how is homeschool chumash coming along?

Our Limudei Kodesh in High School homeschool is not progressing very much.  First of all, we are still on the elementary school curriculum, because we haven't finished Devarim yet.  We are almost done with Ha'azinu.  And we still have the last parsha.  And we haven't been doing much Rashi.

Chana is taking Chumash and Torah Sheba'al Peh at the High School I work at.

And this week we decided on the first area of study that we will do after we finish Devarim.  She was asking me about Moshiach and does the Torah talk about it.  I said definitely the Navi talks about it.  She seemed interested so I asked if she wanted me to put together a sampling of the different nevi'im and what they say about Moshiach.  Offhand I vaguely remember Yechezkel, Yishayahu, probably Micha, Malachi all talk about Moshiach.  She was interested.

So this is actually something that is going to take preparation on my part.  Not my usual "okay let's open up the book and I'll google whatever we get stuck on."

So I'm off to go hunting and compiling a lesson plan for text-based Moshiach information.

How will I go about this?  The Rambam quotes Chazal and maybe pesukim.  I'll take a look at that.  And I'm literally going to hunt through the Stone Nach in the above books (and others) and read the little side notes 'til I encounter the ones about Moshiach.  Then I'll decide which ones are most salient/likely to be interesting to Chana.

converting nagging worries into plans and efforts

it's the beginning of the school year.  that shouldn't make a difference, since we don't really do anything different during the summer.  but this year i started teaching a class in an outside school, so i'm gone every morning til 10am.  this doesn't really make a huge difference in our homeschool because we don't really do anything before 10am anyway, except that it takes me a while to reconnect with the little ones because they are expecting me around and i'm not (like jack doesn't like waking up and me not being there).  and aharon, who is a year old, is used to being with me every minute of the day.

but it has been feeling like there aren't enough hours in the day to do everything.  in the beginning days of homeschooling, i used to be nervous, so i never wanted to skip "learning."  but now, 1) when it comes down to it, i'm quicker to choose to prioritize our relationship and their long-term emotional well-being so i end up choosing to spend relaxed, enjoyable time with them instead of attempting to force them to work in a time-crunched situation which is going to blow up in our faces, 2) even if i skip a lot of learning times, over the course of years, there still ends up being a lot of time and 3) since we became more unschool-y, the kids are much more relaxed about skill work and flexible and inclined to work at odd hours.

case in point.  i told you that i pulled out sfasenu (or sfatenu, as we used to call it in elementary school, before i learned about the ashkenazic "ת" and plunged myself into the conflict of spoken vs religious hebrew) a few days ago.  i've been telling chana i'd like to start it.  she kept saying later and tomorrow.  yesterday we were planning to do it but there was trapeze from 4-8 (it was only 1.5 hrs but i had to pick sarah up from school, dinner, rush out, drive 45 min there and back) so I wasn't up for it we didn't get to it.  this morning, chana woke up at 7:30am by accident (thank you, sarah's alarm) and came down.  i was getting ready to leave for school, but i remembered we didn't do it yesterday.  so we sat down and she did the first story right there.  using the three-years-ahead-rule, i gave her the 3rd grade sfasenu.  she zipped through the story, understanding it, being able to figure out the couple of words or phrases that were new, and i asked her reading comp questions and asked her to answer me in hebrew, using the story.  so that went swimmingly.  i am (anti alfie kohn) using a bribe to make it more palatable.  i told her to pick the bribe, but she wants a dog, so that's not happening.  i'm hoping that she'll pick it up more often than not, and that she'll increase her ivrit ability, and that it will be pretty painless.  i'm not sure how this fits into unschooling philosophy (but i'm not about to get overly bogged down by a philosophy of homeschooling, unless you want to call it pragmatism, ie what is working for us).  i discussed with her that i think her ivrit needs some beefing up.  i acquired something towards that end.  i introduced her to it.  we'll see what happens next. 

and one night this week, everything was pretty quiet, and i said, "hey, want to learn about dovid hamelech?" and she said sure.  so we sat down and i gave her some background about moshe, then going into israel, then shoftim, and we reviewed that shmuel was chana's son, which reminded me that she really is the right age to go through some of the rosh hashana machzor and the torah reading and the haftoras, and then talked a bit about shaul and how the kingship was taken away and how he began to be jealous of dovid.  as i've mentioned before, chana always learns best when she's supposed to be upstairs in bed.  so i'll keep an eye out for those opportunities for navi.  i had the navi open for myself, but did it via storytelling (i did show her one thing in it, but offhand i can't remember what it was). 

