November Art Lesson

Hey, look! Tumbleweeds! Can I call 'em, or what?

No time for a REAL update today - it's budget day, bleccchhh - but I'm so impressed by my kids I had to share.

Yesterday's art lesson was the first since we wrapped up our series on the basic elements of design and art. How to draw a still life by finding the contours rather than by symbols. In this case, when we look at a group of pumpkins, we find the continuous line surrounding the pumpkins and draw THAT instead of setting out to draw individual pumpkins. Like so:

I call it Three Plastic Pumpkins on a Plate

Joseph wasn't even all that interested, worked pretty quickly, and still blew me away.

Josh was SUPER excited to have real art pencils to work with, and spent a lot of time talking about value in his drawing. Gorgeous.

Ben took a lot of time, and put pain-staking effort into the accuracy of the lines on the middle pumpkin especially. I thought he did an amazing job creating the shape of the top divot. Also, apparently he's European. 14/11? Really?

 So there you go. My kids are awesome.

Time to budget.

Park fun, Museum fun, Computers

Usually we head to a park for P.E., and we do a good chunk of structured activity, and then I let them run around on the playground for a while. No big whoop, but one day I was able to take this picture

and that was a big whoop. It was big because Josh got about 7/8ths of the way up there and then started to panic about the transfer from ladder to crow's nest. And, get this, I encouraged him and he actually listened to me and did it! That's huge. It's kind of rare for my kids to trust me like that. Or, at least, it feels like it. Anyway, he got up there and gave me the sweetest thank-you for the encouragement. Totally made my day, but mostly I was proud of him for trusting not only me but himself to do something challenging.

The first Saturday of September, we made an impromptu decision to go to the L.A. Natural History Museum. And then we figured, as long as we were there, why not become members and use it to our homeschooling advantage? The only small hiccup in our day was that it just happened to be opening day of USC football (and the museum is pretty much smack on campus), so that made parking exciting, but we got there eventually.

And so did the Goodyear Blimp.

I haven't been there in AGES. They've really gussied the place up, most notably the area around the front entrance. It's really gorgeous.

The kids hammed it up while we waited for Daddy to finish signing up.

We spent a good chunk of time there. Favorite exhibits were the butterflies, the dinos, and the bugs.

Surprisingly, though, we ended up spending the most time (I think - at least it seemed that way) in the Minerals and Gems area. Too dark for any good photos, but the kids had a blast checking out all the colors and designs and hunting down their birthstones.

Matt has begun his Computer Science unit with the boys. OH MAN are they excited! He'll keep it pretty basic with Josh and Joseph, but with Ben he's doing more with programming. Although, he's gotten them all started on Kodu, and boy do they love that!

The first thing he did with them, though, was grab an old computer out of the garage (of course we have some of those, Matt's a computer guy!) and crack it open to explain the innards to the boys.

Kelly was also very excited to learn.

Joseph spent most of the lesson hugging a hard drive. Yeah, I don't know, either.

Josh just mostly wanted his picture taken with Computer Part. Ben was fascinated by the heat marks on the case.

This made total sense at the time.

Go figure, Ben is eating up the programming lessons. Can't wait for the time I get to call him over every other day to come program my house or fix my holographs or whatever.

Do you feel a breeze?

There it is - whoooooooop the passage of time! Dang! But we've had lots of good in the past few weeks.

Looking back, I'm pretty horrified at how much I haven't blogged. So many things that I thought "I'm SO blogging this" and then didn't, but I had thought about it enough that I was sure I had blogged it. DANG! Now I need to look back and do highlights. Let me go get my USB cable so I can start getting some photos in here from my phone. Be right back, you guys. Don't go anywhere.

Dang, there's a lot. I'll start with Day 3, because I LOVED Day 3.

We went to Simi's "Duck Park" because I remembered from my childhood that they had ball diamonds there, so it seemed like it would be a fun place to practice throwing & catching with a baseball.

Ah, the march of time.

