The Beginning of Wisdom

This week Samuel continued learning about capital letters and when capitalization is appropriate by writing the months of the year and using The Months Poem for copywork.  He learned to subtract with borrowing, to estimate length, and addition properties in math.

Atley was introduced to the concepts of adding and subtraction and read a poem about trees and narrated a story to me about playing in the trees, then drew a picture of his story.

In unofficial schoolwork, Samuel learned that he who doesn’t work doesn’t eat pumpkin pie.  I asked for help with pie-making on Tuesday and Samuel was not interested, even though I told him that if he helped, we’d have a small pumpkin pie after dinner.  This was not a “hey, lets do this together it will be fun” kind of request.  I really NEEDED his help because I have an almost three-month old to tend to and Silas doesn’t understand when he is made to wait.  I got about halfway through the pie crusts before he woke.  If one of the boys had been willing to help, I could have directed them to put things into the bowl of the mixer and mix them up for the filling.  But since they weren’t,  I couldn’t do the filling and put the two crusts and the rest of the dough into the freezer to work on later.  As I was cooking dinner, Samuel kept looking into the oven and finally confessed he was hoping to see his pumpkin pie there!  SUPRISE…I didn’t have time to do it because I didn’t have any help.  He’ll just have to wait until Thanksgiving!

Atley learned the hard way that Atley learned that a treadmill can cause some serious rug burns.  At church last night, he was playing in the exercise room (a place I have told him not to be, incidentally) and decided to put a marble on the treadmill and turn it on.  I’m not sure how it happened, but his hands got sucked in and rug burned pretty badly.  He was so embarassed at having been hurt while disobeying me, though, that he didn’t come crying to me.  He actually didn’t cry at all until I came and found him after Samuel told me what happened.  One good thing about being fearless is that it makes for one tough kid, I guess.

They both learned how to use a kitchen knife to cut up potatoes and sweet potatoes:

Silas is a genius baby (because I homeschool him, right?) and just learned to click his tongue in response to people clicking their tongues at him.  He also stayed in the nursery for the first time last night during our cooking session.  In math, he’s learning to count the snaps on his outfits at diaper changes.

Yesterday was our monthly church cooking night and I now have 12 more meals in my freezer, plus three for my father’s freezer.  I did my half of the shopping at the commissary yesterday and in the process found 28 ounce cans of Muir Glen organic stewed tomatoes for $.50 each.  I couldn’t resist, so I bought 12.  The yummy marinara sauce that they turned into is currently simmering on the stove in my 16 quart stockpot.  $6 for 12 quarts of organic marinara is unbeatable, if you ask me!

The kids think it’s GREAT and ate it by the spoonful before I made them a yummy lunch with it:

Here’s the recipe:
For each 28 ounce can of tomatoes, saute 1 clove of garlic in two T olive oil until just starting to brown. Add tomatoes and blend with a stick blender (alternately, use a food processor beforehand) to crush tomatoes to a pulp. Add 2 T honey, 1/4 teaspoon each salt and pepper and 3/4 teaspoon basil and oregano. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. If not serving immediately, allow to cool to room temperature before spooning into ziplock bags and freezing. Each can yields about one quart. If you make 12 quarts, expect a mess:

This afternoon I  hope to dump the camera’s memory card and share some pictures.  Sadly, though, I don’t have pictures of teaching Samuel to borrow with Legos because Jason took the camera to work that day.  We might have to re-enact it lesson…it was really cool.

My food goals for the week: eat out only the once that is planned and eat breakfast and lunch every day (this sounds so simple, but I often forget one or the other).

Monday-Breakfast: 1c oats, blueberries, string cheese Lunch:  Dinner: Red beans and rice with andoulle sausage

Tuesday- Breakfast: 1c oats, apple, hard boiled egg Lunch: Dinner: Smoked whole chicken (practice for Thanksgiving), mashed potatoes, fried okra

Wednesday- Breakfast: 1c oats, blueberries, cottage cheese Lunch: Chicken salad sandwich made with leftover chicken Dinner: Out

Thursday- Breakfast: 1c oats, apple, string cheese Lunch: Chicken salad sandwich Dinner: Glazed, roasted chicken with sweet potatoes and green beans