also, i've mentioned this before, that i read, many years ago, that one should always stop teaching 5 minutes before the student is finished.  i made this mistake with chana during navi, and kept going even when she was getting distracted.  i should have stopped right then, but it had been going so well i couldn't accept the information she was giving me.  i asked if she wanted to keep going, and she said yes.  i should not have asked her; i should have just stopped.  she zoned out and was earnestly studying the back of a box of cereal.  we ended on a bit of a fractious note instead of me being friendly and saying, we'll stop here, and having her beg for more.

i made that same mistake with my class on the first day of school.  we had 2 minutes left to class, and i should have dismissed them early instead of saying who-knows-what and watching their eyes glaze over.

but overall, my angst last week about things i'd like to pick up the slack on led to me choosing certain activities, then keeping them in my pocket until relaxed opportunities came up. 

regarding navi, if you recall, i had an idea of doing unschooling navi towards the end of last year.  it's now about 4 or 5 months later and we've done navi twice.  you might think that this is not working out.  but i would disagree.  we have years for this.  every time we do it and it's pleasant, it builds on itself.  over the years, it will snowball, i think.  unschooling takes patience, my friends.  i myself am extremely excited to share dovid hamelech's stories.  i just have to wait for the best moments.

nagging worries about judaic studies curriculum: listen to your gut

every once in a while, i start to feel nagging concerns.

- chana's hebrew writing is pretty poor; she always writes the same basic words (and still spells them incorrectly!) and isn't really making enough progress in it

- we've pretty much fallen down on the spoken hebrew

- do i want to work on more modern ivrit?  (yes, i do.  but when?  plus, it's not really unschooling.  so i'm throwing more things into the curriculum that i don't have time for and that she doesn't want to do)

- i would love to do navi stories.  why am i not finding time for navi?

those are the ones that are top of my list bothering me.  but now that i'm writing them down, here are a few more:

- she is less than a year away from bat mitzva, and we probably ought to do some targum tefila so she understands what she is saying in shemona esrei.  also, bentching.

- i've really fallen down on the tenses in ivrit, especially present and future (we did past, but she probably needs more)

i think there are a couple of reasons for this.  i'm busy.  the littles take up lots of time.  chana is busy with what she likes doing all day.  it isn't until after 9pm that we settle down to do work.  or even talk.  (during the day, we have about 1.5 hrs that we block off to do chumash and rashi, and she comes over to me and i come over to her many many times during the day to tell each other things and share things and for me to see what interesting things she's working on or for her to tell me something funny that happened, but that's not deep conversation or really spending time together, it's more ad hoc).  and frankly, by 9pm i'm frazzled and fried.

anyway, i just wanted to share what i do, as a homeschooler, when these feelings start to crowd my mind.

first, i smile to myself as i remember that there is no pressure.  remember we are thinking in terms of months or years, so nothing is urgent.  there is plenty of time to make any changes (three-years-ahead-rule).

then, i think that if i'm feeling like there are some gaps in her education, i should listen to my gut.  that doesn't mean i should necessarily change what i'm doing.  but if i'm feeling like i'm not paying attention to certain subjects that i feel might be necessary for my child's future, or are important and not getting the time, maybe it's time to rethink my priorities or make a plan for how to incorporate them.

just because they are nagging me doesn't mean it's urgent.  i take a few days, weeks, or months to simmer it.  i think about how important they are and how or if i want to add them in.

the last couple of evenings, i looked into different ivrit curricula.  as usual, i either wasn't impressed, or they didn't suit my specific needs, or i wasn't able to look at them closely enough.  which reminded me why i homeschool.  because this way i get to tailor the work precisely to the needs of the particular student and calibrate it to her skills, level, and my educational goals.  yippee yay.  i consulted my friend at the board of jewish ed.

as i'm writing this, though, i'm feeling that although i have a nagging sense of her ivrit being lacking and needing work, my heart is pulling me towards navi.  navi is so wonderful and so interesting.  why oh why am i not doing it?