The city has "upgraded" the ball diamonds to super snooty FENCED & LOCKED areas for league play only. NICE. Provided a couple of fun experiences, though: we lost a ball over a fence (since we decided to practice in the lawn right next to it), which is a pretty classic childhood experience, right? And that led to the next bit of fun - Josh & Joseph making their first attempt at fence-hopping. I did it all the time when I was a kid, but my feet are too big to get me enough traction on fences anymore (same for Ben). They put in some valiant efforts, but decided not to go all the way since the best places for climbing had cement in the landing zone. Not the best for first-timers.

So we put in some good exercise time, then went and fed the ducks, which got pretty hilarious pretty fast.

Yay, let's feed the ducks!

RETREAT!!!

As soon as the free food came out, we got swarmed. Josh was in heaven, since it was so very much like a horror movie. He can't wait to go back armed with a loaf and a video camera. My little Alfred Hitchcock.

When we left, the boys asked if we could walk ALL the way around the baseball fence to see if there were any openings so we could get our poor little ball. There were none, but I felt it a good opportunity to point out that they were walking... by a graveyard MWAHAHAHAHAAAA! Which they could hardly believe, but right across the wall from the ball diamond is Simi Valley Public Cemetery. Oooh, they wanted to see that! And I thought, why not? Isn't that exactly one of the much-looked-forward-to benefits of homeschool? The freedom to pursue educational whimsies? So we went, and we walked through the section with the oldest graves, and it was fascinating and we all loved it. Cool little mini-history lesson. With some Spanish and math thrown in. Plus, the boys had a dentist appointment later that day, and their dentist is over in Chatsworth which is where my dad is buried. So we stopped by there, too. Found his grave, impressed the kids with his military cred and angel Moroni on the marker. :) Got to tell them stories about the grampa they never got to know. It was a pretty sweet experience.

Few individual days since then stand out as clearly, so I'll hit some highlights.

Here's some small indication of the mess from the art lesson on Burnout Monday:

Twelve tiny cups of paint, yay.

I love that we have our own color wheel that we made, though. And we learned about warm and cool colors and did a fun project to highlight that. I got the idea at this website, and the template is very handy to have around. Here's one of the finished projects (mine, sorry):

Math continues to be an interesting challenge. Ben blasted right through his 6th grade workbook, and I have deemed the 7th and 8th grade books from Spectrum useless in his case. SO much emphasis on basic arithmetic, which he already does for funsies in his spare time. Matt found a great self-teaching algrebra textbook; so today I got him going on that.

Josh just plain hates old-fashioned left-brain math, so he continues to struggle. I found some good resources, though, and I'm going to order some special flashcards for him. They incorporate pictures and story to make it easier for Captain Right-Brain to give them room in his head.

Joseph just plain hates grunt-work. Letting him do math on a whiteboard instead of his workbook tends to help quite a bit.

P.E. has been a surprising delight. We're not a sports family. But dang if the boys and I can't each hit a baseball (as long as it's pitched slow, underhand, and from a short distance). The four of us have found a favorite ball diamond on the east end of town (Santa Susana Park), that's league-quality and in a beautiful setting, but also open to the unwashed masses. We rotate the boys through the positions of batter, catcher, and 1st Base while I pitch. Once they've each hit a fair ball and made a run for 1st, they each take turns pitching for me.

The ball diamond is surrounded by gorgeous rock formations and cliffs.

Before every pitch, I ask the kids "Listo?" "Are you ready?" Joseph loves to sort of digs his toes into the dirt and give me a fierce look and say "You know I am" in a dead serious voice that just about kills me.

Well, I have about 10 minutes to get ready for my 2 hours of students and CRAP I just remembered that I never put dinner in the crock pot! CRAP CRAP CRAP!

Dear Matt's Work Bonus,

I'm sorry, but I have to use you for take-out tonight, because I am lame. Please forgive me.

Love,
Amy

Anyway, my point is I can't finish this post right now. Coming soon: park fun, museum fun, science, Spanish, more changes in how we're doing English, church history, more art, life skills learned, U.S. history silliness, and bread baking. Geez, I wonder if I'll finish this month, much less today.

Doing better!

Okay, so I learned some things from my burnout.

