructional experience (and our first experience, besides piano lessons, not learning together with him). I eagerly awaited word at work about how the class went. As it turned out, he loved it. The teacher was a sweet young woman whom he immediately liked and the 5 other kids in the two-hour class were all boys, which seemed like fun. Over the course of 5 meetings, the class introduced him to a wide variety of materials and methods of making art. He didn't get to learn much about drawing people or perspective, but he didn't seem to mind that. He's hoping to take a class in the next session (although right now there are not enough students enrolled to enable the center to hold the class).

As with piano lessons (which, by the way, continue to be a huge success!), it seems that mildly encouraging N. to take this art class turned out well. I am not convinced that the art instruction itself was maximal, but it was good enough, and the class has been a positive experience in other ways. It gave N. an experience of a kind of classroom environment, with its norms and expectations (however loose these are in an art class!); in fact, after the first couple classes N. said, "I like my art class. Maybe I would like going to school." I didn't bother to tell him that a two-hour intensive art class one day a week with six homeschool boys was not much like "real" school (at least not like any schools in our city)! Trusting us that he really could quit the class if he hated it, he learned to face something he was nervous about, and that his fears and the actual event may not have much in common. He gained confidence that he could take a class without us, learn from someone besides us.

Kids in our area have so many opportunities for "enrichment" experiences, and thanks to their flexible schedules, homeschool kids can take advantage of these without their days becoming too hectic. Instead of taking a class for school kids at 4 pm on a weekday or on Saturday morning (during what is sacred chill-out time at our house), N. got to attend a two-hour class at 10 a.m. on a weekday when he was fresh and ready to delve deeply. I'm glad we've begun to sample our city's enrichment offerings and although we are wary of getting too over-committed (in fact, Tim was a bit frustrated because the 10 a.m. art class fell in prime learning time for him and N.), we look forward to continuing to supplement N.'s learning at home with learning of all sorts in our community.

Learning and Games: Borderline

2011-03-28T16:30:00.000-04:00

For Christmas, a friend gave us "Borderline: Africa Edition," a geography card game similar to crazy eights. I'd love to collect the various versions of these games, because Borderline: Africa is turning out to be a fun way to learn the geography of the continent I've always been least sure of. The game is simple: you play cards that border the card most recently laid down. N. likes it.

Making a Cold Frame

2011-03-21T23:10:00.001-04:00

N. and I recently made a cold frame for growing seedlings out of old windows that I bought at the Habitat for Humanity ReStore for $25 total. N. did a lot of the work himself using a manual drill and screwdriver. Since Tim and I have almost no carpentry-type skills, I was quite proud of N. and myself for putting this together!

We filled the finished structure with little newspaper pots and so far have planted two types of basil and sunflowers. Grow, little seeds!

Field Trip to NYC

2011-03-16T10:18:00.000-04:00

Fortunately, my university's spring break just happened to coincide with that of our homeschool, so we took a three-day trip last week to New York City to see the buildings and landmarks that N. loves. It was his first visit to the city, so N. determined the itinerary.

We took an Amtrak train from Union Station in Washington D.C. to Penn Station; N. loved this trip though he couldn't stop lamenting the long-ago destruction of the old Penn Station! Immediately upon arrival, we went up to the 86th floor of the Empire State Building. Then we saw the Chrysler Building, the Chanin Building, Grand Central Station, and the New York Public Library. N. loved taking the 7 train between Grand Central and Sunnyside, Queens, where we were staying.

The second day we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and back, saw the new Frank Gehry apartment tower going up nearby, the Woolworth Building, the old 1802 City Hall, St. Paul's Chapel, happened on the Canal Street Post Office, saw Carnegie Hall, visited the Steinway store across the street (where N. played a $100,000 piano built in 1891), played in Central Park, and visited the Natural History Museum.

The third day we went to the NYPL again and went inside this time, played a bit in Central Park again, then spent a long time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We saw the Guggenheim (only the outside and the central atrium) and then walked all the way back to Penn Station from there along Madison and later 5th Ave., stopping to see the The Plaza Hotel, St. Patrick's Cathedral, and Rockefeller Center before catching our Amtrak back to D.C.

N. enjoyed his introduction to New York. Of course there are a zillion more things I wish we could have done that he would have loved, including the transportation museum in Brooklyn, the Steinway factory in Queens, the Frick, the Pierpont Morgan Library... etc., not to mention plays or concerts for the grown-ups! But N. saw everything he hoped to see on this visit, and he was satisfied. We plan to go again in the future. He loved the train and subway, all the trucks and taxis on the streets and all the people on the sidewalks. He was happy to see his favorite buildings and it was really fun to see the city through his eyes.

Uncle Tungsten

2011-03-15T14:44:00.003-04:00

Tim and N. have finished their epic journey through all five omnibus collections of James Herriot stories and although N. really wanted to begin them all over again (that honor is apparently reserved for me!), Tim has been reading N. Uncle Tungsten, Oliver Sacks's memoir of his boyhood. The book serves as history, science, biography, as well as a model of unschooling in our curriculum as Sacks describes being sent from London at age 6 to a country boarding school during the Blitz and his subsequent passion for chemistry, developed upon his return home.

Sacks' time at school during the war was absolutely horrifying (the boys were cruelly beaten by a sadistic headmaster) but in the remaining narrative we see Oliver given free rein at home as he performs dangerous chemistry experiments in his makeshift home lab. N. is learning a ton about the chemistry from this book; he made a chart of some elements and their atomic numbers after one day's reading, for example. He's also seeing Sacks as a model of interest-led learning; Sacks drew on the knowledge and resources of his intellectually distinguished family just as today's homeschoolers make use of (and often outstrip!) friends' and family members' expertise. N. is learning about the history of science from this book as Sacks details his childhood interest in the lives and work of Mendeleev and Humphry Davy.

This kind of well-written, intellectually rich memoir seems like an ideal way to learn a range of interconnected subjects. I hope we can find others like this. Any suggestions?

New York Times Review here.

Recent Reading and Writing

2011-02-09T23:54:00.000-05:00

I noted recently that N. isn't particularly interested in reading books independently or aloud. This might be due to lack of confidence or his impatience with the slower pace at which he reads (in contrast to our reading to him). I think he also experiences reading as social rather than solitary, something we do together as parent and child or as a family (even though I have assured him numerous times that we will not stop reading aloud together once he is reading independently); like the Victorian families devoted to their reading circles, for N. reading is shared. It takes all my patience to trust that he will come to enjoy reading independently because he can actually read very well now and he absolutely loves books. I am just waiting for that moment when his own reading takes off, when he finally gets how exciting it is to be able to read for himself.

Tim has been working on developing N.'s confidence by asking N. to read a book aloud to him every few days; N. seems to enjoy doing this but has not yet taken the initiative to do so on his own. To build his sense of pride in his reading (and to practice writing), Tim has asked N. to write a note like this when he's read a book.

It's easy to fixate on reading because it seems like such a clear measure of a student's academic achievement and as homeschooling parents we want to demonstrate that we are educating our child effectively. I try to remind myself that many conventional schools push early literacy yet graduate students who don't love books. I am proud of my son's passion for books and I think there is a lot to be gained from a social model of reading together. Because we read together, our conversations as a family are saturated in books, stories, and reading, which has a great impact on the depth of N.'s comprehension and engagement. Nonetheless, I do look forward to N.'s launch as an independent reader.

DIY Math

2011-01-27T22:19:00.002-05:00

You can spend a lot on money on math curricula, but Tim and N. have been making up their own. Most of N.'s math learning so far has been intuitive, experiential, and oral but this year Tim wanted N. to add some written problems to his math repertoire. For example, the other day Tim asked N. to write out all the ways to make 8 that he could think of.

Here's another example of a "worksheet" they made up together. The first two lines are problems N. made up and then answered, and then Tim made up some and wrote down N.'s oral answers, etc.

So, several days a week they've been doing this more traditional math practice. Tim wants to insure that N. develops some test-taking skills by practicing solving math problems in their most conventional form. And as I wrote earlier this year, cognitive research shows that tests and quizzes are effective in reinforcing knowledge over the long term. I'd guess that the act of writing the entire problem out, not just the answer, also reinforces learning.

Fall Semester Report Card

2011-01-26T22:42:00.001-05:00

Since the university semester calendar structures our family calendar and we are now beginning the Spring Semester, this seems like a good time to recap what N. has studied in first grade so far this year. This is not an exhaustive or complete list, but I think it covers a major portion what N. has been focused on between late August and early January.

Major immersion in:

Butterflies. Tim and N. observed butterflies daily throughout the fall in our front yard. They read many books from the library and our own collection and learned to identify a slew of species, as well as learning about butterflies' life cycles and butterfly-friendly plants. N. began a Butterfly Notebook, drawing butterflies he'd seen and writing their names. When we visited a big live butterfly exhibit this fall, I could see all that study pay off: N. was utterly absorbed in the exhibit, spending an hour looking for butterflies and teaching a friend how to identify them. His deep attention was a complete contrast to the first time he'd seen this exhibit earlier in the summer before his fall butterfly study.
Early northern Minnesota history, via Minnesota's Iron Country. This included railroad history, the Louisiana Purchase, a brief introduction to Thomas Jefferson.
Brick masonry. [which involved: history, physics, structural engineering, artisanal craft.]
James Herriot. Lots of life lessons about Herriot's early efforts to establish his career. Science and problem-solving in his veterinary career. World War II history as Herriot trains to be a pilot. Vocabulary!
Music I. N. is really loving learning to play the piano.
Music II. Listening: some of the CDs in heavy rotation this fall: 18 original movie themes; Asian harp music; Hoagy Carmichael; Getz & Gilberto; Duotones; Carter Family; Finlandia; Christmas music.
Clouds. Continuing to learn to identify cloud types.
Math & Numeracy. Worked on: identifying 10s, 100s, 1000s, millions. Learned concept of percent. Worked on single-digit written addition and subtraction, basic mental multiplication and division facts. Multiplication x10. Basic fractions. Counting and fractions via reading music. Radius & diameter.
Art. The work of William Morris. The construction of the Chrysler Building.
Reading. N. can read almost any word he sees and is constantly reading us newspaper headlines, book titles, packages, signs, words in books, etc. without being asked. He has read a few books aloud to us but resists doing this often. He spends lots of time looking at books on his own (including long books with few illustrations), and there is some silent reading is going on then. He seems to be waiting for further confidence and facility before really jumping into reading books independently.
Read alouds: list here (through The Lord God Made Them All).

Minor immersion:

Scientific classification
Solar system
a bit of French vocabulary
myriad Random Encylcopedia entries

Plus: daily long walks, daily drawing, daily play.

Regency Dresses for Felicity

2011-01-24T15:11:00.002-05:00

I'm really just posting this to show off the pretty dresses I made for the new Felicity and Elizabeth dolls N. and his friends got for Christmas. N. chose the fabrics and trimmings; the red dress is for his doll and the pink and purple are for the dolls of his friends. He chose the most historically appropriate fabric for his own doll, of course, and in his favorite color. Before Mattel bought it, Pleasant Company sold patterns so you could make historically appropriate dresses for the American Girl dolls, but these are now expensive and hard to find. I asked Amy Karol if she had any leads on colonial-era patterns and she found this Regency pattern. N. likes the dresses but due to his penchant for categories, he was a little disappointed when he noticed how different they are in style from Felicity's 1770s garb. Fortunately, after I made these, my mom found the Felicity (and Samantha) Pleasant Company patterns she'd bought when my youngest sister was into American Girl dolls. So I expect we'll be making historically accurate outfits for Felicity soon!

Pussycat Mother

2011-01-12T22:17:00.000-05:00

I have a few things in common with Amy Chua, author of the new book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (which I have not read) which was excerpted in the Wall Street Journal (which I have read). Like her, I am a university professor, I don't let my child watch TV or play video games, and I recently convinced my child, despite his initial resistance, to begin piano lessons. But there, it would appear, our commonalities end. As an advocate of play, non-coercive education, and peaceful parenting, I recoiled at Chua's descriptions of the threats, violence, and degradation that she claims as the hallmarks of her parenting.

