It’s the night before we start our grand adventure.  Everyone has gone to bed anticipating a great day.  Annie and I have talked about our plans for the week, and she’s excited.  I’m somewhere between scared stiff and thrilled.  On the one hand, I think we’re ready.  I’ve been preparing for how to handle discipline and creating incentive plans for hard work and concentration.  I’ve tried to imagine ways to keep mother-daughter frustrations at bay while creating an atmosphere of respect during our “school” time.  Mostly, I’m worried now about what happens to the relationship between the two girls.

Since September, Annie left in the morning to go to her school and Pippi sometimes left in the morning to go to her own school or to play with a friend.  Before the end of the day, Pip couldn’t stand waiting any longer to pick Annie up from school.  Pippi practically burst up the stairs at “pick up” and would tackle her sister full of things to tell her, candy or treats that she saved for her, and eager to have any of her sister’s time and attention.  She asked all the time why she couldn’t see Annie at her own school and continually asked if they could be together more.  Annie, though a bit more reluctant to admit it, was often the same way.  She saved things for Pippi.  She drew pictures for her and even created a set of paper dolls for Pippi to play with during “center time.”  As the adage goes, though, absence makes the heart grow fonder, and familiarity breeds… well… in our case… fatigue.  Even after 3 solid weeks of playing practically solely with one another, the girls still get along.  However, there is more competition for attention than there had been.  Tempers are shorter, and the quick push or pull or tearing of dress up clothes sets in sooner and sooner each day.  So, I’m beginning to wonder how the homeschooling will affect sibling harmony.

I know that there are no quick or easy fixes for sibling harmony.  The girls need to work together on many things.  They have a joint sticker chart for cleaning up and following directions.  They can earn stickers independently or by working together.  Working together, however, yields quicker results and this has created moments of genuine teamwork and cooperation.  However, for sisters who sleep together in the same room, play together in the same play areas, and now learn together in the same play spaces… I’m worried that they need a few things that are just their own.

There are 2 areas I know where I can do this.  Firstly, Pippi loves gymnastics.  Both she and Annie started doing toddler tumbling when they were about 18 months.  Pippi, however, is a natural climber.  She has exhaustive amounts of energy and is constantly moving.  On Mondays, she goes to gymnastics with my mother, her Grandmom.  This is her special time during the week.  She also spends time with her friend Matthew on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  His mother and I swap children so that we can get an extra day’s worth of work in each week.  On Tuesdays, Pippi goes with Matthew and his mother on adventures ranging from visits to the farm to trips to the train store.  She looks forward to *every* Tuesday.  These are her special times, and I think it’s important that she maintain these as her very own.

I’m still finding my way with Annie.  She loves to perform.  Singing, dancing, and acting capture and hold her attention longer than any other activity.  A child who has never really played with toys other than those she can “make believe” with, Annie can occupy herself for hours by adopting ever-changing personas.  For years it was Cinderella or Snow White.  The roles have branched from the specific such as Fancy Nancy, Felicity, Orphan Annie, Clara from the Nutcracker, the Velveteen Rabbit to the less specific “an orphan,” “a saint,” “a dog,” “a mouse,” “a vet,” etc.  I would really like to find a class for her that would help her to explore her natural tendency to perform.  She would love to take a ballet class, as well, and I’d like to help her with that.  Finally, she has been involved in the church choir, and this activity has become very important to her.  So I’d like to preserve that as an important part of her own independent self.  The challenge, now, is for me to find a couple areas where she can grow and shine in her own way apart from her sister so that while they share and cooperate so frequently, she (and Pip) can have some activities all of their own.

