unschooling reading/writing

Aharon age 5 has been reading for over a year already.  He is playing a game called Roblox "design it" and you have to dress up and people vote for you.  They give you a category and then you search for clothes in that category and dress your character.  They give you five minutes to dress your character.  So roughly every five minutes for the past three hours, Aharon has asked me how to spell something.  (I believe he is searching for categories of clothing--he asked for "wings" three times and he probably knows how to spell it by now).  In the beginning he was pretty intense and kept shrieking that he only has 4 minutes left and I have to help him RIGHT NOW!!!! (Which I did.)  I just noticed that in the last half hour or so, his requests are growing more spaced.  He must be learning to spell the commonly used words he needs.

Unschooling School Day tomorrow

We are heading into a winter storm tomorrow.  Somebody posted:  

So excited for a free day with the kids due to expected snow storm tomorrow. A day free of back to back sports activities, homework assignments, of rushing to get up in the morning. A day free to relax, enjoy, and finally bake those chocolate cornflakes that I've been promising to make with them for over a month!

And all I keep thinking is, "That's our every day."  

Minus chocolate cornflakes.  I have no idea what those are.

Ah.  I don't think anyone in my house will eat those.  But hot chocolate with whipped cream...Yum.

January update

Elazar and I finished the second Pippi Longstocking book, which he loved.  Last night I tried reading The Time Machine.  He found the beginning boring, which I remember from when I was a kid finding it overly technical.  So tonight I will skip forward a bit to the time travel and see if that helps.  Otherwise I'm not sure what to do next.

The boys have been doing a lot of math.  I wish I paid more attention because I'm sure a lot of people wonder how unschooling works with math.  Let me say that they spend lots of time pondering math concepts.  I mean weeks.  Aharon (5) will ask about google or what comes after google over and over once a week for a month.  Jack (7) asks questions like "Is 3 hours 213 minutes?"  And I'll say, "No, an hour is 60 minutes."  And about twenty minutes later he'll say, "120 minutes is two hours?"

It's an amazing thing watching them play around with numbers and think deeply about it.  And all three of them are able to do basic arithmetic and real life word problems, that come up all the time, most days.

I've been paying attention to the kinds of words they ask me to spell for them during the day.


ELAZAR (9):
passage, what, suddenly, down (thought it was "a"), turn (thought it was e), stone (wasn't sure if has an "e" at the end), was (thought maybe "whas"? No, that's what), now (a?), new, spaghetti, pizzeria, dragEn? would.
What is after "h" in "hours"? I said "ou" and Jack said "r"
What's after "b" in "burger"
Wanted confirmation of spelling of outer star
ocean, kraken, cheetah, cowboy outfit (Aharon and Jack both helped him), somebody, roll, extreme, garden, vortex (we argued over whether or not there is a "T" at the end), missile

JACK (7):
Jack actually doesn't need a lot of spelling help and can mostly spell what he wants to write.
nation, version, count (I said "cou" and then Elazar took over), want, allowed

AHARON (5):
Is this how you spell "I'm recording"
How do you spell "do it"? I said "d-o. space. What do you think?" Elazar took over
"we are the goblins", lego universe (found it when I was up to r), treehouse tycoon (found it after treeh), get eaten
eaten
eaten a 3rd time and I said,  "You know how," and he did, "come in,"
"youtube tycoon.  I know how to spell tycoon"

So you can see that they spend a lot of time helping each other out and that I don't go to them to practice but they are finding that they want to know things because they are searching for games or videos.

unschooling reading and spelling

I went to sleep pretty late last night (watched Blazing Saddles discussing Civil Rights history with Chana) and this morning I was still asleep at 8:50, when Elazar cracked open the door to see if I was awake.  I beckoned him over for a snuggle.  He snuggled into me and said, "How do you spell 'does'?"

Other words he asked today: stagger, device, to do, down, passage.  He's making signs in Minecraft.  