There have been myriad responses all over the internet to Chua's book; I was especially struck by Ann Hulbert's review in Slate in which she identifies the supposed envy Chua's book might elicit from parents, not merely of her daughter's achievements, but of Chua's seemingly blissful belief in herself, her "supreme maternal confidence and almost complete lack of ambivalence about her approach with her children." I certainly do not envy her lack of ambivalence. In fact, this very lack is what makes me most skeptical of her claims. While doubt can be crippling or can foster inconsistency and hypocrisy (Hulbert describes "typical hyperparents buffeted by shifting expertise that leaves them anxious about overpressuring even as they push"), doubt is also productive: it makes us evaluate our beliefs and practices, question our assumptions, seek guidance, explore new ideas, think in more complex ways. Without ambivalence, I would not have discovered the many resources that led me to homeschooling and that continue to shape my parenting.

So many parenting books offer seemingly iron-clad "solutions" (the better to climb the bestseller list) and inspire die-hard devotees. I would guess that most of us, however, have parenting philosophies that are rich in complexity and even some contradiction. My dad has a great mantra that captures this: "Tolerate Ambiguity!" When you tolerate ambiguity, you remain active as a thinker, working to reevaluate and perhaps reconcile contradictory beliefs. I think this kind of active engagement can be a very effective approach to parenting.

[Meanwhile, for an excellent dissection Chua's WSJ piece and the relationship between happiness and "success" see Christine Carter's riposte "How to Raise an Unhappy Child"].

Geography: Collecting Quarters

2010-12-30T15:25:00.041-05:00

Tim and N. have been collecting the special "states and territories" quarters for more than a year and they have them all except Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands. My sister recently bought N. a folder in which to display them and it turned the quarters into an amazing geography learning tool that N. has really loved. He likes quizzing us on the dates when the various states entered the Union, and testing himself on his recognition of the states by shape and location. My sister also got us the folder for the "National Parks" quarters so we've begun collecting them. 5 new designs will be minted each year until 2020, when N. will be 16 (which is completely unfathomable). We'll see if he's still interested in collecting quarters then! In the meantime, I recommend quarter collecting as a fun way to learn the U.S. map.

Learning and Games: Christmas Edition

2010-12-28T23:05:00.000-05:00

Tim picked out two games to give N. for Christmas and they were a huge hit: Parcheesi and Squadron Scramble. None of us knew how to play either game, so we've been having lots of fun learning the games together. Parcheesi is an ancient game of strategy, chance, and counting. Squadron Scramble is a card game invented in 1942; it is basically rummy, but the cards are bomber and fighter sets from both the Allied and Axis fleets. N. loves World War II planes, so he loves this game (and, like Parcheesi, but unlike, say, Candyland or Chutes and Ladders, it is equally stimulating for adult and child players). The game prompted N. to bring out his long-neglected sets of little American WWII planes and to draw the planes pictured on the cards. And he's been doing lots of independent reading of the plane names and info on each card. As I've written before regarding Monopoly, it is easy as an adult to forget just how intellectually productive board and card games can be for kids in the early stages of literacy and numeracy. Equally important is the fun the three of us have playing together. Hooray for new-old games!

James Herriot at Low Tide

2010-12-22T13:28:00.000-05:00

Our homeschool had been in high-tide mode for much of the fall semester, with lots of written number work, handwriting practice, and more formal learning (along, of course, with lots of play). Then right at Thanksgiving N. got quite sick, and all he wanted to do was lie on the couch and listen to one of us read aloud to him. Like, all day. In the first few days of his illness, he only wanted comfort-reading: favorite chapters from favorite books re-read -- no new books. I spent most of the Thanksgiving weekend on the couch with him, reading The Railway Children, the Betsy-Tacy books, and Homer Price. Then as he started feeling just a little bit better, he and Tim resumed their reading of James Herriot's books, which they've been working their way through all fall. They've read All Creatures Great And Small, All Things Bright and Beautiful, All Things Wise and Wonderful, and they are now on The Lord God Made Them All. N. just loves these stories, and he loves the serial nature of them; like the fairy tales Tim read to him nearly every weekday last year, these books offer seemingly endless episodes.

As N. continues to feel under the weather, and with the disruption of the holidays, most of Tim and N.'s "school" time lately has been primarily long stretches of James Herriot reading and piano practice. I've been so grateful that we can change pace to suit N.'s needs as he's been sick. N.'s immersion in James Herriot's Yorkshire in the 1940s has been just as valuable as his more formal learning. Of course there's vocabulary; N. used "subcutaneous" in a sentence the other day, and we all learned that the term "husky voice" comes from the raspy cough that animals get when afflicted with "husk." There's history and geography; for example Herriot enlists during WWII and in the 1960s he travels to Lithuania where he encounters Soviet life. Most important, there are countless nuggets of life wisdom as Herriot interacts with the complicated people whose animals he treats. Herriot's gift as a story teller is to render that complex humanity in such rich color that it is fascinating both to a six-year-old and to his dad. We've all really enjoyed our James Herriot "curriculum" and are grateful for his books, as well as for the opportunity homeschooling gives us to immerse ourselves deeply in them.

First Principles: Categorizing & Classifying

2010-12-09T23:15:00.045-05:00

Brick masonry patterns

N. likes categories. Most of his major interests thus far in his life (construction vehicles, trains, cathedrals, butterflies, etc.) lend themselves to sorting and differentiating by categories, and one of the ways he masters a subject he is interested in is by learning all the iterations and types associated with it. For example, recently, he and Tim have been studying styles of brick masonry (as a subset of N.'s passion for buildings) and everywhere we go they identify the brickwork of buildings as "running bond," "common bond," "Flemish bond," etc. and the positions of the bricks as "stretchers, headers, soldiers, or sailors." N. loves learning specialized terminology!

Tim drew on this mental tendency in order to introduce scientific classification. In November, after reading about the classifications and the organisms in each category, N. copied out lists of the 5 Kingdoms of Organisms and the Classes of Animals and invented little accompanying illustrations, as you can see here.

We did not go into the full (fascinating!) history of scientific classification and the various schemes that have been introduced over the centuries and only lightly touched on the disagreement among scientists about the current "kingdoms" (are there 5 or 6? what should they be called?) and the classes of animals. The idea of classifying organisms was the main concept to learn at this point, to think about why and how we can group living things for comparative purposes.

While building on N.'s interests in their learning together, Tim has tried to emphasize what John Barth (in a very different context) calls "first principles:"

"But my talent for doing correctly the small things that constitute the glorious whole was defective -- I never mastered first principles -- and so the finished product, while perhaps impressive to the untutored, was always mediocre to the knowledged. To how many of my youthful achievements does this not apply! I dazzled old ladies at piano recitals, but never really mastered the scales; won the tennis championships of my high school -- a school indifferent to tennis -- but never really mastered the strokes; graduated first in my class, but never really learned to think." [The Floating Opera by John Barth]

We try throughout our life as a family to emphasize that process trumps product, that it is infinitely more important to learn to think than to graduate first in your class. At the same time, the product of one's thinking is of course going to be much better if you've mastered the process.

On Anonymity

2010-11-23T16:02:00.001-05:00

I blog pseudonymously (no really, Fanny Harville is not my actual name!) primarily so that my professional work remains prominent when you Google my real name. I have been feeling guilty that by using my son's real name I may not be affording him this same luxury (that is, the luxury to control his online presence at some future point in his life), even though I have never used his last name on this blog. So over the next few weeks I am going back over posts to remove his name and replace it with an initial N. This won't affect comments where his name appears, but I hope it will at least minimize its appearance. I'd be so grateful if those of you readers who know his name would use the initial to refer to him as well in your comments going forward.

Even though I justified blogging about my child in my Blog Mission Statement a year ago and I try to be as mindful of N.'s privacy as I can in my posts, I still occasionally feel somewhat vexed about the act of blogging. For me the blog is a productive interactive space for thinking through homeschooling issues. But how would I feel as a child to be the subject of such a blog? (N. doesn't know about this blog, or about blogs in general). I've tried to remember what it felt like when I was a kid and I overheard adults talking about me, but that is not really comparable. I hope by reducing the presence of N.'s name on the blog, he will feel less like a public object when he does read this.

Piano Composition

2010-11-23T15:25:00.001-05:00

One of the many things I love about N.'s piano teacher is that she has him working on his own compositions right from the start. She understands that he learns so much from making his own music and he doesn't need to wait till some later point of mastery to begin. Here's a song he wrote this week. First he came up with the tune and wrote it out. Then he added lyrics and title! I love it!

Piano Lessons

2010-11-05T00:44:00.001-04:00

N. began piano lessons in September. As I mentioned here, this was one of our goals for this academic year, and by "our" I mean, Tim's and mine. N. was resistant, as he is about all suggestions for formal instruction by people other than Tim or me, whether it's swim lessons, language class, art class, summer camp, or school itself, all of which we have in the past suggested and he has rejected. We've always honored that resistance, even though sometimes I think it is based at least in part simply on discomfort with the unknown or unfamiliar. Some people think you should push kids to do things that they say they don't want to do because once they get past that initial discomfort, they discover they really enjoy the activity. I think there is plenty of time to learn this lesson later in life. I'm not going to force my son to go to summer camp if he says he doesn't want to, even if I suspect he might actually enjoy it; it's not an important enough activity to warrant disregarding his wishes.

But music lessons did seem important enough to us that we decided to override N.'s resistance. As an amateur musician myself, I know that learning to read music at a young age is very valuable. N. really loves music and he plays the piano a lot, making up songs, working at them so he could play them again and again consistently. He clearly had a strong interest in the piano and as much as I love that he made his own music, I know that piano instruction, if done well, would give him the tools for a much deeper satisfaction in his playing, a greater range of expression and understanding of what he was creating. When we mentioned lessons, he said, "But I already know how to play the piano!" This goes to the heart of my very mixed feelings about autodidacticism. As much as I value passion- and interest-led learning, I believe that a person simply can't teach himself everything. I explained to N. my belief that he would ultimately be able to do a lot more on the piano if he took lessons and learned more about music.

I found a piano teacher through friends' recommendations and when I explained my concern that lessons build on and not counteract N.'s love of music, she seemed to understand, and promised a focus on fun. I silently reserved the option to cancel if N. wasn't enjoying the experience after a couple lessons. After all, we had tried one piano lesson before, when N. was 4, with a teacher who turned out to be a totalitarian; before that lesson was over we knew the teacher was not the right one for us!

The morning of his first lesson this fall, N. again said he didn't want to take lessons, but when I came home from work in the evening, he reported that he loved the lesson! He liked the teacher, Lori, and he told me all about what they did in the lesson. She eased into practicing, asking him only to practice 10 minutes a day that first week. I was relieved and pleased and excited for N.

Then later that first week, one night at bedtime, N. started crying and said that Lori was making him forget all his own songs. I felt so sad! I think what he meant was that what he was learning was making him think about the piano in a different way, and he could feel the conflict between that and his earlier mode of interacting with the piano. Or, that now when he plays the piano, he has to practice for his lesson rather than playing his own stuff. This broke my heart because it was exactly what I had worried about, that lessons would deprive him of his direct Wordsworthian encounter with creativity, even though I ultimately believe this Romantic vision of creativity is limited and limiting. So, I suggested to N. that he set aside some time every day to play his songs so he can be sure to keep them fresh in his memory. And I assured him that Lori wasn't trying to make him forget his songs, that she wanted him to keep playing them. This seemed to comfort him, and he liked the solution of setting distinct times for practicing the lesson and for playing any way he wants.

