Family Work

So last time I wrote an article on the perfect house, but I skipped the process of how to keep up with the things that have to be done.  So today I am writing about family work which is the process that has worked for us for years.  Now I have to go back a little and tell you that I have tried every chore chart and system in the book, and none of it worked.  I made cute charts and Excel charts and had stickers and check marks and rewards, and none of it worked.  In fact, some of it made things worse.  Not only did I have to keep up with all the chores, but I also had to keep up with who was doing their chores and who was not and then I had to discipline the ones who weren't doing their chores.  Then I read an article on Family Work - here is the link http://magazine.byu.edu/?act=view&a=151.  This changed my life!  Now that sounds dramatic, but it really revolutionized how I did things in my home and made my life and my home run so much smoother.  This is how it works.  If I am working my children are working.  I call it family work, they call it "boss around" which I have taken in stride and embraced my inner oldest child who is bossy anyway :)  So we tackle each room as a family.  When dinner is over, everyone gets up and starts to work.  Someone clears the table and another puts food away.  I usually load the dishwasher because I have this freakish ability to pack things in very efficiently.  Someone else washes counters and someone else sweeps and in ten minutes the dishes are done.  We have continued the dinner conversation or talked about a book or sang songs through the whole thing and no one is fighting or complaining.  The work is done efficiently and I don't have to keep up with who did their chores and who didn't.  We do all the other common rooms basically the same way and the children are responsible for their own rooms.  Twice a year or so I go into their rooms for a "mommy clean" which they have to help with and which they hate, but it gets the drawers and closets cleaned and they are good for another six months.  Bigger chores get handled the same way whether it is the yard, cleaning the garage or spring cleaning the deck.  All the work gets done and I don't resent the fact that the kids are laying around while I am working.  The greatest benefit has been that the children realize that they are an integral part of our home and we couldn't homeschool without all their work.  They love home schooling so on the occasions when they get cranky I remind them that I am not super mom and if they want to home school they have to help.  Another benefit is that my big kids have gone off to college fully capable of taking care of themselves.  I don't like housework any more than anyone else, but I have learned to truly love the time I spend working beside my children for the good of the whole family.

The Perfect House

Housekeeping is always an issue when you homeschool.  I have seen this going around the internet and it made me smile so I thought I would put some thoughts down about the more mundane but essential part of life - keeping the house clean and functioning.  http://thestressedmom.com/2012/03/10-habits-for-a-well-run-home/  Now, lest anyone accuse me of being a messy homemaker I want to nip that in the bud.  I love a clean house and I mean love it, but one of the obvious negatives to having all your children home all day is that it is almost impossible to keep your house completely clean for longer than 10 minutes.  The thing I learned about myself a very long time ago was that I could be a good mom or have a clean house, but I couldn’t do both.  If the house was clean I was constantly yelling at my kids to not make a mess and I didn't want them to get stuff out (this was all before I started homeschooling).  One day I had an epiphany and I made a conscious choice that I would rather be a good mom than have a perfectly clean house.  And yes I have read the Fly Lady and many many more in my quest for a clean house.  After fighting this fight for 22 years now I have learned a few things about myself, about the process and about the value of a clean home and the relationships involved therein.  First, I learned I didn't like myself when I was yelling at my kids to keep things neat.  I also learned that I need quite a bit of sleep to be a sane person so staying up until 1am cleaning house was simply not an option.  So something had to give and the answer for me was the house.  It doesn't have feelings and really my family didn't care as much as I did.  So on the far side of 22 years of parenting and 12 years of homeschooling I am here to say that a perfect house doesn't matter.  Yes, we all need systems to keep food on the table, dishes clean, clothes on our children and the dog hair vacuumed off the floor.  However, I don't think that a perfect house is worth contention and hurt feelings nor keeping children from feeling that we actually like having them in our homes.  Now I am sure there are many people who can do both, but I don’t happen to be one of them.  Second, I learned how little children especially care about the house.  I also learned that family work is the key to keeping the house running.  I am going to write a separate post about this one.  I learned that good relationships are built when you work with children and not against them.  I love that my big kids love to come home and what they want is yummy food not a pristine house. They also want back rubs and to sit on my bed at night and talk about what we are reading or doing.  I am so glad that I let the clean house go and spent the time with my children talking, reading, eating, working and cuddling not worrying about a perfect house!

This is a marathon not a sprint

My sister, who is starting to homeschool her oldest son (4yo), texted me this morning saying, "Public school is looking pretty good day!"  So this post is for her!  This is an idea that has been rattling around in my brain for quite some time.  There are lots of reasons that people home school and often it is a stop gap measure until they settle down in a permanent situation.  Some of us, however, take up homeschooling as a lifestyle choice and for us it is a marathon not a sprint.  Now lest you think I am a runner, let me stop you right now.  My sister-in-law runs marathons and my sister half marathons and other crazy races like the Ragnar; I am the un-athletic one in my family.  I do, however, understand the principles of pace.  When you choose to homeschool full-time, it is all about pacing yourself.  Over the twelve years I have been homeschooling, I have watched a lot of super moms give up and put their children back in school because they were running a sprint.  They went total gang busters out of the gate and made all these super lessons and spent hours and hours planning lessons and making cute cut outs and planning huge things.  I learned really quickly that if I was going to homeschool long term that stuff wasn't going to work for me.  So after a few times of falling on my face I settled into a pattern that works for us.  We simply make learning a part of everyday life.  We turn off the television and the electronic junk and we learn.  Some days are these wonderful aberrations of the perfect day and the next day as we struggle through I wonder what on earth I did different today than yesterday.  The answer is absolutely nothing!!  We are flawed and imperfect human beings and so are our children so why should we think that education should be perfect every day.  So what I have learned with two children graduated out is that it simply doesn't matter.  Good days come and so do bad days and in the end these beautiful children that we sacrifice to love and nurture and teach turn out to be just great.  We are doing God's work and His hand is in it even when it doesn't look pretty and in the end He took my meager abilities and mixed it with lots of family love and helped my children be amazing.  So my message to my sweet sister and all of you who feel like public school is looking pretty good is simply to hang on.  The harvest is great even when the larborers are few and exhausted!

