Piles!

Lately I've been committed to tackling one thing a day in my house. There are certain jobs that I avoid at all costs, like the linen cupboard, that far corner of my kitchen counter, my sewing table, anything that lives under the couch... I could come up with plenty of excuses, and usually do, about why I avoid these things like the plague. But really I just haven't had the fortitude to deal with it... until now.

Today, during Kitty Bill's nap, I set the girls up at the table with some drawing materials and drinks and dove head first into the pile formerly known as my desk. It is the main dumping ground for lost art and broken toys. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here, or something like that. It was really a mess, but I won't get into that. It's better now. Not perfect, not finished, but I can see relative deskness. Hurrah! Hurrah!

In doing this great task, I feel like I can also see the surface of my brain. Very therapeutic this desk-cleaning business. But now I seem to have uncovered this enormous amount of artwork created by my wonderfully artistic and prolific children. Piles and piles and piles of it. A forest worth of paper in all shapes, hues, and sizes.

What do you do with this stuff? Do you throw it away when they're asleep? Do you scan it all in? Do you faithfully bind it up in booklets? Do you box it up and stick it in the attic? Do you wallpaper the entire house, including ceilings? Do you date it, and press it, and coddle it for the rest of their lives?

What do YOU do with your piles?

Welcoming Autumn

We totally and completely missed the Autumnal equinox last year. We were still living in Austin, Texas, snuggling in a new baby while simultaneously up to our elbows in moving boxes as we geared up for our move to the Midwest. It was sweltering hot then, and Autumn just never occurred to any of us.

Fast forward one year, and it's chilly out. The leaves are turning rainbow hues and dropping all around us. Slowly, but surely, one by one. We've been collecting them on our walks and noticing the quiet but steady drift into Autumn. We're singing lovely songs like "The Leaves are Green," and "Yellow the Bracken," rejoicing in all the crisp apples and fresh winter squash, and harvesting the last of our own summer garden. Drying and freezing and packing it all away for the cooler months.

It's a busy time, Autumn is. We snuck in a small harvest celebration to welcome the turning of the season. A few stories around the lantern*, warm food, and a familiar old song, "My Roots Go Down," one that we learned with some friends in Texas. It was our small way of honoring the good times we spent there and marking our journey here. This weekend it will be one year since our move, and Einstein is already applying for jobs for next Fall when his research grant expires. We're doggedly trying to put down our roots... to feel solid in the earth, even if we have to pull them back up again.

"My Roots Go Down" - by Sarah Pirtle

Chorus:
My roots go down, down to the earth.
My roots go down, down to the earth.
My roots go down, down to the earth.
My roots go down.

Every verse is different, made up on the spot. You sing a line, repeat it twice, and end it with "My roots go down." Then follow with the chorus.

The girls LOVED making up their own verses:

I am a dogwood shimmering in the starlight.

I am a climbing tree letting someone climb.

And our roots go down...

*We were inspired to make our own leaf lantern by our dear friend Aleisha. Not only did she turn us on to the wonderful book Exploring the Forest with Grandforest Tree, she's got a beautiful Autumn lantern up on her site as well. She's just full of cool ideas.

The Royal Ball

This morning Sunburst wanted to do "school" which is different than the schule we normally do. She wanted to do "proper school" where she dresses up as the character of the day/week/month and pulls up a chair to the end table and says, "Teacher! Teacher! I'm ready for school."

Today she was Samantha.

Anyway, it seemed like a good time to pull out an idea that I had been thinking about but hadn't completely thought through yet: Math through paper folding. I totally winged it, and it turned out swell.

We started out each with a square of paper. It was the Royal Cake. How shall we cut it? Can we divide it into two slices? What about four? What if we fold it this way? Oh my, 8 pieces! Let's do that again! Wow, 16 pieces! Sunburst folded it in half and in half and in half until she couldn't crease the paper any longer.

It was a lot of counting, but Einstein helped out by writing our totals down on the chalkboard.

1
2
4
8
16
32

Hmmm... was there some sort of pattern emerging? Oh yes! 1+1 is 2. 4 is 2+2. 8 is 4+4. Sunburst noticed that every time you fold it in half again, you double the number of cake slices. "Splendid, just splendid dear," said the Queen. "Now keep folding, I say! Keep folding!"

She ended up with 128 slices of cake. Minus the King and Queen, how many guests could they serve?

But boy, were they puny slices! "This will never do!" Cried the Queen in her haughtiest voice. "Our guests are not mere mice! They shall starve on such a niblet! We shall have to cut larger pieces!" (Being a haughty queen is quite fun!)

So Sunburst looked over all the options and decided that the division of 16 made adequate pieces. Not too large, "We don't want them to start vomiting into their crystal goblets!" And not too small. "Our guests are not mice!" So then we started subtracting the King and Queen and the two Royal Princesses to see how many guests we could invite.

Of those 12, we mused how many invitations we would need to write. Twelve? What if some of them live together? What if they are families? Yes, what if there were two people in each family? Or three? Or four?...

When we finally figured it all out, then we had to decide how we would deliver these invitations. The Royal Horses all had the flu. Whatever shall we do? Of course, we'll send out the Royal Bird! We put all that paper folding practice just then to use making our own origami birds. They flew around the room and finally nested in the well of Einstein's banjo.

Moonshine also wanted a princess origami doll. So we folded one up and decorated it with stamps and such.

It was a Rollicking, Royal Good Time. And I dare say, we may have learned something.

Forms A'hoy!

We're chugging along with our form drawing. So far so good, though it's a bit premature to tell really. However, just two days into the lesson I'm already struck by how this form drawing stuff never ceases to surprise me. It's like some kind of magic.

I thought the first form I came up with, good old Giovanni juggling, would prove to be a bit more challenging. But no. We warmed up with some forms we did last year. Then we took our new form in parts, drew it in the air with our fingers, with our feet on the floor, used the chalkboard and finally pulled out those huge sheets of newsprint and went to town. Sunburst figured it out fairly quickly:

I like to let each form sit overnight before we draw it in the main lesson book. The forms seem to fix themselves overnight and just flow the next day. This is how it came out in her book:

Then I presented the crowd form. Whew! She said to me, "It's only the second form, shouldn't it be the second easiest?" Well, you never can tell which ones will be hard. Everyone is different. To her credit, Sunburst worked on it pretty steadily for quite awhile. I could tell right away though that it was a tricky one for her.