Now about six weeks have passed and N. has never again said anything negative about the lessons. He continues to enjoy them and has been learning at an amazing pace. I've been really impressed with the books the teacher is using; their method seems really to click with N. He learned songs right away, rather than only focusing on fundamentals, so there is an immediate sense of accomplishment and pleasure. In October, he had a whole lesson book with funny little Halloween songs to learn. When we've had guests over, whether his friends or ours, he has voluntarily played some of his lesson songs for them (we do not ask him to do this, wanting to avoid pushing him to perform) and taken great pride in doing so. And he still plays the special songs he made up.

There have been occasional moments when Tim and N. have wrangled over practicing, but for the most part they've successfully incorporated it into their daily routine. As a homeschooler, N. can practice early in the day when he is freshest; Tim has noticed that his practicing goes much less well the few times they've had to do it late in the afternoon. Since so much of N.'s learning is very unstructured, the structure of practicing provides an interesting contrast to the rest of his sprawling, cumulative, additive learning, and I think this contrast itself is a good experience for him. Finally, beyond the musical knowledge he is gaining, N.'s familiarity with fractions, counting, and reading are all being reinforced through learning to read musical notation.

So far, then, all three of us feel good about N.'s piano lessons. Since so much of our approach to homeschool is based on non-coercion, I felt somewhat conflicted about beginning the lessons in the face of his expressed resistance. And he did express some sorrow as he transitioned from one mode of engaging with the piano to another; it was painful to have caused that sorrow. Yet I believe the pleasure he is taking in his rapidly increasing musical fluency vindicates our action.

Drawing Update

2010-09-29T17:06:00.003-04:00

As I have written before, N. loves to draw and spends lots of time every day drawing. He especially loves to draw buildings, and over the past 6-8 months he's drawn many many buildings that exist in the imaginary world about which he tells long elaborate stories.

Two houses for sale in N's imaginary world

N's own caption explains this imaginary building.

As you can see, Tim has been using N.'s drawings to encourage him to practice handwriting and numbers. Recently they learned about dates during their random encyclopedia reading, so N. drew a date tree and wrote an amazing fact he learned about date trees. There are...

1,700 dates on one cluster of fruit!

N. has also been doing some drawings of real places recently, either from a photo or from his knowledge of the place. Here's a drawing based on a photograph of a gorgeous old building in Duluth, MN, The Lyceum, which was demolished in the 1960s.

Our living room (l.) and new kitchen addition

N.'s passion for drawing and for buildings plays a huge role in our commitment to unschooling. I love that he can spend as much of his day as he wants on this. Not only is it a fundamentally crucial activity for him -- there is some way in which he simply needs to draw -- but it gives us so many learning opportunities as we study principles of building, the history of architectural styles (which leads to many other areas of history), learning about different cities where his favorite buildings occur, etc. His art is central to his experience of school, instead of an extra-curricular interest.

Unschooling Tests

2010-09-21T22:29:00.001-04:00

When I was in first grade, I was required to take timed math tests that had a negative impact on my sense of my aptitude for math. This experience has made me very resistant to the No-Child-Left-Behind testing culture of today's schools and was a crucial influence on my interest in homeschooling. I wanted to homeschool our son to give him an education focused on real learning, not tests. My ideal vision was that we would never have tests (beside the yearly standardized test required by the homeschool law in our state). I thought that we don't need tests since we know what N. is learning because we spend so much time with him. I am concerned that tests orient children toward external motivation for learning, learning in order to do well on a test, rather than encouraging intrinsic motivation.

Tim disagreed slightly with me on this issue in part because he had no negative associations with tests from his childhood. He's been doing little math tests with N. and calling them tests. (See picture at left for an example of one of their "tests"). At first, I was upset when I discovered this. But then serendipitously some articles in the New York Times helped reframe tests for me so that I could think about them as learning tools rather than only in terms of my own negative previous experiences. As one recent article points out, "cognitive scientists see testing itself — or practice tests and quizzes — as a powerful tool of learning, rather than merely assessment." Taking tests or quizzes helps reinforce knowledge; according to this article, studying for one session and taking a test in a second session leads to better long-term retention than studying for two sessions.

There's no question that the timed tests I took were not productive in reinforcing knowledge, but I think we can structure little low/no-stakes quizzes to be a productive part of N.'s learning. These can take the form shown in the picture above, or of the Charlotte Mason-style recitation that takes place daily when Tim and N. tell me at supper about what they studied during the day. Tim and I have agreed that written "tests" not be graded or marked with stars in order to keep the emphasis on intrinsic motivation and to keep tests oriented toward learning, not assessment.

It's easy in homeschooling to try to correct all the perceived wrongs that we parents experienced in our own childhood schooling. Our discussion of tests highlighted for me the importance of maintaining our focus on N.'s educational needs and of refraining from projecting my own past on him. Furthermore, I am happy to take advantage of experiments in psychology and cognitive science that illuminate how our brains learn and work. Much of unschooling dogma seems to be based primarily on anecdotal accounts, and I think it is important to bring that dogma in conversation with rigorous science. Sometimes that science may inspire adaptations of unschool dogma, while in other instances scientific findings will support our educational methods.

Thus, while some kinds of tests can be effective learning tools, I still believe that the multiple-choice testing model in much of education is counterproductive to and a poor measure of learning. In a recent Times op-ed, psychology instructor Susan Engel describes what assessments should try to gauge: "the qualities of well-educated children: the ability to understand what they read; an interest in using books to gain knowledge; the capacity to know when a problem calls for mathematics and quantification; the agility to move from concrete examples to abstract principles and back again; the ability to think about a situation in several different ways; and a dynamic working knowledge of the society in which they live." This eloquently captures our primary homeschool goals. Little quizzes can play a role in N.'s homeschool learning while we remain focused on these broader goals.

Butterfly Identification

2010-09-03T00:35:00.002-04:00

We are seeing more butterflies on our out-of-control cosmos this year than ever before, and Tim and N. have spent much of this week watching and identifying them. They've spotted Eastern Yellow Swallowtails, Gulf Fritillaries, Monarchs, Viceroys, and different kinds of Skippers. N. has learned about the markings and shapes of the different kinds, and loves shouting out the name as soon as he identifies one. They are using the excellent Butterflies Through Binoculars as their guide. This activity appeals to N. because he loves categorizing things, and the immediacy of the butterflies in our yard makes identifying them far more compelling than simply reading about them would be.

Learning and Games: Monopoly

2010-09-02T10:15:00.004-04:00

Last week, before I left for work in the morning, N. caught sight of a box on a high shelf that has long tantalized him because it has a picture of a train on it, and he asked if he could look at it. I told him it was a game called Monopoly but it was for older kids. He still wanted it, so I took it down and of course he immediately wanted to know how to play. I started teaching him the basic rules, and he was completely absorbed. It was all I could do to get him to pause so we could eat breakfast; I promised Daddy would take my place in the game after we ate and I left for work.

I called home to check in with Tim and N. later in the day, and heard that they'd played Monopoly for 3 hours, until they finished the game we'd begun. N. won!

It had been many years since I last played Monopoly, and looking at it through the eyes of my six-year-old, I was impressed by how much the game develops the main learning tasks N. is focused on right now: he had to work hard to read the property cards as well as the chance and community chest cards. He had to do lots of math as he managed his money. In the game he finally seemed to understand the concept of making change with bills, something that had been confusing to him in real-life situations. He learned about auctioning and mortgaging and rent. And playing with Tim, he learned about thinking strategically and logically because Tim is all about optimal play. As N. told me, he made a particular choice in the game because "that's one of Daddy's principles." A true card player, Tim plays games to win, partly because he likes winning, but mainly because he likes the intellectual challenge of figuring out the optimal move or play at any given moment and in the long term. It drives him a bit nuts that I don't generally play games this way but am much more haphazard (and am no card player). I suspect he and N. have many hours of games ahead of them!

Unschool in Kids' Books: What to Do About Alice

2010-09-01T10:14:00.000-04:00

What To Do About Alice?: How Alice Roosevelt Broke the Rules, Charmed the World, and Drove Her Father Teddy Crazy! by Barbara Kerley tells the story of Roosevelt's unconventional oldest daughter. She was a wild, physically exuberant girl. Before her family moves into the White House, she shudders as she watches the prim girls of a New York boarding school walk down the street while she has dreams of climbing trees and owning a monkey. When her antics in D.C. (including joining an all-boys club and requiring the boys to dress as girls in order to sneak into the White House to their club meetings) get to be too much for her father, he threatens to send her to that fancy girls' boarding school back in New York. After weeks of crying every day at the thought of going to school, she presents an alternate plan for her education to her father: she'll teach herself by using his extensive library. And that's what she does. Her antics continue into her adulthood, providing ample tabloid fodder, but she also becomes a very effective representative for her father, both at home and abroad. She also becomes one of his most trusted advisors. She eventually makes a savvy political marriage and remains a crucial institution (nicknamed "the other Washington Monument") in D.C. throughout her long life. We loved this story for its representation of independent learning enhancing the life of an irrepressible child.

New York Times review here.

On Routines, or Back to (Un)school

2010-08-27T00:32:00.003-04:00

Over the course of last academic year, N.'s kindergarten year, his and Tim's days evolved organically into a quite predictable routine that they enjoyed calling "doing school." After N. and I ate breakfast together and looked at the newspaper, I left for work (around 8:45) and N. would usually go to the sunroom to draw or the living room to play while Tim ate his breakfast. Then they'd both go to the sunroom to "do school," which meant Tim reading aloud, N. practicing numbers or writing, looking up a random encyclopedia entry and following ideas and connections that arise from that, etc. This usually lasted for a couple hours; at noon they would take a long walk around the neighborhood, usually around 2 miles. They take turns telling each other made-up stories on these walks. Tim's are called "Original Huka-Buka Stories," about a princess of that name, and N.'s stories all take place in an elaborate make-believe country where he and Huka-Buka and other friends live and own a train yard. After their walk, Tim and N. ate a late, long lunch while listening to CDs, talking, reading. The rest of the day was devoted to playing independently or with our neighbors inside or out, sometimes more drawing or reading aloud, household tasks to do together, (gardening, laundry, cooking, or baking). We continued this routine until the beginning of July, when I finished my teaching. Then our homeschool went on summer vacation until this past Sunday.

I use the word "unschool" to describe our homeschool method because we don't use a boxed curriculum, don't make detailed learning plans in advance, we follow learning cues as they arise out of real life experience, we emphasize noncoercive learning and learning through play. There might be other words that better describe our approach, such as "interest-led learning." And as I've mentioned before I like Melissa Wiley's "tidal homeschooling" metaphor to articulate our movement between more and less structure over the course of the year. The routine I've described above might not seem very "unschooly" to some (the combination of "Unschool" and "Academy" in my blog's title indicates that we aren't conventional unschoolers), but I maintain my use of the word unschool to describe what we do because our routine evolved organically and is not imposed by us on N. I was affirmed in my belief that what we are doing works for N. when I saw his excitement to resume the homeschool routine, to "start First Grade." He asked to begin on Sunday, the day after his 6th birthday party and all week he has been really energized by his learning. He thrives on the regularity of his school routine and on the intensity of focus and attention he gets from Tim during these times.

That's not to say he wasn't learning during our vacation. We're concluding a kitchen remodeling project, and N. loved watching and talking with the various tradesmen who've been working at our house. He and I read many chapter books, especially during our road trip to Minnesota. During our month-long visit to Duluth (see here, here, here, and here for descriptions of last year's Duluth vacation), we spent lots of time hiking, socializing, looking at old buildings and learning more about Minnesota history, communing with Lake Superior, learning about rocks, watching the amazing cloud formations over the lake, kayaking and canoeing for the first time, picking wild raspberries and blueberries, learning about Great Lakes mining and shipping, and more. It was a rich summer.