The first is that even on my worst, most stress-filled day, I can still feel tender mercies from a loving Heavenly Father. That is a tremendous gift, and not one that I've been able to have at all points in my life, so I'm extremely grateful. I had moments of feeling successful, even a few small bright spots of joy, and I never once degraded all the way down to "this is a failure, and it's time to send the kids back to school." And then my sister came over and watched the boys so I could leave the house for a short bookstore/milkshake run with my hubby, which was massively healing.

Also, I got a couple of awesome Spanish resources for half price. Thank you, poor management of Borders!

The second thing I learned is that I cannot afford to skip my "homeschool prep" time. My past experience with teaching has been with church, which either doesn't require much prep time, or happened infrequently enough that I had weeks of dedicated prep time for a one-shot lesson, and with music, which I know well enough that I CAN get through a lesson even if I haven't prepped for it

U.S. History, not so much. Science... definitely not.

The third thing I learned is that all the prep time in the world might not help. Monday was our first Art lesson. I probably put more prep time into that than anything else so far, mainly because FUN! And while it was indeed a fun lesson, it also didn't go hardly anything at all like I had planned, and it was messy and exhausting and it didn't go hardly anything like I had planned, you guys! Today, I could handle that just fine. On Burnout Monday, it was just one more.... something that makes a clever metaphor for "it sucked."

The fourth thing I learned is that chilling out is so incredibly beneficial. Mini-date helped enormously. By Tuesday morning, all the stress was back again. Mainly because I was facing a day full of subjects I hadn't prepared for and couldn't fake my way through. So my morning journaling went abnormally long while I ranted and raved and eventually came to the decision that I would make Tuesday a half day - I would spend the morning pulling my act together, and the afternoon doing the two subjects I was prepared for, and we would make up the other half a day sometime over the long weekend. Go to a museum or something.

It's hard to decribe the relief I felt when I came to that decision. It started off in my journal as a sort of "I wish I could do that without ruining my children and homeschooling forever" and then became a reality as I looked at it in black and white and realized it totally wouldn't do that. In fact, it would be more beneficial than not.

And it was.

So Tuesday put out the fire that caused the burnout, and I've rebuilt from there. In fact, Wednesday ended up being a really good day, homeschool-wise. Used one of my new Spanish resources with great success (learning Spanish from movies we own), too.

Today's a bust because a dental extraction will put my youngest in a non-learning state for the majority of the day. And today, that's okay. I can handle it. Actually, it just means more prep time, so yay!

I've had two other breakthroughs that have nothing to do with "poor me," but everything to do with school.

1) Scheduling. My pretty pretty psychotic-looking daily schedule has changed up a bit. I had tucked in just way too much variation to actually work for us. So the days are a bit more consistent for now, and that seems to work better.

2) Rotations. The two subjects that I have workbooks for - English and Math - are just too dry for the kids if all they get to do is spend an hour with a workbook. So I've broken up those two hours into 20-minute Station Rotations.

For Math, the Stations are Workbooks, Computer, and One-on-one with Mommy Time. That way I have a chance to go over what they've done and what they're learning next in whatever way works best for each kid (they're all such different learners!). And there are endless fun resources for math online; all I have to do is find a game that fits what they're doing and email it to them.

I couldn't find anything for Ben, though, so I made my own. And while it was a fun project and Ben enjoyed it, it was WAY too time-consuming to put together for regular use. I may do it again at the end of the year, though, for all the boys.

What's that you say? My double chin is completely oversahdowed by my fabulous hair and shining smile? Why, thank you!

Anyway, English works similarly, although we have three workbooks to work with, so usually the rotations will be one workbook, then another, then one-on-one time with me.

And now, time to take a very nervous child for an extraction! YAY MOTHERHOOD!

Day 4 - Burnt

Burrrrrrrrrrnt. Crazy, one-thousand percent burnt.

Trying not to freak out and over-generalize it. I've been awake since 4, and pretty much going non-stop. Plus, I haven't slept well for, like, a week, between first week jitters and loads of ideas that won't let my mind rest and Excedrin.

So, I'm going to be a cock-eyed optimist and say I'm not burnt because of Day 4 of homeschooling, but rather that I'm burnt because Day 4 of homeschooling comes on something like Day 7 of too much to do and not enough time or sleep.

