Lakeside Math

On one day each week our schedule is such that the window of time between when I pick W up from PE at the public school and when we pick M up from preschool would not allow us much time for work if we went home in between. We tried a few different things in the beginning, but we have settled on this weekly routine: I bring math things along, pick W up, head in the direction of preschool, and we stop at a spacious pull-off by a lake on the way to do math sitting there in the car before we continue on to get M. It allows us 30 - 40 minutes of math time since we aren't using time on extra transitions home or to work at the library or somewhere else. While sitting in the front seat of the car, he's done a lot-- practiced finding the common factors of two numbers, learned how to make equivalent fractions with like denominators, worked through ways to multiply by 4-digit numbers, and practiced multi-step word problems. We try to limit the materials needed for math on these days to pencil and paper and clipboard, but some days require more, and there was the day we lost a fraction bar underneath the passenger seat.

The first time I parked and said to hop up front because we were going to do math right there, W said something like, "Seriously?! Are you kidding?" and I think was a little embarrassed by how strange that seemed. But as with so many things, he's adapted to the new normal. It's turned into one of the special little eccentricities of homeschool life. Maybe weekly math in the car will help him learn flexibility, and the idea that where there's a will there's a way for important work, even if the circumstances aren't ideal. I can hope. The mere fact that he can be productive in an unusual setting shows growth. W said in an essay he surprised me with as a Christmas gift that one of the reasons he likes homeschool is because "we can go more at my level...instead of knowing everything I have to figure it out. Also, I don't have to wait for people to be done. In addition, if I don't understand something, you can slow down." There's some 9-year-old perspective in those phrases for sure and an economy with words too, but the sentiment is about learning being at his speed, and I find that we are as able to do that side by side in the car as we are sitting at a table.

The view is pretty great, too. It's startling how quickly it has changed. It seems like just the other day we could sit there with the windows open and W had to climb down the bank and throw a few rocks in before we started on work each week. Then the fall colors reflected in the lake were really something to take in, and one afternoon from our spot we glimpsed workers at the summer camp nearby taking in the docks for the season. And now the lake has ice that is steadily creeping toward the middle. Even now with the cold, sometimes when his brain or his body needs a break W hops out and runs around the car a few times or stands and takes a few deep breaths outside looking at the lake. Maybe sometime in his future when he has to recall long division or finds himself adding up some fractions, he will reflect back to when he first learned it with a beautiful lake view to ponder in front of him.

Books for Days

I've always loved the tiny library just down the road from us. The librarian, Ms. L, has known W since before he could walk, and often when we walk in she has a new book saved out for us that she thought we might want to check out. If I ask about a particular book she doesn't have, one way or another she'll have it there the next time we are in. She leaves phone messages telling us about upcoming library events. At the library, my kids have played with kittens, planted seeds, decorated gingerbread houses, carved pumpkins, tried playing a harp, and attended concerts. The library was the first way we felt a part of the community, before the kids were the age for school or sports or lessons. Ms. L has been her usual helpful self now that we are homeschooling. She has always let us be pretty loose with our due dates but knowing that we are using our books for school now, she's taken to digitally renewing them for me, so I don't even receive the automated "books due soon" or "overdue" emails that I used to. Right now I am reading a book called The Brave Learner solely because she heard about it and purchased it with me in mind. (It's nice to feel special!) Ms. L is also the one who connected me with a homeschool parent who recently moved to our town and whom we've gotten together with a few times.

And yet our library is very small and its stores are limited. Before our homeschool year began, I was worried about having access to enough of the right kinds of books at the right times. I wanted to have books to go with topics we were studying in the content areas. And to teach reading itself, I wanted to have a lot of a given type of book for 6 or 8 weeks while we worked on strategies to read and understand that type of text and while I gave W big periods of time to read independently and put those skills to practice. The first set of reading skills we focused on this year was fiction in general, and for that I probably could have been satisfied at our library, but I knew later in the year I wanted to have, for just as long, a selection of books on the American Revolution, and later a bunch of historical fiction, and later a plethora of different biographies, and eventually poetry anthologies... I wanted to have enough of each of these categories not only to supply a voracious reader, but to offer him with choices and the ability to make comparisons at any given time. I knew I'd want to be able to keep most of these books longer than the typical two-week library loan time. I considered buying some of the great books I'd researched and felt I had to have. I made a wish list of titles for our studies across the year. I tried contacting companies like Heinemann to see if I could get a big discount on some sets of books for use in a homeschool setting, since the book lists they offer are excellent but the quantities and prices are intended for entire classrooms. I even asked the area sales rep if there were used books in certain categories that we could borrow. (The answers to both were no.) I knew I could buy some books through Kindle, or find some things through Epic or Reading A-Z which were sites with online kids' books I had access to. But I still wanted a lot of actual books.