We found inspiration during the summer for further study during the academic year. Tim and N. spent a lot of time on a cloud book last spring, and the gorgeous sky vistas in Duluth made them both want to continue learning to identify clouds and to understand what they signify. Tim bought a history of Iron Ore mining when we visited a mine overlook in northern Minnesota and he and N. have already spent a lot of time with that book this week; its early chapters lead to them learning about the Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson's presidency, and a bit about the relationships between the French, British, Americans, and Indians. We don't make daily lesson plans, but we have some broad goals for the year: to continue regular practice of reading, writing, and numbers; beginning with the cloud book, to build on science knowledge; continue building on geography and history knowledge; piano lessons (pending). I suggested we sign him up for a homeschool Spanish class but N. rejected the idea of taking a class with others and anyway he wanted to learn French because he's already learned a few words from "Eloise in Paris." So at his request I agreed to start teaching him French myself with short lessons a couple afternoons a week.

We're all feeling refreshed from the summer and excited at the beginning of our second official year of homeschooling!

A Kindergarten Year in Chapter Books

2010-06-15T06:24:00.007-04:00

.As I wrote last summer, N. got interested in read-aloud chapter books in earnest last spring. Here's what what we've read to N. between roughly March 2009 and June 2010, excluding daily fairy tales, nonfiction, and of course many picture books. Several of these books were read multiple times. A few, as you can see, were abandoned unfinished because N. didn't like them or lost interest. Reading chapter books to N. has primarily been my province, for some reason (Tim reads many other things to N.!) so I've noted if the book was read aloud by Tim. The books are listed roughly in the order in which we read them. I am keeping records both at LibraryThing (click the "chapter book" tag for complete book info) and at Listography. I readily admit I am bragging here; I think this is an awesome list. And I think it's accurate to say that N. loved every book on this list that we completed. It's been a very fun read-aloud year! What should we read next? Recommendations?

The Five Little Peppers by Margaret Sidney
The Railway Children by E. Nesbit
Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgred
Betsy-Tacy by Maud Hart Lovelace
Besty, Tacy, and Tib by Maud Hart Lovelace
Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill by Maud Hart Lovelace
Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown by Maud Hart Lovelace
Strawberry Girl by Lois Lenski
Complete Tales and Poems of Winnie The Pooh by A.A. Milne
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle by Betty MacDonald
Homer Price by Robert McCloskey
James Herriot's Treasury for Children
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
A Bear Called Paddington by Michael Bond
More About Paddington by Michael Bond
Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling (did not finish)
Tales from Centerburg by Robert McCloskey
Rabbit Hill by Robert Lawson (did not finish)
The Boxcar Children No. 1 by Gertrude Chandler Warner
Stuart Little by E. B. White
A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett (read by T.)
Winona's Pony Cart by Maud Hart Lovelace
Caddie Woodlawn by Carol Ryrie Brink (did not finish)
The Family Under the Bridge by Natalie Savage Carlson
Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective by Donald Sobol
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
The Cricket in Times Square by George Selden
Frindle by Andrew Clements
Half Magic by Edward Eager
Knight's Castle by Edward Eager
Felicity: An American Girl, 1774 by Valerie Tripp (almost finished)
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's Magic by Betty MacDonald
Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw (read by T.)
The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Robert Fagles (read by T.)
The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes
Magic by the Lake by Edward Eager
Higgins and the Great Big Scare by Rebecca Caudill
The Magical Ms. Plum by Bonny Becker (did not finish)
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
The King in the Window by Adam Gopnik (did not finish)
Mr. Popper's Penguins by Richard Atwater
Ginger Pye by Eleanor Estes
Gone-Away Lake by Elizabeth Enright
Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator by Roald Dahl
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
The Children of Green Knowe by L. M. Boston

Delivered to Our Door

2010-06-14T00:15:00.003-04:00

Newspapers and magazines (home delivery, not online) are a major homeschool resource for us. We subscribe to our local daily paper, and even though it has declined shockingly in the past few years and beyond local coverage is barely a worthwhile news source for adults, it is a perfect newspaper for a 5-year-old boy. N. and I read the paper together every weekday morning over breakfast. There are almost always front-page stories with lots of big photos about local road work and other construction projects as well as stories that help us learn about the history of our city and upbeat local stories about kids and cultural events. The national and international news is very basic, and thus just at N.'s level. Through reading these stories we've had lots of good introductory civics lessons on elections, protests, forms of government.

Even though our newspaper is politically right-leaning, it is still relentlessly cheerful in tone, and nothing like TV news (which we don't watch). Depressing stories are buried deep in its very slim pages, making it easy for me to censor what N. is exposed to (for example, I shield him from photos of bombings in Afghanistan or elsewhere). Although I don't want him to think the world is perfect, I am very wary of exposing him to images that are too disturbing for a five-year-old to process, that will make him too worried and sad about the future he is growing into. The other downside of the newspaper is the huge ads. Tim and I have always found Rousseau's exhortation in Emile (1762) so compelling, if hopelessly romantic: "form an enclosure around your child's soul at an early date." I would love that enclosure to be ad-free; I wish N. never saw an airbrushed face, a lingerie model, or a brand logo, but that is obviously impossible. I fold the paper down to get large ads out of our sight-line when I can, and when I can't I explain what I don't like in the images. We also get the Sunday New York Times (though not everyone in our household agrees that this is a worthwhile expense), which right now is much less useful as a homeschool resource for N. precisely because it is an adult newspaper with adult content and even more inappropriate ads. N. and I do, however, enjoy the Travel section!

We get other magazines, but our National Geographic subscription comes in N.'s name and plays an important role in our "curriculum." He looks forward to getting it every month and Tim and/or I read through it carefully with him, learning what we can from it as well as using it as a point of departure for many other inquiries. Science and nature, history, geography, and anthropology are just some of the academic subjects that the magazine regularly spans. We like the adult magazine rather than National Geographic Kids because the photography is so compelling, the articles have much more depth, and the approach doesn't pander to kids' supposed interests or supposed short attention span. Again the magazine has ads, and they are ads that are particularly hard for a kid to distinguish from editorial content, which is more pernicious (luscious photography of a luxury car in an exotic locale, for example). But we still think it's a good resource.

So, reading the newspaper daily and National Geographic monthly has become part of our learning routine, although we didn't exactly set out explicitly to make this happen. I read the paper every morning over breakfast, so I started sharing that with N. from an early age whenever there was a story I thought he'd like, and the habit has grown as his interests have expanded. We subscribed to National Geographic when N. was born, hoping he would like it, and it too has become habitual. The daily newspaper is so important to N. that if I am running late for work and skimp on reading the paper to him (or God forbid, try to skip it all together), he gets extremely upset. He loves routines and regularity, so it is easy to make anything he enjoys a regular part of our daily life. Too bad journalism is a dying industry. N. will probably grow up to be the last American reading a print newspaper.

Reading Update: Dick and Jane

2010-06-10T23:13:00.003-04:00

I had never actually seen a Dick and Jane reader, but Tim bought one of the reissued "treasury" compilations a few years ago and stored it away for future use. Since N. was sounding out words with great pleasure and read Dr. Suess's "Hop on Pop" completely by himself, we thought we'd pull out Dick and Jane, just for fun. The books are every bit as ridiculous as I'd always heard: dull, repetitive, saccharine, white, and blond. Once you see them you can easily understand why they became controversial both from a pedagogical standpoint (the vocabulary is limited to train children through repetition to recognize whole words rather than to sound them out) and a political standpoint (they do not depict the multicultural America, even with the addition of a black family to Dick and Jane's neighborhood in the 1960s). It's easy to imagine that, as Rudolph Flesch argued in Why Johnny Can't Read (1955), these books would turn a child off of reading rather than inspire him.

As it happens, however, N. loves Dick and Jane. He loves the pictures, he thinks the repetition is hilarious, and he enjoys the stories. With his taste for all things vintage and retro, he admires the dad's car, the kids' toys and clothes. He's proud of being able to read the stories; each one is very short and quickly produces a gratifying sense of accomplishment in the reader. We don't do any formal reading lessons with Dick and Jane (or any other text) but N. routinely asks to read a few of the stories aloud to me at bedtime. Since part of the books' fall from favor was due to a return to phonics-based reading instruction rather than Dick and Jane's whole-word/look-see method, I was interested to see that N. uses both methods when reading these stories: he sounds out new words, while the repetition reinforces words he can read without sounding out.

I certainly wouldn't want Dick and Jane to be any child's only exposure to the world of reading, but I've been pleasantly surprised by N.'s enjoyment of this much-maligned classic. Next I want to get my hands on the McGuffey Readers that Dick and Jane replaced!

Plus ca change: Joseph Andrews

2010-06-09T12:40:00.002-04:00

In Henry Fielding's novel The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews (1742), the eponymous hero and his mentor Parson Adams engage in a dispute about the merits and disadvantages of "public schools" (such as Eton, Harrow, or Westminster, what 21st-century Americans would call elite private boarding schools) and "private education" (which in eighteenth-century England meant the education of a small group of children in a domestic setting by a local clergyman or perhaps a parent). Their discussion turns on the issue of what is known to today's homeschoolers as socialization. Is the socialization, or initiation into the social codes and behaviors of a large community, provided by school beneficial or detrimental?

Parson Adams is partial to a private education, since he offers that service to boys in his parish. He takes a protective stance and believes the socialization learned in large boarding schools has a negative effect on boys' moral development. "Public Schools are the Nurseries of all Vice and Immorality. All the wicked Fellows whom I remember at University were bred at them. . . . Joseph, you may thank the Lord you were not bred at a public School, you would never have preserved your Virtue as you have."

Joseph, although privately educated himself, demurs, citing the views of his employer, Sir Thomas Booby. Joseph and his employer make the familiar argument that children need to learn to navigate the school community as preparation for navigating society at large after completing school. "It was his Opinion, and I have often heard him deliver it, that a Boy taken from a public School, and carried into the World, will learn more in one Year there, than one of a private education will learn in five. He used to say, the School itself initiated him a great way, (I remember that was his very Expression) for great Schools are little Societies, where a Boy of any Observation may see in Epitome what he will afterwards find in the World at large."

"Hinc illae lachrymae [hence those tears], for that very Reason," replied Adams, "I prefer a private School, where Boys may be kept in Innocence and Ignorance: for... Who would not rather preserve the Purity of his Child, than wish him to attain the whole Circle of Arts and Sciences; which, by the bye, he may learn in the Classes of a private School?... A Lad may have as much Learning in a private as in a public Education."

Joseph points out "And... he may get as much Vice, witness several Country Gentlemen, who were educated within five Miles of their own Houses, and are as wicked as if they had known the World from their Infancy."

The discussion ends at an impasse; Fielding does not advocate one side of the question or the other, but highlights with typical Augustan balance both pros and cons of each mode of education. Children are not automatically protected from vice by a domestic education, neither are they automatically learning less by not going to a large school. We shouldn't complacently assume that the mode of education we happen to favor is actually superior. Instead we have to be engaged actively as teachers, parents, and students to make our education yield the results we desire and to counteract its disadvantages.

On Barbies and Sewing Lessons

2010-06-01T15:44:00.005-04:00

N. and I have been sewing Barbie clothes for some time now. It's a collaborative process: he chooses the fabric and has a strong vision for what he wants the clothes to look like. We measure fabric, cut pieces out freehand and together talk through the process of machine sewing: threading the needle, placing the bobbin, the different presser feet, etc. Sometimes N. pushes the treadle while I guide the fabric through or vice-versa.

Here he is experimenting with the various fancy embroidery stitches on my machine, working the whole thing by himself.

Recently, inspired by some adorable clothes my mom made for the Barbies and gave N. for Easter, we actually used a basic pattern. Here he is tracing the pattern markings on the fabric. So we had a little lesson in garment construction and the art of turning a flat piece of fabric into something three-dimensional. What is the effect of darts? Why do we sew with right sides together? The end result is every Barbie's dream: a floor-length strapless Bob the Builder gown!