Call me Polly-freaking-ana.

Typos count as warts.

That is all. :)

Day 2: Cooking, English, U.S. History, and Science

Cooking was just a fun hour of measuring stuff. Then I demonstrated just why dry measures are best for dry ingredients, and liquid measures for liquid. I showed them the measuring cup I prefer for sticky stuff like peanut butter and honey (and why),

"and then shoooop you push up the middle part and it comes out clean!" 

and I showed them why weight measurement is best for things like flour. Thankfully, when I had them each measure out a cup of flour, they each came out at slightly different weights, or that wouldn’t have been such a good demonstration.

Somehow or other, the question of what certain ingredients smell like came up, and I ended up having them whiff some molasses. HAHAHAHA they hated that. Then I explained where molasses comes from (it’s a by-product of the sugar refining process, in case you didn’t know), and they couldn’t believe it. I told them that a common baking substitute for brown sugar is just white sugar plus molasses. They couldn’t believe that either. So we determined that after the rest of our “classes” we’d do a taste test. Baking cookies would provide an excellent vehicle for both the test and practical application of their new measuring skills. SWEET. (Literally! Ha!) (Yes, I amuse myself.)

English was quiet, just the boys working in their workbooks while I cleaned up Cooking Class. Good stuff, though. Now I have a better idea of what they understand there.

For our first foray into U.S. History I took us over to the giant world map, and covered four main points: Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, the transfer of world dominance from Spain to England, and Jamestown. They seemed to get it. I hope history is more interesting for them in this story-like format than it was for me throughout my school years. I hated history; it was so dry and dense. It was the Lembas Bread of learning, and I was an unexcited Gollum trying to choke it down, though it burned as it went.

In other news, I’m a nerd.

Anyway, I hope I can make it more interesting for my boys, is my point.

As I had mentioned in an earlier post, I want to make sure the boys are well grounded in the scientific method before we begin any experimentation. So that was today’s science lesson: The Scientific Method. We’re going with the 6-step version (Question, Research, Hypothesis, Experiment, Conclusion, Communicate). We came up with some goofy sentences to help us remember the steps in the proper order, then realized our cookie taste test was an experiment in disguise! So we formalized it.

1.       Question - Do cookies made with brown sugar taste like cookies made with a substitute made of white sugar plus molasses?

2.       Research

a.       Molasses is basically what’s left over when cane sugar is refined into white sugar (a point in its favor).

b.   White sugar plus molasses is a common substitute for brown sugar in recipes (another point in its favor)

c.      Molasses does NOT smell anything like brown sugar (a point against).

d.   Molasses looks very much like "tentacle blood" (a point against, but duly noted by Josh for future use in a horror movie).

3.       Hypothesis

a.       The cookies will taste only slightly different.

b.      The cookies made with molasses will likely taste a little gross.

4.       Experiment

a.       Bake two batches of peanut butter cookies, with all ingredients identical except for the brown sugar/white sugar plus molasses.

b.      Blind taste test.

c.       Data

                                                              i.      The cookies really did taste very similar.

                                                            ii.      Josh noted a slightly saltier taste in Cookie “A,” which he determined to be the brown sugar cookie (it was not).

                                                          iii.      Ben noted a slightly more sugary taste in Cookie “A,” which he correctly identified as the molasses cookie.

                                                           iv.      I thought they tasted exactly alike.

                                                             v.      Joseph thought that when tasted side by side they tasted pretty much the same, although he slightly preferred Cookie “B” (the brown sugar cookie).

5.       Conclusion – If a difference is detectable at all, it’s a very slight one.

6.       Communication – Um, this is our report.

Also: COOKIES! Nomnomnom! Hooray for science!

I deem Day Two a success, since we had fun and learned and I was bizarrely relaxed throughout the day. I expected to be way more frazzled. I WAS exhausted by the end of the day, though. It was just as well Matt & I only had time for one episode of Eureka (we're working our way through Season 3)(because you care), because I'd have probably fallen asleep had we attempted a second.

