What do you Need?

For any activity, there's a list of things you need to get started. Have you looked at the front of one of your knitting or quilting books lately? There's a whole list of things you supposedly can't do without. And I'm guessing that there are at least a few items on that list you either don't own or don't use.

Last fall, I kept stumbling across lists of the things you absolutely must have if you're going to homeschool your children, many of them written by mothers who'd been homeschooling for two whole weeks. I'm glad those moms were enthusiastic. I'm glad it was working well for them.

But the list of things you can't homeschool without is a very short one and it really doesn't include a dry erase board, a laminator, or an electric pencil sharpener. I've also done it for many years without a CD player or a printer hooked up to the computer. (That last one was kind of an accident.)

Depending on whether preschool counts or not, I've either been homeschooling for eighteen years or fourteen. However you add it up, it's been a long time.  I've had the dry erase board and the laminator and the electric pencil sharpener.... and I didn't use any of them.

So what do you absolutely need?  Most of it is stuff you already have if you're living in a household with kids.

More than anything else, it helps to have a sense of curiosity and the ability to be flexible. We spend a good portion of our days chasing rabbit trails, like the afternoon we spent four hours watching a fifty-eight minute video about the history of stained glass.  I do wish I'd switched to a smart phone sooner. Now we can look up things while we're out and about. Like the proper way to remove a leech from your mother's arm...

You need something to write on and something to write with. My current favorite pens for the kids are still those multi-pack of  Paper Mate InkJoy pens I can get for a couple of bucks at Walmart. For my own use, it's the Paper Mate Flair felt tips pens I use in my planner.  Crayons, highlighters, pencils, colored pencils, mechanical pencils... those are all optional.You probably already know which pens or pencils you like best. Use those!

We also like having a fast internet connection and a computer and access to a good library. There's plenty of other stuff that's great to have, but there's really no list of things you can't do without.

If you actually laminate things, go for it. (But I'm guessing you'd already have a laminator in the house anyway.) And I hear that dry erase boards are really good for practicing free motion quilting designs. Mine had an....unfortunate accident several years ago, so I wouldn't know.

This post is linked up to Tots and Me, Rock Your Homeschool, Faithful Homestead, Motivational Monday, Mommy Monday, Totally Terrific Tuesday, 

Why it Takes Four Hours to Watch a 58 Minute Video...

Sometimes it takes us four hours to watch a fifty-eight minute video. And sometimes that's the best possible way to watch one.

On Thursday, my youngest son saw a picture of a stained glass window and wanted to know why when he saw that type of window it was always in a church so I did my best to explain how the windows were used to explain the stories of the Bible back in the days when most people couldn't read. And then we found a documentary because I can only rattle off so much art history without looking things up and, although I know exactly where to find the stained glass explanations in our packaged curriculum, I thought a video would be better.

It was. In addition to learning why the windows are there, we got to see reproduction glass being made and learn about the restoration process and how much of it involves fixing earlier "fixes."  Along the way, we paused the movie to  discuss Gutenberg and how stained glass was around long before oil paints and whether or not they should be taking the windows apart and putting them back together or they should leave them the way they were and looked at pictures of the Sistine Chapel before and after its restoration. And that's what I love best about homeschooling. We have time to explore rabbit trails and stop to look things up.

Today we're talking about Mitochondrial Eve. I'll definitely need a documentary to explain that one!

Homeschooling

My kids are homeschooled. These days, I rarely have to explain that to anyone. There are plenty of homeschoolers in our area and the public schools have a four day a week schedule (or at least they did the last time I looked.) We don't get the "no school today?" question much at all anymore.

Except for that cashier at the grocery store a couple of days ago who sternly told my son that it didn't matter if he was homeschooled, he had to go back to school. She'd asked him if he was excited about starting school and he'd told her that he does school all year and I don't know if she didn't understand his answer or just didn't like his answer.

And the cousin who asked me one night if I just sat the kids down at the kitchen table and told them what I thought they needed to know. No wonder he'd treated me like a lunatic when I first mentioned homeschooling.

I'm not teaching my kids just what I think they should know. Or just what I know. I'm not trying to shelter them from opinions or lifestyles that I disagree with. In this day and age, I don't think I could do that even if I wanted to.