It's fair to say that this year N. interacted with fewer kids his own age than he would have if he had gone to kindergarten. He plays almost daily with the neighbor girls and he has other friends he gets together with, but as the neighbors start school next year, one of my major goals is to get us more plugged in to the local homeschool networks for regular play-date purposes. Meanwhile, however, I think that because N. hasn't been to school and doesn't watch TV or movies, he doesn't restrict his play by socially imposed gender codes. He loves playing with trucks and Barbies, often together. I am really proud of this, even though as a feminist I am ambivalent about Barbies. I played with Barbies as a kid but in a strongly feminist household where we talked a lot about the consequences of cultural images of women. I don't think that in and of themselves Barbies are damaging to girls' self image, but Barbies can work in concert with images that can have negative effects on girls. So, what about their effect on boys? I am pretty sure I have never read anything studying this! The main thing we worry about is that the Barbies become some kind of female ideal in N.'s eyes. But from the moment he saw two Barbies in a box of my old toys in the basement, he wanted to play with them, and we couldn't justify denying him this pleasure. Instead, while still validating N.'s play with dolls, Tim has talked to N. about why he personally doesn't like the impossible physical proportions of Barbies, and we try to counteract the image of the generic blonde by not calling them Barbies (and by seeking out brunette dolls); instead N. gave each an individual name. His current tribe (whose provenance is the basement and rummage sales) includes Iris, Linda, Myrtle, Violet, Tulip, Millicent, and Nora.

Overall, the Barbies have provided N. with myriad opportunities for pretend play and an introduction to sewing, a very useful life skill that I hope to help him develop. I'm so glad that no one has told him he shouldn't sew or play with dolls.

Fun and Games

2010-05-20T00:26:00.004-04:00

Here are two games N. has been playing a lot lately: word jumbles and marbles.

He made up the word jumbles after seeing them in the newspaper; we each take turns writing a jumbled word for the other to rearrange. This is a great example of what John Holt describes in Learning all the Time, namely that an important part of learning to read is learning what arrangements and combinations of letters don't make words in English.

N. recently bought an old-fashioned wooden marble shooter and we play a darts-style game with it and keep score on the sidewalk. We write down any points a player gets, and verbally keep a running tally, compare scores, quiz each other about how many points each player needs to take the lead, etc.

I think N. enjoys these games so much because they are building on skills that he is (unconsciously) working on very intensely right now: reading and math. I believe strongly that child-led activities and games like these are the most productive kind of learning, much more so than empty adult-initiated busy work or drills. And being able to solve problems flexibly in situations where the answer matters to you is more important than being able to answer a question on a test.

Unschool in Kids' Books: Stuart Little

2010-05-08T00:27:00.104-04:00

I've been making a mental list of the depictions of conventional school in some of our favorite children's books. Whether for the necessities of plot (a sedate school day might not provide many story opportunities) or because compelling characters are spunky and unconventional, children's literature often critiques traditional schools. What happens when the hero is a mouse in a human world?

When E. B. White's Stuart Little volunteers as a substitute teacher for a day, he quickly dispenses with traditional subjects of instruction in favor of stimulating conversation.

'What's the first subject you usually take up in the morning?'

'Arithmetic,' shouted the children.

'Bother arithmetic!' snapped Stuart. 'Let's skip it.... What next do you study?'

'Spelling,' cried the children.

'Well, said Stuart, 'a misspelled word is an abomination in the sight of everyone. I consider it a very fine thing to spell words correctly and I strongly urge every one of you to buy a Webster's Collegiate Dictionary and consult it whenever you are in the slightest doubt. So much for spelling. What's next?'....

'Writing,' cried the scholars.

'Goodness,' said Stuart in disgust, 'don't you children know how to write yet?'

'Certainly we do!' yelled one and all.

'So much for that, then,' said Stuart.... 'Instead of taking up any special subject this morning, why wouldn't it be a good idea if we just talked about something.'

Stuart's cavalier dismissal of the subjects is funny, but also worth pondering. I believe "arithmetic" in the early years is best learned in the context of real problems, and that arithmetic is only one part of the necessary mathematical thinking we want to help children develop. Dedicated use of the dictionary is indeed a very good way to learn how to spell (dictionary use in general seems to be a dying practice; it thoroughly amazes me how few of my college students ever look up unfamiliar words in the course of their reading). I love Stuart's assumption that the only purpose of Writing as a separate subject of instruction would be for students who don't know how to write the letters of the alphabet. Although it is important to practice handwriting, divorcing writing from content and occasion makes the "subject" of Writing meaningless (not unlike "teaching" content-less Reading as described in a New York Times op-ed last year).

Instead of leading lessons, Stuart proposes a conversation (which happens to be Tim and N.'s primary mode of instruction). Stuart is a rather autocratic pedagogue; instead of working with his students' suggestions, he rejects outright their somewhat narrow suggested topics ("'Could we talk about the way it feels to hold a snake in your hand and then it winds itself around your wrist?' asked Arthur Greenlaw. 'We could, but I'd rather not,' replied Stuart") and instead suggests "Let's talk about the King of the World." This idiosyncratic conversation-starter ends up leading the students through major problems of government and ethics (is there a King of the World? what is the difference between a rule and a law? should we have sympathy for the despised among us, such as rats? is a law such as "Absolutely no being mean" enforceable?). They talk, question, and role-play. They establish "what is important:" "A shaft of sunlight at the end of a dark afternoon, a note in music, and the way the back of a baby's neck smells if its mother keeps it tidy." Also: "ice cream with chocolate sauce on it."

Stuart's teaching concludes with musing on the pleasures of summer, when you aren't in school, but might be playing by the lake, rambling, swimming, flirting. "Summertime is important," Stuart says, and he leaves his students with this parting bit of wisdom: "Never forget your summertimes, my dears." The children "all wish they could have a substitute every day, instead of Miss Gunderson."

Handwriting Practice

2010-05-04T11:26:00.005-04:00

Tim looks for meaningful occasions to encourage N. to practice writing letters, and this often means writing notes to mail to family and friends. Valentine's Day, birthdays, Mother's Day, thank-you notes for gifts all warrant an N. card (hint to family and friends: send N. more mail so he can write back to you!). Tim and N. start by talking about what N. wants the note or card to look like and what he wants it to say. N. will dictate the message to Tim, who will write it down for N. to copy. Sometimes N. practices on a piece of paper before writing on the card. Here's a recent sympathy card he sent to my mom and dad, whose cat had died. It's pretty much the sweetest thing in the universe.

As you can see, N. still prefers to write in all capital letters. As he is doing more independent reading, I've noticed that there are still a few lower-case letters that he mixes up (b, d, p) so it makes sense that when he is writing he uses the letters he is most comfortable with and for which he apparently also has an aesthetic preference.

These notes make handwriting practice a meaningful task; they also feed into his developing literacy, and they provide important lessons in socialization. N. is very proud of them and so are we!

Gardening 2010

2010-05-03T22:52:00.004-04:00

We love growing vegetables every summer, and this spring Tim and N. revamped our main garden because Tim was concerned about possibly contaminated soil in our old urban yard (where we regularly find "clinkers" emptied long ago from someone's coal furnace). He and N. built this raised bed together, had a big load of dirt delivered, which they then had to transport from the alley in wheelbarrow loads (N. working alongside Tim with his own shovel and little wheelbarrow), and planted seeds and plants. Here they are planting marigold seeds outside the perimeter of the bed for pest reduction. We also have a second smaller bed elsewhere in the yard.

We have some favorite plants that we grow every year: eating pumpkins, butternut squash, kale, arugula, mixed salad greens, a huge variety of tomatoes, zucchini, black-eyed peas, pole beans, basil, dill, cucumbers, peppers, nasturtiums. We're on the second year of nurturing several asparagus plants, but they take several years before they produce edible spears. This year we are also trying broccoli, leeks, and Japanese eggplants. There is probably more that I am forgetting right now. Tim has written everything out on a garden map this year, because later in the summer the vigorous growth tends to overwhelm us, and we lose plantings among the squash and tomato vines.

In the spring, before the mosquitoes come out in full force, work on yard and garden projects is a regular part of Tim and N.'s day. N. loves these kinds of projects, whether it's placing paving stones, moving dirt, planting seeds, or watering plants. He and Tim talk the whole time about all kinds of things. N. is often working right beside Tim, but when he wants to take a break to play, he does. Either way, he's getting sun, air, and exercise, building up his knowledge about plants and food growth, participating in a long-term project that requires planning, regular attention, and teamwork. It's our own Edible Schoolyard!

Greens 2010

2010-04-25T00:38:00.004-04:00

As I described last year, we grow lots of kale and a bit of collard greens over the winter. This is the second year we've harvested, blanched, and frozen the whole crop before planting the spring garden. Last year, N. wanted to help me with the greens, and his self-assigned task was swirling the blanched greens in an ice bath. This year he wanted to take on a bigger role in the process. In addition to cooling the greens, he filled the freezer bags with chopped greens and weighed them repeatedly on the kitchen scale till each bag weighed precisely 8 ounces, then carefully squeezed excess air out of the bags and sealed them closed. After I labeled all the packages, he insisted on putting them in the freezer without assistance. Throughout the whole process, it felt more like I was assisting him than the other way around!

It seems funny to chart N.'s growth and development through his participation in the annual freezing of greens, but I was struck by how very much older he seemed this year as he took charge of parts of the process. Although it would have been easier, faster, and less messy to do the whole task myself, taking advantage of N..'s desire to participate gave him opportunities to practice thinking about fractions and multiplication as we talked about the various components of 16 ounces, to be engaged in the production and preservation of his own food, to follow precisely a multi-step process, to take a responsible role without being asked or required to. As I ceded more steps of the process to N., I was also able to be more conversationally engaged with him, which helped me maintain my patience as the whole process inevitably slowed down in a 5-year-old's hands. Being truly present in our conversation made the process more intellectually rich for both of us. So, the moral of the story is that greens are delicious, easy to grow, and good for you in lots of ways!

Tell me, O Muse

2010-04-13T00:58:00.004-04:00

Tim tutors the 11-year-old homeschooled son of our friends/homeschool mentors. They meet more or less weekly to discuss literature and papers the boy writes on the readings (or on his passion for art history as it intersects with the readings, which are chosen precisely for these intersections). Although N. doesn't participate directly in the tutorials (he plays while Tim and his student talk), every week as Tim prepares for his tutoring session, N. asks him to read the works to him. Last year, they read major portions of the Hebrew Testament together. This year, N. has heard some of the Metamorphoses, which seemed to fit in with his predilection for fairy tales (almost daily, Tim reads to him from Calvino's collection of Italian Folk Tales, Grimm's, or African Folk Tales). Inspired by Ovid's story of Galatea, Tim and his student read Shaw's Pygmalion, which N. absolutely loved because the Broadway soundtrack of My Fair Lady has been in heavy rotation on our kitchen CD player for at least a year. Not only did N. comprehend the play as Tim read it aloud, but he was so absorbed in it that he made Tim read it to him all in one sitting. For the past month or so, they've been reading The Odyssey. Fagels' translation makes for a riveting read-aloud, as do the poem's origins in oral performance, and N. has been really enjoying it. I don't expect that N. fully "gets" everything he is hearing in these readings, though he and Tim pause frequently for questions and discussion. Though it never would have occurred to us to read The Odyssey to a 5-year-old, we aren't checking this work off some list of classics, as if we have now "done Homer." Instead, we hope this is merely the first exposure that he'll have to this great work, that since he's enjoying it, he'll have a positive memory of it that will inspire him to return to the poem, weaving his cloth over and over.

New Mexico

2010-03-30T00:40:00.006-04:00

We recently traveled to Albuquerque, New Mexico for three days so I could attend the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS). One of the basic things I love about our homeschool life is that Tim and N. are not prevented by work or school obligations from traveling with me so they can take advantage of the learning stimulus that travel inevitably provides; we are grateful for these opportunities (I wrote about our ASECS trip to Richmond, VA last year).

