We wrapped up the third quarter of our school year last week, too. We do quarters, and at the beginning of the year I set a calendar showing the kids when the quarters are and which days they'll get off of school. It's a little artificial, but they like getting "holidays" and knowing exactly how close they are to finishing up with school. If we didn't have a schedule we'd get nothing done, so it works well for us.
And with third quarter we wrapped up a few other things, too. SweetPea - technically in kindergarten - finished first grade math and grammar. We've been careful not to push her through the work, but she's enjoying it, and so she just marched right through the textbooks and did just fine, and we're not about to hold her back because of the grade numbers on the books. After Easter she'll start the second grade books, and we'll keep a close eye on how she's doing and go as slowly - or quickly - as she's ready for. She's loved being in Daisy Scouts this year and at a recent meeting the girls had to write down one thing they were afraid of. She wrote that she was "scared of first grade" - until we pointed out that she was almost finished with it, and hadn't even noticed. She wrote her first-ever book report this spring, and loved writing about a horse book - and celebrated with a ride on her much-loved pony buddy.
SweetPea has been racing ahead academically, and we appreciate that homeschooling is letting her move at the right pace for her, but I think it's Sprout who has really benefitted from learning at home this year. Last year was so, so hard in many ways. We were all adjusting to our new roles, and we were all at odds with each other a bit. The learning curve was steep, expectations were (perhaps too) high, and the nuts-and-bolts of getting through the work sometimes seemed impossibly hard.
This year we've been able to relax a bit, in part because Sprout knows his job - and is less likely to blow up when his lack of focus means that he's still working on math problems at dinnertime. I'm also more flexible. He needs more work on his multiplication tables and grumbles about how dumb, and stupid, and hard, and awful they are - but he happily practiced them for almost an hour today as he tried to get a high score on some eyeroll-inducing math app called "SushiMonster." I've also been less hesitant to ditch what isn't working for us. He started reading The Black Cauldron and it was over his head - so we switched gears and did Harry Potter instead. Neither one of us was frustrated, neither one of us felt like we'd failed - we just set the book aside for another day or year and went
.about our learning
And as Sprout approaches the pre-teen year, I'm more happy than ever that SSHH and I are the primary educators in his life. He's encountering and noticing hard things that weren't on his horizon before, and I'm glad that we are the people he's coming to with questions - not his teachers, not his friends - his parents. Whether it's moving from "how will the baby come out of there?" to the much harder "how did the baby get in there?" (and yes, his nine year-old self got a straight answer to that), or "why did someone post a comment on this computer game that it "is so gay it makes my f&*^ing eyes bleed?" - and what does that mean?" or "I read a Garfield comic and someone said Jon dances like a retard. What's that?" or "what's an abortion?" - we have been able to navigate the answers with him.
Sprout just finished reading Maniac Magee and put together a short but pretty incisive paper, for a nine year-old, on the portrayal of race in the book. We had a lot of talks about it, and about how people form opinions of each other, and what things are important about people and what things aren't, and how to form respectful friendships across differences. He read, and answered comprehension questions, and learned about topic sentences and finding quotes in a book - but it was full of little life-lessons, too, and I'm glad that those happened around the dining room table and not in a classroom.
When we started homeschooling I read a lot about the "growing up" aspects of it. I was concerned that our kids not be "sheltered," that they not be limited to our sometimes-insulated Catholic homeschooling group, that they learn about the diversity of people and beliefs in the world and how to encounter them respectfully and openly while still maintaining their own faith and identity and not succumbing to relativism. And I think that we're accomplishing that, in a small way. But that involves running up against hard questions, and navigating hard answers, and while I trust many people to teach my kids math and writing and geography, I don't trust them to guide my kids through those questions when they are prompted by a book or article or conversation read in the context of school. I don't trust that when those hard questions come up, that a kid who spends most of their waking hours and most of their learning time with other people will automatically turn to their parents first for advice and answers. And so I'm glad that while Sprout is out there getting his feet wet in the big wide world, he's able to stay grounded and connected to the moral compass that his family and faith should be for him.
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