Well, my fretting was for naught because I haven't bought any books and it has all worked out beautifully so far due to not one but a combination of local libraries, which deserve a special shout out. Besides our favorite little library, we also have free library cards at three other local libraries and the public school library. All these places are helpful, and by using some books from all of them, I have been able to find, if not every specific title I had in mind, plenty of books on any particular subject or genre that we have needed. We renew them as many times as we can (which is, depending on the library, anywhere from over a month to indefinitely) and that allows us to have things around as long as we need. I am often checking due dates and sorting out which books need to be returned where, but it's well worth it for all the free resources we use.

Another way I've been getting the resources we need is with free trials. What a fabulous concept! I have a free trial on Newsela, which is a great source for research content in general and kid-appropriate news and current events. You can even click to adjust the reading level of most articles. (I probably shouldn't say anything, but I've been using Newsela for free for a lot longer than the 30 days the trial was supposed to be.) I currently have a free trial to Freedom Flix, through Scholastic, which has provided some great online texts on the American Revolution while we're learning about that. I got a lot out of Mystery Science for free for a while but eventually paid for it ($69 for the year) because I wanted a feature that it wasn't allowing access to without doing so. (I appreciated that they offered a reasonable price for homeschoolers which was less than the regular classroom price, as I've found that too many great educational resources don't seem to consider, in their cost or otherwise, that homeschool families also might want to use them.) I had a free 30-day trial of Audible, which I've since cancelled because I didn't want the monthly fee, but that free month was great and allowed us to listen to some books not available through the library, which leads me...

Back to celebrating libraries to mention one more awesome feature: online audio books. Maybe this is old news to everyone else, but I thought it was amazing when I discovered this year that, simply by having a NH library card, I could check out audio books online using an app ("Libby") and listen to them through Bluetooth in the car. Having these audio books on hand helped us make the long journeys to Nova Scotia in August and Washington, D.C. in October, and it's been a game changer for our daily 25-minutes-each-way drives to M's preschool. M is not a huge fan of audio books yet (at least of the novels W wants to listen to) so we usually spend the drive over there in the morning when it's all three of us singing songs, talking, or playing games. But after dropping her off, we listen to an audio book on the way home; we do the opposite in the afternoon when we pick her up. Besides helping W to actually look forward to the time in the car, this has allowed us to read so many more books. And what's really nice that it provides a slew of books we have in common to talk about. At the beginning of the year, I was startled by how difficult it was for W to discuss books. I'd ask him 4th-grade-level types of comprehension questions-- about the characters' traits or motivations, about how the character changed, how one part was important in relation to the whole book, or about theme-- and this probing could be a bit of a battle, even though we were explicitly working on strategies for thinking about all of those things. He'd insist he didn't know/he forgot/the characters could only be described as "nice"/the book had no theme or life lesson, and he'd just want to get back to reading. I sometimes wondered if he truly didn't understand books (beyond plot recall), or if it was just too hard to focus on the conversation part enough to really show he understood. Either way, he's come a looong way in this regard and it's in no small part due to the fact that we have had all these shared audio books between us to discuss. (I try to get him talking about the books he reads on his own too, and I've been known to look up online summaries and discussion questions about books I haven't read myself in order to do so, but it's much more natural and fun when it's a book we've read together.) I pause the books once in a while to ask him questions or explain vocabulary or make predictions and we discuss the bigger ideas each time we finish one.

Just the other day we had just heard the last words of The One and Only Ivan, and while W might still prefer I immediately start the next book we've got queued up, it was completely painless for him and pretty efficient to respond fully to all the questions I brought up about it. I pointed out to him how much harder this would have felt to him a few months ago.

Here are some library books (mostly audio) I've had the pleasure of sharing with W this school year. Every parent and kid is different, but these are all ones my 9 1/2 year old and I both enjoyed. (I'm leaving out a few we've listened to that I don't particularly recommend. I am also leaving out Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which is the actual physical book we are currently reading and which no one needs me to recommend.)