We worked inside for a bit then took it outside on the front porch. I drew it really large so that she could trace over it a few times and we could walk it with our feet.

While we were doing that, Moonshine (age 4) was busy at work drawing chalk bunnies. She came and pulled me away to show me that she had made Giovanni all on her own.

Obviously I let little sister listen in on our stories and lessons. I give her paper and crayons and she goes to town drawing her own things. Once in awhile she will draw an image from a story, but for the most part she is happily lost in her little dreamy world. Oddly enough, Moonshine drew the first form from Sunburst's first grade lessons, too. My curiousity piqued, I pulled out the newsprint Moonshine was working on while we practiced Giovanni.

Two females. Normal 4-year-old stufff, I think. Can you see them? See all the horizontal lines on that dress? Now check out the hair. Little spirals on the ends, like curls. She has started making these little spirals lately, as well as decorating dresses with layers upon layers of frill-- or running curves. I can't help but wonder what it will be like to teach her in two years.

Meanwhile, Sunburst was still having fits with this "crowd" form. "It's too hard! I'm trying, but I can't do it!" And then came the tears... not a bunch, but they welled up in her frustration. I've figured out that's my cue that I've selected the right form for her. And also, that it's time to shift gears and change the presentation.

I ushered her back in the house for a cup of warm tea and a snack. While the tea was brewing I asked her to practice it on newsprint again, just once more. I stood there looking at the form I had drawn on the chalkboard, and suddenly it occured to me that it was International Talk Like a Pirate Day. And oddly enough, that crowd form also looked like the edge of a pirate ship. All it needed was some help. Sunburst got so sidetracked watching me morph my form into a picture that she forgot she was "done," turned her paper over and started again.

This time she just looked at me and grinned. "Arrrr! Ship a'hoy!"

Juggling some new forms

Our school supplies finally arrived, so last night I stayed up long after I should have and finalized my plans for our next lesson. I'm presenting a 3 week block on Form Drawing using the story of The Clown of God. It's a fairly intense story that circles the seasons of one man's, or clown's, life. It touches upon religion and purpose and a sense of something more. It's not a light story, but it seems to fit, and I feel good about it.

Sunburst has never heard this story before. I picked it up on a whim at the bookstore earlier this summer. It spoke to me when I read it and seemed to mirror the spirit world connection that's present in the Saint Stories for Grade 2. The more I looked at it, the more I realized how it was just brimming with forms. And voila!

I read through my pile* of form drawing books and printouts late last night and started sketching the possibilities. I came up with twelve forms that I'm really happy with. My plan is to retell the story in bits as we go along. The ending is really surprising and magical (ok, and kind of freaky,) so I want to leave that for later. The rest of the story is rich enough that it will sustain her as we go along.

I would love to see what forms other Waldorf homeschoolers are covering with their children, so in the spirit of sharing, here are the twelve forms I came up with, roughly sketched/crammed onto the chalkboard. I've tried to incorporate some metamorphosing forms (where you add onto them/change them,) running forms, vertical and horizontal symmetry, lemniscates, growing forms, inward/centering forms, invisible lines, and circles upon circles. A story about juggling really works for all these circular forms!

What's really crazy is how symbolic these forms turned out to be. #1 (top left) is a simple metamorphosing form of a young Giovanni juggling. Though it kind of also looks like a cross emanating rays of light. Our last form, #12 (bottom right) shows a simple lemniscate (numeral 8) and then working a lemniscate inside a lemniscate. It represents the statue of Mary holding the Christ child holding Giovanni's golden ball. But it's also this very solidly infinite thing... and really gives the sense of holding or being held. And yet, it's really not an overly religious story. The only thing that's really in your face is the magic, the mystery, the possibility...

Though you don't have to tell these long, drawn-out stories to do Form Drawing, it's a good idea to make sure the lines on the page represent something tangible that a child can grasp and roll around in their imagination.

The forms I've chosen will represent:
1. Giovanni juggling (Spring)
2. Crowd (young and old)
3. juggling the rainbow balls
4-5. different balls?
6. I think I'll shift this to #11, and make it be the balls rising higher than ever before
7. crowd applauding (Summer)
8. Little Brothers
9. Giovanni old and defeated (Autumn)
10. city scape
11. candle light (Winter)
12. Mary, Christ, and the golden ball

*For those genuinely interested, my pile of Form Drawing Resources includes:
Form Drawing Grades One through Four - Laura Embrey-Stein & Ernst Schuberth
Form Drawing - Hans Niederhauser & Margaret Frohlich
Form Drawing for the Homeschooling Parent - Barbara Dewey
MillenialChild.com - Eugene Schwartz
Form Drawing for Young Children: Grades 1 to 3 - Marsha Johnson (WaldorfHomeEducators)
Journey to Numeria - Alan Whitehead, Spiritual Syllabus

A Remarkable Recovery

I just got a phone call... from my stepmom! She lives and breathes and talks!

After an entire month in ICU, having gone through some horrendous medical emergencies, she has made a remarkable recovery. Miraculous. She has definitely backed away from that precipice and I'm so ecstatic I want to shout!

But it's late. My children are sleeping. Must not wake them...

Hear my virtual joy! Hear my thanks for all the love, thoughts, energy, and prayers! Hooray! Hooray! There is nothing like hearing the sound of another's voice when you weren't sure if you ever would again...

I can't stop smiling! :=)

The Great Smashitude

Yesterday, as we were driving home from the science museum, something smashed into our car and totalled our windshield. As you can see in the pictures the whole passenger side is pretty smashed up. Glass bits/shards/dust flew everywhere, including the tiniest bit into my right eye. It all happened so fast that I didn't see what hit us. It was crazy!

The girls both started freaking out. The crying was instantaneous. And I was caught completely offguard-- adrenaline pumping, rubbing my eye reflexively, and looking for a spot to pull over. It took me a minute to figure out what had happened, at least, to note that indeed the reason I couldn't see out of the windshield was that it was smashed, rather than what I immediately presumed-- that a large bird had dropped a tremendous amount of feces on our window. Or someone tossed a large boulder from a second-story window.

As I partly pulled over to the side the shrieking in the backseat only got louder and more frantic. Kitty Bill joined in and I couldn't see or think straight. I couldn't even see well enough to pull off the road. I took half a look at my screaming kids and just kept driving. This is how hit and runs happen, I thought later. By folks so shaken up by a sudden impact and overwhelmed with a backseat full of shrieking kids that they can't think straight until two hours later.... when they return to the scene of the crash, and find nothing. Which is exactly what we did.

