Aharon's First Torah

A couple of days ago, Aharon told me he doesn't like it when I speak in Hebrew. 

"Well," I said, "I speak in Hebrew so that when you want to read the Torah, you'll understand it.  Because the Torah is in Hebrew."

And he said, "But I can't read the Torah."

"Actually, I think you can," I said.  He hasn't been practicing his Hebrew reading very much (except once a week at Avos U'Banim), but like unschoolers usually do, he had practiced every day while he was interested in mastering it, then hit a level of proficiency and stopped working on it.  Last time I saw him read, I felt he was pretty fluent.  I had been thinking I should offer to work on davening with him, but as always, I vacillate between wondering if I should try to work with them and figuring it will be way more efficient and quick if they do it when they are motivated.

Aharon and Elazar began talking about how they actually knew a fair amount of what the words meant in the Hebrew reader.

[When I started unschooling, I had a fear that one day my kids would grow up, realize they have massive gaps in their education, and blame me for not forcing them to learn it.  But I then realized that a lot of unschooling is cheerfully talking about how when they want it and are interested in it, they'll learn it.  So they don't learn Torah inside right now, but when it comes up, we talk about how when they are interested and want to, they'll learn it.  It turns out that unschoolers happily and cheerfully learn new things and master new skills as they become relevant or interesting.]

Tonight, Aharon was wandering around, and I said, "Hey, want to try to read the Torah?"

He said okay.  I asked him which part of Torah is his favorite.  He said the part where Hashem turned the water into blood. 

No problem.  I pulled out Shmos and opened up the pasuk.  Aharon read המים and I repeated it after him and he said, "the water!"  Then he read אשר and didn't know what it was.  I said "that" and he said "אשר קדשנו במצותיו" and I said Yup. Then he read ביאור and I told him that was the Hebrew word for the Nile River.  Then he was getting antsy and I told him just one more word.  And I pointed to the last word in the pasuk and he read לדם.  And I repeated it and he didn't know.  And I said just "dam" and he said, "Blood!"  And he grinned.

****

An example of how halacha comes up naturally: Aharon wanted to eat his pizza bagel and I told him to make a bracha but he was waiting for the bagel to call off a bit.  Then he came over to me a minute later with a tiny bit of the cheese from the top and asked me if this was the same bracha as the bagel.  I said no, that's shehakol, and he should make that bracha and then a bracha on the bagel later when it cools down.

How is Unschooling Going? Age 11

I'm on a group and someone new asked: Does anyone have any ideas on how to motivate a 2e kid who isn’t?! 10 yo boy...

I wrote an answer and I figured I'd share here.

My 11yo is severe ADHD.  I've pretty much given up trying to teach him anything (he starts getting tics or destroying things if he sits for five minutes).

I give him unlimited video games--he learns a ton from there.  Access to youtube--he looks up lots of things he wants to know and watches a lot of science and social studies [and a lot of other 'nonsense' but he ends up being well "read" with a fantastic vocabulary].

I'm always hanging about if he wants to tell me things and discuss what he's watching, doing or thinking about.  A ton of his learning comes from me just sitting around doing my own thing and pausing when he comes over and being a person to bounce things off of or for him to share something he just watched that he's very enthusiastic about.

I daven out loud sitting next to him every morning while he plays video games.  Some mornings he sings along with me.  Very rarely.  Sometimes he hums the tunes to himself as I walk away.  Some mornings he decides he absolutely must go visit the neighbor right when I start davening.

I also have a ton of art supplies for him to tinker around with.  Glue gun.  Duct tape.  Paper, scissors, stapler, lots and lots of cardboard (he collects that himself on recycle day).  That's pretty much his day every day (we also do parkour outside the house 2x a week).

He's a happy kid and is thriving.

Also we eventually discovered that a mishna is great because it's very, very short.  He learns one mishna most nights but that's after years and years of really not doing anything official--and he chooses to do it.  If he's resistant, we don't do it.  He gets tics.

My husband takes him to avos ubanim motzei shabbos and he reads a page of reading and hears parsha.  He can still barely read hebrew.  His English he somehow learned (from minecraft) but he doesn't love to read.  Just enough to navigate the internet.

I have him read about 2 lines of bentching after bread if he doesn't scamper off too quickly.

Little bits, here and there, very relaxed.  Me always around for conversation.  We take walks where he asks deep philosophical Torah questions.  He asks halacha questions very very frequently.


All in all, seeing how much anguish parents go through when their kids have trouble in school.  And seeing how much the kids suffer--aside from the actual pain of sitting still, many of them suffer from anxiety and crushed self esteem.  I mostly feel a shaky sense of relief and delight that Elazar is a happy, thriving, confident kid who loves learning and loves his life.

How Things Roll

Last week, Ari brought in groceries and it's the kids' job to put the basement fridge ones in the basement.  We had a new gallon of milk.  I called the kids to put the milk away but 3 of them were playing a game. 



I don't like the milk being left out, and I was getting agitated.  It wasn't such a big deal for me to put it away, but I think it's important that I get help, or else I become a resentful, nasty person.

I asked where E was and he was outside playing.  I kept asking them to do it and they kept being in the middle of the game, and finally I got all huffy, snapped at the room at large, and stomped down with the milk.

When I got up, E had just walked in.  And I said, "NOW you walk in?"  He was utterly bewildered.

I was thinking this morning how glad I am that I'm not normally like this.  It's really unpleasant to live with a mom who is resentful, can't get her needs met, yells, stomps around, and gets angry like that.  I remembered a few major times over the course of my parenting when I did that, and different techniques I've used to change my habits.  (Including but not limited to: practicing controlling my temper, decluttering, changing my parenting style, reframing expectations, practicing straightforward and direct communication, simplifying my life so that I'm not overwhelmed, streamlining processes, thinking about long term affects of my behavior...)

This morning, Chen (teen) sat me down somberly and told me that she saw that E reacted with some shame when I yelled at him, and she felt that was unfair, since he did nothing wrong.  She told me she thinks that in general when I get intense he's particularly susceptible to feeling ashamed, and therefore she thinks I should make an extra effort around him to avoid speaking in those ways.  (Even though obviously it would be good if I could avoid doing it to everyone else, too.)

This is part of the trying to stop blaming thing that I've been working on since Rosh Hashana/Yom Kippur this year.  I particularly noticed that it's been affecting Elazar. 

I thanked Chen (I'm blessed that she has a real gift for speaking to me about things in a way where I don't get defensive.  I think part of it is she watched me and Sarah during Sarah's teen years work so hard to de-escalate, and part of it is her natural ability and personality).  And she's going to point it out to me when she sees me do it in the future, and I'll try to cut down more.

I was thinking afterwards about how the unschoolers would approach this.  (Assuming they would agree that kids "should" help with the groceries, which they do not.)  The radical unschoolers have a way of looking at things very creatively.  So I realized if I absolutely wanted them to take the milk down later, and I absolutely could not let the milk stay out the 3 minutes until their game was done (which I could have, but I'm anal about milk in the fridge, which is my issue, and not the kids' problem), I actually could have stuck the milk upstairs and then when they were available, they would have been happy to run it down.  That would have been a decent solution.  Instead, I got resentful and mean. 

I'm glad I've been exposed to the radical unschooler way of thinking, even if I only could think of it after the fact.  I've had a lot of success running through scenarios in my head that went not well and figuring out what I could have done that would have worked better for me.  (Stick that on the list of techniques I use to change my habits..)

Best Use of My Time

I have to remember that conflict resolution is one of the most important things to me as a parent and homeschooler.  

Way back when my oldest was homeschooling, and I was trying to figure out how to manage my time and make decisions about what to teach, I did a "begin with the end in mind" approach where I thought about what things I wanted my adult children to have.  And then planned their education with that in mind.  

To recap, it was 4 things:

1. Basic reading, written communication, and math (I've since dropped math--they seem to figure out the basics of a calculator pretty easily)
2. A sufficient sense of responsibility that allows a person to hold down a job; i.e. show up on time and do your work diligently.
3. The capacity for satisfying and emotionally healthy relationships with a spouse, children, and friends.
4. A non-superstitious relationship to Judaism and Torah (I've since changed it to a love for Torah AND mitzvos, after some missteps in parenting during the teen years)

I've mentioned that physical fighting has gone down and we are seeing a lot of verbal disagreements with raised voices.  One of the things I've always loved about homeschooling is that there is time to slow down and handle these issues.  And what I love about unschooling is it seems like that IS the job.

So now I'm reminding myself not to get swept away by my own projects and the minutiae of running a fair-sized household and not to forget that when I hear the voices raised, I have nothing better to do than to go over to them or call them over to me, help them talk through the conflict, and learn and practice the tools to resolve it.