Friday- Breakfast: 1c oats, blueberries, hard boiled egg Lunch:  Leftovers Dinner: Lentil and rice casserole

Saturday-Breakfast: whole grain blueberry waffles, hard boiled egg Lunch: Leftovers Dinner: Shrimp in beer sauce

Sunday- Breakfast: 1c oats, cottage cheese, banana Lunch: Lazyman’s beef stew Dinner: Leftovers

I used to worry about teaching my children math.  See, I’m not great at math.  It all started when I was taught to add and subtract with “touch-math” in first and second grade (OMG, they still use that method somewhere?  It’s so addictive I STILL use it to balance my checkbook in the absence of a calculator *SIGH*) and was compounded when I was handed a sheet of multiplaction facts to learn, but wasn’t told that I should ask my parents to help me memorize them.  I told my mom when she saw that I had no stars on the chart indicating who in the class had mastered the multiplation tables (don’t even get me STARTED on the problems with that), “everyone just KNOWS them and I don’t know how they do it.  I don’t know them.”

Sometime in middle school I decided that I would just work my ass off and DO IT, even if I didn’t GET IT.  I tested into early algebra in 8th grade and had some of the biggest homework battles ever with my mother that year.  I couldn’t understand what she was saying, and when I did, she was telling me to do it differerently than the teacher told me, which would mean even if I got the answer right, I wouldn’t get credit because I’d used the wrong process to get the right answer (if you come up with the right answer, how can the process be wrong?!).  I decided to stop asking her for help and muddled my way through the rest of my math classes with a B- or C+ average (this was hard because up until this point, I had been a STRAIGHT A student).  Since I took early algebra, I was in the “college track” in high school and took more math than required, all the way up to trigonometry in my junior year and calculus in my senior year.  I knew as I was working my way through this process that I had a string of REALLY BAD math teachers (and this is true…just because you can DO it doesn’t mean you can TEACH it).  As a matter of fact, I quit calculus after three weeks and joined the school’s newspaper staff in third period because calculus wasn’t something I needed, my GPA certainly didn’t need to reflect my efforts at calculus (isn’t that ironic: I decided to stop learning higher math because I feared what it would do to my GPA and thus my college prospects), and because the teacher was so bad that our soon-t0-be valedictorian was teaching the class behind her back (incidentally, he was the son of missionaries and homeschooled until 8th grade when he joined our closed-minded little learning institution).  Don’t get me wrong, we all loved our teacher.  She was great fun, sweet, her son was in our graduating class, but man…she couldn’t bring her mind down to a level that would allow her to communicate in a way that our brains could understand!

Interestingly enough,  my struggle with math was one of the reasons I started to consider homeschooling.  I remember sitting in my weekly talented-and-gifted class in third grade looking around the classroom and thinking “when will I learn to do math with letters?  and how on Earth can you add letters?” The class met in a freshman algebra classroom and there were always algebraic equations all over the board during our weekly sessions.  At the point when I figured out that a letter simply represents an unknown (about 2/3 of the way through my first year of algebra…seriously, the first 2/3 of the year I was still trying to figure out how you do math with letters!), I realized that someone could have saved me a lot of time by teaching me this concept when I was much younger and homeschooling became a thought in my head and eventually that thought became a reality.  Still, I wasn’t sure that I was competent enough to teach my children math.  Sure, I managed to muddle through and grasp a lot of concepts that other people don’t (Jason often calls me from work for help with geometry, partly because I’m near a computer and can google formulas for things like the volume of a cylinder, but also because I can do things like figure out the angles of a right triangle using just the measurements of the sides: Hello, Trigonometry!), but I am still haunted by the notion that I’m “bad” at math.