Books we've Loved Lately:
Fish in a Tree: Uplifting story about a girl with dyslexia and her self esteem and how we all have strengths.
One and Only Ivan: Narrator is a gorilla, yet there is strong character development. A nice story for animal lovers.
My Side of the Mountain: Old story about a kid running away to live in the Catskill Mountains by himself. W ate up all the tough and clever survival details.
Blubber: A Judy Blume gem, so much more of a book than Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing (which was fine). Makes you think about the social games of upper elementary schoolers, and gives a good look at bullying from all perspectives.
Ungifted: Not the great literature that some of these other books are, but we both enjoyed this story a lot about an impulsive, always-in-trouble kid who accidentally gets sent to the gifted school and how it changes all their lives. By Gordon Korman, a prolific and accessible author who also wrote the Dive and Everest series we've gotten hooked on in the past.
Frindle: One of the best of Andrew Clements. I read this book as a student teacher in a fifth grade about 15 years ago and thought it was fabulous even then. About language, flouting authority, and the power of ideas.
Little House in the Big Woods: Very optimistic family story that is practically a manual of 19th century living in sections (how they made cheese, trading, sewing, hunting, cleaning the gun...).
Little House on the Prairie: More of the same, but as the family moves west the interesting bits about the biases and fears about "Indians" led to good conversations.
The Black Stallion: A beautiful story about a boy and a horse who save each other and it all works out in the end.
Love that Dog: Read some poetry first so kids have some background knowledge. Lots of cool references to famous poems as a kid works his way through learning how to write poetry without realizing he's doing it. Quick read.
Henry and Beezus: We loved the entire Ramona series a few years ago. The Henry books now are easy reads and it's fun to revisit the same characters through Henry's perspective. Henry is his own unique, earnest, do-the-right-thing kind of guy.
First Light: Complicated, cool book that is part fantasy and revolves around the impacts of global warming.
The Lemonade War: Well-written realistic fiction about a brother and sister and a competition. The sister is high functioning on the autism spectrum and her character gives some insight into how people like that can have difficulty reading emotions and interacting with others.
Wonder: A kid with a deformed face goes to public school for the first time. Given that, it's surprisingly upbeat and sweet.
The Tiger Rising: Sad in parts but uplifting overall, a super rich book by a great author with lots of symbolism and repeated imagery.

Animal Intelligence

I have a kid who has always been riveted by a story of a squirrel on a birdfeeder, wanting to hear it again with better details; he relishes stories about his grandmother's pug's latest escapades. He has a relationship with every dog and cat he knows and they all feature highly in his mind. He kisses our dog goodnight ritually, and the two of them share many, many cuddles every day. Whenever we are near a certain shop in town, he has to go in to see if the owner's black pug is in, because he happened to meet him once. I like animals, but W loves them.

But besides the definite interest he has in animals, I've come to really admire the manner he has with them. He has this sixth sense, a sort of animal intelligence. He knows every cat and dog has its own personality and he approaches gently, letting them come to him. He reads their signals and is really responsive to animals. He wants to be close to them and he gets as close as he respectfully can. He took seriously the quick video we watched on the New England Aquarium web site before a visit there last summer about how to be a ray "whisperer" at the ray touch tank-- and he really was. He touched a lot of rays that day, even the biggest ones that don't come close for long. When he was three and a half, we visited a petting zoo at an apple orchard. It was an intense scene, with a slew of animals-- chickens everywhere, a peacock screeching, goats poking at us. There were lots of people, and the rabbits darted quickly whenever anyone moved toward them. W was intent on holding a rabbit, which I did not think was going to happen. I was proved wrong; after he patiently sat still for a long time with palm upturned, they eventually sniffed him, and stayed near and let him pet them. He was so pleased with himself. The rabbits were the important thing from that day-- not the apples or wagon ride or pumpkins.

I can count on him to be attentive and responsible with our dog. At 14, our Brunsy frequently needs to be carried up and down stairs or lifted on and off the couch and W is always the first one there to do these things. Over the summer it surprised me when I realized I trusted him to carry the dog. He asks me if he can feed the dog each night, whereas I'm the one reminding him about almost everything else. In life in general, love him as I do, W he can be impulsive, forgetful, distractible. In certain day-to-day respects-- how he reacts to his sister, carrying a glass of milk to the table-- he needs support and reminders. With animals, it's different. He is so engaged and attuned, he does not have the same challenges when it comes to critters. He doesn't forget, he doesn't do anything precarious, he never displays poor judgement. It's fascinating.

