It seemed an innocent question enough. I knew someone who’d already started school. And the babies were bored. What harm could it do?

So I set out to start school two weeks ago.

First I had to hunt down all the curriculum. Problem: Imani’s 5th grade math book still hadn’t resurfaced. I had had to reorder. Good news: The new book arrived ca week 2. Problem: neither the answer book nor the test guide had arrived yet. So I gave Imani a 4th grade fact sheet. Fail.

Problem: The leap from Kindergarten to first grade means MUCH MORE busywork. Esteban’s school went from being a cute little play session here and there that was easily made up to an all-day work session, one of us ending in tears. Fail.

Joy reads much better this year, and cheerfully dove into her school work without me. Problem: she still needs me to help her understand assignments and tests. We started the second week reviewing week one. Fail.

Problem: it was still hot out, and we still had another fruit-picking trip to plan, and everyday I was pushing and waiting for school to be done so I could get on with my life, the whole while screaming inside that I was not ready for this. . .

So, we did a week of school, then a Monday. And as I was a hysterical maniac, I decided to stop school until I could mentally and physically prepare for it. I thought that the little children wanted to start school because they were bored. I bought more crafts, and started the origami and needlepoint craft sessions.

I took a personal day last week. That was very restorative.

I’m looking forward to starting afresh on Tuesday. Are you ready for school?

This summer, I pulled out a bunch of kits my mother had bought years ago for the children. One of them was a house you could assemble using brick and mortar. She had bought the dollhouse kit for Xay, my second born, to design a castle. I was intimidated by the idea of designing a castle. I couldn’t figure out how to make a house like on the box, let alone wrap my mind around round towers, turrets, etc. So, though we may have measured out how to lay the foundation on the provided platform back when we got the kit, we never proceeded with the house.

I wanted to remedy that this summer, and so we set out to make the house. Talk about an exercise in cooperation and patience! We copied the diagram best we could, laying out the foundational bricks. We mixed the sand mortar mix with water, and figured out how to lay bricks. We called Xay in to help at one point, but for the most part it was a project for the babies and me. Bricklaying was addictive. I wanted to keep going, and I ended up laying bricks where I should have set windows. Our project became very mortar-covered, and slightly crooked.

We let the house dry before we proceeded. The next time we worked on the house, Yanni helped us. We agreed we needed to tear the house down and start over. Thankfully, the mortar is water soluble, so we wet the house to pull the bricks apart. This time we glued the house to the foundation. Yanni worked on one side of the house while I worked on the other side. Imani did the ornamental work–the archways for the front porch. Joy laid bricks across the back wall, while Esteban scraped excess mortar. Even Chanya could spread mortar on a brick so I could lay it.

We worked on the house whenever we had time. Now it is ready for a roof. We still need to tile the roof. If we work on it daily, the house project should be done in about a week. We may drag it out by taking our time.

Structurally, our building is solid, but we have too many bricks on the front of the house. We make up for gaps in other places by mortar. We would do things differently if we started over again. It is not perfect, but it has been a great learning experience. When we finish this house, I’ll display it on the breakfront next to the other house. I neither want to make it again nor do I want to let the children play with it.

We have a wooden dollhouse kit beckoning us from the laundry room shelves. We have only just begun our dollhouse making adventure.

I pulled out our chunky wooden map of the United States puzzle. Said child gushed, “I LOVE that puzzle!”

Mind you, this is the same child who threw tantrums and flatly refused to work on the puzzle years ago when I had decided that playing with the puzzle was geography for the year.

After she played with the puzzle, this child was able to identify various states that she hadn’t known beforehand.

Which brings me to my titular question. I know all about the math manipulatives. We have been using them for years, and I’m pretty pleased with the results thus far. When I was a child, I made maps of my state and my birth state out of homemade play dough (salt relief Maps), and the hands on activity probably really helped my memory.

What do you use to teach geography?

I have also been experimenting with teaching Chanya to play. I thought it would be cute to put her on the program tonight.

Chanya and I had a rough dress rehearsal. She was distracted. She was more interested in sucking her fingers than playing her piece. I wasn’t sure whether she’d be up to performing when her time came.

I started the program out with Esteban. Bad idea. He played tentatively and choppily. He was obviously nervous, and it sounded like he didn’t know his music. So he won’t be headlining any more recitals for a while. Esteban made a bee-line for the couch after his performance. He didn’t want to bow.

Joy was next up. She started out much more confidently than Esteban, her piece sounding like real music. Then she hit the section she was less sure of. The music lost its way, sounding confused and repetitive. Joy slowly got back on track and finished strong. She took a hurried, joyful curtsy before hopping on the couch.

Imani’s playing had a mellow tone to it. She played with dynamics (loud and soft) and she had a lighter touch than Joy. Imani took a confident bow. She had impressed her father.

Chanya had been sitting quietly on the couch in between Yanni and Xay. I didn’t know if she wanted to leave her spot to go perform. I picked her up and asked her, and she was happy to go to the piano. I started playing chopsticks, and she copied what I played. Then she looked over at her father. I gently returned her attention to the piano. We played through the notes twice, and left the piano bench.

I softly told Chanya to take a bow, fully expecting to bend her body for her, showing her how to bow. Before I could help her, Chanya had bent her tiny body at the waist and put her hands on the floor. It was the deepest bow I’d ever seen.

I should have known little miss precocious would already know how to bow.

I was thinking that I have seriously, stupidly over committed myself this year. Surely all this running all over creation is just wrong on a whole lot of levels.

But watching the children comfortably chatting with other children, seeing how they look forward to going to games, etc. Watching them building their athletic skills and friendships at the same time, and all the joyful chatter afterwards, shows me something going right.

The air soft war host’s father made the comment, “People are so worried about socialization, but I’m always running him everywhere to see friends.” Indeed, here was an only child who had 17 boys eager to come celebrate his birthday with an outdoor air soft war. In January. With a high temperature of 19 degrees.

What does socialization look like for you?

I casually threw out how sometimes the kids have basketball games at the same time out of town in two different directions, and how much fun it is trying to figure out how to get them there.

“Don’t they have a bus?” my sister-in-law, who used to play high school basketball asked.

I was taken aback, not sure how to answer that not only did they not have a bus, but in homeschool, there is no ‘they.’ It is all we. As in, the coaches are parents (like in Little League), the players are all someone’s child, and we know all the other parents and children, and the people who schedule the games are also in the group of parents that have agreed to do this sport together. So, while me may agree to play thus and so game in thus and so town at thus and so time, there is no bus to take all the children there.

We take ourselves, or rely on email to carpool.

Tonight I had a conversation with one of the dads from Xay’s team. We’ve done carpool a couple of times, but we don’t know each other’s names, really. I know his wife, and she’s the one I usually make arrangements with. He asked if we had reserved a hotel room for regionals yet. I told him that we usually just drive up and back for regionals; we don’t stay overnight. (Large families and hotel rooms are not a good match).

The Dad looked a little lost. I asked him what his plans were. “We’ll work something out,” he told me. “Do you want us to call when we figure it out?” “Yes,” I told him, “please do.”

Because that’s what you do when you’re in a community, right?

Both my parents were professors. My mother used to say that “nothing can be gained from hanging around with low class people.” When she said that, she was questioning my decision to send my daughter to a predominantly poor/black school. She thought everything would be fine if I just sent her to a middle class public school.

But I grew up in the same school district, and I didn’t like my middle class public school. I didn’t like never fitting in, the stares, the ostracization for being different. I had thought that if my daughter were not in the minority culture at her school, she would be free to be smart, etc.

She started getting in trouble early on in Kindergarten. She wouldn’t take a nap; she had stopped taking naps at the age of 3. She was bored with reading class; she already knew how to read. So I made the decision to skip her to the 1st grade.

Her magnet school had double size classrooms of 1st and 2nd graders together, 40 children to 2 teachers, plus aids. The classrooms were set up with centers to encourage individual learning, and the grades together were supposed to help all the children to cooperate and help teach each other.

How it really worked out, though, was the children were mostly unsupervised. They played however they wanted with each other, and if you were smaller than the rest of the children, you were either treated like a pet or a pest.

After the PTO built the new playground during my daughter’s 2nd grade year, many of the children would get sick to their stomach on the tire swing. I’d go to the classroom after lunch and find my daughter lying on the couch, completely removed from any instruction. I was not happy about this, and often just took her home. Since my daughter was considered a good kid, nobody ever challenged her on this kind of checking out.

When I’d visit her 3rd grade classroom, I’d find children dancing on the desks, movie day several times a week, popcorn parties, etc. The double classroom was really just two rooms, making it impossible for the teachers to keep an eye on all the children all the time. I was told that my daughter was doing 4th grade work, even though she was never held accountable for completing any homework.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was the fact that the teachers couldn’t even mention Jesus in the classroom. When I took her out of the classroom at the end of her 3rd grade year, I thought I was giving my daughter a year of review by starting her out in the 4th grade the following fall.