The other day I realized that rather than a hindrance to my teaching efforts, my struggle with math is an advantage.  A friend was asking me about doing homework with her second grade daughter, who is in public school.  The math homework was simple addition and math facts and her mother was frustrated after doing it with her because the daughter didn’t grasp the concepts (ie doesn’t naturally think mathematically…this sounds very familiar to me!).  For example, she didn’t understand that addition is commutative so 5+3 and 3+5 are always going to equal the same number.  Her mom kept saying to me (and, I suspect, to her), “her thinking doesn’t make any sense.”  As an example, she said that the daughter, in trying to figure out what 6+6 equals expressed her reasoning this way: “since 6+7 equals 14, 6+6 equals 14.”  And here’s a secret: I’m so “bad” at math that I didn’t realize that both of those statements are wrong for at least a few moments!   I tried really hard to explain to this mama, who obviously thinks more mathematically than either or daughter or me, what might be going through her daughter’s head here.  First of all, none of this makes any sense to her at all.  Her reasoning illustrates that she is feeling the way I felt with the multiplation tables: everyone else just KNOWS this and I don’t.  She is guessing, hoping that she’ll get it right and get let off of the hook.  To say that her thinking doesn’t make sense doesn’t help her because to her none of it makes sense!  There’s no rhyme, reason or order to it (as indicated by her belief that both 6+6 and 6+7 equal 14).  She doesn’t understand that there’s a process behind it.  While many people have tried to explain the process to her (I know her mom has, she was talking to me about what she was doing to teach this concept and it was very reasonable, sensible stuff), no one has managed to explain it in a way that resonates with her.  I tried to explain all of this, but was worried that I was coming off as critical of her daughter or of my friend’s teaching methods.  I guess I was critical of her teaching methods (though again, they were perfectly sensible to someone who already knows the concepts or who thinks mathematically) because as we talked about it, I was taken back to first and second grade and realized that her daughter was probably feeling just as confused, hurt, stupid, and attacked as I did every time someone tried (and failed) to explain the math concepts to me yet again.  I love her daughter and don’t wish anything like my math struggle on her, so I tried to explain to her mama that unless she approaches this very gently, her daugher will decide that she’s just “bad” at math and shut down, even at this early age!

Today I was reading John Holt’s Learning All the Time and I had to call my friend because John Holt says all of this so much better than I said it to her the other day.  I told her that she MUST read his chapter on math before she does another homework assignment with her daughter: it’s THAT good!

A few excerpts:

“Nothing makes school more mysterious, meaningless, baffling and terrifying to a child than to constantly hear adults tell him things as if they were simple, self-evident, natural and logical, when in fact they are quite the reverse–arbitrary, contradictory, obscure, and often absurd, flying directly in the face of a child’s common sense.”

“It occurred to me then…that children could get a very strange notion about numbers.  They might see them as a procession of little creatures, the first one named One, the second named Two, the third Three and so on.  Later on these tiny creatures would seem to do mysterious and meaningless dances about which people would say things like ‘two and two make four.’  It seemed likely that any child with such a notion of numbers could get into serious trouble before long…For this reason when…little children frist meet numbers they should always meet them as adjectives, not nouns.  It should not at first be ‘three’ or ’seven’ all by itself, but always ‘two coins’ or ‘three matches’ or ‘four spoons.’”

He goes on to discuss addition and subtraction and the teaching of “math facts” like “3+2=5″ and “2+3=5″ and the fact that they are taught separately.  About this, he says the fact that a group of five things can be divided into a group of two things and a group of three things “is not a fact of arithmetic, but a fact of nature.  It did not become true only when human beings invented arithmetic.  It has nothing to do with human beings…an infant playing with blocks or a dog pawing at sticks might do that operation, though probably neither of them would notice that he had done it; for them, the difference …would be a difference that didn’t make any difference.  Arithmetic began…when human beings began to notice and think about this and other numerical facts of nature…Once we get it clear in our minds that [this] is a fact of nature, we can see that…whether we put these in symbols or in words…they are simply four different ways of looking at and talking about one original fact…In short, all of the number facts that children are now given, and then asked to memorize, they could discover and write down for themselves.  The advantage of the latter is that our minds are much more powerful when discovering than memorizing, not least of all because discovering is more fun.  Another advantage is that so much of arithmetic (and by extension mathematics) that now seems mysterious and full of coincidences and contradictions would be seen to be perfectly sensible.” (bold emphasis mine, all other emphasis his)

Now, chew on THAT!  You mean, children can be allowed to discover mathematical principles on their own and in the process LEARN to think mathematically?!  Sure, some people are more mathematically minded than others (my long-time friend Robin is a great example of this…she has always thought mathematically, much to my amazement, especially when we were sitting in 8th grade algebra together!), but I realize now that people who think mathematically after a typical elementary school math education do not think mathematically because of the way they were taught, but IN SPITE of the way they were taught.  However, it is possible to teach (0r more appropriately, to allow children to learn) math in such a way that those who don’t naturally think mathematically can learn to think mathematically, which is a very important skill in any society, but particularly in our society, which rewards technology and innovation more highly than it rewards creativity and art.