Retro pics:

Since one of the benefits of homeschooling is the chance to follow personal interests, one thing I knew all along I should help W learn more about or have more experiences with was animals in some capacity. We first set up a visit with our nearest humane society. They didn't offer any programs or opportunities for kids to help out, but they were nice enough to offer us a little tour and we got to meet all the animals and give some treats. We got to learn about how they do things. It occurred to me that W had never been to a humane society before, and barely knew what one was, so I felt we did a good deed in introducing an animal nurturer to that aspect of the animal world. During our visit he was so interested in everything from the information on the walls about the number of pets that had been adopted that month, to the way the two chinchillas moved around each other in order to both fit in a very snug way under the little plastic dome house in their crate. He was completely calm and collected walking by the dog kennels and trying to get a treat to each of them through their chain link walls as they barked up a storm and the echo made it incredibly loud. (And here was my affirmation that I was correct in my decision to not bring my daughter along on this particular field trip.) He understood the dogs were excited and he was careful to watch out for his fingers but he wasn't scared. He didn't ask that many questions on our tour, but he asked some, and I could tell he was soaking up every word and was super engaged with the animals themselves. Even the littlest detail shared with us, he remembered-- such as the advice during our tour to just briefly pet a certain cat then give her her space. He remembered, including the cat's name, and which one it was, when we had the chance to go back and visit the cats on our own before we left. I never had to remind him to have a calm body around the animals or worry about him doing something that would make the staff nervous. It was a 45-minute visit with a 45-minute drive on either side of it, but it was well worth it to hear how it was the best day and to get so many thank yous for doing it.

 
Because of the success at the first humane society, I spoke with another one only a little bit farther away after that. They were happy to have W come volunteer as long as an adult was accompanying him. We went last month for the morning and we went again this week. I feel good that I am getting him out to do some volunteering, period. But the fact that he is doing something he cares so much about makes it more than worth the "lost" academic time and the drive there (even though cleaning litter boxes would not be my first choice if I was volunteering on my own).

Some special highlights from our visits have been:
Along with sweeping and mopping the cat rooms, we were asked to change out all the blankets and cozy poofs and toys as part of their weekly room rotation schedule. W was fully engrossed in choosing the coziest blankets and deliberating over where to put them, not to mention the toys. After shopping for a couple handfuls of fresh ones in the supply area, he then thought hard about where to put them in the cats' room, and played with the toys long enough that he enticed the cat that hadn't moved the whole time we were cleaning the room to get up and attack it. He was so rewarded.

They let us take two Husky puppies for a walk around the field. I had forgotten the roly poly, tug-of-war experience that is walking a puppy who isn't yet leash trained (not to mention two) and W had never experienced this. He put his all into it as we strategized how to leave the right distance between us to not stress the dogs but also keep them from getting tangled up with each other. W was so happy to find they both had been adopted the second time we visited. 

W needs to visit each cat room while we're there, of course, not just the ones we clean. The great thing is that the staff seems to expect and want this from volunteers-- just hanging out with and petting the animals for long periods of time. W reads each cat's name and age and bio on the door (and remembers it). One cat kept licking him on the back of to head while he was sprawled on the floor in the room, which he loved. He can't get over the question of who would give up this animal, or why, when it says "surrender" in their information. He'd adopt them all if he could.

There are less exciting jobs we help with, too, like folding the constant vast pile of clean laundry there. But even with that, he feels that he is doing something for the animals and therefore enjoys it even though I don't think he's ever folded a towel at home. Plus, he likes to overhear conversations about the animals as we fold, and ask staff questions about particular cats and dogs.

He comes home each time, telling our dog about these animals we've seen as Brunsy smells the evidence all over him.

Some pics of our two visits so far (he apparently wore the same shirt both visits):

Two Morning Hikes

It was the end of the second week of homeschool, in mid September. We'd been trying out our schedule for nearly two weeks and in my quest for balance I figured it was time to break out of it and do something fun because we could. The weather looked good Friday and I planned a little hike.