Other boys asked about "to" and "too."  They ask me how to spell things all day long.  I love it.

I was about to press "publish" when Jack said, "Mommy, what does B-O-O-G-E-R-S" spell?"

Gotta Make Some Choices

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is finished.  Fantastic book.  We need a new one!  Great Brain and Rats of Nimh were unsuccessful.  No idea what to read next.  Help!!

And we skipped the rest of cellular respiration AND photosynthesis and moved on to cellular division.  That seems to be working.

Also, I downloaded The Evolution of Physics by Albert Einstein and we read the intro.  Looks like one of those things that in theory we might read, but in practice we might end up reading only a sampling of.

not yet halfway through the year update

Elazar really enjoyed Matilda by Roald Dahl after Pippi Longstocking.  So that was great.  Next we moved on to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang by Ian Fleming, which is surprisingly relatable considering it's a couple of generations old.

Last night, suddenly Bio became boring.  This is very sad, because until now, Chana had really been loving it.  We were doing it slowly, but it was fascinating.  And I have to agree with her.  The chapter was indeed boring.  She said no more ATP; she doesn't care how it's made; she's done.

The question is whether to skip this chapter (and probably skim photosynthesis) or to find a new book.  I gathered a couple of leads that I now have to check out.  This is the kind of thing where the right book or curriculum really makes a difference.  I think we fell off the whole math wagon from not finding a great curriculum, which is a pity, because she was enjoying math.

The truth is, though, that just going to two classes in school is seriously sucking all of her energy and she doesn't really have much left over to learn.  Since switching to learning after 9 or 10pm, she's been more energetic and eager but I am thoroughly zonked.  So even though I would love to learn more Navi with her and do math with her and read more frequently, we are at the moment sticking to Science (and now we are back to reading the Stranger and hopefully will finish that up before reattempting Science.

The boys are pretty happy, asking me how to spell things pretty much all day long.  Not a huge interest in Judaics, though things come up in discussion.

A friend of mine is looking at high schools for her son now, and thinking about sending him vs. keeping him home.  She mentioned at this point, her second son (in 6th grade) is planning to stay home for high school.  Unless Elazar is interested in sports or loses his social group, I suspect he will do better at home for high school, too.  I told her that I will probably freak out around his bar mitzva time, but to please remind me that my assessment of him at age 9 is that he will probably blossom between age 15-18.  Please remind me of this when I am freaking out the year before and of his bar mitzva.

Chinuch in the Teen Years

My boys still refuse to wear tzitzis.  They aren't comfortable; they scorn even the soft cotton ones.  I've been thinking a lot, having been through the teen years with my oldest and now going through them with my second.  And it's really changing how I'm thinking about parenting the boys in their teen years.

I was talking to a dear friend of mine who parented 5 wonderful boys and her sixth is a girl.  As I was talking to her about girl teenagedom and mother-daughter relationships, she said to me that it's too bad she'll have gained all this knowledge from parenting her daughter through her teen years and then she won't have another girl to parent with the benefit of this knowledge.

I half joked: "Take it from me--it doesn't help."  But that's not strictly true.  Some of the lessons I learned with Sarah: how to de-escalate during conflict, how to take a step back, take a deep breath, how to shift my tone and my body language out of "bristling" and into "listening" mode; how to assume that if they say I'm yelling at them or if my tone is aggressive, then to dial it down, whether I think I've been aggressive or not; how to cool down from an encounter and then later, when we are more calm, ask her to please explain her position and really, really try to listen without explaining where I'm coming from-- all of these things have only been helpful as I stumble through these years with the next teenager.  However, with each child being so different, and the challenges being so very, very different, I am often just as much in the dark now as I was the first time.

I simultaneously grapple with major issues (as people always used to say, which I never really understood, "little people, little problems; big people, big problems"), while I am also very immersed in little people and the drudgery of caretaking.  I have the experience of parenting littles while having an awareness that within the decade, the boundless desire for them to be in my personal space and have me share their lives is going to shift into the desire to separate from me, to individuate, to reject me, my values, and everything I stand for in clarification of where they stand on things.