I’ve just sent a letter to Annie’s teacher explaining that she won’t be coming back to her school. Each of the steps in the process of setting up our home school has brought me closer to a kind of resolve that this is the right choice for our family for now. At the same time, there are all kinds of anxieties surrounding that decision: What did I sign us up for? Can I really do this? Am i going to be spending all my time in the car? I know that it’s the best choice for her. To a certain degree, I think that she’ll grow faster and more confidently in her learning. However, in my eagerness to prevent Annie from feeling isolated, I signed her up for afternoon Pre-Kindergarten. It’s a unique 4+ class which is geared toward those students with late birthdays who don’t meet the date cut-off for school. Three of the students in her class were also in her nursery school class, so I feel pretty confident that she won’t feel as though the students are too young for her. However, the class runs only 2 1/2 hours in the afternoon. Pippi’s class, which begins at 9:15 goes until 11:45. As a result, I’m about to spend much more time in the car driving from one place to another than I had ever really thought about. It’s not the driving that bothers me so much (except for the environmental concern, the waste of gas, and the waste of money) as it is the loss of time for Annie’s instruction. For the past 3 weeks I’ve been reading about various approaches to homeschooling. Between school-at-home and “unschooling” and hyper-scheduling and unscheduling, I think our natural family rhythm falls somewhere in between. I want much of what we explore and learn to come from self-directed and guided questions. At the same time, I feel that Annie needs structure to learn basic concepts, not to mention to learn how to follow a schedule so that she can become a productive student and adult as she grows in her education. So, all the interruptions on a daily basis are worrisome…

Hence the panic. I’ve worked out on paper when we can set aside instructional time. I know that at some point I’ll have some materials to work with from the school where we hope she’ll attend. In the meantime, I’m on my own. I feel a certain amount of pressure that when we start on day one that it not be rushed or disorganized. I want to portray for Annie the sense that we have it under control, that there is a plan, and that we are going to achieve short-term and long-term goals right from the start. Still, I don’t *have* the materials yet. Also, I want to make the goals reasonable, challenging and yet achievable. I don’t want each day to become a series of workbook pages. Sure, a few at a time are fine, but page after page of busy work is something that she and we reacted against at her old school.

So, where do we begin? Many of the books on homeschooling that I’ve skimmed through or read suggest starting with a kind of learning style assessment. There are quite a few books out there about assessing your child’s learning style. From Judy Willis’s How Your Child Learns Best to 100 Top Picks for Homeschooling Curriculum by Cathy Duffy, there are plenty of books dedicated to this topic. I have to, sheepishly, admit that I ordered Talkers, Watchers, and Doers by Cheri Fuller–and not necessarily for the most admirable of reasons. It was only $8 on my Kindle. Anyway, it makes sense to start here. I know that I talk about Annie as if I already know what her “learning style” is, but my goal is to be genuine in my attempts… and I don’t just want to borrow from my parenting baggage and proceed based on my own, sometimes shaded, preconceptions. On the other hand, and in the interest of full disclosure, I’m also a little concerned about the idea of labeling any one child’s learning “style” so early on in life. It seems to me, in my not-so-expert opinion, that learning styles would change, develop and grow along with the socio-emotional-cognitive growth of the child. So, lest I put too much stock in one “style,” I still need to have some “plan” for getting the basics down.

It occurs to me, though, that one place where Annie has really been struggling is with her handwriting. It’s one of my biggest complaints about how kindergarten was going for her, and perhaps one of the areas that need the most support. I believe that good handwriting is important. The ability to make well-formed letters seems tied to one’s ability to think, to parse, and to organize language and ideas. Again, that’s just my own assumption… I’m not an expert. But, since this is “Mommy School” anyway, I get to base my own curriculum on my own assumptions and discovery, right?

Handwriting, then, will be a second area of emphasis for us. I know that Annie’s new school uses the Handwriting Without Tears instructional method. In fact, they used it for her nursery school classes, so potentially, I could use some of the materials that were unused and try to improve on it. I’ve discovered that there are online you tube videos, as well. Since I don’t have a copy of the materials yet, I’ll begin with a general premise of the curriculum, then work from there depending on whether or not I can get the materials myself. I’ve been watching youTube videos, and will start with some of the songs and with reaquainting Annie with the language of big lines, little lines, curvy lines, diagonals, and frog jump letters.