None of us had ever been to New Mexico before. Anticipating our trip, Tim and N. studied bits and pieces about New Mexico: adobe architecture, the state capital, the Rail Runner train that runs from Albuquerque to Santa Fe, petroglyphs, etc. In Albuquerque, they hiked among the petroglyphs, spent a full day at the zoo and aquarium, and explored the city by car and on foot. We ate lots of delicious food (an education in itself!); N. is moderately adventurous about restaurant food, especially since he can almost always find meat, which we eat very rarely at home, on the menu. We took a day trip on the Rail Runner to Santa Fe where N.'s passion for old buildings was slaked by our visit to three churches: the Basilica of St. Francis (cf. Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop), the Loretto Chapel (complete with so-called "Miraculous Staircase"), and the San Miguel Mission Church (built in 1610!). N. really liked the Zia Sun that adorns the New Mexican flag (as you can see in his picture above; his version of the flag also includes the Rail Runner train). He was also totally entranced by the New Mexican music played by local artists on the public radio station KANW and he would have been happy to listen to it in the rental car for hours. In the days since we returned home, N. and Tim have followed up on some of the topics the trip generated that they wanted to learn more about: the Zia people, sting rays, aviation, the Sandia Mountains.

When we travel as a homeschool family we experience what Melissa Wiley calls "tidal homeschooling" because travel shakes up our normal rhythms and routines. Travel provides new stimuli and new objects of inquiry and at the same time coming home makes the simple routines, the low-tide times, that much more dear. I enjoyed seeing N.'s anticipation of the trip build just as much as my heart was warmed by his happiness to be home again when it was all over.

Metaphor

2010-03-29T01:29:00.003-04:00

Out for an evening stroll, we walked past the house of a neighboring family; we consider the parents friends of ours, but their son and ours don't get along well and never have. They've always rubbed each other the wrong way.

"I wish I was as old as O." (the son, who is 6 1/2), N. said. I was surprised, because usually N. laments the idea of growing older. I wondered where this sentiment came from, and where it was leading. I said, "You'd like to be as old as O." Norris responded, "It's a castle with the drawbridge up, and I can't get in. O. and R. (O.'s even older best friend) are inside but I can't join in."

I was so moved by the aptness and poignancy of this metaphor. I wanted to tell the college students in my introductory literature classes who don't see the value of literature, who resist reading: this, this is why we read! Stories help us make sense of our lives and express that to others. Stories give us images, a metaphor like a castle that helps a boy think through the complexity of his adversarial relationship to someone who doesn't intend to be mean, but whose age gives him defensive strength, whose play has a sophistication that remains impenetrable to the young outsider's forays.

Math in School

2010-03-12T16:00:00.005-05:00

One of the reasons I am so much enjoying N.'s developing numeracy is my own traumatic experience of math in first grade. It would not be an overstatement to say that my experience of math instruction in school scarred me for life; because of this I am especially drawn to Holt's account and thrilled with N.'s experience of math so far.

When I was six years old and in first grade, we had to take timed tests of addition and subtraction problems. We were supposed to complete a sheet of problems in a certain amount of time without error. If we did that successfully, we moved up to a test to be completed in a shorter time, and then another and another, each test to be completed in a shorter time than the last. The point was to drill math facts so that you could eventually do them automatically without thinking. I couldn't progress beyond the tests with the longest time allowed. I understood how to add and subtract and I could do it correctly, but not quickly. My parents were concerned, so they had me practice the timed tests at home. I still vividly recall my father's desk in the dining room where I sat to take the tests, the florescent glow of avocado green desk lamp, the menacing red numbers of the digital desk clock.

Timed math tests constituted my first experience failing at something in school. And I definitely felt like a failure. It was humiliating to see my friends moving up through the test levels while I had to take the longest timed test again and again. I hated practicing the tests at home. I felt anxious about my parents' concern because I knew that doing well in school was important, and I wanted to do well. Describing it here, I find it hard to believe these little tests ended up looming so large in my life, but in some ways I never really got over my inability to succeed on those tests. I developed a phobia about timed tests more generally to the extent that my mom had to ask my teachers throughout elementary school not to announce the time remaining on the yearly California Achievement Tests; I was afraid I would freeze up and not complete the test if I heard how much time I had left.

The consequence of my first grade timed math tests was that I thought I wasn't good at math, and I thought this all the way through high school, even though what I wasn't good at at the earliest stage simply was doing math quickly. I also had a very difficult time memorizing the multiplication tables, even though I had a very good memory for words. I think now that in addition to the anxiety I had already developed about math thanks to the first grade timed tests, I struggled with the multiplication tables because I hadn't really internalized the relationships of numbers to each other. The times tables were content-less to me, a series of meaningless numbers. My favorite experience of math came outside of school, in a book my mom bought me called The I Hate Mathematics Book which presents mathematical concepts in real-world contexts (I still remember the pages on permutations and combinations of ice cream flavors).

Despite have an analytical and logical turn of mind, and good spatial relations abilities, I came to define my identity as a student as someone who couldn't do math. I took the bare minimum required math to graduate from high school (Algebra II) and am embarrassed to say that I have never taken pre-calculus, trigonometry, or calculus. I didn't like taking courses that were really difficult for me and that I didn't enjoy working hard in (I was willing to work hard in classes that I was interested in); I didn't like failing.

My own dismal experience of math in school shapes my approach to N.'s education in several ways. First, what happens in the early years does matter, and can have a profound impact on a student's later learning. Second, we try to cultivate a holistic and deep understanding of the many facets of mathematical thinking in N. rather than focus on the surface "math facts." Third, speed doesn't matter, understanding does. Fourth, it's okay to fail. Or, better yet, we hope we create a learning environment where there is no failing, only learning, where everything N. does is recognized and valued by us and by him as an important part of his learning and development. I hope he feels that it can be fun to struggle at something that is hard and that his sense of self-worth or his self-definition do not derive from whether something is hard or easy for him. In fact, isn't it better to try to cultivate in children (in adults too!) an open definition of self? What if I hadn't let my struggles with math in first grade become such a strong part of who I thought I was?

Unschooling Math in the Early Years

2010-03-12T15:05:00.006-05:00

John Holt's Learning All the Time offers a compelling account of the ways that some conventional instructional approaches to math can hinder children's understanding of the relationships between numbers; he describes alternative ways to foster children's sense of the connections and relationships between numbers rather than focusing on "math facts." For example, you can explore all the different ways to make six rather than concentrating only on 3+3. Math is all around us, and children don't necessarily need to master addition before subtraction or even multiplication.

So far, N.'s exploration of numbers has naturally followed Holt's account and it's been fascinating to watch. His interest in numbers has arisen out of his play and his passions. For example, when he was 4, he learned that steam train engines are described by the number of bogey, driving, and trailing wheels they have. So a 2-6-4 has two bogey wheels, six driving wheels, and four trailing wheels going from the front of the engine to the back. But when you look at a 2-6-4 from the side in illustrations (in the zillions of train books we own!) you see one bogey wheel, three driving wheels, and two trailing wheels. So to identify the train properly, you have to double what you see in the picture. I don't recall us explaining this to N. (because frankly I had no idea what this chain of numbers was that was always listed with the make and model of a train), but he looked at a lot of books and apparently from pondering the disparity between the identifying label and the picture, he figured out how to multiply by two. And when he figured this out, he took immense pleasure in doing this operation. Whenever he looks at a picture of a train he says what its wheel configuration is. So now he has a concept of multiplication that we can refer to when we talk about other ways that numbers can be put together or split apart.

Whenever questions about numbers come up in conversation (and they do all the time), we try to build on them and extend them. So, if N. asks us what five and seven make, we'll say 12, and we might follow up by asking him what seven and five make. Usually he likes to think about it and respond; if he doesn't we'll answer our own question. If he's wrong, we'll just say pleasantly what the answer is. We're not quizzing him, but engaging in thinking with him about numbers.

Other ways that I've observed N.'s math skills developing include his extensive play with blocks and legos. Not only is this kind of manipulative play crucial for understanding quantity and number stability, but it also gives him lots of opportunity to add and subtract, to create symmetry and asymmetry, to consider the relationships of shapes to each other (proto-geometry).

I remember his excitement when he first realized that two particular triangles could make a square after he'd run out of square blocks, and his difficulty getting two other triangles put together in the proper way such that they'd form a rectangle. Turning those blocks this way and that, again and again, patiently trying out positions till they fit develops the spatial relations skills that are crucial to mathematical thinking. Because this happens in the context of play, there is no failure, and there is complete motivation because N. wants to make something that he can see in his head take shape in front of him. My crucial role here was to be stay in the background even though I was ostensibly playing with him, to let him figure it out even though my first impulse might have been to show him how to do it!

We also do a lot of cooking and baking together, which of course provides a great opportunity to play with fractions. I've enjoyed watching his slow grasp of "half," "quarter," and "third" (which has been especially tough). It's been really interesting for me to see how hard these concepts can be and so it seems important to provide lots of opportunities to talk about them, explore them, and get them wrong.

The two dominant modes of N.'s math development so far have thus been through conversation and manipulation. But N. has also said to Tim "Let's do some math, Dad," or "Let's do numbers," so they've done some practice with written numbers. Here are some examples:

Writing 1-100:

Even and odd numbers:

Adding:

Writing numbers in different fonts!

N. is by no means a math prodigy, and what he's done on his own and our numbers work with him is not anything out of the ordinary. I've tried to describe here both that he has an innate interest in numbers and in other mathematical concepts and that we've tried to build on that in positive, no-stress, non-coercive ways.

Reading Update

2010-03-08T13:48:00.015-05:00

We’ve been following John Holt’s approach to reading instruction in his book Learning All the Time, which is to say creating a text-rich environment full of stories, printed books, handwriting practice through copying notes to Grandma, but not explicitly teaching reading. Sometimes I wanted to do more, especially when I read the blogs of other homeschooling moms with kids N.’s age who are doing explicit reading instruction. But Tim and I had agreed we weren’t going to push early reading for a variety of reasons, some more idiosyncratic than others (our thinking about this is not slavish devotion to John Holt).

Tim was taught how to read in school at age 7 and my mom taught me to read at age 4; we both have Ph.D.s in English so it would seem that earlier or later reading in and of itself had no impact on our respective literacy and love of reading. Tim and I believe a multifaceted culture of language is the best way to prepare for literacy.* We are also fairly obsessed with the Finnish academic model, which is very successful by a variety of measures, and they don’t teach reading till age 7.* This is not to say that 7 is any kind of magic number. “Readiness is all” is our mantra; when he is ready, I am confident that N. will learn to read.

Without romanticizing illiteracy at all, we have also thought about what might be lost when a person becomes literate. Literacy is a necessary skill and also a wonderful pleasure, but it is simply a very different mode of experiencing the world. N. listens intensely, has an amazing memory, an inventive imagination, and keen powers of visual observation. Will full literacy displace any of these modes of experiencing the world, or can they coexist? William Dalrymple, in a New Yorker article from 2006 called “Homer in India,” describes the ancient oral poetry traditions – bards who recite ancient poems that, when written down, are more than 600 pages long – sustained by the special skills of the illiterate: “Just as the blind can develop a heightened sense of hearing, smell, and touch to compensate for their loss of vision, so it seems that the illiterate have a capacity to remember in a way that the literate simply do not” (p. 54). In some cases, when illiterate bards have been taught to read and write in order to record the poems they perform, their memory of the poems weakens as they become literate. The process of preserving the poems in the form preferred by modernity – writing – ends up eroding the process that had preserved them for centuries – memory. Some older Anglo-American models of education (Shakespearean-era grammar schools,* Charlotte Mason’s pedagogy) emphasized literary memorization as much as if not more than literacy, and I like the idea of trying to preserve N.s capacious memory at least to some degree as he moves into literacy.

