a report of many subjects

Social Studies

The Storyteller said, "I'm going to do a math lab. But just first, Mama? How did the war in Afghanistan start?" I explained. He turned to math for a while. Then he proclaimed, "Wait. That was almost TEN years ago!" No kidding. A little while later he asked what Osama Bin Laden looks like. I showed him the standard shot. He said, "Huh, looks Arabian." He drew the connection from The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles I've been "letting" them watch if they watch the documentaries that come on the DVDs. They just saw the one about Lawrence of Arabia.


Phys Ed

I managed to get them interested in soccer today. I had to be sneaky. They somehow absorbed this old geek/jock dichotomy and have put themselves on one side of it. So I told them I wanted to play a game, and explained basic rules. The Scientist eventually figured out it was soccer, but by then they were all having fun. When we had to leave the park because the two people sitting nearby getting drunk starting having sex, I told the children they could play a better game in the parking lot across the street because we could use chalk to mark out a field. They were excited.


Literature?

We've been talking about Astroboy a bunch. There's lots of good stuff in that movie about who is a person, and slavery, and the first law of robotics, and consciousness. We've discussed that some, and the Scientist is now reading Robot Dreams by Isaac Asimov and hoping even harder for a robotics kit for his birthday. But on the way out of the theater, the Scientist and I discussed the parallels between the story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Two demigods, both meant to do a specific task for humankind, opposite and entangled, end up showing people, through an unexpected choice during a fight, what it means to be a human being. We thought that Astro bringing the wisdom from the surface to the city was a lot like Enkidu coming out of the wilderness to Babylon. We even thought Cora was a little like Shamhat, standing between the two sides for a little while, loving both.


Math

We did that too.


Science

As I type, the kids are watching Extreme Engineering: Off Shore Oil Platforms on Netflix via Wii. So far I am not impressed. There's too much extreme ("it's hot, dangerous work, with no where to hide from the spray of sparks!") and not enough engineering ("ya gotta be real careful there 'cause it's real heavy"). We'll have to find another program to watch, or maybe just use our subscription to Supercharged Science. The Gamer in particular likes that site.

There has been, as there always is, more science learning than I can keep tabs on. The kids read and read. A couple of days ago I noticed the Storyteller sitting in a pile of books on astronomy.


Grammar and Composition

I planned for the children to do a very traditional program in this subject this year. I'm having a hard time forcing myself to implement it. They're not inarticulate kids, when they choose to be careful. They don't usually choose that, though, and they tend to give up early on in their writing projects, not showing the discipline to carry them out. I kind of jokingly refer to that as unschoolers disease, the tendency to fear failure caused by never being pushed into something scary plus always needing to prove that unschoolers can learn just fine. There was a good reason I chose traditional (actually Mennonite, but pedagogically speaking, traditional) textbooks for them this year. But I don't want to kill their joy or waste our time. I've got a kind of English OR Latin thing going on in our school plan. I do believe English can be and is taught up mostly by good reading. That's a similar dilemma...


Reading

The kids are not challenging themselves. They're stuck in this juvenile fantasy stage. I can be patient, but it's been three years now. I need to nudge them out. I'm thinking of assigning readers. I've done it in the past with the Gamer, but never with the Scientist.


One area where I don't have to worry

Handwriting. This is the Storyteller writing about the Hero after the partner and me discussed with Story our parental position of allowing a child to experience more of the consequences of his actions as he gets older. Another way to phrase that would be that the younger a child is, the more we protect him from the consequences of his actions. Obviously, the Storyteller had some concerns. Knowing we won't discuss parenting philosophy in front of him, the kiddo wanted to remind us to talk about it amongst ourselves. He left this note on our bed. I think he has very nice handwriting for a seven-year-old boy. Spelling is good too. Punctuation and grammar could use a little help, but he's seven.



So we may just end up being a very traditional school for a while, not so much a classical, bare bones, Latin & unschooling school. I don't know how to do this well. I'm worried. I'm not sure I'm definitely going there. We'll just try things and see.