School Progress

It’s really late, and I would like to be in bed, but Craig is finishing GI Shmoe (Joe), the movie, in our room, and I’d rather be in here! We watched My Sister’s Keeper tonight, as well, and I didn’t use the hanky as much as I had anticipated. Of course I cried, about 3 times, but not through the whole thing, like I’d been forewarned I would. That’s because I’m tough as nails. Lol. Nails made out of glass, I suppose. It really was a sad movie, and I can’t imagine losing a child, and what I would do to fight to keep them, but I’ve also loved and lost someone that looked just like that in the end. I’m not sure if that made it more sad, or more bearable. Maybe a little of both, I guess.

This has been a fairly uneventful week, for which I am thankful. We’ve had a successful week of school, including Jake completing his first diorama book report. You know, where you build a 3D scene from the book inside a shoebox. I’m trying to give him some options besides just doing written reports, which can get pretty boring. The problem is, he reads so many books, it’s hard to make him do a project for every one. He just read Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, a biography of Mark Twain, and is now reading The Prince and the Pauper, so he’ll be writing an interview with Mark Twain for the next one. He’ll have to write the questions and answer them as the author would have, so that should be a little more enjoyable for him. Something interesting that he’s learned, of which I was unaware, is how Samuel Clemens chose the pen name of Mark Twain. If I have the story correct, he worked on a boat as a teenager or young adult, and had to lower a rope over the side of the boat that had knots in it to mark depth. You had to have at least two knots in the water to have enough depth to keep from grounding. (I’m sure I’m not using correct terminology here, as I am nautically ignorant.) So, he chose the ‘mark twain’ as his name. Pretty clever. I’m glad Jake shares things like that with us, as we don’t have time to read all the books he does!

Another tidbit from school this week – we learned the Latin word for ‘iron.’ Not surprisingly, the first thing Jake did was put together a sentence… “Sum ferrum vir!” That means, “I am iron man!” Levi and Luke loved it, of course, so that’s now a common phrase in our home. Boys!

Luke is progressing nicely in his reading, which is very encouraging. I have always feared teaching reading, and when Jake came along and learned with so little effort, I kind of relaxed and thought, “Well, this isn’t hard! They just teach themselves!” Oh, I learned two years later, that only SOME of them teach themselves! The others require lots and lots of practice and help. Actually, the greatest factor in reading improvement with my boys has been time. As so often happens with homeschoolers, and especially novices, of which I still consider myself, is that we start getting antsy. I believe, whole heartedly, that boys, especially, shouldn’t be rushed into reading and writing. I think it’s perfectly okay that a 5 or 6 year-old, or even 7 year-old, is not completely ready to read. They WILL learn, as long as they have someone there to teach them. But, you start ‘biting your nails’, so to say, as you see other kids their age, or younger, reading, and learning so quickly, and you begin to doubt yourself and what you’re doing, or not doing, that is keeping your child from really taking off. You go back and forth between being confident that giving him time is important, and okay, and feeling like a total failure because he’s not up to speed with other kids you know, or even where one of your other children was at the same age. It’s kind of scary, really. If they have trouble memorizing addition facts, or don’t get word problems very easily, or don’t have a natural inclination to spell correctly, that’s okay. Those things take work and practice, and might be something with which they struggle. But, when it’s READING!?! Ack! That’s terrifying! Reading is the basis for all knowledge, the one tool that they must have in order to acquire everything else, and imaging that you could be messing that up, or missing something that would help them succeed in it is disturbing. Furthermore, it’s not just that you want them to LEARN it, but they need to LOVE it. Being able read what he has to is one thing, but it’s when he reads when and what he WANTS to that he really absorbs the information and fills up all the tiny rooms in his brain. THAT is the aim. So, I do get excited when I see progression. Levi is just getting to where he is interested in a book and wants to pick it up and read it, instead of being made to read, and that is thrilling. When Luke is there, too, I will feel like a huge part of my educating job is conquered. From there, we can learn anything!

I think I just got my cue… heading for bed. There’s nothing important enough to blog about past 2 am! Not this week, anyway.