I parked the kids at the dining room table and spooned food into their mouths to stifle the noise. I clutched Kitty Bill to my breast, rubbed my eye, and tried to figure it out. Luckily for me, I had Agatha Sunburst on the scene.

"Kitty Bill did it," she announced with great certainty. "I saw him do it."

Theory #1
Now how does a baby, sitting in the back seat in a rear-facing carseat, shatter the windshield of a moving car? Apparently with his favorite toy. Allegedly, Sunburst claims she saw him huck it backwards, up and over his carseat, with tremendous force, where upon it IMPACTED the windshield, and... get this... rebounded back into his chair. Like a boomerang. Tremendous force. Talent, even. Forget Kitty Bill, we should call him Baby Hulk.

And the toy? Wait for it....



A pitch pipe. Think harmonica-like.


Now, Sunburst almost had me with this one. It was the sincerity of her voice and the serious look on her face. She SAW it. Kitty Bill. In the Car. With a Pitch Pipe. But then I thought about it. If I had chucked it, would that break the window? It's metal. But small. How hard would I have to chuck it? Pretty hard. Over my head? Backwards? On a good day, maybe.... but I'm no Hulk.

Then we examined the windshield. Apparently you can tell whether the impact was on the outside or inside from the kind of damage present. Is there glass missing on one side? Does it bubble inward or outward? Is there debris?

That's when I saw it. Little, stiff, fawn-colored hairs embedded in the glass on the outside of the windshield. Definitely an outside job. But what the heck did I hit?

Theory #2
A squirrel?

I was driving 25 mph on a residential street. There are trees, but none were overhanging at this particular stretch. The entire right-hand side of the street was loaded with parked cars. So if it was indeed a squirrel-- the hair color is right... where did it come from?

And could a squirrel do this to a windshield? Really? I was only going 25 mph, it wasn't like I was speeding down the freeway. Wouldn't there need to be a lot more force involved?

Newton's Third Law of Motion. "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." I knew I should have taken physics in high school. So if a bug hits my windshield, both the bug and the car are exerting the same amount of force. By law. The bug splatters because it can't withstand the force... Now, whatever I hit yesterday SMASHED my windshield. So if my windshield looked like that... that same force exerted on a squirrel ought to have killed it. Don't you think? Itty bitty little thing like a squirrel. Smashola.

Theory #3.
What has the same fawn-colored fur as a squirrel but can be chucked out of a two-story window? A coconut? Think about it.... SMASH! Yep. A coconut could do some damage. But wouldn't it splatter stuff all over my windshield, too? Coconut milk, meat, shell debris?

I loaded the kids back into the car and drove back to the scene of the crime to look for bodies. Nothing. No roadkill. No coconuts. No boulders, birds, tree limbs, or people. Nothing.

Theory #4.
A squirrel with a coconut head dropped out of a black hole in the space-time continuum and smashed into my car and then vanished. Into thin air.

Theory #5.
Not some coconut-grafted flying squirrel... maybe Time bandits.

and then the POLICE came...

But it's okay. I called them. Just to make sure I didn't hit anyone or anyone didn't hit me. Just to be sure that if someone was chucking coconuts or lead-filled squirrels out of two-story windows in the University area that there was some sort of record somewhere. That the powers that be know about it.

The very nice officer that came out stood at my windshield and shined his flashlight on it for a very long time. He took a few notes and looked at the windshield some more. Clueless. Definitely an outside job, but clueless. I showed him the hairs. Aha! Evidence.

"A cat?" He pondered, and then shook his head.

"A coconut-headed cat," I suggested, and let him in on my crazy squirrel dropping out of the sky theory.

"No, this was no squirrel," he said. "Whatever hit you had some weight to it." He took another look at the hairy windshield and said with full sincerity....

Theory #6.
"Are you sure you didn't hit a deer?" Deers, squirrels, coconuts and Time bandits... all falling from the sky. Yeah, uh huh.

What else is there???

maybe... you don't think... could it be?



Theory #7.
Raccoons?.....Nah! But maybe...

What do you think?

The Gamble of Song

Welcome to The Singing Lottery, where every morning we each draw a song out of a hat, open our hearts, breathe deeply into our lungs, lift our heads to the heavens and SING. Together. I know it sounds strange, but hear me out.

This is my answer to the impossibility of a daily circle time. We would love to have a circle every day, and it sounds good in theory. But that lengthy, involved, lovely, composed circle with all the songs and fingerplays and recitations just isn't something we can do everyday in our house, especially with Kitty Bill competing for attention.

But... I still want my girls to sing. Daily. Together. In a lovely, harmonious way. As a guided activity, which is very different from the normal and contstant outpouring of their own creative song that happens throughout each day. In this I want them to listen. To memorize. To sing together. To work together, and to start the morning with song. Every day. United and present and lyrical and healthy.

I think it's IMPORTANT, but you don't have to take my word for it.

“Music is a strange thing. I would say it is a miracle. For it stands halfway between thought and phenomenon, between spirit and matter, a sort of nebulous mediator, like and unlike each of the things it mediates — spirit which requires manifestation in time and matter that can do without space.” --Heinrich Heine
"We need no convincing about how phenomenally good music makes us feel. There's nothing esoteric about the fact that when we sing, our pupils dilate and a rush of endorphins (our body's natural painkillers) surge through our bodies. Singing increases oxygenation in our bloodflow, tones the nervous system, heightens our immunity, and affects glandular secretions. Healers often use sustained vocalization of individual pitches for the purpose of resonating specific body areas to realign and rebalance." --Naturally You Can Sing

Singing promotes deep breathing, oxengenates the blood, stimulates brain activity, releases 'feel good' endorphins, reduces stress, builds self-confidence, enhances memory, and boosts creativity! --Beth Lawrence, Viva La Voice

"Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful." --Plato

Sounds great, doesn't it? Singing daily for health and inner peace and connectedness. It's a communal exercise. Turning it into a game like The Singing Lottery brings in the element of surprise, mystery, and fun. What will we sing today? My girls can't wait to find out! But of course there are rules, too.

The Singing Lottery Rules
1. Anyone can contribute a song to the hat.
2. Each song must impart a sense of goodwill, joy, spirit, and/or welcome.
3. The songs can be in any language.
4. Each person has to draw at least one song from the hat.
5. After each participant has drawn a song, the singing commences.
6. Each participant must sing standing up (posture and breath are important.)
7. All songs will be sung together, as a group.

We're having great fun with it, currently singing selections from Sing Through the Day, This is the Way We Wash-a-Day, Teach Me German, and the musical play of Peter Pan. Moonshine in particular has been heard repeating the songs throughout the day. Not just Moonshine though, me too. I can't help myself. It feels good.

What will you sing?

Feel free to play along.

Making Sidewalk Chalk

I'm getting things ready for our first form drawing block of the 2nd grade year. We like to draw the forms as large as we possibly can outside on our back patio. It's an activity that necessitates A LOT of chalk.

So we make our own.

It's really simple. We use plaster of paris, tempera paint, and water. Then we pour our mixtures into toilet paper tubes lined with wax paper. We set our tubes on a FLAT surface (i.e. hardboard) with a double layer of wax paper underneath. You let them sit overnight in the tubes, and then peel them out and let them finish drying. If the weather cooperates, it takes about a day or two for them to fully dry.

The ingredients are really inexpensive. You can find plaster of paris and tempera paint at a craft store. I buy the regular tempera paint, not the washable. And the chalk works great. You can add as much color as you like, so you get really vibrant results.

The original recipe can be found HERE.

U Can't Touch This!

I decided to take advantage of the cooler temperatures last week and did some weeding out in the yard. To my surprise, and dismay, I discovered some Poison Ivy. Some here, some there, some... everywhere! I took the kids over and gave them the poisonous plant tour, doing my best MC Hammer* impersonation:

"You can't touch this!"

Obviously I didn't spend my summer weeding. Nor my spring. Heck, it wasn't until recently that I even discovered what Poison Ivy looks like. I grew up in the Sonoran Desert, and I can identify a cactus a mile away (who can't?) If we were lucky we had a few blades of grass. Ivy, of any kind, didn't stand a chance in the parched desert.

I'm not in the desert anymore, and luckily the internet exists. With pictures. And you can learn about anything. I thought this lesson was important enough to share with the kids. It fits nicely in the Natural Science category, don't you think? Health sciences, too.

"Ring the bell, school's back inBreak it down...."

What does Poison Ivy look like?
You can't touch THIS!.... or THIS!... or THIS!

What will Poison Ivy do to me?
Check out the Posion Ivy RASH Hall of Fame.

Why does it make you itch? And can I wash it off?
Read the FAQ.

Test your knowledge. Take the Quiz.


So now comes the hard part. Removing the poison ivy. It's all over the place.
Can anybody loan me a goat?


*Me? Quoting MC Hammer?
You never can tell what I'll pull out of that magic hat. But look, Hammer's got a BLOG, too. It's a small world afterall...

Modeling with Beeswax

This week I told the Grimm's story Allerleirauh, and it was great fun. We pulled out our Stockmar modeling beeswax and tried to capture the story in a different medium.

First I drew a representational picture on the chalkboard. Sunburst copied that picture into her main lesson book, and then pulled that image into her modeling. I didn't tell her what to make, I just let her lead the way. This is what she came up with:

The King is on the left, and Allerleirauh is on the right. You can see her bright dress peeking out from her fur cloak. In the middle is the stove where Allerleirauh stirred the soup, and the brown bit is a spoon on a rack of some sort. Inside the pot of soup, which you can't see, is a golden ring. Behind the King is a door with a window. Behind Allerleirauh is a wooden bough with dried herbs for cooking.

She probably worked on this scene for 45 minutes or so. I sat next to her and sculpted my own vision of the characters on the left. What a large pot of soup I made! I tend to make enough food to feed an army in real life, so why should I be surprised that my modeling should turn out any different? The chalkboard scene we worked from is on the right.

To get started on your own modeling fun, I suggest you check out this PDF from Stockmar. Other manuals for their wonderful art products can be found HERE.

Back to School...

This is Moonshine's "rainbow leaf." Yes, the autumnal change is upon us. The morning air is crisp and cool, the oaks are scattering their acorns, and a few leaves here and there are slowly turning. I love this time of year!

Last week we stuck to our rhythm fairly easily. We enjoyed the morning walks and the chill they left on our noses and ears. We pass a house on our walk that the girls have taken to calling "the castle." It's a grand house of limestone with two turrets, one on each end. It's really something to behold, especially on a street with fairly normal-looking houses. Some of them are just as large, but turrets? Lion statues poised on the steps? Not even close.

This house has really peaked the girls' interests in castles and what it would be like to live in one. As soon as we return home from the walk Moonshine runs to the costume box and gets princessed-out. More often than not Sunburst has joined in, and they've been queens of their own castle.

While I'm waiting for our shipment of school supplies (and for my grand plan to solidify,) I thought we would keep with the castle theme . We're warming up to the new school year with a few more Grimm's tales and accompanying writing practice. So far, so good. I'm bringing in a few of the "castley" stories that reference God a bit more, since we're going to delve into the stories of the Saints this year, it seemed like a good warm-up to the idea of godliness.

Sunburst isn't too comfortable with the idea of God, actually. Jesus, is easier somehow because there is a human form and baby worship, but God? She can't quite wrap her brain around it, all on her own. I once overheard her at a party debating with a table of mixed-age children about the existence of God and his/her gender. It never occurred to me that children would discuss this topic at length amongst themselves, but there they were... Sunburst adamantly espousing her disbelief and another child declaring that God is a woman. "But God doesn't sound like a girl's name," I heard before I walked away shaking my head and thinking they would get clearer answers from a magic eight ball.

I'm toying with the idea of starting into the second grade lessons with form drawing inspired by the story The Clown of God, told by Tomie dePaola. It has just that spark of the mystery of spirit and miracle that I've been looking for. And touching on our own personal needs, it's a good look at the circle of life, following one clown's life from early childhood to his death, from poverty to fame and back to poverty, and seems to encompass the spectrum of human/animal behavior we'll be covering this year in our readings. It's also a good introduction to St. Francis and the Brothers, which we'll return to in another main lesson. It's brimming with material.

Most of all, I love the passage in the story where Giovanni meets the Little Brothers:

"Our founder, Brother Francis, says that everything sings of the glory of God. Why, even your juggling," said one of the brothers.

"That's well and good for men like you, but I only juggle to make people laugh and applaud," Giovanni said.

"It's the same thing," the brothers said. "If you give happiness to people, you give glory to God as well."

"If you say so," said Giovanni...

I'll stir some nature into the story, plug in some forms, and be set to start when our new supplies arrive. I'm excited, actually. The weather, the story... it feels like I might have wandered back onto the path. In spite of everything. It feels good.

Planning for Fall

With the recent events in my life being what they are, I've felt more than a bit unfocused. Scattered, emotionally and mentally. It's not a frame of mind I'd recommend to anyone, especially when raising young children and homeschooling. During my struggles this week to screw my head back on straight, I ran across a couple of quotes in my readings.

I'm always open to signs from the universe, and these two felt a bit serendiptious.

"Do not let the fact that things are not made for you, that conditions are not as they should be, stop you. Go on anyway. Everything depends upon those who go on anyway."

--Robert Henri

"There's a thread you follow. It goes among things that change. But it doesn't change. People wonder about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread. But it is hard for others to see. While you hold it you can't get lost. Tragedies happen; people get hurt or die; and you suffer and get old. Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding. You don't ever let go of the thread."

--William Stafford

There are a lot of ways to interpret this idea of "thread." It can manifest as one's faith --mine being weighted by ideas of destiny and the interconnectedness of the spirit world with our own, which is something I have felt and experienced many times in my life. I have to take a breath and remember that everything happens for a reason, as it is meant to happen or unfold-- and that nothing changes but the earthly body. It's hard for me to really hold these ideas in the thick of grief, though I do believe them with all my heart, they don't dissipate my human feelings of loss or helplessness or suffering.

Thread can also speak to our relationships with others-- mother, daughter, sister, aunt, friend, wife.... We have this uncanny ability to tether each other to the earth, to life in all its messiness and hilarities. It doesn't get any more real than wiping bottoms or the salty tears of a teething baby or a four-year-old's knock knock jokes during dinner.

But what about homeschooling and how it applies to my family? Thread is something like a rhythm we can hold onto, a set plan, an order to our days. A bit of stability we can count on.

It's time to get back to a steady beat. If we can hold onto that, maybe we can keep ourselves afloat in this murky current of emotion. Anyway, it's worth a shot. I've come up with a rough plan. We'll try it out and see how it goes.

Monday - wet-on-wet painting/washing
Tuesday - music
Wednesday - handwork/mending
Thursday - music/bi-monthly co-op/park day
Friday - circle/foreign languages

We'll also walk in the mornings and work our second grade blocks into this weekly rhythm. Thursdays are our only "day out" from the house, so it should be easy. I still have to figure out what those blocks are going to be though. I like to come up with a theme that guides the year. Last year was our "quest for the light," which showed itself in our Martinmas play and lantern walk, our letter story, our intro to numbers story (working through the Cave of Mysteries to the Sky Queen with her twelve white horses,) and Robin Red's form drawing story/song. It felt perfect for the first grade year, a child just setting out on the path, coming into the light of knowledge, getting her first taste of that brightness.

The second grade child is continuing along that path, bridging this gap between the animal and spirit world, base behavior and a higher calling. Most Waldorf folks teach Aesop's Fables and Saints' stories this year. Me? I'm not feeling it. I'm reading over the materials and waiting for divine inspiration to strike me. Presenting the Saints' stories feels important, but my intuition tells me they need to be grounded in/with something else. Reality. Truth. Experience. Something. And that these lessons need to cast some light on the things that are unfolding in our own family, hold our space. But how? And what? Hopefully the right answers will come soon....

In the meantime, I will go on anyway. Blindly moving forward, grounded in rhythm and family and friendship, and dirty bottoms.

The Passage of Time

This summer we've been talking a lot about time and events and looking forward. Planning ahead. How many days until we go to the beach? How many days until someone's birthday? How many days until it gets cold?

With my stepmom in the hospital, I too find myself counting off the days. The doctors have diagnosed her with something called Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS), and it could be weeks or months before she comes off life support, regains consciousness and checks out of the ICU. That's a huge chunk of time.

Sunburst has been filling in pre-printed calendar pages and putting together her own glimpse of the year. She's writing in the name of the months, the days of the week, and numbering the days. She's filling in birthdays and celebrations as she comes to them, and we'll bind it all up with string and hang it on the wall. It helps her to see ahead and really get a taste for how the seasons unfold and the map of our year is put together.

She was delighted to look on her page for August and discover that today is my birthday. So for the last few days she and her sister have been secretly preparing. I woke to a birthday crown on my bedside table. There were flowers, oddly-shaped packages, and a breakfast carrot muffin served with a hand-rolled beeswax candle.

I appreciate their collective excitement, but this year I feel dismally prepared to embrace this day with so much going on inside my head and my heart. Really, it's an imbalanced state where the hands have nothing to do but wring themselves, helplessly, over and over. However, I find it eerie that my stepmom apologized a month ago for missing my birthday. She was really upset about it, and we both had a good laugh when I told her she was a month early. But now she really IS missing it... oh wonder of wonders! How did she know?

Her health is still balanced on that precipice, and with a positive outlook, full recovery may take as long as six months. There's no choice but to keep on with our own paths, despite the heartache, despite the worry, despite the unknown. We have to keep moving forward.

Which means... we must eat cake.

Prayers Needed

My stepmother is in the hospital in extremely critcial condition.

Just this morning I was finalizing my order for school supplies, hemming and hawing and nitpicking it to death. Am I getting the best deal? Am I leaving anything out? Trivializing over trivial matters. And then I got a call, and those trivial things just go right out the window. Is this chalk better than that one? Does this paper absorb less water? Who cares.

Life is way too short. We've lost three people we love tremendously in the last two years, including my Dad, and it's excruciating. Welcome to the emotional carnage of my life. Chalk? Pah!

I haven't been able to get a good grasp on my plan of attack for Second Grade. There's so much rich literature to draw from, that I find it dumbfounding. But here it is, end of August-- cool morning air, darkness working it's way in earlier and earlier. It feels like it's time. But we may be out of here on the first flight tomorrow. Or next week. Or? There's just no telling. Extremely critical. That's something like pins and needles. Holding your breath. Poised on the edge of a precipe. And it's not okay. It doesn't feel okay.

So where does homeschool fall into this? Where do the kids fall into this? They have experienced more loss than I ever did at their age. Is it better? Is it worse? Is it healthy? It just is what it is, regardless. The unstoppable force of life... and death. Completely out of my hands.

Tonight we offered up all the love our hearts could hold.

I hope it's enough. That's all we can do.

And we're back...

We took off last week and headed for the beach, specifically Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Sun, sand, surf... good times. Coincidentally, I spent most of them indoors.

Einstein's grandmother lives just a stone's throw away from the beach, but Kitty Bill came down with a funk enroute, and I spent the first few days holed up inside coddling him back into a reasonable state of health. By the last day of our trip he was feeling well enough to sit under an umbrella on the sand and finger some seashells.

We had a great time visiting with the relatives, which was the real purpose of our trip anyway. Nurturing our relationships so they don't crumble like sandcastles when the tide rolls in. This goes for our nuclear family unit, as well. It's amazing what spending two days in the car together will do for a family. We learned quite a few things about each other:

1. Einstein and I are getting older.
We think we're still young and invincible, but our bodies betray us. Long gone are the days when we could actually sleep on any pitted concrete slab the low-end motel chains feign to pass off as a "bed." On our return route we kicked in a few more dollars on a nicer place and were giddy with delight to discover high-end matresses with memory foam.*

2. I'm Henry the Eighth I am
Can be sung more times than necessary on the drive from Asheville, NC to Louisville, KY. It's a good way to accidentally practice counting and rank. "Second verse, same as the first..." "Third verse, same as the first..." "Eighty-ninth verse, same as the first..." Whew, boy. Einstein will die a happy man if he never, ever hears that song again.

3. There are not enough books
Sunburst reads much more voraciously than we had anticipated. We had lugged along a huge stack of books to begin with, but somehow she managed to polish them all off on the way to South Carolina. For the trip home we picked up a copy of The Wizard of Oz. It barely lasted the two day stretch.

4. It's not the destination that matters, it's the journey.



The bridge in Louisville. Heading into the storm.





The windshield wipers were actually on... somewhere in Kentucky.





Asheville, NC. An artist's paradise, and one of the easiest towns to be vegetarian in.



There was no shortage of cool things to see in Asheville:



The medicinal herb bench.





Star lamps. We were taken with them.





Hollywood Squares?





Knit hat wigs in the display window at a quilting store.


The best scenic view of the trip:



Veteran's Overlook on Clinch Mountain in Tennessee.






Oh, and the beach was nice, too...



*For those of you who must know, we stayed at the Ramada. The tv was also hidden away in an armoire, which was a huge bonus as far as we were concerned.

Grade Two Resources

** Updated September 2012 **

Waldorf Grade Two Resources

Essential Grade 2 (options for fables, saints, trickster, jataka tales)
Fables of Aesop   (Grade 2)*
Teaching with the Fables by Sieglinde de Francesca (Grade 2)*
Animal Stories - Streit (Grades 2 or 4)*

The Giant at the Ford  (Grade 2)*
OR Stories of the Saints (Grade 2)
Our Island Saints (Grade 2)
Saints and Heroes - Christopherus (Grade 2)
Various Saints books from Tomie de Paola (Grade 2)*
Clown of God by Tomie de Paola (Grade 2)*
Saint Odelia - Streit (Grade 2)*
The Man Who Loved Books - Fritz (Grade 2)*
Brother Juniper - Gibfried (Grade 2)*
Fin M'coul - de Paola (Grade 2)*
Lady of Ten Thousand Names (Grade 2)

Anansi and the Moss-Covered Rock - Kimmel (Grade 2)*
Anansi and the Talking Melon - Kimmel (Grade 2)*
OR African Folktales (Grades 2 and 7)
OR Brier Rabbit stories (Grade 2)
Indian Why Stories (Grade 2 or Grade 3)
Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling (Grade 2)*
Twenty Jataka Tales (Grade 2)*

The King of Ireland's Son  (Grade 2)*

Poems and Rhymes/Grammar
A Journey Through Time in Verse and Rhyme (Grades 1-8)*
Waldorf Book of Poetry (Grades 1-8)
An English Manual - Harrer (Grades 2-8)*

Mathematics
Making Math Meaningful - York (Grades 1-5)*
Math Lessons for Elementary Grades (Grades 1-5)*

Music
Waldorf Teacher's Companion to the Pentatonic Flute (Grade 2 +)
One for the Golden Sun: pentatonic songs (Grades 2 +)
Clump-a-Dump- and Snickle-Snack (Grades 2 +)
Music Through the Grades - Barnes (Grades 1-8)
Sing A Song of Seasons - Naturally You Can Sing

Art Resources
Painting and Drawing in Waldorf Schools - Wildgruber (Grades 1-8)*
Elements of Grade 2 (main lesson book images) - Millenial Child / Eugene Schwartz (Grade 2)*
Form Drawing Grades 1-4 - Embery-Stine and Schuberth (Grades 1-4)*
Form Drawing - Niederhauser and Frohlich (Grades 1-5)
Inspiring Your Child's Education - David Darcy (Grades 1- 5)
Creative Pathways - Auer (Grades 1-8)*
Will-Developed Intelligence - Mitchell (Grades 1-12)*

Steiner
Rhythms of Learning: Selected Lectures by Rudolf Steiner - Trostli (Grades K-12)*

Curriculum Guides
Millenial Child - Eugene Schwartz*
Path of Discovery - Fairman
Waldorf Without Walls - Barbara Dewey
Christopherus Publications (First Grade Syllabus; Curr. Overview)

*All of these resources have been very useful to me at one time or another, but these are my personal favorites. 



Our Lessons and Resources
You can sift through my Grade Two posts HERE.
For the older Gr. 2 posts, it gives you an option of clicking "older posts" at the bottom of the page.
Or if you're looking for something specific, please see the labels (saints, fables, etc.) on my sidebar or use the search function at the top of the page.



Other places on the web
Chalkboard Drawing (images)
Waldorf Library (free e-books)
Waldorf Teacher's Gallery (images)
Waldorf Ideen Pool (images)
Baldwin Project / Main Lesson (free e-books)
Rudolf Steiner Audio
Rudolf Steiner Archive
Naturally You Can Sing (songbooks)
Waldorf Curriculum Chart (Grades 1-8)


My Favorite Unschooling Books
Learning All the Time - Holt
Homeschooling and the Voyage of Self-Discovery - Albert
Free at Last: The Sudbury Valley School - Greenberg

Piano Lessons

A while back I made an agreement with Einstein that we'd sign Sunburst up for "formal" music lessons before her eighth birthday. Somewhere he read that this was Important for some such reason... maybe it was that they learn better, or faster, or fire some special neurons in their heads that only exist before the eighth year, I don't quite remember. I'm sure it was a Good reason. When she showed interest in playing the piano this summer, we conveniently signed her up to take lessons with our piano-teacher neighbor.

It didn't quite go as I had expected.

First, I'll say that my expectations always get me in trouble. However, when I sign a child up for lessons, I expect that they will be taught something, and that the person I'm paying will do the teaching. This was the way it worked when Sunburst took gymnastics lessons, trapeze lessons, and felted doll-making lessons. The only finger I had to lift was the one that signed my name on the check. I assumed the same would be true for piano lessons. Boy was I wrong.

The piano teacher taught only at the very first lesson and then assigned Sunburst homework in her music book, which then we, her parents, were supposed to help her figure out, i.e. TEACH to her. Sunburst went back to the next lesson, demonstrated the material she learned at home and received more homework. By the end of the third lesson, when Sunburst received upwards of a dozen pages of new material to learn while the "teacher" was on vacation, I about nearly split in half. What exactly was I paying for?

I've heard the horror stories of parents having to help their public-schooled children through two or more hours of homework a night, and oddly enough it's those same parents that say, "Oh, I could never homeschool." Don't they know they're already doing it? We're all homechoolers here.

Apparently I can now add Piano Teacher to my ever-growing list of credentials.

I pulled Sunburst out after the fourth lesson. She refused to go back until she had completed all the homework assignments, and was extremely dissapointed when the "teacher" didn't have enough time during the lesson to check all of these new songs Sunburst had worked so hard on. Worse yet, this teacher uses a reward system to get the kids motivated to play. After they master a new page/song, they get rewarded with a sticker on that page. When they finish the book, they get a prize.

The whole idea curdled my stomach. I'm one of those crazy fools that thinks learning should be its own reward. And it was hard to tell until that fourth lesson whether or not learning piano was it's own reward until Sunburst didn't get stickers for the work she had done. She didn't get the recognition for doing the work-- really, I think that's what the meat of it was, that she worked really hard to finish up those pages and learn the songs, and then they didn't even go over them. All that work for naught. I'm sure that's how Sunburst saw it.

She came home from that lesson completely disinterested in the two new pages she was supposed to work on. I cancelled her next, and final, lesson, and instead she just practiced the three songs she would play at the piano recital. She was so motivated to dress up and play in front of people that she woke up at the crack of dawn, slipped on her puffy crinolin-lined dress, and woke us up to the sound of her fingers plinking away with wild abandon. She practiced off and on all day, on songs that she could play with her eyes closed by now, and she did just fine at the recital.

But on the way home she asked if she could have a reward. "For what?" For getting up and playing in front of people. "Why should I reward you for something YOU wanted to do?" It was hard, she said. "So was learning to read," I said, "which was also your idea." True, she said. "And did you get a reward for doing that?" Yes, she said. The whole world opened up.

Such insight from a seven-year old! I had to pick my lower jaw up off the floorboard of the car before I could respond. "True," I said. "Welcome to the whole world of music."

As things would turn out, our piano-teacher neighbor moved out-of-state shortly after the recital. We met the woman who was recommended to take her place. Already feeling a bit jaded about the whole thing, I frankly asked her what her teaching style was. She didn't appear to have one or even understand the question. I tried again, "Do you teach using a rewards system?" Oh yeah, there's rewards, she said. Kids love the sticker thing.

Now for those of you that don't know me, my musical background is zip. Sure, I've been singing along with the radio since I could talk, and I seem to have this uncanny ability to memorize lyrics and sing along in the grocery store, but really I have never played an instrument, never had formal training in anything musical, and up until the flute business, I considered myself completely inept. Although I can hum like nobody's business, and as a child we practiced playing our noses while we sang along to "Winchester Cathedral." But that's it. When it comes to the formal subject of music I'm really, incredibly sensitive and hyper-critical Eggshell woman.

I know. A whole post about overcoming perfectionism, and like you, I'm all too human. This is that area for me. And yet... it appears as if "formal" music instruction will continue at home, taught by yours truly.

The earth is going to move. The ground is going to shake. And the whole world is going to open up... for both of us.

First Steps

"Learning is a process, not the static image provided by an intelligence test. It's an intrinsically hopeful process of improvement. As an animal, I am also perpetually beguiled by the bumbling folly of baby animals, while also understanding what I see is not stupidity, but an early stage of a journey toward grace, competence, and comprehension."

--Becoming a Tiger: How Baby Animals Learn to Live in the Wild, by Susan McCarthy

Kitty Bill, our youngest child, stood up the other day and began to walk. He took two wobbly steps and fell. He pushed himself back up on his fat, little sausage legs and grinned at us. He took two more steps and fell. Undeterred, he stood back up and tried again. By the end of the week he can walk across the room.

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about how we learn new things. Not just how we teach our children, but how we teach ourselves. To me those ideas are connected because our children learn so much from watching us. If learning is a painful process for us... If we curse, or get frustrated when we mess up... If we chuck our knitting or statistics books across the room... If we are easily defeated and give up the first time we take a spill on the ice, they might see those things and adopt them as their own. If we make a fuss, they learn to make a fuss.

The opposite is also true. If we're sure-footed and excited about learning... If we're eager and interested... If we're accepting of new challenges and seek out new learning experiences, they will too. If they see us laugh at our own mistakes, our own follies, our own early attempts at mastering a new skill, and if we don't give up, they learn to try and try again. Of course it won't always happen this way, but we're the biggest role models our children have.

Kitty Bill isn't old enough to feel humiliated when he fails. He's still in that natural, unblemished phase of life where every moment holds some new discovery. In watching him I have to wonder if that's how each one of us started out, on shaky legs but eager to learn and discover. To taste the untasted and explore the unknown, without bias or fear or embarrassment or expectations. Imagine carrying that into adulthood and how empowering that would feel. I'm not saying that at age 35 we should go around mouthing shoes or licking the cat. But if we could hold onto our sense of wonder and eagerness and ride that horse of self-esteem into adulthood, goodness knows what we might accomplish.

As I watch Kitty Bill in this pure state of exploration, I can't help but ask myself where does he go from here? What pitfalls in learning might trip him up, and like ashes on the snow, mar his unfettered sense of discovery? When and how and why does this eagerness and self-motivation start slipping away?

I don't have the answers. I just know that I wasn't always eager to learn. Even in the recent past I have given up because I felt foolish and innane and simply not up to the task. It's not the newness of something that I find daunting, the idea itself. In reality I want to learn everything. I want to be perfect at it the first time out: bowl a 3oo game, play a symphony, hit the ball out of the park. Completely unrealistic, but there it is.