In a story-rich environment like N.’s (we read a lot to him every day, and he and Tim tell each other elaborate stories on their daily long walks), there isn’t a lot of incentive for him to learn to read for himself, although he enjoys looking at books on his own very much. N. mentioned a couple months ago that he didn’t want to learn to read, and I pointed out that we would still read to him, that one wouldn’t replace the other, which seemed to reassure him. Jim Trelease’s Read Aloud Handbook (which I’ve mentioned before!) reminds us of the importance of continuing to read aloud after a child learns to read, since there will likely be a huge gap in sophistication between what he can read and what he can comprehend aurally. [If you have access to JSTOR, here is a really interesting account in The Journal of Educational Research (Vol. 95, No. 5 (May - Jun., 2002), pp. 259-272) of a study suggesting that "semantic abilities (i.e. oral definitions and word retreival) not phonological awareness, predicted 2nd grade reading comprehension."]

N. has known the alphabet and the letters’ sounds for a couple years, and he had early whole-word recognition of a few words (bus, off, on, no, cat, etc.) but he could not comprehend “sounding words out.” Sometimes he would ask what something said and I would try to lead him through sounding it out, saying the letters’ sounds and stringing those sounds together to figure out the word. Over the past 6-8 months, no matter how much I modeled this, he just didn’t get it and couldn’t do it independently. I was puzzled by this and it was a struggle for me to remain patient and true to our plan; Tim reminded me that there was no rush for N. to read. I backed off, so that when N. asked what a word said, I would maybe briefly sound it out for him, but I wouldn’t ask him to do it.

Then, suddenly, just in the past two weeks, N. demonstrated that he understands how to sound out words -- even big, complicated words! I have no idea how this happened, but something seems to have clicked in his brain, and he now enjoys sounding words out, and does it all the time. This feels like a huge literacy milestone. N. seems to enjoy our shock at his new skill and to feel pride in having figured it out himself. He can truly feel that this is his accomplishment. Since N. can sound words out, Tim taught him last week about syllables, a little song to remember which letters are the vowels (which he’d been having trouble remembering), and that there is generally one vowel sound per syllable in English. N. absorbed these concepts right away (telling me all about them when I came home from work): readiness is all! He still hasn’t shown particular interest in reading books to himself (and that’s fine with us), although last night as I was reading him a chapter from Robert McCloskey’s Centerburg Tales, N. kept interrupting me to ask about random words or phrases he was noticing on the page; he would get excited when I finally reached those words or phrases in the course of my reading, thus making a connection between his aural and visual experiences of the words.

I see this development as confirmation that the approach we have taken so far to abjuring reading instruction is working for N., that he is on a path to reading that builds on his readiness and makes reading a positive and no-stress process while at the same time not displacing all the other ways of experiencing and interacting with the world that are so crucial to a 5 ½-year-old.

Notes:
* Many of the studies and policies advocating early reading assume children entering school from non-text-rich (less conversational engagement between children and adults, less reading aloud, etc.) environments. The response to this in U.S. educational policy is to push so-called "academics" earlier and earlier at the expense of play (Google "early reading academic success" and you'll get a raft of examples). But the Finnish model suggests that a more successful response would be to create a multifaceted culture of language in all preschools and kindergartens made up of story-telling, reading, conversation, language-rich play. See alse: Alliance for Childhood's "Crisis in the Kindergarten: Why Children Need to Play in School."

* "[R]eading and writing instruction is not part of kindergarten activities in Finland. Instead, kindergarten focuses on social skills and free play, with rhymes, songs, and listening to stories as popular activities. In many kindergartens, children occasionally use workbooks or teacher-made pages for practicing coloring pictures, drawing lines, and cutting with scissors. The curriculum is typically based on thematic units, which include field trips, listening to books read by the teacher, singing songs, and art work on the theme. Although teachers often read a story to the children, books in the classroom are for teachers to read to children, with no library corners or literacy centers. Nor are alphabet cards posted on the wall, as in American kindergartens, because the emphasis in Finnish kindergartens differs from those in the United States. Finnish kindergarten teachers are trained to work with children from birth to age 6; the training emphasizes child development and care and does not include literacy instruction. Kindergarten children are not expected to learn to read and write, and there is no pressure on their teachers to have them do so." --Journal of Literacy Research, Sept. 2000. See also: 100 Years of Kindergartens in Finland

* I am simply noting the role of memorization in Renaissance English schooling, not advocating at all for its draconian discipline!

Geography

2010-02-24T22:54:00.007-05:00

Geography has been a regular subject of study for N. this year. He is very interested in maps and the lay of the land in general (sometimes I try to soothe him to sleep by reciting the streets and turns of the route I drive to work, and he likes to assemble a mental map of places we visit), so we try to make to most of the geography learning occasions that seem to be everywhere. We don't want N. to be one of the many Americans who are notoriously ignorant about basic geography. While following N.'s interests, we make a conscious effort to cultivate his geographical knowledge.

This big map hangs in our breakfast nook for easy reference. When N. first started investigating the map, he was confused by the colors. He thought there was some connection between all the countries that are green on our map, for example, and when he saw other maps that randomly used other colors to differentiate countries, he thought those maps were wrong. I thought this was really interesting. He has now learned to look past the colors (a hard thing for a kid to do!) to focus on the shapes and locations of the countries.

Another abstract concept that had been hard for him to grasp is the nesting relationship of city, county, state, country. He seems to have this down pretty consistently now, although the fact that New Mexico is a state but Mexico is a country and New York is a state but York is a city caused some confusion and then turned into a favorite joke.

How is it that geography comes up in our conversations all the time? N.'s passion for old buildings naturally leads to this as we talk about the cities and countries in which his favorite buildings are located. The Random Encyclopedia Entry exercise which Tim and N. do almost daily is heavily weighted towards geography, due to the nature of encyclopedias. We subscribe to National Geographic in N.'s name (the real deal, not the kids' mag); we talk about it as his magazine and he looks forward to its appearance in our mailbox every month. Our family members have done a lot of travelling lately: my sister lived in Abu Dhabi for ~~nine months~~ a year and visited Dubai, Greece, and Amsterdam. My brother is marrying a woman whose parents are from India so there have been various trips to Mumbai by assorted family and future family.

With all these, we go back to the big map to reinforce and make connections. When I was in 5th grade, we spent a ridiculous amount of time on a project called "State Reports," which consisted of meticulously copying out information about all fifty states from the World Book Encyclopedia onto lined loose-leaf paper. We drew little state birds and flags, copied out the capitol cities and major manufacturing products. It was the ultimate busy-work; entirely unengaging, it took forever and I at least retained almost nothing from it. In contrast, I hope that since it is contextualized and interest-driven, N.'s exploration of geography has a more lasting impact.

Unschool Craft Projects

2010-02-15T21:17:00.006-05:00

Lately N. and I have been making lots of cardboard structures as impromptu weekend projects. He gets an idea, and I try to help him create it, and then the ideas morph and multiply. This weekend, inspired by the Olympics, he wanted to make a skating rink for Violet, one of his Barbies. His starting idea was putting a sheet of waxed paper on a cardboard box; then he wanted stairs, then railings, then we decided to take the whole thing outside to paint it.

We also made Violet some paper-clip ice skates.

January weekends were dominated by The Dollhouse Renovation Project. N. has never played much with the dollhouse, but he suddenly he decided to convert the basement to "an addition." This led to creating a bathroom, fireplace, windows, interior walls, a front door, fenced yard, gates, roof and roof embellishments with carboard and blocks. One day we made stained glass windows from crayon shavings melted between wax paper.

In December we made some paper dolls and a stage. This started as a two-dimensional drawing I made, just doodling around while N. did his own drawings. N, thought my drawing looked like a stage, so we cut it up and mounted it on cardboard. Then we had the idea to make a man and woman to perform on the stage; they turned into a family when N. asked for a little boy!

I like it that these projects are driven primarily by N.'s ideas, with occasional suggestions from me. I could never plan stuff like this! And if I did, the projects would likely go in another direction from my plan anyway, which might frustrate me. I like making things, so it has taken some discipline and practice on my part to hang back, to facilitate and collaborate without dominating. It is so rewarding to help N. give shape to the visions in his head.

Sleep

2010-02-01T22:55:00.007-05:00

I firmly believe that a person’s approach to sleep is part of his temperament, one of those hard-wired elements that make us who we are. So one of the challenges that I face in parenting is how to work with rather than fight my child’s sleep temperament. I found the first nine months of N.’s life at night quite easy. Although he would never nap out of arms in the daytime and even in arms slept usually for no more than 40 minutes at a time, N. nursed to sleep easily at night, and when he woke to nurse he usually fell back asleep easily.

After nine months, as he became increasingly engaged with the world, he woke more frequently and often found it difficult to go back to sleep even after nursing. I am militantly opposed to any form of “crying it out,” so I did whatever I could to help him fall back asleep in those days. He hated his crib, so he slept with us from 9-12 months, after which he slept on a futon on the floor in his room, which adjoins ours. I made a conscious effort not to focus on “sleeping through the night” as if it were a significant goal; Meredith Small's ethnopediatrics helped me remember that “sleeping through the night” is nothing more than an American cultural norm, and that far from having any scientific basis, the “sleeping through the night” ideal probably runs counter to evolutionary logic of children’s sleep and the child-parent attachment. Despite all my efforts not to focus on this, I can tell you that N. slept without waking exactly 5 times between age 1 and age 4.

Until he weaned himself at age 3, N. always went to sleep by nursing.It was the only thing that worked for him. I worried a lot about this at the time, but now I am glad he had this, since it clearly helped him to relax and let go of the day. An effect of his nursing to sleep was that bedtime was (and remains) exclusively Mommy’s domain unless I have to work or travel. Once he decided he didn’t want to nurse, we instituted a Pavlovian routine of reading and singing lullabies, then quiet as I lie with him on his futon till he falls asleep. This routine often works well. But the times when it doesn’t work are really challenging. N. is remarkably self-aware about his resistance to sleep. Once when he was 3 ½ or so, and we were wrangling about going to sleep, he cried out, “But I can’t go to sleep, Mommy! I still have so many questions!!!” He is intensely alive and he just doesn’t want the day to end.

Why is this a problem? I gather that the radical unschooling perspective on sleep is not to enforce a bedtime but to let children control when and where they go to sleep, thus learning self-regulation. Even Mrs. Piggle-wiggle cures the “Never-want-to-go-to-bedders” by recommending they stay up as long as they want until they are so exhausted they beg to go to bed at 8 p.m. In Mrs. Piggle-wiggle’s world, however, this only takes a weekend. In most of the radical unschooling parent accounts I’ve read, it takes about six months, and neither Tim nor I can handle six months of a sleep-deprived child. We tried it for one month, and then decided it didn’t feel right for us or N.. I feel like a neglecting parent when N. doesn’t get enough sleep, because the effects on him the next day are so obvious. One of the reasons we don’t send him to school is our resistance to the overscheduling and early morning start times that lead to increasing sleep loss among American kids, so I want a home routine that fosters sleep for fully engaged learning and general happiness. N. can’t take full advantage of the homeschooling that he so enjoys when he is tired and cranky. His natural waking time right now is around 8 a.m.; if he is asleep by 9 p.m. he is fully rested the next day.

So, we’ve tried many strategies for the times when the bedtime routine doesn’t work. Sometimes we try to wake him up earlier. I tried to come up with a metaphor that would help him conceptualize what it means to get ready to sleep; drawing on his passion for vehicles, I would tell him it was time to turn off his engine. Because N. doesn’t go to school, he often isn’t completely exhausted or sensorily overloaded by day’s end, and I think that’s a good thing. But to compensate for this, we try to make sure he gets a lot of physical activity during the day playing outside or taking long walks with Tim; in winter weather this becomes a bit harder. When he is clearly just not tired yet, lately we’ve let him turn on his reading light and look at books by himself until he is tired. (I worry that this is a further incentive for staying up, however.) When he reads, I leave the room because I do a lot of work preparing my classes etc. at night and I can’t hang out with him till he’s tired. Occasionally he falls asleep with his head on a book (which I later remove!) and I think this is great practice for him as he learns to let go and fall asleep by himself. The challenging nights are when he doesn’t fall asleep by himself but asks me to come back in his room. Sometimes I resist this because I don’t want to reward him for staying up late with yet more Mommy time. Or I simply have a ton of work to do before my morning class and don’t want to lose my work time or to risk falling asleep myself before I am done (and I hate when my work interferes with my parenting). If I refuse to return to his room (and I can be stubborn when I am frustrated), N. gets upset, which in turn upsets me, because even though he’s not a baby I still hate for him to cry himself to sleep. At the same time, I worry that he is 5 ½ years old and he almost never falls asleep by himself. I can’t decide whether it is important that he learn to do so more regularly (though how I would make this happen I have no idea) or whether, like so many things, N. will go to sleep by himself when he is ready to and not on anyone else’s schedule.