Annie wants very much to wear her Cinderella watch more frequently. I had explained at one point that when she could tell time to the half hour, that I’d let her wear the watch on a more regular basis. We do have flash cards for telling time, and she eagerly learned how to tell time to the hour… so perhaps this would be a good week for working on telling time to the 1/2 hour. That covers math.

Last week we went to Philadelphia and visited several museums. When we left, I created a “writing journal” for her. She’s eagerly writing words and sentences whenever and however she can, but I wanted some way to capture her ideas in one place so that she could see her own growth as a writer and have a record of her own musings about what she sees and does, from the mundane to the adventurous. This week, then, it makes sense to start the notebook. It has three lines at the bottom of each page for handwriting and space at the top of each page for pictures. We can start with one or two sentences each day with a picture. This week’s topic can be “What we did in Philadelphia.”

Finally, I just got off the phone with Jason, who has taken the girls with him to visit his parents and to retrieve our dog whom Jason’s parents have so thoughtfully and generously been taking care of for the past week. They went to Barnes and Noble last night, and Annie bought a new Felicity book from the American Girl collection. For social studies, I think we’ll make it a goal to buy a map, to read the book, and to learn about what life was like for children during the Revolutionary Era. I have the loosest ideas here, not exactly sure what the learning outcomes “should” be, but perhaps this is the purpose behind leaving some area of our schooling unscripted. There should be at least one part that is open-ended exploration. Felicity will provide that for us this week.

The panic has begun to ebb. As I list out possible goals for the week, I am beginning to believe again that this may be possible and that it may all get done… maybe.

Welcome back to the blog! We’ve had a long period of absence on the blog because, as I’ve discovered, the task of raising kids who are active, engaged learners leaves little down time! Combined with normal “life” activities, keeping up with my goals for fostering an atmosphere of creative exploration takes untold amounts of time and energy. So does writing about it. In the end, I spent more time doing and much less time reflecting and writing. However, life has changed significantly in the past six months. Annie began school at the beginning of the year, but before the winter break, we decided to pull her out of our neighborhood kindergarten and to begin homeschooling her. As I’ve considered how to homeschool, and more importantly how to do it thoughtfully and purposefully, I concluded that more reflection on our activities was necessary–by myself and by my daughters.

This is where the blog comes in. As I begin this journey as a homeschooling parent, I want to take time to reflect on what I’m doing, why I’m doing it, and if it’s working for me and for my daughter.I’m not sure how long we’ll be working this way. When we decided to remove Annie from her school, we did so with the intention of placing her in a parochial school as soon as a space becomes available. That may be this year, but it may not happen until the next school year. I’ve been working on an explanation of how and why we made our decision, but that will probably appear later. It was not a sudden decision, but rather something we arrived at after months of trying to make something fit that simply wasn’t right for our child.

So, we’ve made a clean break. Annie is excited about what she calls “Mommy School.” She’s laid out a list of things she wants to study: the colonial period of American history (including Felicity, the American Girl stories about that time); Western expansion (in light of the Laura Ingalls Wilder series of novels, which she has listened to on CD); the lifecycle of various animals including frogs, butterflies, and penguins; and fitness and nutrition. When I asked her what she wanted to study, these were her answers, and given that they’re interesting, compelling areas, I’d like to honor those. We’ll add to that some of the other kinds of things we’ve been doing this year, revisiting field trips from the summer and from this past winter break. Annie and I have also become subscribers to Imagination Stage in Bethesda, where we’ve been following each of their plays and their respective books. Also, we’ve just returned from a trip to Philadelphia where we explored the Please Touch museum for the second time, the National Constitution Center and the Liberty Bell on Independence Mall, and Adventure Aquarium in Camden, NJ. I’d like to find a way to include all of these in her portfolio.

2009 was filled with adventure. We did manage to make it to almost every one of the items on our initial list. We’ll continue to make our way through that list and to add more as we go this year. I’m looking forward to our new challenge. As exhausting as it has sometimes been to take 2 or more children on day-long adventures so frequently, the energy expenditure pays in dividends. I’m looking forward to sharing more of those with my daughters and with you in 2010.

I wish you equally exciting challenges and adventures…