We don't participate in those online courses that they advertise on television. Those didn't even exist (at least not in their current form) when we started with our oldest.

What we do started out as a "school in a box" curriculum. We bought a package that included all of the books and a teacher's guide with a schedule that tells you which pages to do on which days.

Over the years, we've strayed more and more from the strict schedule, replacing the math portion with one that worked better for us, skipping some books and adding others, studying subjects when the kids were interested in them instead of waiting a year or two until it comes up in the curriculum, and learning about things that aren't in the curriculum at all. The goal is for them to learn as much as they can about our big wonderful world, not for them to learn it in a particular order.

I'm deliberately not going into my reasons for homeschooling here. I'm kind of rabid on the subject, at least when it comes to my own kids. If you want to have a private discussion about the whys and hows, send me an email.

Got Any Halloween Candy Left?

This year, I saw all kinds of suggestions for dealing with Halloween candy, from selling it to local dentists to eating a piece a day  for a few days and donating what was left to (my favorite) freezing some of it to use in those dessert recipes that  call for chopped up candy bars.

My own plan, which I got too busy to follow up on, was to do a bunch of the experiments from Candy Experiments by Loralee Leavitt. We're going to have to buy a Cadbury egg to see what happens when we fry it.

My two younger boys love doing experiments, especially that one where you fill a jar with muddy water and wait for it to settle into layers. I don't think they've ever left the jar alone long enough for it to work the way its supposed to, but filling the jar and shaking it up makes them happy.

This book is full of simple experiments that don't require much preparation. The author even offers alternatives to a microwave (for the two or three of us families living without one like we are!)

I was thrilled to find out that there's a second book, Candy Experiments 2. That one has a strong focus on science fair projects as opposed to science demonstrations, which are what you'll find in the first book. (The boys and I are after science demonstrations.)  Both books explain what's causing the reaction you get. I don't  expect my boys to get deep scientific understanding from either book, but they'll be perfect for those days when they wants to make something happen.

Disclosure -- I found Candy Experiments on my own. The publisher provided me with an ARC of Candy Experiments 2. 

Cranberries!

I've been wanting to take the kids to see the cranberry bogs for years. There was a group field trip at one point that we skipped, probably because the kids were still way too young, but the idea stuck in my head. We finally made it to the cranberry museum a few weeks ago, mostly because it was on the way to something else. 

It was neat to see berries growing, but I'm glad I didn't plan a whole trip around it. We showed up not knowing much more about cranberry bogs than we'd gleaned from Ocean Spray commercials and a few mentions on the Food Network and left not knowing much more. 

But it did put me in the mood to bake some cranberry cheddar cheese bread, as soon as that new oven element gets here.

Why?

My youngest son is amazingly curious, and he's not satisfied by simple answers. Tell him that the moon's gravity makes the tides happen and he'll want to know how it makes the tides happen because it doesn't make sense to him.  Tell him that mirrors work by reflecting the light back to your eyes and he wants to know how the light knows what you look like.... (And I'm really proud that Teenage Daughter could come up with that explanation off the top of her head while putting on makeup and being pestered by her younger brother.)

How does fire work? Where do farmers get their cows? How much does a cow cost, anyway? Huh?

I can tell him where to buy a cow and about what they cost, but until he asked and I did some research I had absolutely no clue how fire works.  I knew that it needed oxygen and a source of ignition, but I didn't know what was happening to that wood in the fireplace while it burned. Does it make me a horrible mom to admit that I don't really care what that flame is doing as long as it stays where it belongs?

In an effort to keep a step ahead of my kids, or at least not fall too far behind, I've been reading science books.

Why? by Joel Levy is one of the most useful that I've come across. Now that I've read it, I know where the salt in the ocean comes from (it's not the answer I was given in school and passed along to my kids), how the fire works, why the veins in your arm look blue when your blood is red, and why we get old. And a lot of other things that my seven-year-old hasn't asked about yet.

The author starts with simple explanations and then explains things further, getting to what he calls the "ultimate explanation."  And he explains it all in simple enough terms that most of it didn't make my head hurt. It's written for older children, but for a  mommy who's trying to explain things she never learned in school, it's a godsend.

