bearing blog

Put 'em to work as soon as they can walk.

Individuality.

Very recently, when he began to show many signs of readiness, I started teaching Milo, nearly four, to read; and Monday he and I began Saxon Math.  (Although it's labeled "kindergarten," I think Saxon K's manipulatives-heavy approach makes for great preschool math, at least for the right preschooler.)

Before I started working with him, I wondered whether it would be less interesting to go through all this stuff again.   I'm discovering an unexpected special kind of excitement learning and growing with the second child that has made it all new again.  It's really been true about everything the second time around, and it's been especially fascinating in the past few months because so many milestones are being reached at once.  Learning to read, learning numbers, learning to swim, learning to stay for two hours in an age-group at family camp, learning to write, learning to do chores.

Homeschooling the first child felt like blazing a new trail through myself and through the family.   A bit like that first birth, a bit like nursing for the first time -- you have to figure so much out as you go along, and it can't really be explained to you until you are actually doing it.  Everything we did together was the first time for me.     So it had to be interesting and new.  It was new.  Watching him learn, hearing him tell me things in his own words, seeing his reaction to things, was amazing.  I'd never seen that before.

But when you do each same old thing again, for another child, you really can start to see the uniqueness of human persons.   

Before, you might have taken what you saw in your first child and generalized to "all kids."  You discover a way of explaining or showing something that really gets through to your child, and you're recommending it to every homeschooler you know, and maybe a few elementary school teachers too.  You try some elective, a language or a musical instrument or a side-topic, and it's sluggish and boring and you drop it and think "Yuck, I don't like teaching that at all."

Now, you realize with every day that different children are -- different.  Each new topic really is new because you're seeing it reflected in different eyes.  Some parts of it are the same, but a lot of it is truly different.  And every day you experience the uniqueness of your second child and realize how very individual is your first child too.  They like different things.  They use objects in different ways.  They think with different logic.  They make different jokes.  You enjoy them in different ways -- that yucky boring sluggish curriculum may be riveting and fresh when a different child pulls it off the shelf.   Every day a new facet of their differences and a new delight.  And sometimes when you discover a sameness, that is a delight too. 

Take pattern blocks, those ubiquitous colorful polygons two centimeters on a side.  Our first set was purchased as a tub toy when my first was eighteen months old.  I opened the package and dumped them into his bath, and watched amazed as he constructed an intricate pattern with perfect threefold symmetry.  I have never seen him make any design that was not symmetric in some way.  (When I gave him a tangram set to play with at age two, he carefully constructed a bilaterally symmetric picture with the three matched pairs, and then puzzled over the odd piece, the parallelogram, for several minutes; finally he set it on its long edge, exactly bisecting the picture he'd made.)  My second, on the other hand, constructs wildly rambling pictures and describes them at length with the most bizarre vocabulary choices.  "This part is the protein, and it has to wear a mask so the germs don't get into your body.  This part contains gas, and it explodes if you touch it.  This part is the part that invaporates so you can go really fast."

I guess when my third gets to this age I'll be discovering the newness of schooling a daughter.  At any rate, I'm really enjoying this time, much more than I thought I would, and am so thankful for it.

Just back from vacation.

Which I don't tend to announce ahead of time, for obvious reasons.

Posting will resume when we finish the laundry.