Further reading: Meredith Small: Our Babies, Ourselves
Elizabeth Pantley: The No-Cry Sleep Solution
William Sears: The Sleep Book
John Butler: Hush Little Ones (the last book we read every night!)

Tumbling, Commonplacing

2010-01-19T14:01:00.004-05:00

I was inspired by Melissa Wiley to create a Tumblr commonplace book to easily share intriguing things I read online (and to keep track of them with tags so I can find them when I want to!). I've added a link at right. Happy tumbling!

Unschool in Kids' Books: Willow

2009-12-10T13:34:00.005-05:00

Without at all trying to, we have stumbled upon many library books that depict school as an arid and rule-bound environment that squelches children's creativity. Maybe a disproportionate percentage of creative children who were unhappy in school grow up to write kids' books!

The art classroom at Willow's school is neat and orderly, and the children face front in tidy rows... all but Willow, who is reprimanded by the art teacher for turning around to gaze out the window. The teacher assigns art tasks (such as drawing a green tree) and Willow is scolded by the teacher and mocked by her classmates for the pink tree or blue apple she paints instead of following the model pictures. Willow brings her book of Famous Paintings to show her teacher paintings like hers, but the teacher merely mutters "Horrid little girl" under her breath!

For Christmas, however, Willow gives her beloved art book to her teacher. We see the teacher studying the book, then drawing and painting with increasing abandon. Her hair comes loose, her clothes are spattered with paint, her pictures are scattered all over her classroom floor. When the children return after the holiday break, they enter a room flooded with color and a woman they don't recognize, their transformed teacher, invites them to help her paint murals on the walls.

It's a bit didactic, I suppose, but what I liked about this book was that Willow gave her art book to her teacher not to prove a point, but to open up a world of creativity to her teacher; it was an act of generosity on the part of a child who wanted to share something that gave her pleasure with someone who was clearly unhappy. The image of the uptight schoolmarm is a bit sexist, and I wasn't terribly pleased by the visual representation of her transformation in the shift from her austere hair pulled back in a bun to a much prettier, happier woman with loosely flowing locks. But I like the book's basic depiction of the value of creativity, of the two-way street of education as the teacher learns from the student, and of a school environment transformed by child-led learning.

Drawings, Fall Semester Edition

2009-12-10T01:11:00.007-05:00

Here is a small selection of the zillions of drawings N. has made since September. As I have mentioned before, he likes to draw every day.

Old Buildings, Fall Semester Edition

2009-12-07T12:32:00.009-05:00

N.'s deep interest in old buildings has continued and developed all this fall and winter. For example, he has learned about the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian orders. Thanks to the Random Encyclopedia Entry, followed up with library books, he learned about International architecture, which he enjoyed very much, though he still says he prefers old to modern. Thanks to our National Geographic subscription, he studied Angkor Wat intensely for a week. He has also become acquainted with Indian temples, primarily through the Taj Mahal. My sister and her boyfriend took a trip to Athens and we had been studying a bunch of books on the ancient buildings of Athens, so N. loved seeing those buildings show up in my sister's photos. Every trip to the library nets books about buildings, whether cathedrals or skyscrapers. One day we were looking at a picture of a building designed by Renzo Piano and I reminded N. that he was one of the architects of the Centre Pompidou; N. shouted "Renzio Piano Building Workshop!" and began excitedly paging through a book on skyscrapers to the final page, an architect's rendering of the London Bridge Tower (apparently also derisively referred to as The Shard), upon which construction began in 2009. He loves making these kinds of connections.

A colleague asked me what exactly N. likes about cathedrals and old buildings, what draws him to this study. I found it difficult to answer because I am really not sure myself, and that is not the kind of thing he could articulate if asked. I think part of the appeal is taxonomic, as with his earlier (and ongoing) passions for construction vehicles and trains; that is, he seems to really love to learn categories and types. He can tell you whether a cathedral is Norman, Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, or Neo-Gothic, and he knows a cathedral's different parts, from nave to apse/chancel to transcept, etc. He also seems to enjoy the interplay between type and variation, in other words when a building has most of the features of one type, but departs from type in a few details. This is especially true in his daily drawings of buildings, the seemingly infinite variations of cathedrals, churches, factories, etc. he comes up with (photos of this fall's drawings coming in a future blog post). And I think he enjoys thinking about and trying to understand the idea of history. He's commented repeatedly that buildings that we think of as old were new when they were built. It is exhilarating to begin to grasp the scope of the past.

Throughout the fall, wherever we go, we have been looking at old buildings:

Train tracks leading to abandoned tobacco factories in our city. We walk among these factories regularly because N. is fascinated by them.

A bit of very old cobbled street near the old tobacco factories.

The entrance to the grand Art-Nouveau headquarters of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, built in 1929. This 22-story building was the tallest in the South when it was built, and it was designed by the architects who went on to build the Empire State Building. (Incidentally, it is now for sale!) Last year, the receptionist wouldn't let N. and me in the lobby to look at the Christmas tree set up there and made us look at it through the street windows instead. The lobby reeked of stale cigarette smoke.

Salem College, the oldest educational institution for women in the United States (1772). I think this building dates to the mid-19th century, but I can't remember for certain.

N. was very intrigued by these typical Old Salem windows that are neither Gothic nor Romanesque.

The underside of a modern bridge built in the style of the late eighteenth-century Moravian settlers of Old Salem. N. and I regularly argue (in fun) about whether it is old or modern.

Entrance to what is now the Sun Trust building in Durham, NC.

Duke University Chapel.

Another view of the Duke Chapel.

One of N.'s drawings of the Duke Chapel. (There is a cloister on the side that you can't see in the above photos.)

The American Tobacco campus, now redeveloped as office space. I like the mixture of buildings in this photo.

Court House in Durham.

A church in downtown Durham that N. liked.

The old Kress department store, downtown Durham.

The Library of Congress, Washington D.C. N. LOVED this! It was so fun to take him to it!

The Old Post Office, Washington D. C. Another one N. really loved. We went up into the clock tower for a great view of the city. (Architectural style: Richardson Romanesque)

Side-view of the Old Post Office.

The National Cathedral, Washington D.C.!!!! (Neo-Gothic)

Another view of the National Cathedral.

The Purity of Speculation

2009-12-01T15:54:00.004-05:00

In J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello (2003), which I am teaching this week, the title character discusses experiments performed on apes in 1917. In one experiment to determine mental capacity, food is withheld from an ape named Sultan, a bunch of bananas are hung on a wire three meters above the ground in Sultan's pen, and three wooden crates are brought into the pen.

'Sultan knows: Now one is supposed to think. That is what the bananas up there are about. The bananas are there to make one think, to spur one to the limits of one's thinking. But what must one think? One thinks: Why is he starving me? One thinks: What have I done? Why has he stopped liking me? One thinks: Why does he not want these crates any more? But none of these is the right thought. Even a more complicated thought -- for instance: What is wrong with him, what misconception does he have of me, that leads him to believe it is easier for me to reach a banana hanging from a wire than to pick up a banana from the floor? -- is wrong. The right thought to think is: How does one use the crates to reach the bananas?' ....

'At every turn Sultan is driven to think the less interesting thought. From the purity of speculation (Why do men behave like this?) he is relentlessly propelled towards lower, practical instrumental reason (How does one use this to get that?) and thus towards acceptance of himself as primarily an organism with an appetite that needs to be satisfied....' (p. 72-73)

Such a poignant vision of what behaviorism looks like to its subjects as they must limit and reduce their thoughts to meet the low and limited expectations of their trainers! The account of Sultan's first "wrong" thoughts reminds me of one of my mom's methods of punishing misbehavior: we were told to "go to your room and think about it," and we later joked as a family that of course what we thought about during the brief banishment was anything but our actual transgression. Thoughts are wayward.

The experiment on Sultan is not meant to be a punishment; it is meant to measure what he knows, his powers of thinking. But he experiences it as punishment (What have I done?), as a withdrawal of affection (Why has he stopped liking me?), as a profound misunderstanding of his nature (What misconception does he have of me?). Given this account of the experience of behaviorism, I was so saddened by the recent light article in the New York Times about parents who apply Dog Whisperer tactics to their children as if they are merely animals to control. I don't know a thing about dogs, but I suspect Elizabeth Costello would find the use of such tactics on both dogs and children unjust.

I want both in my university classes and in my parenting not to create situations in which there is a single "right" thought or response, but to foster "the purity of speculation." Just as Elizabeth Costello calls for us to sympathize with Sultan, I want to sympathize with my students and with my son, to be open to all their ways of thinking.

A Child's October, Part 2

2009-11-21T20:38:00.010-05:00

[Another belated post!]

Before I had a child, I had never been trick-or-treating. My parents believed that Halloween was in conflict with their Christian beliefs, so we went to parties at our church instead. We wore wonderfully creative costumes that my mom made and we got plenty of candy at those church parties, so when I was a child I didn't feel deprived of anything. But now I absolutely love Halloween and I think there is nothing like trooping door to door. I love the festive feeling of the night as our neighborhood teems with costumed kids and adults. We live in an especially good neighborhood for trick-or-treating because the streets are on a grid and lined with sidewalks; people come over from the surrounding neighborhoods and this year Tim (who stays home to dispense candy while N. and I make the rounds) counted over 150 trick-or-treaters at our door (excluding accompanying parents). The scene is always enlivened by the students from the nearby local public arts high school/college who dress to the nines and sometimes sing for their candy.

This year N. trick-or-treated with one of his best friends and they had so much fun together. I loved seeing their glee at the spookily decorated houses. One neighbor is apparently a lighting designer at the school of the arts, and her house featured fog, lights, spider webs, a costumed man leaping out of a coffin, etc. It was so well done! Last year, N. wouldn't have enjoyed it, but this year he and his friend thought it was just scary enough to be really fun.

N. and his pirate friend. N. (at his insistence, of course) has been a black cat 4 years in a row.

We were proud of our simple ghost haunting our yard.

I like the traditional trick-or-treating, neighborhood Halloween more than any other substitute because we are out celebrating the season with our neighbors, both those who are our friends and those we don't know well. Halloween is a kind of antidote to our era's social fragmentation.

I love that it is a holiday of generosity and excess; when I was a kid I used to marvel at the very idea of trick-or-treating because it seemed it would violate all my social conditioning to ring a stranger's doorbell and ask for candy. How totally bizarre it must be to do that!! At the same time, our era's sanitized version of Halloween (parents and cars all over the place) is nothing like what Tim experienced as a child, when "Trick or treat, soap or eat" was a genuine threat. As much as it seems to violate social norms to ask strangers for candy, social rituals are strongly emphasized in today's Halloween as children are reminded to say "Trick-or-treat" when the door opens and then to be sure to say "Thank you!" (I was annoyed at myself for falling into this as I walked with my friends, the parents of N.s friend. We were repeatedly reminding the boys to say "thank you" and I really don't think that should matter much at Halloween!).

We haven't talked much yet with N. about the complex origins of Halloween, though these were exactly what disturbed my parents when I was young. But as the streets of our neighborhood are thronged with ghosts and witches and cackles and howls ring in the air, I like to think we are connected to an ancient way of marking the season as it turns, wondering what it will hold for us, and thinking of those no longer with us.

Tim hoped to ward off swine flu with this sick jack-o-lantern.