The part that trips me up is the falling. The failing. The making a complete ass out of myself part. If you're not the kind of person that can laugh at yourself, and most people aren't, then the hurdles of learning appear a bit larger than they actually are. It's like looking at your pores with a magnifying glass. Of course you're going to look hideous and pock-marked. But isn't that what we're doing when we critically examine each and every attempt at learning as a separate thing? When we focus too much on one critical aspect and lose sight of the whole, the bigger picture?

Learning isn't like that. That's like focusing on a two inch square of one of Monet's water lilies. We would think it was blurry crap. Maybe he did, too, since he painted so many of them. Maybe he was just trying to get it right. Maybe he didn't know the first one was outstanding. Maybe Manet came along and laughed at him, and said, "You call that a water lily? Ha!" Manet was dead by then, so it would have to have been his ghost. Or what if Rembrandt's ghost came along and fashioned a grade on Monet's water lilies. Imagine Rembrandt, with his exacting eye for the smallest detail, came along and put a big honkin' red F on Monet's sort of hazy way of painting the world.

What if you and I were graded on a daily basis, on each task laid out before us? Overcooking pasta might earn us a C, while forgetting to buy cat litter, yet again, would get a big fat F. Could you imagine living in that world? Two nights ago I finished knitting my first adult sweater. It took me months of agony, and it looks ok. It's not perfect. But I'm proud of it. Who knew I could follow the directions and knit a sweater?! But if some knitting genius came along and gave me a grade on it. If they turned it inside-out and examined every seam I guarantee they would find plenty of mistakes. It would not hold up to that kind of scrutinty. Would I ever dare to knit a sweater, or anything, ever again? If someone graded my first row of stitches, I might not have even tried knitting a dishcloth, let alone a sweater.

Learning is hard work. Those first steps can be traumatizing if we let them be. If we fall off the horse and never get back on, we may never know what it's like to gallop fearlessly on with the wind whipping through our hair. If we don't learn how to overcome our own hurdles, how can we learn to teach?

"Teachers and educators must be patient with their own self-education, with awakening something in the soul that indeed may sprout and grow. You then may be able to make the most wonderful discoveries, but if this is to be so, you must not lose courage in your first endeavors.

"For you see, whenever you undertake a spiritual activity, you always must be able to bear being clumsy and awkward. People who cannot endure being clumsy and doing things stupidly and imperfectly at first never really will be able to do them perfectly in the end out of their own inner self... If once or twice you have succeeded in thinking out a pictoral presentation of a lesson that you see impresses the children, then you will make a remarkable discovery about yourself. You will see that it becomes easier to invent such pictures, that by degrees you become inventive in a way you never dreamed of. But for this you must have the courage to be very far from perfect to begin with."

--The Kingdom of Childhood: Introductory Talks on Waldorf Education, by Rudolph Steiner

Why Homeschool?

In the past two weeks I have met more and more families that are considering homeschooling. More than have crossed my path in the past two years. Way more than since I was first introduced to the idea of homeschooling over ten years ago, before I had children of my own. Today it is estimated that there are somewhere between 1 and 2 MILLION homeschooled children in the Unites States, increasing at a rate of 7-15% per year. The sheer number of us is astounding!

And it's no wonder. Homeschooling is not a new idea. It's the oldest educational system there is. Parents have always been teaching their children, from humans to wombats, it's cross-cultural and cross-species, and has been around for as long as there has been life on this planet. We're just returning back to the old ways, the natural way things used to be. There is nothing novel about it.

I shouldn't be surprised that others have come to similar conclusions that I have about the U.S. public school system. Some folks say that it sucks the life right out of their children. Others say No Child Left Behind sucks the life right out of the teachers, so it's no wonder. They're between a rock and a hard place, as the old adage goes. They have to teach to the tests to maintain funding. There is no time left to stop and smell the proverbial roses. No time for experiential learning or fun and games. Music and art and sports have been labelled extra-curricular rather than fundamental to the educational experience, and in some places done away with entirely. And many people say that the loss of those things, among others, turns our children into robots. They say that public school is a factory, a machine, and our children are squeezed through the process until they emerge on the other side, dumbed down, nondescript, submissive and spiritless. Or cynical and maybe even angry.

Me? I don't know. I'm a product of that system. It wasn't a fate worse than death, but it wasn't terrific. I got out before the major budget cuts, before the stringent testing, before anyone talked about viable educational alternatives. There are many reasons not to send your kids to school. We could bash the public educational system until the cows come home, but to what point? Who does it serve?

I think a more interesting question is: Why are people homeschooling? What's the payoff? What does it do for your children? For your family?

What could I say to all these people that are on the fence, or interested but overwhelmed, that would really give them a fuller sense of what homeschooling is all about? I've been thinking about it, and have come to realize that what's really key is not my curriculum choice. It's more about how I teach than what I teach. In that sense I don't think I'm really that different from the larger homeschooling flock. My reasons are simple, my findings are ordinary. Ordinary among homeschooling parents, and yet... they are phenomenal. Ordinary phenomena.

Subject matter aside, my children are learning:

• to think for themselves
• to question
• to find their own answers or truths
• that the right answers are often a matter of perspective
• to trust themselves
• to be interested
• to create and explore
• to develop relationships with each other, their parents, and the world
• that they have a voice
• that they're unique and special
• to dream
• to follow those dreams
• and that they, and their dreams, matter

Even if they learn nothing else, I will have done my job.

But in my experience with other homeschooling families and teaching my own children, it's obvious that homeschooled children also learn the key curricular ideas of our time-- the three Rs. They also manage to learn physics, astronomy, biology, chemistry, engineering, history, sociology, etc, etc. And they do it remarkably well because they love learning. Being able to learn something at your own pace and because you're interested in it is incredibly motivating. Initially I was worried that my children might not be interested in the right stuff, but the fascinating thing is that if you let them guide their own learning the content seems to just bubble up out their interests and questions. They manage to turn a pirate card game into a lesson of physics, world geography, geometry, history, and moral fortitude.

The bonus factor is that I'm learning all these things, too. It's no secret that most homeschooling parents find themselves repairing their own educational shortcomings, everything from physics to self-esteem, in the process of educating their own children. We're all learning how to stand up and follow our dreams.

It's not an education of facts. It's an education of spirit that no institution could ever hope to compete with.