hmm.  maybe i should do elazar and chana together?  or maybe 6 yrs apart is too much discrepancy for me to tailor it to their specific emotions and intellects?  or maybe a group navi story once a week would be awesome?

this summer, one shaleshudis, we were all sitting around the table and ari and i started discussing the facts of egla arufa.  then we said: what are the questions--go! and they shot off questions one after the other.  then i summarized what i vaguely remembered learning that addressed the questions, keeping it on target and short.  it was a lot of fun.  maybe i can do something like that for navi.  i really really really would like to do navi.

but if i say i really want to do it, but i don't do it, then do i really want it strongly enough?  time will tell.

oh, and a final thought--if i'm worrying about this stuff, i can pat myself on my back because chumash and rashi are going swimmingly :-D

navi

so chana's been in camp for 2 days now (comments from all her fellow campers, practically universally: "wow, you're homeschooled?  that's so awesome! (pause)  do you have friends?").  i've actually missed doing chumash with her.  which got me started on thinking about the parts i dread vs the parts i miss.  why do i (sometimes) dread it and what do i miss about it?

i miss spending an hour+ with her, giving her my concentrated attention.  i miss hearing about all the little things she's thinking about.  i miss her perspective on a rashi that i think is pshat and she asks a penetrating question that makes me realize although rashi may superficially seem like pshat, it isn't quite.  i miss watching her zip through translation and see how far she's come in her skills.  i miss learning torah with my daughter.

i don't miss her frustration and her anger when she is having trouble translating it and i feel like she can do it and she yells at me that she CANT find the shoresh and then, oh, it's amad.
on the other hand, navigating these conflicts makes me a more patient person (i have seen tremendous progress in myself how i handle this with chana from all the practice i got with sarah ;) and it's great practice for both of us to engage in the art of de-escalating conflict.  looking back, in addition to the usual pre-teen conflicts, i can point to chumash as a solid block of time that went on for months where we both got frustrated and had to learn to back off and regroup and re-attempt to communicate and both have things to work on and compromise and change behaviors and still have frustration and do it all over again.

(which does make me think about unschooling and the tantalizing promise that there won't be so much conflict around learning torah, and isn't torah supposed to be pleasant?  or maybe skills are drudgery and this is the way it goes? **cue jessie whining about how she's not sure about unschooling benefits vs skilldrilling benefits**)

anyway, i'm going to try to do chumash in the car with chana on the way up to my parents today.

but about my navi project.  as is frequent in homeschooling, i had an idea and it took on a fantasy life of its own about how we'd do navi every night and she'd love it.  ok, stop laughing.  true unschooling would be where she'd be interested and i would facilitate her learning.  but there is also an element of unschooling where "v'dibarta bam b'shivtecha b'veisecha," torah is constantly on my mind and we talk about it.  i then go back to the pesach seder and i hear many of my rebbeim echoing in my head: a pesach seder doesn't just happen without the parent thinking a great deal about where the child is at and what type of learning they'd find interesting.  from the kids' perspective, interesting things are happening and then they ask questions and then learning naturally emerges.  but from the parents' end, you need to think about what sort of things will trigger the questions and what approach you want to take to answer those questions.

so back to Summer of Navi.  i'd like it to be that when chana remembers doing navi, it was Really Interesting.  (hehe, jane austen capitalization for emphasis.)

tip #1
ask a child if s/he wants to learn when it's past his or her bedtime.

chana babysat for us last night when we went out to dinner (yay summer date nights! i look forward to that all year).  part of the charm of babysitting is that she can stay awake until we get home.  so around 10:30, just when i was thinking of telling her to go to bed, i asked her if she wanted to do navi.  i figured it was late and she wouldn't want to.  but she said yes.

we chilled on the couch and did the story of ehud.  i gave her the background of shoftim (the cycle of sinning, enemy, calling out to hashem, shofet) and she immediately said that many of us are not keeping torah now but we don't have an enemy.  i said we are in galus and she countered by saying we have israel.  (i did not bring up the midrash "revach tasimu ben eder l'eder" as she's only 11.)
anyway, she enjoyed it and next up is yericho.

i think in unschooling, one of the things that is nervewracking is that the classical way of doing things is very regular.  you do it every day or every week or a few times a week.  you drill and drill.  you plug away, day in and day out, year after year.
and in unschooling, things happen more in bursts.  or there is a lot of fallow time and productive waves.  there is a sudden burst of interest and it's very exciting.  then nothing for days or weeks.  and then it's exciting again.  everything you pursue is fueled by your interest.  your motivation carries you into it and through it.

so perhaps i should not be surprised that navi is not happening regularly, and focus on it's enjoyability factor plus that there is genuine learning going on.

how much does a 5th/6th grader cover?

let's see, we started shmos on may 15.  we started va'era the day after she went to great adventure, june 19.  we did 36 rashis in shmos, that she can read, with nekudos, and with knowing the general meaning when she reads the hebrew (she doesn't 100% know all the words exactly).  so it was about 3 wks to learn shmos plus a week of chazara.

chana has been complaining a lot about rashi recently.  maybe i'm working her too hard.  it seems like she is capable, though.  she also mentions that she dislikes it.

as always, i wonder if i would get better results waiting until high school and taking only 3 years to build up the skills instead of 12.   i was having a minor bout of anxiety about not teaching her math.  and what if she goes through high school with NO MATH. 
(until i calmed down and realized she would a. have no math except for that which she needs to figure out her financial affairs, which is fairly extensive or b. she would learn math when she got interested.)

anyway, it's been busy and we have not done any more navi.  one of the things i worry about with unschooling, too.  though the summer has barely even begun.  no need to worry yet.  i would let at least a few years go by before worry is warranted.

navi day 1

so today chana came home from a full day of work.  yup, she's working.  what else are homeschooled kids supposed to do?  we're going to the circus tomorrow so she can't work.  disappointing.  she was upset that she came home at 8:50, which was only 10 min til bedtime.  i told her she can stay up and chillax (heehee, i love that word) and i went out for a walk.  when i got home at 10, she told me she was going to sleep in a few minutes (we did double chumash yesterday when we found out she had an early call time this morning).  i asked her to say shemona esrei.  (by the way, in case you are wondering, she says the entire shemona esrei every night and has gotten fluent enough to say it in 6 minutes, which is the time it takes me to say it if i have kavana.  she still says it sitting down, and she still does not know what she is saying.)

then i decided it would be a great night to begin operation: navi.

so i asked her if she wanted a story from navi.  she was kind of reluctant, so i said, ok, never mind.  she decided she did want one. 

now one of the things that happens in chumash, and i wonder if it happens to all homeschoolers, is that when i officially sit down with my child and concentrate attention on her in the guise of doing schoolwork, she has extracted her attention from whatever it is she is doing all the rest of the day and suddenly realizes that she has my attention.  so she has many, many things to tell me.  all sorts of feelings and thoughts. 

sometimes i think that it is foolish to distract her from talking about what is in her heart for the secondary accomplishment of feeding her some information or skills, and that this blossoming of our relationship and of her communication is what homeschooling is all about.

anyway, on a night like tonight, when the littles are asleep and ari and sarah aren't home, and i have nothing to do but follow her lead, it's easy to do chumash or navi when she pauses, and for me to pause to hear what she has to say when she begins to talk.

i decided to start with ehud.  to do that i gave a little background of shoftim.  as i anticipated, she didn't know who was in charge after moshe.  she guessed his son? (she was quite surprised that it wasn't.) aharon?  she didn't know yehoshua (we are still in the beginning of shmos).

so i opened to ehud and said that eglon conquered yericho.  then i realized she didn't know the story of yericho.  we will perhaps do that next.  and she said her mind kept wandering.  which is how she gets when she's very tired and we try to learn.  we talked about his withered hand.  i wondered about google imaging it, but i figured that would probably be uncomfortable.  (actually, i just did and there aren't any good images.  ah, there we go: hand disfigurement.  maybe i'll show her tomorrow if she seems interested.)  her mind kept wandering.  so i said, ok, we'll pick it up tomorrow.  his withered hand is important to the story.  that got her all excited and she started begging.

a long time ago i read a chinuch newsletter, and the author quoted a gadol who said, "you should stop learning five minutes before the child is done."  i thought that was very deep.  because you want to leave the child wanting more, not leave the child wishing it was over and that s/he wanted to stop 5 minutes ago.  but it's tricky--how do you know before the child is finished?  it's something to think about.