First Day

Our first day of school was Wednesday August 24^th 2011. For better or worse, I decided to start off by sharing the same calendar as the local school district. It’s what one of my exemplar homeschooling families does, and it makes scheduling easier, especially when you’re dealing with families in the public school system. I decided to just go with what my pretty calendar says will be happening on Wednesdays, which meant P.E. first!

That worked out well, because my other exemplar homeschooler, my SIL Cindy, suggested having a “NOT Back to School” celebration. Said celebration, “school” photos, and P.E. could all be nicely taken care of by going to a park, so that’s what we did. Not our neighborhood park that butts right up against our elementary school, because AWKWARD, but one that the boys decided on, over in a different neighborhood.

Photos first!

Then we practiced catching and throwing with a volleyball. Our first P.E. unit is actually baseball (by popular demand), but I thought I’d start us off easy. Sports are not traditionally our family’s strong suit (we're NERDS). Then the boys just played for a good 15 minutes or so. I uploaded photos to Facebook while swinging, which I still love to do. They ran around and got sweaty and worked up their hearts and burned calories and they loved every second of it. Can I just tell you how much they have HATED regular P.E. at school? Pretty much without fail, it is their most hated subject. But now we can all get exercise and learn sports and LOVE it. I can’t tell you how happy that makes me!

Then we headed home for math time. Spectrum workbooks, if you’ll recall. We can already tell Ben’s way WAY beyond the usual 6^th grade standards, so we’ll have him just skip and jump through the current workbook as a review and move him along as fast as he wants. We got his STAR test results back a couple weeks ago. In math and science he got perfect scores. That’s where he shines.

Side note: Ben’s science GRADE did not shine at school last year. Ben is pretty solidly a left-brain kid; all analysis and number crunching. So when his science teacher put most of the grade weight on the kids’ science JOURNALS and how pretty they were, he almost frigging failed that subject. I think he ended up with a D on his report card. And then he aced the state-required standardized testing. Another point in homeschooling’s favor: no required and enforced homogenizing. I will help Ben improve his writing, but I will never require him to be as good at it as he is at math. It will never be his joy nor his strength, and public education hates that. /rant

FIRST DAY GOOF (yeah, I told you this blog would be warts and all): So here's the deal with my 9YO Josh. He's bright, every bit as bright as Ben, but is SO very right-brain. All creativity and stories and "Want to hear about the movie I'm going to make when I grow up?" So Joshua's language and reading grades have always been high. His math grades have always lagged a bit behind, but it's NOT because he's no good with math. He can totally do it, he just HATES to. It's horrible horrible grunt work for him, with no room for creativity, and that drive him nuts. He's a very active kid, too, so sitting still (yuck) PLUS crunching numbers (yuck) while his brain is trying to tell him a story equals DOUBLE YUCK.

So I was okay with the fact that his math workbook was the ONE book stuck on back order, because I thought it would be a great opportunity to do math in a fun way for him. His 3rd grade teacher, bless her heart, recognized his talents and limits and suggested I have him keep a ledger of some sort to give math more real-life relevance. I was all over that back when I was planning on starting us off with a Spy Unit ("and I'll have a store with spy gadgets and Josh will be in charge of shopping and then he'll have to figure out if 3 bottles of Invisible Spray at $12 a bottle is a better deal than blah blah blah" and that's why we're not doing a Spy Unit. Yet. Too much work for a n00b).

Then there I was on the first day of school with nothing brilliantly creative planned for Josh. "But!" I thought, "but I have little individual white boards! We can drill multiplication facts on his whiteboard because kids love writing on whiteboards and that will be fun!" 

It wasn't. Although now I know several kickin' hairstyles for the number 7. 

Then Church History (a brief overview of the time between Jesus’ life on earth and Joseph Smith’s first vision, with stops at Martin Luther and the establishment of religious freedom in America). That was fun. Oh, hey, if you don't know me and just stumbled on my blog somehow, my family is LDS.

Then lunch. And more running around outside for “lunch recess”. Guess how many times that happened voluntarily during the summer? Like, zero. Kids are so weird.

Then the last subject of the day was Spanish, and that was hysterically fun. We just looked up nouns in our little English/Spanish dictionary (and online), and labeled things in the house. Including the dogs. And our butts.