I didn't even mention it to W ahead of time, partly because suggestions of things like this are often met with whining. He gets super engaged once we're out and does a great job physically, whether hiking, biking, or cross-country skiing, but the motivation to go in the first place is usually lacking. I was attempting to let it be a "surprise" at the last minute to leave no time for debates. Because even if he didn't want to, I really did and this is my adventurous year too. So, after dropping his sister off at preschool that morning, I told him he'd been working hard and we were going to do a new little hike to take a break and celebrate. I was pleased that he just said, "Okay" and thought it might be because he was pretty focused on his book in the back seat. I had picked out Eagle's Bluff, overlooking Lake Morey, which involved a relatively short but intense hike to a ledge jutting out of the side of the mountain. I'd done it a couple of times long ago but not in his lifetime and I thought he might appreciate the spot (and the novelty of a new spot was also part of my strategy to get him into it). As we drove over there on that foggy morning, I found myself worrying a little that the fog better hurry up and clear off soon so we'd actually have a view.

The hike was immediately uphill right out of the parking lot. We hiked up and up, stopping a few times to test out newly learned map skills with the trail map I'd printed, to let W take pictures of moss, leaves, and fungi, to relocate a newt from the middle of the trail, and just to catch our breath. Even though it only took about an hour to get to the top, sections of it made it one of the steepest hikes I've done. We were bent over, needing to use our arms as well as legs to navigate some especially steep, washed out portions (which felt even hairier going down later). We had conversations about mushroom foragers and how they know what to gather. W stopped and hushed me in order to observe a chipmunk and then managed to get unnervingly close to it before it darted away.

Then we were at the top. A few steps down from the trail and we were on a boulder, nothing in front of us but a vertical tree-covered hillside and the lake. It's a lake we've swum in, ridden bikes around, and ice skated on, but from up there it seemed so much bigger and grander. There is a road around the lake and W commented on how quiet it was. We could see the unoccupied buildings of a couple of summer camps, but not many signs of life otherwise. We could see a bit of highway straight across the lake at about our eye level. I remembered a 4th of July years before driving home from somewhere north and stopping on the side of that exact section of highway to watch fireworks over the lake. The leaves were not yet starting to change, so they were still thick, but their greenness was starting to pale, so you knew they'd only be around a little longer. Now that were weren't sweating and climbing, we needed our sweatshirts back on.

The best part was that the fog had in fact not cleared, but was moving around in pretty fantastic ways. There were big swaths of it travelling up and to our left and W commented that it was like a big ghost the way it moved slowly. There were little wisps of it hovering low all over the lake below. There were patches of it straight ahead obscuring part of the hills across the lake, then allowing more of a view, then covering them up again. We'd never seen a view quite like that. I'm also usually not at high elevation looking across a valley first thing in the morning. W was appropriately impressed and kept commenting on how awesome the fog was.

In wanting this hike outing to feel like a good homeschool treat, I had tried to bring a good snack: crunchy apples, chocolate-covered pretzels, and a thermos of hot chocolate. We shared it and kept pouring it from as we sat there. It had been a very long time since I had been anywhere but a basement classroom on a beautiful fall weekday morning and it was exhilarating, surreal. It was barely 9:30 in the morning and we both felt energized up there, looking out. I imagined and hoped that W was noting that homeschool has some obvious pluses.

Eventually we drank most of the chocolate and made our way back down. It took noticeably less time than it took to go up. We drove back on the curvy road around the lake and back home and did our regular work for the rest of the day. But that hike was with us all day. W even raved about it to his dad when he got home later.

...And a week later we did it again. While I wasn't planning to go for a hike every week, it looked to be another nice day and we were only going to have so much longer to be able to get outside in these ways. I was eager to repeat the feeling of starting off our day with a relatively quick, rewarding hike. I had planned, though, to go a different place the second time, one we happened to be more familiar with, just for variety. But when I told W my plan, he lobbied and convinced me to instead return to Eagle's Bluff, comparing the views of the two options and saying that the lake and the fog were "just so cool." I couldn't argue with that. I of course had brought along hot chocolate and snacks again, and they were just as appreciated this time, even though it was a warmer morning on the rock and was much less foggy. It was neat how different the view felt just one week apart.

We went on a couple other novel, quiet weekday hikes in the fall and they were all great. But those couple of Friday mornings were majestic-- our own mini tradition of hot chocolate and a grand view to start the day. 

First hike, fog changing by the minute:

    Second hike a week later: