bearing blog

Co-schooling and planning.

Today Hannah and I sat down and made a supply list for our (between us) four youngest children's school days together.

To recap, our family co-schools with Hannah's family on Tuesdays, and with Hannah's and usually Melissa's family on Thursdays.   Partway through last year Hannah and I completely revamped our school schedules to sync them together, so that on T-Th we were working together on the same subjects, more or less, and the stuff we couldn't do well together we segregated to the other days of the week.

(Meanwhile Hannah and Melissa set up other days to work together for their two families.  It's a weird sort of three-family co-schooling thing we've got going.  But it's working pretty well now, fantastically well compared to before when we weren't sync'ed together.)

Hannah's and my oldest boys, who are both fourth graders, are pretty much scheduled out for the rest of the "school year."  We have a few vague plans -- When we get to the end of the second level of the writing curriculum, how about we have them do a subject report with library research, and take however long that takes, before we go on to begin the next book?  -- but mostly we know what they're up to.  I run world history, American history, and Latin.  Hannah runs English grammar and composition.  We are chugging forward through curricula and book lists, and it's all pretty much worked out at least till mid-June.  

The younger children are harder to fit together, maybe because of a slight age mismatch.  Our middle boys are an "old" kindergartener and an "old" first grader.  They're not too far apart in reading skill, i.e., "can read many sentences with help, not much independently yet;"  but there's a big gap in attention to detail and ability to sit and work for a while.    Our youngests, both girls, are still wider apart; Hannah's girl will be 5 soon and so is nearly ready for kindergarten-level stuff, but mine has only just turned 3.  They play together beautifully, but will they be able to work together?  Or will Hannah's youngest, the 5yo girl, wind up being the natural schoolmate of my middle child, the 6yo boy?   How will that work?  Maybe we will be doing some cross-pairing from time to time.  We are experimenting right now with teaching an early-childhood music theory curriculum to the younger four as a group, and seeing what happens.

Despite not being exactly sure how to put it all together, a year or so of working together like this has made it easier for us to identify "stuff" that will probably work for us.  So we really enjoyed sitting down with the Rainbow Resource catalog and picking out some things we can do with each group of children.   

The middle boys have been learning about common Eastern mammals via the Burgess Animal Book for Children, and coloring pages and doing narrations about what they've learned.  When they finish that book, we've decided to spend some time working on birds -- not an exhaustive study, but focusing on the dozen to twenty species they might actually see in the backyard.  We'll use the Burgess Bird Book for text, and the Peterson Field Guide Color-in Book for coloring pages (with attention to correct coloring -- it matters more with birds than with bobcats), and the Cornell Ornithology Lab site for birdsong.  And spend several sessions on each bird.  And use it as a starting point to jump into the Usborne First Book of Nature, bird section, for generic bird anatomy and lifecycle and stuff, and see where that takes us, through the winter I hope.  We also hope to dabble in the activity suggestions in One Small Square:  Backyard, which has a couple of winter activities, but mostly we would gear up for that in the spring.

As for the younger girls, Hannah will probably take the lead in their adventure together, since she's got a child who's approaching Real School Age, and mine is only a preschooler tagging along.  Still, my 3yo's "first exposures" to things like letter formation and number theory can happen alongside a kindergartener's "firm grounding in the basics."   They love to do worksheets together (to my MJ, "schoolwork" = "Mommy sits and does a worksheet with me, or better, ten worksheets in a row"), and so we identified some books that they can do together (because the nice thing about worksheet books is that they are easy to tote and easy to pull out the instant the girls come clamoring to us, "We want to do our schoolwork!")  We think we'll teach them how to use the telephone in the coming months, and to remember a parent's phone number and their addresses.  We found a great prewriting worksheet book that incorporates nursery rhymes -- memory work! -- along with practice with the basic handwriting strokes and shapes.  And we've got some old Charlotte-Mason-y tricks in our bag from when our older kids were younger... a listen-and-parrot Spanish phrase curriculum that they might like, Aesop's Fables to hear and narrate back, a stash of art prints to show and talk about.  When we were done with our list, we were satisfied that the stuff we had would make part of a proper kindergarten curriculum for Hannah's 5yo, while still allowing my 3yo to join in fully as much as she wants.

Hannah and I enjoyed the work session so much, we didn't even notice that we had forgotten to have our "schoolwork's done, pour a cup of tea and sit down" ritual.  That's something we don't miss much -- it was one of the things we resolved to make time for, way back when we revamped our awful schedule so we would enjoy life more, and enjoy the kids more, including each other's kids.   

Which just goes to show what inveterate curriculum geeks we both are.   Which is one of the reasons why it works so well, I think.

Tuesday, 2:50 p.m.

Hannah teaches prepositional phrases to the two 4th-grade boys.

The girls, having had Bible stories and narrated them back, are producing illustrations.  Hazel is about to ask me to write on this one, "Noah built this boat and his sons helped him.  And THE END."

They also finished pictures and narrations of the burning bush.

Milo, not currently being taught, asked for paper and glue and went off to another room, where he produced this snowman.

Meira finished the Latin translation exercise I gave her and Ben and Oscar, and went off to do her own thing.

 
 
 
  

Slipping.

 Halfway through third grade, Oscar's cursive handwriting was reasonably tidy, well-formed, and compact.  I put away the handwriting workbooks and told him he was done with handwriting as a separate subject; all he needed to do from now on was try to write legibly and smoothly whenever he had a writing assignment, and his handwriting would get better and better without special handwriting practice.

But he resisted writing in cursive, and unless I explicitly ordered him to he would tend to print.  So when we began the school year and he started displaying comparatively atrocious handwriting, I made a mental note to pick up some fourth-grade handwriting practice books.  Clearly he needed to re-learn some skills.

Today, though, prompted by a fairly stressful day in which Hannah's Ben and my Oscar reacted off one another in ever-increasing mood swings, and after a post-schooling cup of tea venting and self-analyzing session in which Hannah and I wondered aloud to each other if we'd done the right thing by each other's children, we both took a closer look at some of the writing Oscar had produced over the last few weeks.

We noticed a pattern.

Some pieces:  fairly neat writing with well-formed letters, (usually printing but sometimes cursive), correct spelling or reasonable guesses, thoughtful composition.

Other pieces:  scrawly writing, unreasonable guesses at spelling, careless sentences ("Yep, I think so" as the third of an assigned three-sentence summary).

Good writing, good spelling, and good composition went together.  Bad writing, bad spelling, and bad composition also went together.

Diagnosis:  Not a handwriting problem.  A sometimes-I-go-too-fast problem.  Developing under my radar.

Clearly it's ME who needed to re-learn some skills, namely (a) setting clear standards and (b) following up by checking and correcting.

I brought the subject up in the car on the way home, stressing that I wasn't angry but that I thought the two of us had fallen into some bad habits.  We talked about it and he agreed that he had been trying to get his work done and over with quickly.  The "Yep I think so" sentence?  "I wrote that in bed," he admitted.  "I just wanted to go to sleep."  I promised I would tell him exactly how I wanted a piece finished:  in cursive or printing, with careful spelling attempts or with checked and corrected spelling, and ask detailed questions, and explain the purpose of each assignment.   He promised he would be more careful and try to meet the standards I set, and also asked if I would get him a handwriting practice book so he could get faster at writing in cursive, a request I agreed to fulfill.

It was one of those days where somebody learned a lot.  It seems to have been me, mostly.

If it's Tuesday, it must be muffins. Definitely not cookies.

This morning:  chocolate chip coconut pecan.  "Again?  We had those last week!" I asked Mark, a little bit incredulously, after I had requested his input (incidentally, it took me several years of marriage to learn that asking my spouse's input about the menu leads to a certain expectation that said input ought to, you know, have some effect on what I decide to make.  I keep forgetting this important insight, and I still slip up and ask for input from time to time).

"Hon, you are the only one around here with the 'we can't eat the same food twice in a row' complex.  They were good muffins.  Let's have them again."

Really I was thinking "I made those for the kids' tea.  What kind of degenerate person eats chocolate chips for breakfast?" but decided not to verbalize that.  Until now.

Last week I told the kids they were "chocolate chip cookie muffins."   It's what came into my head naturally; a while ago I dubbed another kind of muffin "oatmeal cookie muffins" in an attempt to make them sound more attractive, and also because they contain oats, raisins, cinnamon and cloves, and molasses.  Anyway, there were exactly six "chocolate chip cookie muffins" left over after breakfast, so I thought:  Perfect, I have to feed a snack to six children this afternoon at Hannah's.

When it was four o'clock or so and time for tea snack, I announced that I had chocolate chip cookie muffins, plus apples or whatever else I had (don't really remember), which brought several children running.  I handed out the muffins and busied myself preparing something else in the kitchen; a moment later I heard a loud altercation behind me.

Perplexed, I turned around and saw that the altercation was coming from Hannah's four-and-a-half-year-old daughter, who was screaming at me in utter, red-faced rage.  I honestly could not make out what she was saying.  "Hazel!  Calm down -- what's wrong?"  Hannah wryly translated:  having been promised something called chocolate-chip-cookie-something-or-other and being handed a muffin was, um, unacceptable.  Or the last straw or something.  To say the least.

Now let me preface this by writing that after nearly 9 years of bringing our families together one or two days a week, Hannah and I have established a comfortable pattern of responding to each other's children.  So in that kind of a situation, I get to decide how to respond -- we mostly suppress our impulses to jump in and whisk the child away and insist that she apologize.  

Hazel is a sweet little girl, and it had been a long day, and frankly I was surprised (and admittedly kind of amused) by the unforeseen result of my muffin-naming.   (I mean -- you give a kid a chocolate chip cookie muffin, you don't expect apoplexia.  At least I don't.  Maybe I should.  I don't know.)  So I sat down beside her and said "What a mix-up!" and explained why I named the muffins "chocolate chip cookie muffins."  She sniffled and hiccuped and tried the muffin. I don't remember, she may even have apologized to me.  I don't think she liked the muffin very much.  But everything did turn out okay in the end.

Where am I going with this?  I don't know, but the chocolate chip cookie muffins are done now and I can take them out of the oven.  Today I'm leaving the muffins at home and bringing applesauce.  I didn't make it myself, so I know it's safe.

Six.

Hannah suggested that 3yo Mary Jane draw a garden of flowers.  She said she couldn't.  "Then draw just one flower," suggested Hannah.  

"I can't," insisted Mary Jane.

"Well, what can you draw?"

"I can draw myself," she told Hannah.

"Then draw yourself," Hannah told her.  But she said:  

"No!  I will draw my WHOLE FAMILY."

From right to left, she reports:  "The new baby in Mommy's body... Daddy... Sister (me)... Mommy... brothers."

First Tuesday. (updated)

We are at Hannah's for our inaugural day of co-teaching for the year.

The fourth-grade boys are studying geography at the table, a bit of review before jumping into world history ("Elizabeth the First to the Forty-Niners.")

Having completed their morning session of nature study (coloring pictures of striped skunks), my kindergartener and Hannah's preschooler grab some down time.

My preschooler can't really read this book, but she likes the pictures.

Typical kitchen counterscape.  Lots and lots of used tea cups.

 

(added after lunch)

 

Our preschool girls work on their matching Kumon workbook pages, our slacker solution to the "But we want to do OUR schoolwork!" problem.  Hazel is four and a half and MJ just turned three, but they both seem to enjoy these equally well.  Later this year we hope to merge their reading lessons -- we're getting pretty good at co-teaching reading even when the kids are not at precisely the same level.

 

"Tell me what you already know about adjectives.  Oscar, you go first."

Trucking along together.

Hannah and I are slowly developing some new patterns to our days together.   Here's how they are changing.

------

Before:  We each started with a list of what each of our own boys had to do for school, and we made them work until they were done. 

After:  We each bring a list of what we would like our boys to accomplish.  We sit down together over coffee in the morning and we put the two lists together and try to figure out how best to mesh them so that our families are "working together" as much as we can.  Can Ben quiz Oscar on his mental math?  Can Oscar administer Ben's spelling test?  Can Hannah present the same writing assignment to both Ben and Oscar?  Can Erin run a Latin drill session for both boys together?    What will each boy work on while he is waiting for the other?  If some of our goals don't mesh well, or if a list seems too long, we just drop goals; they can be done some other day when we're not together.

Before:  Each boy worked from his own assignment checklist.

After:  We write one unified assignment checklist for "Ben And Oscar."   For example, one item is often "Take turns giving each other spelling words from your lists.  Each of you write a sentence for each missed word on his own list."  Another might be "Look at pages xxx-xxx in the History Encyclopedia and take turns quizzing each other about the facts and pictures."  A third might be "Ben does his handwriting sheet while Oscar practices his catechism memorization." (We're still figuring out how best to order things on the list.)

Before:  We made the boys work until they were "done."   If they dawdled, there was less time for play.  Sometimes nobody, including us, got a break except for lunch.

After:  We are sticking to four hours total of work. School is from about 10:30 to 12:30, we take an hour break for lunch and play, and then again from 1:30 to 3:30 when we have tea snack.  (We haven't yet figured out what consequence to impose if the boys deliberately waste time and so don't get a reasonable amount of work done.  Fortunately, they haven't tested us yet.  My temporary measure on our side is to tell Oscar that what he doesn't get done, he must do on Saturday.)

Before:  I read history to the big boys while Hannah tried to pay attention to all four other kids and also make dinner or do housework at the same time.

After:  I start reading with a storybook for everyone around the table, and then I begin reading history.  Hannah stays with us, fetching tea and icewater and light snacks, and listens in on the story, stopping to ask questions or discuss a point.  The other children may stay and listen, or they may play quietly nearby, or they may play elsewhere.

Before: I gave Milo his reading lesson whenever I managed to scrape a few minutes together to sit down with him.  Hannah gave Silas his lessons whenever she managed to find a spare moment.

After:  One of us gives the two of them together their reading lessons -- they take turns, each boy reading a page from his own lesson (they're on different levels in the same curriculum.)  And one of us gives the two of them together a math lesson:  sometimes Silas listens in on Milo's lesson, and sometimes Milo listens in on Si's lesson; then they each do their own practice exercise (they use different curricula but are at approximately the same level.)

----

There have been a few lovely surprises along the way.  Hannah overheard the younger boys arguing about a plot point in the biography of Las Casas I've been reading to the third-graders; we hadn't thought they were even listening to it!  And those same middle boys are clearly relishing their new identity as "study buddies." 

Sometimes it's still pretty hard.  Yesterday wasn't really a good day.  We got started late, and everybody was really frazzled (it seemed that nobody had slept well the night before), and we just knew not a lot was going to happen.  We made the list pretty short, and still not much got done.  But we know we're working for the long term, and learning what works and what doesn't, and next year will be easier because we'll plan our whole curriculum around this new way.  That keeps us going, even when the coffee pot runs out.

Another meal-sharing idea.

One of the things Hannah and I do on Tuesdays is make dinner.  She plans it and buys the groceries; we make it together, at her house (since right now our schedule has me at her place every week); and I take my family's share home.

We used to alternate weeks, one at my house and the next at hers, and we figured that made us even.  When we switched to all Tuesdays at Hannah's, we agreed that I'd compensate her for the extra planning and cost two ways:  (1) I'd bring lunch and tea-snack, and (2) I'd give her a dinner's worth of meat out of my freezer each week.   It works pretty well.  I miss doing the planning every other week, and making stuff together that my family loves but that I hate to do single-handed -- e.g. calzones and samosas -- but what goes around comes around, and sooner or later we'll have some other arrangement.

Yesterday, not long after we'd all enjoyed the crockpot full of hot dogs and sauerkraut I'd brought for lunch, Hannah was about to thaw meat for a lasagna that we were to make together.  I opened her fridge, looking for the ricotta, and saw about a quart of chili left over from Ben's birthday party on Sunday.  There were still two pans of the accompanying cornbread on the counter.  "Hey Hannah!"  I called down the stairs.  "Before you get the meat out, I have a proposal."

"What?"

"How about I just take all that leftover chili  home in my crockpot?  And the corn bread?  And a bag of frozen vegetables?"

"All right!" she called up.  "We've been eating that stuff for days!  My family'll eat crackers and summer sausage tonight!"

That was easy.

It got me thinking.  One of the reasons Hannah and I usually make dinner together on Tuesdays is because it's a pleasant job for us to do together.  We like chopping and stirring as we discuss the weekend past and the rest of the week ahead.  And it's kind of fun to discover new recipes together -- foodies that we are.   It's also great because, dinner freshly made, we don't have to end our day together early just so we can each put dinner on the table.   I hope we don't have to  change our schedule anytime soon.  But yesterday, pressed for time because each of us spent more than an hour voting (that's another story), I was content to serve my family her family's seconds.  (Fortified a bit with an extra can of chili beans.)

She warned me it was really bland chili, made to suit her kids' tastes.  She was right, it was really bland, but in a really satisfying, stick to your ribs, bean-stuffed, comfort-food way.  We ate it all, yum, and my family drenched the corn bread with honey and ate that too.  I poured my chili atop the slender cooked green beans, crumbled the cornbread on top, and couldn't finish it all, it was so filling.

Anyway, I was thinking -- another model for families who get together in the afternoon, if they don't have time to actually cook together, could be the Leftover Swap.  

Let's say Jane gets together with her friend Sue every Wednesday afternoon for a cup of tea.  On Tuesday night, Jane's family eats lasagna, salad and green beans on the side.  Meanwhile, Sue cooks up a brimming pot of chicken vegetable soup, with fruit salad and saltine crackers.

 On Wednesday, Jane brings the lasagna, plus extra bagged salad and bagged frozen green beans to Sue's house.  They have their tea, the children play.  At five Jane goes home with Sue's leftover chicken soup and fruit salad and the extra box of crackers that Sue remembered to buy at the store.  Sue pops the lasagna in the oven, tosses the salad with her own favorite dressing, and boils the green beans for a quick side dish.

I like it.  You each cook once and eat leftovers, but since they're somebody else's leftovers, they're not the same thing you had last night.  I think it would work best with a regular arrangement, but you could also do it for get togethers planned only one day ahead; I bet everybody reading this could make at least one full meal, on short notice, with enough to share for another family.  Heck, I probably have enough Spanish rice in my crockpot right now to feed two families, at least if they didn't have any teenage boys.

Getting it together.

Yesterday Hannah and I sat down with our end-of-day cup of tea and grinned at each other.

What a great day.  Already we're seeing results.

We agreed that the most important ingredient of our new, togetherness-focused schooling day is me spending time teaching her kids, and her spending time teaching mine.  Those stitches tend to draw us all together.  It's challenging, but we're learning so much about each other.  And although there was some pushback the first couple of times, I'm already seeing her Ben's shy grin a lot more brightly than I was just a couple of weeks ago, and she's already seeing my Milo respond cheerfully to his reading lessons with her.

Milo and Silas, our second-borns, are starting a new identity as "study buddies," now that we are doing their lessons together.  They are not at the same level; but we sit them next to each other, and they take turns each doing one page of their reading lessons.  They share a pencil between them, passing it back and forth.  They listen and watch as the other does math, roughly the same level, one with Saxon and the other with Singapore Math.  They had Bible stories together yesterday; Hannah discussed the Beatitudes with them while I guided Ben and Oscar through Latin drill (each at his own level).

And...

And...

There's so much less fighting!  Everyone is getting along better.  I'm not making it up -- we are seeing results already.

Today it felt for the first time not like a scarily difficult thing -- what we're doing now, me teaching hers and her teaching mine and drawing everybody together -- but like an exciting new challenge.

Possibly some of that feeling came from the extra coffee in the middle of the day.

But I think it's real.

Ben wrote out the sentence I dictated to the bigger boys today without complaint -- and he accepted my corrections of his spelling, capitalization, and mechanics and recopied it without hesitation!  Hannah assures me this is a big deal.  Oscar complains less about his workload when we write the to-do list for "Ben and Oscar" than when he's got his own and Ben's got his.  Both of them listened with rapt attention today to our American History book -- several chapters from a biography of Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas -- even though the chapters were mostly about debates before the Spanish court.  They paid attention!  I asked questions -- and at least one of them knew the answers!

And we both agreed, too, that the effort to connect with each of the children -- mostly each other's children -- is spilling over into our own families.  Things are better in our own homes.  We are so continuing this into the future.  Every day it is getting easier.

Your way and my way Our way.

I set down my second cup of coffee and leaned back in my chair, rubbing my eyes.  "Okay.  Write these two things down."  I paused while Hannah turned to a new page in her spiral notebook (past one that read If Hannah finds the broken pieces of the yo-yo on the floor Ben will pay her 25 cents, signed Ben, Witnessed Hannah).  "First.  ONE ROOM SCHOOLHOUSE.  Second.  SINGLE LARGE HOMESCHOOLING FAMILY."