And that was our first day of school. The boys had a blast, and I had a blast, and it was all very encouraging. And I'm looking up some fun math websites for Josh till either his workbook comes or I can get my butt in gear and come up with some stuff of my own for him.

Gifts for Teacher

Joseph and Joshua made me First Day of School gifts, which touched my heart in a big way.

A special pen for the teacher from Joseph.

An awesomely creative card from Josh.



It reads:

Jingle bells, Jingle bells, Jingle all the way…

FOR

Math and science

And maybe art

Hip hip hip hooray!

The Office

In the course of the last few weeks of summer, I began to notice something disturbing. I was still getting letters from our elementary school about the upcoming school year. I thought I had taken care of having the boys' records removed, and there was a chance that these were just generic local mailings to everybody in the neighborhood, but I wanted to be sure.

This past Monday I plucked up my courage (did I mention the nightmares yet? No, I see I haven’t. I’ll get back to those later) and went over to the school. Walked into the office and announced my reason for being there, trying as hard as I could to look neither confrontational nor apologetic. I’ve volunteered at that school a LOT over the past two years, so I’m a pretty familiar face in the office, if not a familiar name. “Oh sure, come with me and we’ll go check to make sure,” said Office Lady, without any hints of surprise or dismay. Encouraging! So we went over to her desk and she had me repeat to her coworker (Office Lady 2) that I was there to make sure my boys were off their records because I’m going to homeschool them.

“Oh no, don’t do THAT!”

That wasn’t OL2. That was a voice from an adjoining office. And though the occupant of the office is not familiar to me, the voice was, so I looked up, and there was Joseph’s kindergarten teacher.

She’s probably the one person I spent the most time with as a volunteer. Well, it’s between her and the librarian. Anyway, we’ve been very chummy. I was surprised to hear her be that adamant – she knows me, and knows that I’m not a Slacker Mom or anything like that – and I think she was pretty surprised, too. She immediately apologized and declared it to be none of her business, and let me finish what I was there for.  But before I left, she expressed her hope that we would be back next year. “Well, we’ll see,” was all I could think of to say.

Getting the kids’ names off the school records (because there they indeed were) was a piece of cake. I was there a total of three minutes, tops. But I don’t think I’ll ever get that voice out of my head. Not that it discouraged me at all. No, it was just the first real voice of dissent I’ve heard so far, and that’ll probably stick with me.

Well, we’ll see.

Science Jar

So last week I made a Science Jar, and holy crap am I proud of this idea. Like, I’m-going-to-be-struck-by-lightning-as-I-type-this proud.

First, I guess I should explain how I’m going about dealing with all the different grade levels. For math and English, I bought Spectrum workbooks. The boys can work on those on their own, largely, and I can go around and help individually as needed. But then I figured science and history are two subjects that really, truly, don’t need to be separated by grade level. Yes, you can understand history on a deeper level as you get older; yes, you can do more with science as you get more math under your belt. But by and large, we can learn these things together. Especially since I’m hoping mainly to inspire interest, and send them into the world as adults who will seek knowledge on their own. And know how to do it. Without Google.

So I got to thinking about science as a subject, and trying to put together a curriculum, and it was very daunting. But then I thought about the history of science. Where does all our scientific knowledge come from? Dudes got curious about the world around them and started asking questions. Then they really poked and prodded at those questions till they came up with answers. That’s science, boiled down.

While I was going through that thought process, the boys would every once in a while ask me a totally normal question, like “Why don’t dogs and cats talk like humans do?” or “How does ______ work?” And then it came to me – those questions were my curriculum! If I gave the boys a solid grounding in The Scientific Method, then we could just spend our science time asking questions and gaining knowledge about the world around us in the same natural way that Real Scientists do. Newton and Archimedes and all the great scientists through time did NOT become great scientists by learning a bunch of regurgitated facts by rote. They saw something, it made them curious, and they pursued that thing that interested them and shared their knowledge with the world. That’s how we’ll pursue science in our home.

I found a jar in my kitchen awaiting a purpose in life, grabbed a bunch of $0.25 science magazines from the library bookstore, and got out the old jar of decoupaging glue. Man, I haven’t had a real excuse to be crafty like that in ages. It was SO fun. And here she is!

