It has begun...

Even though I still feel rather like I'm in the first trimester, my growing belly and the handy dandy spinning wheel calendar are calling incessantly that "we're halfway there!"  My head is most certainly reminding me that it's time to feather my nest.  There is much to be accomplished and only twenty weeks left to do it, ten of which will be encumbered by a belly so large that I will only be able to point and beg that it be done.

So, we begin with the most physical tasks keeping me awake at night. 

• Our learning room needs to be ruthlessly purged and re-organized (again). 
• Our mudroom, which made a surprise appearance at Kitchen Comforts, must be tamed. 
• The craft room, which has somehow taken on the appearance of a dumping ground, must be restored to its former glory.
• Fifteen years of photos need to be scrapbooked (I'm beginning to resign myself to the fact that this is how I'll spend my golden years, but I keep putting it on the list).
• The freezer meals must be cooked and stored but first the freezer is to be defrosted in anticipation of a side of beef.
• The pantries must be stocked (why is it that I approach having a baby the same way I approach natural disasters: bottled water, batteries, fully stocked dry goods, plenty of books?).
• I need to make sure there is nothing under beds or couches.  Why?  I don't know; it just keeps me up at night.
• I've already enlisted my seven-year-old to wash walls and baseboards with me, a task which will be revisited several times before the stork comes.
• Window washing is another ongoing task.
• The spring gardens are nearly in, but fall bulbs must be purchased so that the children can plant during the babymoon.
• One of these weeks, I suppose we should clean out the garage.
• And then there is the fact that I had given up on ever being so blessed again:  I gave away all my baby things.

And on and on the list goes; I know that one key to a peaceful postpartum for me is to leave for the hospital with the house in very good order.  If the underpinnings of organization are in place, the rest will work much more smoothly.  I will share details as we go.

This time will have some unique challenges.  This baby is due days before his/her brother's eighteenth birthday.  This time, my biggest task is to pull together homeschooling transcripts/portfolios for college applications before September.  I don't want to be learning this new skill while sleep-deprived and nursing, so it must be nearly finished before I go into labor. That's where my computer time will go this summer.

That means it won't go into what I usually do before a baby comes:  lesson plan overdrive.  Usually, I write pages and pages of detailed plans to take us through the first few months.  And then we follow them, more or less (often less). It's been four years since the last baby, so I think I'll just recycle the old plans.  They are written for multiple levels and everyone can just move up a level. We'll study ancient Greece and then Colonial America with a heavy dose of fall nature study and nature books.  Yes, it's eclectic, but it's also proven and I'm looking for guaranteed successes this time around. This plan will make my dear husband very happy since that means there will be no pre-baby book buying binge. We have about nine linear feet of books on these topics. Some people buy layettes.  I buy living books. Many of them.

Since we are well-stocked in the living books department for the plans I will pursue, I'll just update the workbook stash, move the living books for the units I've chosen to the forefront, and see where that takes us.Of course, Catholic Mosaic is due to arrive in my mailbox in a couple of weeks.  I reserve the right to revise the plans and the budget.

But back to the household.  I've noticed during my can't-hold-my-head up stage, that this house doesn't really run very well without my direct involvement.  Could be a problem...

Before we hit the bullet points, I need to dust off and update the daily plan.  Yes indeed, it's time to re-establish the chore chart. 

The pegboard is from Family Tools, but I don't use it the way they intended.  I'm not into complicated reward/punishment systems.  We expect children to do chores cheerfully because that's how they serve God--just like we are expected to do our duties cheerfully and so fulfill the duties of our vocations. One of my duties is to clearly outline my expectations.  I've fallen short here in the last couple of years or so.  Slowly, I slipped into just doing it myself rather than requiring someone else to do it, teaching her to do it properly, and inspecting the job when finished.This became woefully apparent when I was out of commission.  We've begun an intensive training period in housekeeping.  Everyone needs the refresher course or they need to be taught for the first time. This is not your usual "curriculum."  But it is real. And it's oh-so-necessary, both now and later. My children will leave my home knowing everything they need to know to run their own homes. It will make their young adulthoods much more fruitful and harmonious. Their spouses will rise up and call me blessed.  At least that's the idea.

Workbooks? In my home?

So often, one of the first questions that inquiring minds ask is what home educating moms do when they are sick.  There is no substitute teacher.  All the lovely plans of narrations carefully keyboarded by a patient Mama, long walks in the woods acquainting each other with flora and fauna, and messy, joyful artistic endeavors at outdoor easels are tossed aside in favor of a plump pillow and a steady stream of chamomile-peppermint tea.

I've spent seventeen weeks and five days with that pillow and tea (but who's keeping track, right?).  The first ten weeks or so, things moved along quite nicely.  We had been in a great rhythm and the children even planned and executed some very lovely Charlotte Mason days.  They spent about a week at the Rabbit Trails forum and put together a rather impressive snowflake unit.  They plugged away at notebook projects.  But then...

...somehow, the order started drifting away and chaos crept in.  They figured out that if I went to bed a few moments after eating,I wasn't going to resurface any time soon.  And I broke the cardinal rule of home and school management:  Don't expect what you don't inspect.  And so, my home and our lessons began a sure slide into disarray.

How to right the ship?  Well, I determined to redistribute chores on the chore chart and to begin a new unit.  I was sure we'd all be invigorated.  Problem is, invigoration and motivation were never my problem.  My problem was physical limitation.  I can want to take all the hikes in the world. I can want to do a unit that requires my constant attention. But the spirit is willing and the flesh is nauseous and dizzy.    I think God had a plan.