Disclosure -- the publisher provided me with and ARC of WHY? and I'm really glad they did. Most of the review copies I leave aren't nearly this helpful!

please just tell them what it means...

A few weeks ago, I followed a link to the essay Where Did Our Vocabulary Go? and found myself in a heated online debate about whether it's better parenting to tell kids to look up new words for themselves or just tell them what it means. I think I was the only one who voted to just answer the question. (I'm also pretty sure that I was the only homeschooler involved in the discussion. It might be fun to ask some other homeschoolers and see what they think.)

If I know how to define the word, I'll tell my kids what it means. Why make them put the book down and look it up? They can learn about alphabetical order and guide words when they're not in the middle of an interesting story.

That's if the word they want is even IN the dictionary. We went through six or seven different children' s dictionaries in our house before I finally gave up on them. By the time my kids (and that includes the littlest two) don't know what it means, it's time to Google it. I love that the Kindles allow them to quickly click and get the meaning of most words. Not because it keeps them from bugging me, but because it doesn't interrupt their reading as much.

My seven and eight year olds already know most of those million dollar words listed in that essay. Maybe it's a homeschooling thing. Or a listening to lots of good audio books in the car thing.

As for learning to do research -- the same week I read that article, all four of  the kids got into a debate about whether or not anteaters have teeth. There's no shortage of research going on in this house. Teenage Daughter has a new favorite word, erinaceous. She discovered that one on Pinterest.

Anyone else agree with me that Pinterest and Wikipedia just might be the modern equivalent to learning neat facts by flipping through a dictionary or hardback encyclopedia?

I'll be linking this post to WFMW at We are THAT Family.

Edited to add:

Lucy from Charm About You had a great point about Wikipedia being full of misinformation. Most of the discoveries my kids tell me about include whether or not they've verified whatever it is through another source.  We've found errors in television documentaries, and those children's books from the library that are held up as fact-checked and superior to the internet. Two books from respectable publishers gave us totally different information about the same animal last week.

I Hate Math

Can't say it within earshot of my kids, so I'm gonna say it here. I hate math!

Not so much that I won't draft a quilt block or calculate how to change a sweater pattern enough to match whatever gauge I'm getting, but teaching my four kids may be the end of me. Especially when the only answers to "When am I going to need this?" are "To pass a standardized test" or "When you're homeschooling your own kids and teaching them so they can pass a standardized test."

The back-to-school thing has hit me like a ton of bricks this year. Usually, we do school all year and, except for great sales on paper and crayons, September isn't anything special. But with my knee and the related chaos, we took the summer off this year -- and then didn't even get to enjoy the long vacation.

I will not do that again.

I've almost, but not quite, convinced myself that getting the two older kids through their schoolwork every day counts as enough of an accomplishment and I don't need to feel any not-quilting guilt.

But I really want to sit down at the sewing machine. Just as soon as my headache fades a little more and I get a few more minutes of sleep.

This quilt, which we saw at an Oregon Trail information center on the way back from the trip, has me all inspired --



Part of me wants to make a big reproduction to snuggle up in, and part of me wants to use those hollow sawtooth stars to make another scrappy little sawtooth chain.

And part of me wants to start another Bullseye quilt because I can't have this one --



I don't buy a lot of quilts, because I always convince myself that it's like buying a puzzle someone else has already finished and then sealed with that protective glue stuff. I'd rather buy the fabric and have the fun myself.

But this quilt screamed at me to snuggle up in it. I think I might've wrapped it around my shoulders for just a moment even though Grandma had bought it in a box at the auction and I wasn't sure where it had been. The backing was a soft yellow floral, and the quilting was this fantastic micro-stipple with a spiral inside the circles... The only thing I would've done differently was to leave off those borders. I don't do borders.

Grandma wasn't home (but I had specific permission to go dig out those quilts and take a look while Bill and the kids were visiting Grandpa), so I didn't get a chance to ask her what she planned to do with the quilt until after our trip.

And by then Mom had seen it and now it's Mom's quilt.

It's not like I can't make my own. Or like I hadn't already actually started my own two years ago. Wonder what the odds of finding those blocks are...

Probably better to start a new one. And I've even found a pattern.