My thoughts on testing

It is April here in North Carolina and that means annual testing at my house.  In NC all home schooled children are required to test every year using nationally standardized tests.  I personally hate achievement tests.  I hated them growing up when we were all required to sit at our desks and listen to the teacher drone on for the umpteenth time - "Fill in the bubble make your mark heavy and dark and if you want to change an answer erase your mark completely."  Where did all this come from??  Achievement tests to me are about the stupidest thing we do to children.  This is no measure of the knowledge of any child I know and only frustrates and humiliates children who do not test well or cannot communicate what they know in little round bubbles that must be colored in heavy and dark.  My high schooler's test is full of political correctness and some time I want someone to tell me what in the world that has to do with intelligence, reasoning, or the ability to communicate.  We do these tests every year because we are required to by law and I am also trying to teach my children about being good citizens and obeying the law, but I ignore the results of these tests completely.  I know full well what my children can and can't do because I am with them every day.  I know that children develop at different rates and not on a linear scale.  I also know that my ten year old has math days and non-math days.  There are days he gets up in the morning and for whatever funky reason he can't do math.  When these non-math days happen we simply read math books, biographies of mathematicians or play games, and then return to the math book the next day and he is fine and goes gang busters.  But if he tests on a non-math day people would think he is innumerate which he is not.   I know testing is not going away anytime soon so my April's will continue to contain this silliness, but I am so grateful that we live in a free land where we can homeschool our children and minimize the damage these tests can cause.

PS- I found this article today (April 20, 2013) and thought I would add it here.  Great article!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/04/17/eighth-grader-designs-standardized-test-that-slams-standardized-tests/
 

Thomas Jefferson's Great Example

“To read Latin and Greek authors in their original, is a sublime luxury. I thank on my knees him who directed my early education for having put into my possession this rich source of delight; and I would not exchange it for anything which I could then have acquired, and have not since acquired.”– Thomas Jefferson

Dwane at Visual Latin posted this today on his Facebook and I love it!!!  I also love this quote from the book The Real Thomas Jefferson, "Young Tom was five when schooling began in Goochland.  He later recalled sneaking impatiently out of a classroom that first year and kneeling behind the building to repeat the Lord's Prayer, hoping thereby to hasten the hour of dismissal.”  Tom stayed in Goochland when his family moved, under the care of an Anglican minister who was his tutor and in 5 years he could read Latin, Greek and French and he later added Spanish, Italian and Anglo-Saxon.  (Real Thomas Jefferson pp. 14-15)  Thomas Jefferson didn’t always love school, but he had a wonderful tutor who required him to keep at it and it blessed his entire life.

I hear so many homeschoolers who think that children should never be unhappy or dislike their schoolwork, or that they should guide their own studies.  It is difficult to push children through learning curves when they are learning new things or to require things of them that we as their parents we know they need, but it is always worth the effort.  And children who were unhappy at being required to finish a math or Latin lesson or practice scales one more time are forever grateful to a mother or mentor who required them to stretch beyond what was fun and pleasing at the moment to the great luxury of a strong mind or a skill well learned.

One of the things I love about my kids getting older is the words of gratitude for making them do the hard things.  It is truly an amazing feeling to have an adult child send a college paper home to mom and see remarks from the professor about how good a writer they are and I smile at the thought of this same reluctant writer as a child telling me they would not write no matter what.  The time spent lovingly coaching a child through the difficult moments of learning is worth more than anything else I could have done with my life.

 

 

 

Snow Days

I love snow days.  OK so it didn't actually snow in NC yesterday, but sleet and freezing rain will shut everything down for a while.  So yesterday I cleaned everything and did laundry in case we lost power and then I had time today to have a nutter in my school room.  One of the hard things about homeschooling is that it is messy.  I'm not just talking about science experiments and art projects.  When you teach children, you aren't cleaning your house so things get messy.  So today I had a nutter!  I don't get to do this very often, but the school room was seriously making me crazy so I took down boxes and books and dusted and cleaned out.  I got rid of pens that don't write, highlighters out of ink and sharpened every pencil.   I cleaned out papers and books - it is a funny thing as children grow up and children leave home and all of sudden you don't need this or that curriculum or book.  Home school moms really do work themselves out of a job, but with eight years still to go and a house full of broken pencils I am grateful for an occasional snow day to have a nutter and Monday I am back to math, history and read aloud.  I love homeschooling even with the mess and I love snow days!

The Winter Blahs

I just woke up!  I have this big blue rocker recliner in my school room that I refuse to use for read aloud anymore because I was constantly falling asleep in it and my kids would cover me up, turn out all the lights, and run away until I came to.  Today I couldn't resist its pull!  I read aloud in my regular chair, but it is such a gray day outside that I fell into the big blue monster and was asleep in seconds.  True to form, my boys covered me up and turned out the lights!  I am wondering when some enterprising home school grad is going to come up with a magic pill to help tired moms get through homeschooling in the winter, when it is gray and cold and rainy and the only civilized thing to do is curl up in a big blue rocker and read everyone to sleep!