At the beginning of this school year, our family gladly volunteered to watch the one-year-old of a dear friend while she went to college. Her story is told here. For the first week, Gracie could not be consoled. She fussed. She cried.  She wanted everyone's attention, all the time.  I was despairing.  I didn't want to bail out of this arrangement.  I didn't want to sacrifice our home education either. I wanted Gracie to be a part of our days at home and I was confident that was God's will too.  Our lives were inextricably intertwined.  But how did God want me to incorporate it all harmoniously and productively?

I did something I'd never done before.  I placed a huge order for boxed curriculum. It came.  I didn't open the box for days.  It seemed like I was denying everything I'd always wanted to believe about education at home. I didn't want someone else's plans.  And I really didn't want workbooks.  But I was pretty desperate.  So we broke open the box and we discovered some real gems there.  We discovered that delight-directed learning and living books could co-exist along with basic, faith-infused workbooks and lesson plans. Mom learned a valuable lesson.  Funny thing was, Gracie had stopped crying before we even opened the box.  It turns out she was cutting four teeth that first week and just as soon they were in, she was all giggles and grins.  But we now had workbooks.

And oh what a blessing they have been since January!  I can stay completely still and horizontal and still help a child with a worktext.  We're still making progress.  And when we slipped into chaos, I drew up list and made a promise to check progress with those texts. I miss the lapbooks and the hikes.  I'm longing to do something impulsive and creative, but I'm glad for the blessing of the books in the box. We've read a whole lot of books up in my big bed, played plenty of board games, begun family blogs with lots of journaling, and been pretty faithful to the workbooks and somebody else's lesson plans.

I have found great comfort and encouragement in this poem about workbooks, written by the eldest girl in Alice's lovely Cottage. Clearly a child who could write such a delightful, sophisticated poem has had a an education that might have included workbooks but certainly wasn't limited to them or by them.  Wonder of wonders: workbooks can co-exist with real education! If Alice's children can know and "love" workbooks ;-) and still have the rich and varied education I know they have, mine can too!

What is Real Learning?

Educating a child’s mind is a primary goal of home education and is absolutely essential to helping our children become what God wants them to be. Edith Stein believed in balanced formation—the heart, soul and mind all need to be educated. She was a strong critic of the education system of her day which stressed memorization and the acquisition of unrelated facts. Charlotte Mason concurs when she writes,

“Upon the knowledge of these great matters—History, Literature, Nature, Science, Art—the Mind feeds and grows. It assimilates such knowledge as the body assimilates food, and the person becomes what is called magnanimous, that is a person of great mind, wide interests, incapable of occupying himself much about petty, personal matters. What a pity to lose sight of such a possibility for the sake of miserable scraps of information about persons and things that have little connection with one another and little connection with ourselves!” (Ourselves, p.78)

Edith Stein deplored the fact that the idea of education typically is:

“that of encyclopedic knowledge: the presumed concept of the mind [is] that of the tabula rasa onto which as many impressions as possible [are] to be registered through intellectual perceptions and memorizations." (Woman, Edith Stein, p.130)

Like Charlotte Mason, she recognized that education is so much more than the acquisition of encyclopedic knowledge. In the poetic words of William Butler Yeats, “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.”

Edith Stein wrote that the teacher’s job was to encourage the student’s “inner participation” in the educational process. She was to get the student excited about the material, encourage a response, offer guidance, but ultimately the child was to make it his own.

“The teacher’s role in the formation of the students is an indirect one since all development is self-development. All training is self-training” (Woman, p. 5)

With these three forces in mind, we can look at a new paradigm for home education, one which focuses upon developing the whole personality of the child—the heart, soul and mind using the wisdom of Edith Stein, Charlotte Mason and others to pursue a happy, wholehearted, academically excellent, spiritually complete childhood. Over and over again, both Edith Stein and Charlotte Mason articulate beautifully the need to reach a child’s heart in order to truly educate him. We cannot limit education to that which is poured into a child’s brain. Instead, we seek to touch the core of the child. Stein writes,

“Actual formative material is received not merely by the senses and intellect but is integrated by the ‘heart and soul’ as well. But if it actually becomes transformed into the soul, then it ceases to be mere material: it works itself, forming, developing; it helps the soul to reach its intended gestalt." (Woman, p.131)

I don’t consider education from the perspective of filling buckets because I don’t consider children from that perspective. When I look at a child, I see a living breathing person made in God’s image for whom God has a plan. As parent educators, we need to embrace a new notion of learning. We need to help the child discern the Lord’s will and equip him to answer his particular call. It is the heart and soul of the child we want to touch. For our purposes, we need to engage the heart in order to effectively educate the child. Our vision of a well-educated child is a child who has a heart for learning, a child who has the tools he needs to continue to learn for a lifetime and the love to want to do it. He has been led to a lifetime of learning all the time. We must be absolutely certain of our goals in education. When we know where we are going, we can confidently chart our course. We want children who know, love, and serve the Lord. As their primary educators, it is our privilege and our duty to equip them for that task. I want my children to love learning. I want them to revel in their curiosity and delight in their discoveries. And I want to learn alongside them.

If such a style of learning interests you, you might be interested in reading Real Learning: Education in the Heart of the Home, from which the above was taken.

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Tags: homeschooling, homeschool, home education, Charlotte Mason, education