Thursday, September 11, 2014

The Year has Begun

Clearly I'm going to have to work on scheduling time for this blog. :)

We didn't officially start 'schooling' until this week.  Like last year it's going to be a fair bit of driving around, but I think we have a wonderful schedule in place and that will be a great opportunity to listen to podcasts.  We got a wonderful surprise when the family that hosted the singing group my son really enjoyed last year decided to do a homeschool group at the library in Charlottesville.  There are three sessions, writing, geography/history, and math, as well as an opportunity for him to go to lunch with the other kids without me there.  I asked him if he wanted me to go and he said no, so I stayed behind and amused myself while he went on his first 'lunch on the mall' excursion.

The mother of the family offering the group is a published author as well as a warm, caring person and is teaching writing, although what she's really doing is trying to see what the kids are interested in and going along with that.  Her partner is a clever, witty guy who owns his own business and is a history buff, so he's going to teach the geography/history session.  For math they're having a math tutor come in and for $5/week the kids can bring their work and get some coaching.  The focus is on the kids figuring out what they want to learn, as opposed to having to follow some kind of structure or curriculum.  My son is pretty intimidated by the idea of directing his own education after being pretty thoroughly indoctrinated to follow what others tell him he should learn, so I don't know how this is going to work for him, but I'm really happy that he's getting exposure to child-led learning.  He's pretty resistant and anxious when it comes to things that he could possibly fail at, even with constant assurance that there isn't really any failure in homeschooling because we can do whatever he needs to do to learn.  I sat in with him at his request and I got to help by going down and getting pages for the kids to do blackout poetry.  The library has a desk set up with loose book pages and a black sharpie and the librarian I spoke with was happy to go find six sharpies for me to bring back up to our little room along with a handful of loose pages from The Minotaur Garden, which I've never heard of.  What fun!  I did some blackout poetry with my son last year on Poetry Day so he knew what it was, but he was too anxious to participate, so I brought up a blackout poetry website and he read some and enjoyed himself.  At times like that my heart aches as I watch him struggle to do what the others do, to engage in things he's intimidated by, and it takes a LOT of effort to be quiet and present but not try to save him.  The kids shared their poems at the end and the lady leading the class is so wonderfully supportive and gentle, it feels really good to know that my son would be alright in that session about something that he's so anxious about and I'd have no worry at all about how she would handle him.

I'll talk more about the math and geography/history sessions in future posts.

On the curriculum front, decisions were finally made!  For language arts he'll use Time4Learning, for science he'll use Uzinggo, for math my husband went with Thinkwell math and my son seems to really enjoy it's format, and for history we're going to wait and see what the library group does and then I'll put something additional together if necessary.  My son loves history and has a lot of natural curiosity about it so I'm not concerned about him not having a curriculum to follow.  Looking at the syllabus for the public school this year it looks like eighth grade is mostly about test preparation, so we have an opportunity to let him test his child-led learning sea legs.  He's also doing karate, tap and modern dance classes, and my husband is leading a Programming in Minecraft with Javascript class, not to mention the pragmatic skills class my son has done for four years, including summer programs.  There's also a homeschool group that I've become the leader of all of a sudden and another group where he's taking two classes that started last week.  He was happy and tired when I picked him up, which is the best I could have hoped for!  It's a packed schedule to be sure, but I have high hopes for it being engaging and really good for my son.  I really want to see his desire to learn and his confidence in his ability to do so rekindled.

On the anxiety front things have been pretty intense.  I've talked to him a great deal about getting to the cause of his anxiety and beginning to think about managing his reactions instead of feeling like a victim of them.  He frequently says that he wishes his feelings weren't on the outside and I do my best to validate his feelings and reassure him that there are worse ways to be and there are plenty of kids who are in the same boat.  I squeezed a visit to an observatory late one night for their public night and that turned out to be an excellent investment of time and well worth him being up until almost midnight.  He was so excited about looking at the moon through a 129 year old telescope and I have to say that I was just as excited as he was!  There were also two smaller telescopes set up, pointed at the Ring Nebula and a set of stars, one blue and one yellow, that appear to be one star to the naked eye observer but are actually two stars that orbit each other.  I've emailed someone at the Observatory to see if I can find out the name, I can't remember it and didn't write it down.  I hope to get to the public nights as often as I can, we had a great time!

That's all for now, I hope everyone's school year is off to a great start!

Article about Blackout Poetry - The article that introduced me to blackout poetry.
http://newspaperblackout.com/ - Blackout Poetry website.

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