This is not a photography blog.

And the back view:

Couldn't leave out the shuttle. It's in my blood.

I leave it on top of a bookcase in our front hallway. There’s a pen inside and sticky notes next to it at all times. Anytime somebody has a question they can pop it in the jar, and we will slowly work our way through those questions this year.

Plus, we have lots of “50 dangerous things to try in your kitchen” –type books to fall back on when we need something pre-planned, and plenty of Bill Nye DVDs (thanks to my sister Debby), and a selection of lesson plans to go with some of those episodes (thanks to the library bookstore, my new best friend).

SCIENCE!

Check Out My OCD!

So here’s a glimpse at my current thoughts about scheduling.

I know it looks very conspiracy-theory-slash-OCD-slash-The-Shining. I also know that every homeschooler in America recommends NOT putting together a rigid schedule since it’s unrealistic. I know it’s unrealistic, but this is how my brain works. For comparison, here is my daily schedule for the summer.

I'm a fun Mom!

Did every day actually work out that way? Not even remotely! But at least I knew what things were supposed to happen, and I had time set aside to make it happen if I needed to. I’m the kind of person that needs the structure in place, even if it’s not adhered to rigidly. If it’s not in place to begin with, then mental chaos reigns supreme, nothing whatsoever gets done, and that’s the fast track to depression for me. My sticky note conspiracy theory style daily schedule works for me.

Also, pretty.

Now, so far that just covers school time and meals and scouts and my other job teaching private music lessons. And actually, that’s another way this schedule comes in handy. If I didn’t have this all laid out nice and visually for myself, I would accept more and more students till I drove myself insane. Now I know without a doubt I can take a maximum of two more music students on. That is my absolute limit. Which is a bummer, because I really love teaching and want to provide everyone I know with an inexpensive way for their kids to learn their instrument. But I just can’t do that. But I wouldn’t know that if I didn’t see it in black and white. And purple and orange and pink and green.

Where was I?

Oh yeah, I still need to figure out where in there I’m going to squeeze all the OTHER stuff I need to do on a regular basis. You know, budgeting and meal planning and grocery shopping and music lesson prep and school lesson prep and you know, someday I may even mop. Not someday SOON, mind you, but sometimes these things need to be done. Oh yeah, and “me” time. Which I suck at. Can watching Star Trek in the evenings with my hubby count for that? Because that time is sacrosanct, and way more relaxing to me than getting a manicure or whatever it is girls do. Yeah, I think I’m officially counting that as my “me” time.

Hi There

The name of this blog refers to two things: 1, I am the youngest of my siblings, and a girl, therefore forever a little sister, and 2, this cartoon.

For those with no patience for dumb cartoons, I’ll sum up: a cynical dude imagines the saddest character he can think of (to make others cry for his amusement), and creates “Li’l Brudder,” a one-legged dog whose catchphrase is “I can make it on my own!” His pathetic cuteness causes everyone to cry, but his hopeful resilience causes stupid people to seek him out for financial advice.

What I’m saying is, no matter how resiliently and cutely I flail about attempting to educate my children, you’d be stupid to seek me out for advice of any sort whatsoever. (But DANG am I cute.)

Though probably not as cute as Li'l Brudder.

Also, “schoolmarm” is a funny word.

No, I just feel compelled to attempt a chronicling of my homeschool experience (though I have no doubt this blog will have tumbleweeds blowing across it after a month or two). Not because there aren’t already homeschooling blogs out there – there are, approximately, a bajillion – but because I never really found one that I could relate to. Most blogs are created after a homeschooler’s been going for a while and feeling pretty confident. Advice blogs, idea blogs, that kind of thing. I’d like this to be the blog somebody can look at and go “oh, thank goodness I’m not the only one who tried that and messed it up!” “Is she chronicling about homeschooling without Comic Sans? OR animated GIFs? Is that allowed?”

I’d like parents to consider homeschooling without feeling like they’re outsiders looking in.

So, if you’re considering homeschooling and feeling like an outsider, I’ll let you peek through my window first. Then you can be all “Oh, if THAT idiot can do it, then so can I!”

You’re welcome, America.