It's a been a week or so since I posted that Real Learning was out of print. You all know how to get things done! I got a note from the publisher yesterday. She says she has sent it to its third printing and we'll soon have some brand new books. Bless you for your efforts!
We rarely follow the plans as written. In real life, my days look nothing like my iCal pages. Oh, I love the plans. They are like good recipes. I gather the ingredients, tinkering a bit to take advantage of what looks freshest and best at the grocery store. I glance through the directions and do what seems best at the time. And usually, whatever we're cooking comes out well. Cooking is an art, you know, with a little science sprinkled in with love. So, too, raising and educating children is an art. When it comes to our homeschooling days, I write the plans, but I don't become attached to them.
Because I do become attached to the children.
On Monday, iCal called for Outdoor Hour. Have you tried these? What absolutely wonderful gifts they are! We're on a roll with them this fall. Barb makes the Handbook of Nature Study come alive for us and graciously offers free guidance that is priceless. Everyone is enthusiastic.
We headed out to our new favorite, very local spot (we walked) and spent a pleasant time drawing. I had to drag the boys away because of an urgent girl potty issue. On the walk home, the littlest girls each fell asleep in a stroller. We wheeled both strollers into the house and let them snooze. I seized the quiet opportunity to read William Shakespeare and the Globe to all children still awake. [Note to those who have followed my iCal plans previously: "School" didn't happen in any meaningful way on Friday of Birthday Week and I slid last Friday's plans to Monday. ]
My plans called for children to create a diorama of the Globe Theatre. Somehow, in my keeping room, those plans morphed. Big boys became team captains; teams were picked; cardboard, duct tape, craft paint and glue guns were sequestered to opposite corners of the house. Daddy was named Judge. A deadline of three weeks hence was set. One child was frantically researching on his iPod Touch. Another was printing madly from the computer upstairs. A hush fell. And then the man arrived to deliver the dishwasher.
The man barely stepped from his truck before competing teams of children were begging for appliance boxes. Wise man, he gave them the box from our dishwasher and then stripped the box from another. More quiet.
Big boys left for soccer. I slipped out with a lone ballerina. I left her at dance and spent 33 minutes alone, in the quiet, at Adoration. Not that I was counting minutes or anything. What a beautiful gift quiet with Jesus is!
After I gathered my dancer and a week's worth of groceries for a family of eleven, I returned home. Globe Theatre construction resumed after dinner and continued well into the night. I went to sleep thinking what a perfect day it was: nature, Shakespeare, Adoration, soccer and dance. A good meal. A quiet night. What more could I have wanted?
Don't answer that. I know there was no math, no Latin, no grammar, no time whatsoever at a desk. But really, truly, it was perfect in my book. A day when seven children from 3-17 are meaningfully engaged and working together all day long? How often does that happen?
The next day, while I hustled three sick children to the doctor, the children at home ignored my plans and kept right on working on those Theatre dioramas. There was a brief skirmish over toothpicks that resulted in my emergency trip to the grocery store, but mostly, work was steady. I thought about the iCal plans. Tuesday is our heavy geography block day. This Tuesday was about scale drawings, popsicle stick construction standards, and wee felt actors.
Truth is, my days rarely look like the pages of Serendipity. They are not that neat. They are not that beautiful. They are not that full. Well, maybe they are that full but not in the way they look there. We pick and choose from the plans and the books. I hope you do, too, as I think it would be near impossible to do them as written. We change things out and abandon things that don't work and add things that work better. We abandon the plans altogether to binge on a great project.
"Simplicity" seems to be a goaland a virtue in pockets of the blogosphere. For some people, simplicity is next to godliness from what I can tell. Things aren't simple here. At least, when I put my head on the pillow at night, in the three seconds before I fall asleep, they don't seem simple. There's is a lot going on.
A few weeks ago I read an authoritative email that declared that the secret to homeschooling success was to never, ever deviate from the curriculum as written. This seems foolish advice to me. If you are using my curriculum, please, please consider it in light of your children and your home and your energy level. Please use your common sense and your mama-wisdom. Please don't attempt to do it all. And please, if you find a better way to do it, write and let me know. I might just do it that way, too.
Along those lines, here are some tweaks I've not yet had time to tell you about:
And now, I truly must go. Gosh, it was nice to blog again. I had no intention of writing so long this morning. God's good; it's happy to be here. Thanks for listening.
Blessings on your day!