I fantasize often about going back to college and taking the courses that I avoided because I was “bad” at math: calculus, organic and inorganic chemistry, statistics, microbiology and so on. Incidentally, these are all prereqs for a career path I would love to follow: medicine (specifically obstetrics).  So far, though, my fear of all things mathematical has prevented me from taking that path.  I’m slowly learning to think more mathematically and to reframe my math struggle to realize that someone who successfully learned trigonometry and precalculus in high school is not “bad” at math!  I hope that someday I’ll be able to choose that path or at least to say that I chose not to take that path for reasons besides fear of math!

Have I mentioned how much I like our new math books?  If not, let me say that I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE them.  They’re the DK Math Workbooks on our “bookshelf” to the left and they are wonderful.  I have finally found something that’s the right mix of introducing new concepts and moving slowly enough for the concept to be understood.  I think the key to these working is that they’re designed to be for “enrichment” purposes rather than to be a stand-alone curriculum.  At this point, that’s working really well for us because the boys are grasping the concepts quickly, not getting exhausted with a bunch of redundant practice problems, and I’m not trying to figure out when we’ll actually LEARN something.  It’s easy for me to get caught up in the little itty bitty steps of some math programs and not realize that there’s progress, even if it’s microscopic progress.  I actually THREW AWAY the Horizons workbooks the other day, by the way.  We’re so done with Horizons.  It didn’t work for us, so why hang onto them?  They’re not going to work for us, clearly!

Today I actually had to teach math to both boys, which is a great sign because it means that we’re learning new concepts!  Samuel learned to add with carrying (WOW!) and Atley learned what 1/4 and 1/2 are.

Here’s a picture of Samuel carrying numbers:

And a close-up of a problem in progress:

And Atley coloring fractions:

I did a little math myself and realized at our current rate of two lessons per week, it will take us 60+ weeks to finish these math books.  If we step up the pace to 4 lessons per week, we’ll be finished by mid to end July 09, which is perfect.  I gave the boys the choice to do two lessons per day on our current math days (T &Th), or to do math every school day (M-Th).  They opted to do two lessons per math day, which would have been my choice anyway (and no, I didn’t influence their decision and yes, I was open to trying the other option)

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Originally uploaded by charmie981

Samuel says, though, that he definitely wants more for Christmas than just his two front teeth!

We are wrapping up week three (or four?) of being consistent and are still on track.  Today was a great example of one of the reasons I love homeschooling: flexibility.  Atley’s Phonics book today said to “draw a picture to go with each short vowel sound” and then had blank boxes across the page with the letter at the bottom of the box.  After a few minutes of watching him stare at the boxes, I could tell the drawing thing wasn’t going to fly.  He has gotten MUCH more adventurous with his drawing and when his LA book tells him to draw something, he will actually draw it now, but to ask him to come up with something that goes with a letter and then draw it was a little much.  So I gave him a magazine, a pair of scissors and a glue stick and asked if he could find pictures that had the short vowel sounds in them.  It wasn’t as easy as you would think.  E was the hardest, but he ended up with “kitten” which has a short E sound in the last syllable.  Here’s a picture of the finished product:

Samuel did two lessons in LA today because the first lesson was simply to write the capital letters that the days of the week start with.  The second lesson he did was to write the days of the week in order, which is also pretty easy now that he’s stopped worrying so much about not wanting to write ANYTHING.  I took a picture of him doing his work because it illustrates so well that we don’t need a specific place in the house for our schooling:

I think this is the first time the dog kennel has been a school desk.  Excuse all the mess..leftovers from our recent rearranging of the house that I need to clean up.  And the little girl is a friend’s daughter who was visiting (she’s certainly not mine…we don’t make girls over here ).