I was in for a rude awakening. My daughter struggled to comprehend and finish her work. This is her senior year, and we are still working out kinks that she got from her time in school. None of her other siblings has ever been to school.

If I had to do it all over again, I’d JUST SAY NO.

It broke my heart to hear how this child, the same age as my son Esteban, would get a message at school that she was scary and to be avoided, just because she is black.

I know there are those who would say that kids have to be exposed to that kind of thing sometime, and you can’t shelter your child always, blah, blah, blah. But I would ask them, “how young would you like to expose your child to attitudes like that?” And, do you really think a 5 year old is equipped to deal with such a reaction? I don’t think any elementary aged child would know what to do with that.

As for the argument that this is a teachable moment? I don’t think it’s the child’s job to teach her peers anything. Why does she have to take eat crap and teach too? Are you kidding me? Where is the other child’s responsibility here? Where is their contrition? Now the child just has the scar, the stress, and the impetus to deal with it.

I don’t know where the justice is in this situation. Maybe if the mother talks to the teacher and the teacher addresses the class? Maybe talk to the other girls’ parents?

Or homeschool in the beginning and deal with people as families, rather than exposing unsupervised children to Lord knows what out in the world?

The second group to watch out for potential terrorism is the common law movement proponents. These people are opposed to drivers licenses, among other things.

The third group identified as potential terrorists are lone individuals. Why are individuals so threatening? Because they are less likely to fall for the one-world religion united world characterized by solidarity.

The mindset that would shift the focus from catching confirmed terrorists to identifying potential terrorists does so in the name of ‘prevention.’ The concept of prevention introduces a by any means necessary mind-controlling strategy. It would point fingers at homeschooled children who might be considered loners, independent thinkers unwilling to compromise or who prefer to work alone rather than in groups. Wow! I knew loneliness was bad, but it may become illegal!

I’m not saying it’s socialist–yet. This is the kind of thinking that sets the stage for socialist control. Socialist control looks like targeting people who oppose social, economic and political change.

If isolationism paints a bullseye on your back, why not band together with the common goal of preserving our liberty? Or is that the same thing as ‘solidarity?’ I would think it was different. We’re talking about preserving our liberty to be individuals; they’re talking about how everyone is the same. What say you?

Fact sheets are a daily part of the curriculum. Last year, when Joy was in 1st grade and Imani was in 3rd grade, Imani struggled answering 100 math facts in 4 minutes. Or fewer, for that matter. We counted by 2s, 3s, 4s, 7s, squares, etc. We drilled with the cards, did facts sheets sporadically in the summer. . .

And this year? Imani knows her facts. She gets them all right most of the time.

Last year, Joy was jamming on her fact sheets. She rarely missed anything. This boosted her confidence. That was 1st grade, when you don’t time fact sheets. This year she must answer 25 questions in 1 minute. And she’s a 2nd grader, so handwriting is kind of new, along with any new facts.

Her latest hard facts are the +9 facts. She can answer the questions, but doesn’t do it very quickly.

Today I took the babies to Pizza Hut for their November book it rewards. While we waited for the pizza, I tried to do a bop it style game with the +9 facts.

I beat on the table and said 0 + 9, and asked each child in turn to give the answer on beat. I held the sleeping baby in her winter coat. She never once opened her eyes. I told the children they would be out if they couldn’t say the answer on beat. Imani, at 9 years old had the advantage. Joy, 7, was much more interested in her new book it key chain. I confiscated the key chain. We were going to have educational fun if it killed us!

Finally I got Joy’s attention, and she told me that the beat was too fast. I slowed down and tried again. I gave Esteban, 5, easy questions; if they went higher than 9 + 3, they would be in sequence, so he could answer them. I gave Imani harder questions. She got out. Then it was between Esteban and Joy. . . and I asked Esteban 9 + 4 out of sequence, and Joy won.

I gave everyone their key chain back and soon it was time to go.

After lunch, I gave Joy her math lesson. I nervously anticipated her fact sheet for the day. It was new facts–the subtract half facts, or the reverse of the doubles facts, ie. 18-9, or 14-7. The answer is right in the question, which Joy figured out right away.

She answered 25 questions in 35 seconds.

(edited to add: the next day Joy took the fact sheet for the +9 facts and she improved her score by 16 points!)