We were at a Caribou Coffee in a little strip mall, not far away from Hannah's house, where presumably our husbands were playing chess, cleaning up chili, or turning on a DVD for our total of six children.   

We were looking for a new paradigm.

Hannah said at one point, "The problem is not that we don't know how to let go of the we-do-it-differently-in-different-families paradigm.  The problem is we haven't taken it past the Naptime Level."  I had to get her to explain that, and she reminded me:

When our children were all small and we would excitedly explain to other mothers, weary, isolated at-home mothers, how we had brought more balance and fun and connection to our lives by spending one or two whole days together every single week and sharing our work, the other mothers would listen, sometimes with a longing expression on their faces, and tell us how wonderful it sounded.  "You could do it," we would tell them.  "You could find a friend and just start spending lots of time at each others' houses.  We hardly even knew each other when we started.  You just have to make it happen."

And the other mothers would say, "It sounds great.  But it would never work for me, because my baby has to take his nap at one.  We would have to be home for his nap."  End of discussion.

We'd always been pretty proud of ourselves that we decided we would forget this whole "gotta be home for naptime" thing.  OK, so our children have a need that we usually meet by going back home, isolating ourselves once again in our own houses?  We won't ignore the need, but we'll find a way to meet it that meets our goal of staying together, of not being isolated.   Babies learn.  Our babies did.  They nap pretty easily in each others' houses. 

That was the naptime level.

Fast forward five or six years and we have some school-aged kids.  

The other mothers now ask us, "So, you co-teach?"  and we say, "Um, no, not really."  They can't imagine why we would be going to such trouble to spend all this time together without seeking the benefits of co-teaching.  

Hannah and I don't teach the same way.  Our kids don't learn the same way (a superficial example:  my Oscar does well with a list of stuff to finish each day; her Ben, all last year, thrived on a schedule of so many minutes studying one subject, so many minutes working on the next, and so on).  We don't teach the same subjects.   We have assumed all along that our differences mean we cannot really integrate our schooling.  When I spent a day at Hannah's, I lugged a big bag of "our school" to her house, unpacked it all, and we did "our school" at the table next to Hannah and Hannah's kids, then packed it all up at the end and carried it back to my van.  When she came to my house, she did the same.  Small wonder that we both have come to store our kids' school stuff in sturdy tote bags hanging on hooks in the schoolroom!  

It's exhausting, and it's kind of dumb.  We have to get past the Naptime Level.  OK, fine.  So Oscar "needs" to learn one way, and Ben "needs" to learn another.  So Hannah likes to teach one way, and I like to teach another.  So we plan differently, pace differently, organize differently.  This is not insurmountable.  If we decide we NEED to work together, we can find a way.

Toddlers have different nap schedules BECAUSE they are in different families.  They are not in different families because they have different nap schedules.

And though we thought we had to do school separately because we approached it so differently -- the truth is that we approach school differently on Tuesdays and Thursdays BECAUSE we have not done it together.  If we set out to work together on those days, we reasoned, we will find a way -- not the way that Hannah's family works -- not the way that my family works -- not some compromise, halfway between -- but the way that our families work when they work together.  

We're going to tear out the page that says TWO FAMILIES HOMESCHOOLING AT THE SAME TABLE.  

* * *

We've made up our minds not to mess with the curriculum for this year; next year, I guess we'll be choosing curricula together.  This year, though, we can take a look at the schedule.  Can the boys do their spelling together? (They can at least administer the daily spelling tests, one to the other, even if they are spelling from different lists.)  Can the boys do math together, one with Saxon, one with Singapore?  (They can at least listen in on each other's lessons.)  Can Silas and Milo learn to read together, even though they're at different levels in the same program? (We tried it yesterday and found a pattern:  Milo reads one of his workbook pages, and Silas reads one of his; they pass the pencil back and forth to trace their letters on their pages, taking turns.)  

Yes, I think we can do this:  we've done it with Naptime, we've done it with Teaching Kids To Get Along, we've done it with Housework, we now have to do it with School On Tuesdays.  It is going to knock us out of our comfort zones, but then... we've been through this before.  Making connections means resisting the culturally programmed impulse that says I have to do it my way and you have to do it your way.  But every time we've figured out an our way, that has turned out to be just as comfortable, and a lot more companionable.