We were done with school by 9:15am.  Time to buy science and do a little of it every day, I think! I’m going to order it on Friday, since I’m not having much luck finding it used. We’ve decided to do Apologia’s Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day for science.  I hope I don’t regret it.  Our first experience with Apologia–Exploring Creation with Astronomy–was less than stellar (pun intended), but I think that we’ve all grown a little since then. I really wanted to do a health or human biology study this year, but I can’t find anything age-appropriate and I have decided to concede that I NEED something that’s open-and-go.

On Sunday Atley helped me make BBQ sauce:

And Samuel and Ford had a photo session (check out the flickr feed for that).

Monday was a tiny bit cold (50s, I think?) so Jason built a fire in the fireplace. I think he jumped the gun a little, but okay. Silas enjoyed sitting in his boppy in the middle of the action, which let me get dinner done and the kitchen clean. That’s always nice!

I’m working on getting a rug, two chairs and an ottoman to go near the fireplace to cozy it up without having to use every pillow in the house to make a pallet. Since we rearranged the house and put the pool table in the front room and the living room furniture in the back room, there’s nothing cozy around the fireplace. I suspect it would have been a problem anyway because we replaced the wall-to-wall carpet with laminate at the beginning of this year.

I’m working on my freezer meal menu for the next cooking session.  I’m going to take advantage of some of my staple meals being offered in our church group and get 12 (instead of the standard eight) meals from church: Shepherd’s pie (2), Chicken Pot Pie (2), Beef Stew (2), Corn Chowder, Lentil and Rice Casserole, Pecan Crusted Tilapia, Shrimp in Beer Sauce, Glazed Chicken and Sweet Potatoes (2).  My goal is 30 meals in the freezer, so I’ll still need 9 more meals to cook two of and freeze.  Here’s what I’ve come up with:

Beef Stroganoff (must get the recipe from a friend or find the copy she’s already given me), Pizza kits (dough, sauce, cheese and possibly sausage or pepperoni), Apple-chicken curry, Beef and black bean chili, Turkey-corn chowder with barley, Cheesy potato and corn chowder, Stuffed chicken breasts, Minestrone, and Ribollita. Many of these recipes are in the current issue of SlowCooking.  I know it sounds like a lot of work, but I’m really looking forward to it.  It will have to be a day when Jason can keep the kids (all three of them), though, because I don’t see getting a whole lot of this done with baby in tow!

This is probably the last week that we’ll be able to eat ALL freezer meals.  I’m definitely hooked on the convenience, though, so I’m going to plan another once a month cooking session for right after Thanksgiving (maybe even that Saturday), which means I need to start menu planning, budgeting and list-making now.  I should be able to use some of the leftovers from my HUGE turkey in the meals, which will be nice.

Monday: Breakfast-leftover pumpkin roll, Lunch-leftover lime broiled tilapia with green beans, Dinner-Sherry Chicken Casserole

Tuesday: Breakfast-MOTGB, Lunch-leftover sherry chicken casserole, Dinner-zucchini beef bake with baked sweet potatoes

Wedensday: (Small group) Breakfast-MOTGB, Lunch-leftover zucchini beef bake, Dinner-BBQ Sandwiches, ranch style beans, potato salad (I keep putting this on the menu and we haven’t eaten it yet!)

Thursday: (Jason’s pool night) Breakfast-MOTGB, Lunch- leftover BBQ? Dinner- Breakfast for dinner: corn for breakfast casserole, sausage and pancakes

Friday: (Grocery Day) Breakfast-MOTGB, Lunch-Out, Dinner-Beef Fajitas

Saturday: Breakfast-Quiche, Lunch-Leftover fajitas, Dinner-Shepherd’s pie

Sunday: Breakfast-at church, Lunch-Chicken and dumplings (double and freeze one), Dinner- Leftovers

Thanksgiving Prep:

Already in freezer: cranberry sauce, GB casserole, sweet potato casserole, cornbread crumbs for dressing

Prep and freeze: pecan pie, chocolate pecan pie, pumpkin pie, bread dough for rolls, cinnamon rolls for breakfast (didn’t get to it last week)

Feed the Freezer: Chicken and dumplings

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Originally uploaded by charmie981

Atley decided to write his letters in the foam. I think he got to “I” before Samuel got in his way.

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Originally uploaded by charmie981

Work up a good, thick foam and cover the entire surface.