anyway, begging for more is definitely an ideal way to stop, because it leaves her eager for the next time.  i didn't give in, and hopefully she'll be excited next time.

so in summary, i picked a story that i remember positively from my elementary school days.  i started at a time when i was extremely relaxed and had absolutely nothing else going on.  i went in with zero agenda except that she enjoy herself.  i stopped fairly quickly.  i think she enjoyed it and is excited for more. 

summer plans and navi

chumash is chugging along.  chana is planning to go to daycamp this summer.  she'd like to go to sleepaway camp, but it's expensive.  perhaps if she ends up being homeschooled for high school, we'll send her to sleepaway camp.  i know a lot of homeschoolers (myself included ;) get a little itchy about the socialization question.  but i can tell you, it's not the ability to socialize that is a problem.  and it's not the opportunity to socialize.  what does become problematic is 1. close intimate friends and 2. a large social group. 

as 6th grade approaches, there are a lot of social/physical/emotional changes going on for girls (and presumably for boys, but i have no idea yet).  girls who were friends for years switch allegiances and interests. 

i'm hoping chana will meet some local girls this summer.  she's old enough to walk to their houses by herself on shabbos.  it will be luck of the draw if she clicks with any girls and becomes close friends with them.  both she and sarah went to local daycamp at various points.  they had absolutely no trouble integrating, socializing, and making friends.  but they never clicked with anyone enough to keep the relationship going.

anyway, in past summers when chana chose not to go to camp, we kept our schedule the same as during the rest of the year, including chumash.  but she will probably not have enough time to devote to chumash.  though i would not like to drop it completely.  i have to figure out how to do chumash over the summer.

but a project i would really like to pick up is navi.  i really think chana would enjoy it.  however, i tried getting the little midrash says and it was both too difficult and too boring for her.  she didn't enjoy reading it.  i think she needs it to be more personalized.  i need to tell the story on exactly her level, and choose which stories to tell. 

this is going to take some preparation.  you may or may not know that i'm not a "prep" type homeschooler.  i sit down and whatever happens, happens.  but i think regarding navi, like the pesach seder, a little thought about

- where my child is at
- what approach would be enjoyable
- what specifically i'm going to teach and how

will go a long way.  i particularly would like to attempt an "unschooling" approach here, as a prototype for the future with the boys.  i don't have to worry about skills, because chana is getting skills via chumash.  i just want to make this really enjoyable.  i want her to love it.  i wonder if i'll be able to do that.  i'm imagining that i've been hired to teach a course.  that the child will remember and love for the rest of her life.

al pi darko

today during chumash time, i pulled out the condensed version of pesukim i culled from the megilla to make the bare bones of the story.  i read it to her and translated it. 

i realized that this was not the way to go this year.  i am reminded of my friend's wise words: any year that you have a baby, kiss that year of homeschooling good-bye.

so really, as aharon is only 9mo, anything we do this year is gravy ;-)

the problem with doing it so bare bones is that chana was ready to have a much more sophisticated level of detail in the story.  when i read the first 3 perakim to her in english, the details she focused on and the things she noticed and commented on and the questions she asked were fairly detailed and sophisticated.  since the entire word for word translation was a little TOO detailed and boring, i made the mistake of thinking we could whiz through what we did in previous years.  this was also boring, and not detailed enough. 

as usual, i am back to the idea that i don't use a curriculum or supplies because in the moment, i need to make decisions about how and what to teach. 

i think tomorrow i will take a block of time, with no agenda in terms of amount to cover, and just go through it at exactly her pace and with the amount of details that will be interesting to her.

i think she would greatly enjoy navi this way (after seeing our thwarted attempt at the little midrash says).  i am finding, though, that i just don't have the time/energy to throw another subject into the mix.  however, that might be a good idea for a summer project.  if i don't have her translate, and just do the story with her, we can do some navi this summer.

know thyself

we just finished shlishi.  these last 6 pesukim were break your teeth kind of pesukim.  earlier in the day, i asked chana to review rishon (i know i was saving it for friday, but we were both sitting around).  she asked to do it at 1.  i said ok (it was about 12).  at 10 to 1 i reminded her that we were working at 1.  at 5 to 1 i reminded her.  at 1 i said, let's go.  she asked for 2 min.

i said, no, right now.  she thought we had negotiated that she could ask for 2 min.  i said only if i wasn't ready at the time she agreed to.  she tried to negotiate for 2 min, but i stood firm. 

she asked if instead of us doing chazara, i could just do milim.  so i did that, and she didn't know most of them, but often read the phrase around it in order to give her context, so we got a decent review even though she doesn't know a bunch of the words and i am running out of zitsfleisch to keep doing chazara.  i wonder how much of noach she remembers. 

patar did show up a lot and she remembered it :-)

then we zipped through the rashis.  they are all pretty simple.  there are 9 we are doing.  then break until 7:30ish.  it didn't take too long to do the new pesukim, but they were tough.  i think tomorrow i'll have her review all of shlishi.  maybe friday she'll review sheni.

oh, and in case anyone was wondering, chana and i ran out of steam after reading 3 perakim in english of the megila.  i think she's at the age where it is too long and too many details.  i think what i will do is find the condensed version of the megila that i do with the pesukim cut out and read it with her.  either i'll read it to her (though she is not all that auditory) or she'll read it out loud and maybe i'll translate it or we'll figure something out.  stay tuned.

also, i decided, after sitting down to read the little midrash says with her again, that it had a lot of details that were boring her, and so between that and the midrashim, i'm not going to buy it.

i kind of had this fantasy that with unschooling i could just leave them lying around and my kids would just pick them up and read them like my homeschooling neighbor down the block has with her son.  but i think i have to know myself and know my kids.  just like i don't do science projects no matter how simple and interesting they look, and i don't do crafts, and my kids don't do computer sites (at least not the girls), i have to accept that the best method i have found that works with me and my kids is for me to directly interact with them and teach them the pshat so i can tell exactly what level they are on and how much they are ready for and exactly how to present it.  there is a lot of mutual feedback going on and i have never found a substitute, which is why people try to talk to me about curricula or workbooks and i just found that there is nothing more efficient or more interesting to me and the kids except for us to do it together where i present the material in the best way i can see for them at that exact moment.  i have the same thing with math; it's easier for me to write problems for them than for me to follow a book, because there are never exactly the problems to work on the level of my kid as many as i need or exactly what i think they need to be working on.  so too with chumash and navi and megilla, i think it's best when i interact with them.  darn, because i kind of wanted them to go off and find it themselves and do it themselves, but they really learn best by being taught.  so i have to put in energy and engage them and keep it interesting.

which means when i fall down on the job, they don't learn.  kind of like when they ask me questions and instead of knowing the answer and being able to explain it to them in exactly the level they need, i say, "i don't know."  that's when unschooling falls down on the job.  i can't be lazy about being a resource for them.

to buy or not to buy?

yesterday we finished chazara.  today i wanted to review shvi'i one more time, since there was a lot of hesitation and words that she asked for.  she objected, and by the time we got around to chumash she was excited about doing new pesukim and i forgot that i planned to have her review shvi'i again until she finished.  i let her choose however many new pesukim to do, and she did 7.

then i wanted to review all the rashis w/o nekudos.  we took a break and then she did all but 7 rashis.  we will convene to do the rest later.

i would still like to review shvi'i, but will have to figure out a way to present it to her that will be agreeable.

in other news, i've been contemplating the purchase of the little midrash says set for navi. (the family midrash says.)  first, i was disappointed that it only is for nevi'im rishonim.  but then i thought, let me not get ahead of myself.  right now chana doesn't know all that much of any navi.  let her do all nevi'im rishonim and then i can think about neviim achronim and ketuvim. 

i borrowed a volume from another homeschooler.  it is very readable. the problem is that there is a combination of pshat and midrash.  it is not clear that the midrashim are midrashim.  they are presented as part of the basic story.  although i don't object to the choices of midrashim (they seem to be the types i would choose, similar to rashis i choose), i do have a problem with them being enmeshed like that.  i like my students to be able to distinguish between pshat and not pshat. 

i have to weigh the extreme readability plus the fact that they very well might be picked up on their own (an advantage if i unschool the boys) against the fact that i am opposed to my kids learning without being able to distinguish between pshat and midrash.  (plus they are expensive: over $20 a volume, though if they were just pshat i would purchase them in a heartbeat as an investment.)

in other other news, i've started having chana recite birchas hatorah before we do chumash.  she only does the brachos, and not the mishnayos etc that come after them.