Once I told someone that if this homeschooling mom gig didn't work out, I'd love to have a cooking show. I like to cook. I like the art and the science of making food taste good and look beautiful. I like messing with presentation. I like to put plates in front of my family that make them slow down and savor the moment. Maybe it's genetic. I come from a long line of Italian cooks who respect the beautiful.
She scoffed. Scoffed! She actually said that food was just something to make, eat, and clear out of the way. She said she couldn't be bothered with thinking too much about it. She had a big family to feed and it was sinful somehow to give food more than its utilitarian thought.
I gulped. Didn't talk to her about food again.
Last year, I relinquished my inner foodie. First, I acknowledged that it didn't play well with all-day-long morning sickness. Then, it didn't hold up to the admonition not to be on my feet more than necessary. Then, it died altogether when I was banished from the kitchen and sent upstairs for 6 weeks of bedrest. After the baby was born, I couldn't really multi-task the premature baby nurturing and tasks that required--well--my hands.
We didn't starve. Remember, the foodie thing is genetic. Almost all of my children appear to have inherited the gene. The jury is still out on the one who puts hot sauce on everything. They COOK, these kids. And they care about presentation. The eight-year-old is particularly fond of finding just the right garnish. His current hero bakes cakes. (Apparently the creative kitchen gene is alive and well in that family, too.)
Now, though, I'm back in the kitchen. I choose menus that are a bit more involved than I probably should. I stand at the counter and do quite a bit of peeling and chopping. I am certain to make a mess as I go. I can almost hear my utilitarian commenter clicking her tongue and telling me that there is no place for creativity in the kitchen, that it's a waste of time and energy. No matter. I find loving, thoughtful creativity has much the same effect in the kitchen as it does in the schoolroom. Joy in the beautiful process is contagious and it draws us all in.
I'm not in the kitchen alone. Ever. The creative process and the creative product draw my children to me. They want to help. They see the joy that cooking brings and the want to be a part of it. And there we are, busy creating, when something else happens. They start to talk. Big ones. Little ones. They instinctively know that that recipe with all those steps will hold me here in this sunny yellow room. I will not leave. I will not turn away. I will listen. And they can be assured that I will hear the subtle seasoning in their stories. I will be attuned to the questions they hope to be asked. I will the mom in the apron who knows that it's not about the white sauce at all. It's about the inevitable conversation that happens around good food. It happens at the table, of course. We eat as a family and never are at a loss for words. But the intimate conversation, the sharing of hearts, happens over nearly-bubbling milk, whisk in hand.
I take the time to consider food. To consider cost. To consider skills. To consider time. To consider cleanup. And I decide again and again to choose the thoughtful, creative approach. Because, really, there are so many ways our children need to be nourished. Food is just the beginning.
Questions about the new curriculum:
I noticed that your selections for Religion are different from Jen's in your teenage girls' curriculum. Can you tell me why you are using what you are using? And why don't you call it Religion?
Mary Beth is my fourth teenager.When I first started putting together programs of study for the late middle school and high school years, I bought into the popularly propagated notion that because teenagers are naturally argumentative, we should give them something to argue about and so "Apologetics" is perfect for teenagers. Now, I've reconsidered that a bit.
When I consider my goals, particularly for the early teen years, I most want them to know their faith and integrate it into their being. While I might like them to be able to answer the Mormon at the door or a skeptical evangelical from our neighborhood homeschool group or even the many Hindus who play in our backyard, that is not my primary goal. My primary goal is for them to hear and answer Jesus with joy.
My primary goal is that they know their faith to the very core of their being and that they develop a habit of relationship with Jesus while they are still in myhome. I truly believe that we are all called to make believers of all nations. The most effective evangelists though, are not the ones who have memorized the answers and mastered the art of debate. Instead, they are the kids who have their sharing spill out of the joy in Jesus those good habits of relationship have helped to cultivate. When they are totally in love with Jesus and happily living in His Church, the apologetics angle falls into place in a very genuine way.
In my house, I've found it to backfire to equip a child with all these tools to "argue his faith." I have hyper-competitive children who might just easily lose sight of the fact that we're standing for truth and defending our Best Friend Forever, thinking instead that the point is just to be right and to win the fight. When the focus is on winning the argument, the discourse sounds dangerously like a fight and is likely to slip into something angry. Mixing the natural inclination to argue with materials that underscore an "us versus them" air of superiority seems to feed a contentious attitude.
The overt focus on arguing the faith can result in a curriculum that encourages too many words on the part of the teen. By shifting the focus to relationship with the Lord and His Church, I am hoping to cultivate good listeners--faithful adults who both listen to the Lord and to each other.
"Religion" is a subject and that is how this component of the course would be recorded on a transcript, but the real goal is a deep, maturing faith. I want to guard against strident, sanctimonious superiority that sometimes comes with a teenage focus on apologetics. Faith is gift. If we think about that truth, it humbles us. By keeping "faith" along that margin, I am constantly reminded that it's not knowledge about the Church that I want to drill into them. It's love for Christ I want to imbue and, ultimately, it's the Holy Spirit who will "teach" this "course."
First off, my children read these books by Amy Welborn. These are fairly quickly read, basic cornerstones:
Then there is a decided emphasis on Peter Kreeft. Peter Kreeft resonates with the people in our home. What isn't listed on the young lady's curriculum are the Peter Kreeft books we read and discussed last year, books that were particularly suited to young teens seeking some answers for themselves. You could say they are apologetics books, but the emphasis is not on winning an argument with someone else. The emphasis is on truly understanding the philosophical underpinnings of the faith for oneself. A family I admire greatly, where all nine children embrace the faith as adults, have shared with me that their father sat with them as teenagers and talked about philosophy and theology on a regular and frequent basis. That kind of practice is not something I can replicate on my own in my home. I don't have the education that father has. But, I can read these books with my children and have those important conversations. Peter Kreeft helps me with the education part. I can't speak more highly of these books:
You will only see two core books listed for this year for my teenagers (Mary Beth's "religion" class and Patrick's are the same). This "living books" decision is a distillation of what has been the most meaningful with my teens in the last eight years of parenting teenagers.
The first book is Kreeft's Catholic Christianity. Many years ago, Catholic Christianity was recommended to me by Nicholas' godmother. Linda is a brilliant woman who has done a masterful job with the academic education of her children. She's also a former Evangelical Protestant, who was passionate about Jesus and winning souls well before she converted to Catholicism. This is the volume that spoke to her--that made sense both intellectually and spiritually. She used it with her young teens before they left homeschooling for Catholic high schools because it best embodied the gift she had discovered in the Church combined with the joy of the Christ of her youth.This book is a careful, well-crafted, articulate walk through the faith in a style reminiscent of C. S. Lewis. It's a step-by-step explanation of what we believe and why we can believe it. It represents the active part of the "religion course." We'll discuss each individual article until the three of us understand it for ourselves.The goal in our discussions won't be winning an argument; it will be helping each other to better understand the treasure of the faith. I will purchase my fourth and fifth copies of this book this fall. Michael, Christian, and I already have our own personal copies. The next two are for Mary Beth and Patrick to keep.
The second book is the private, personal component of the "religion course." You Can Become a Saint is a book of habit training. If the wisdom in the book is applied and integrated into the lives of my children, they will have habits of a morning offering, meditation and spiritual reading, time management that is ordered towards the will of God, examination of conscience and night prayer. The book is drawn from Opus Dei spiritually. My family is not an Opus Dei family, but the habits here are time-tested habits of saints throughout time. They are not unique to any particular movement or spirituality. My dearest hope for this "course" is that they will cultivate the habits of a life in constant dialogue with Christ. Those habits will nurture a genuine joy in the Savior that will be organically effusive and will naturally draw people to them so that they might share their joy. In my opinion, those habits will engender genuinely kindhearted young people who are great apologists because they exude joyful charity.
Finally, each of my teens has a stack of biographies of heroes of the faith. Reading stories of the saints offers them a look at the many, many spiritualities that are represented in the body of Christ. As they learn more about themselves through spiritual reading and meditation, they will begin to identify more closely with certain saints over others. In doing so, they will make lifelong friends and companions for this journey of faith. Stories of the saints are built into every single year of our educational adventure.
These are a lot of words to explain two simple book choices. If, together, we can truly integrate the wisdom of those two choices into our lives this year, our education will be a huge success.
I am so blessed by you! These plans are beautiful. I have all the books. You've inspired me, and encouraged me, and made me smile. No small task these days. Thank you so very much.
I'm Elizabeth. I'm a happy wife and the mother of nine children. I grab grace with both hands and write to encourage myself and others to seize and nurture the joy of every day. I blog here with my daughter, Mary Beth, a wholehearted young lady on the brink of adulthood.
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