This has gotten me thinking about a lot of things that I never realized would be an issue with boys.  Growing up a girl and feeling the burden of halachic modest dress and later covering hair, I never realized that boys grapple with minyan, waking up for shema, wearing tzitzis and covering their heads all the time.

When I was a young and naive parent, I assumed that at bar and bat mitzva, my child would joyfully pick up the "עול מלכות שמים" the yoke of mitzvos.  My daughters would dress with skirts to knees and shirts to elbows, and would daven every day and make brachos before and after meals, and their newly bursting intellects would enjoy the wondrous Torah that we would learn together.

Well.  Suffice it to say, reality is different.  Even with Chana's (not so) recent transfer into full nocturnal, along with recent studies that say that teenagers should start school not before 10am made me realize that in a few years I'll be heading into a monumental battle, especially with my middle son, who has naturally preferred a 10pm-10am sleep schedule since he was two years old.

I've observed teens AND adults fully grown, those who attend minyan regularly and those who don't.  Of the minyan go-ers, some tell me their parents instilled it in them, and some tell me they came to it themselves.  Of the non-minyan go-ers, a huge percentage tell me that their parents pushed and annoyed them.

Personally, I feel that telling my teenager what to do is generally an exercise in futility, frustration, and conflict. (To a large degree I feel that telling any of my children what to do tends to devolve into that, which perhaps is why I gravitated towards unschooling, which has a different approach to that whole issue.)  However, I also feel strongly that the internet exerts a very strong pull on the concept of identity and values, and although my teens are smart and skilled at analysis and tend to make good decisions, I want our family values and our Torah and Judaism to be one of the voices in the conversation.  As I may have mentioned before, when I consulted with my Rabbi, he suggested that I take opportunities to share my thoughts and values in conversation, and stay away from nagging and being annoying.

More recently, I've been thinking about my own upbringing.  I was brought up "Modern Orthodox," and when I stopped wearing shorts and began covering my hair when I got married, I crossed over into the land of "crazy""strict" according to my parents, even though I had studied the halachos in school and considered them to be as binding as the laws of Shabbos and kosher that I had grown up keeping.

Modesty was something my mother cared about in terms of the spirit of it, not in terms of halacha.  We wore shorts to midthigh and went swimming in bathing suits; very tight shirts and dresses were our battlegrounds and it had nothing to do with halacha.  My mother rarely told me to daven; davening was between me and God.  Brachos were between me and God.  Everything was between me and God.  I decided what I wanted to keep and how much and what I really thought.  My parents didn't have much opinion except being extremely supportive of my education and my Torah study.

My approach until now, which was to be mechanech my children to keep the Torah so that they will be keeping Torah halachically when bar or bat mitzva, did not take into account the complexity of teens wanting to figure out for themselves who they are and where they stand.  It didn't account for the fact that they often use their parents as a safe space to push against as they discover themselves, as the book Untangled describes with a pool metaphor--we are the walls of the pool and we need to be stable and be there as they push against us to swim, and come back to us to take a rest and breathe, and push against to go swim again.

And inserting myself into the ruminations doesn't seem to be useful.  If a person is grappling about halacha and God and values and restrictions and meaning, isn't the grappling simply about that person thinking about those issues?  What possible good can it have to throw into the mix their complex and conflicted relationship with their superego/parent?  Waking up for minyan and going to shul should be about the question of tefila and being part of the tzibbur; is it a value to have the person also grappling about whether this act is going to please or annoy the parent?

(One might say that there is a value in doing things to please the parent, as per Yosef Hatzadik seeing the image of his father and refraining from adultery with the wife of Potifar.  I don't disagree with that.  But it does seem to me that me pushing for certain halacha observance during the teen years does muddy and cloud their thinking and grappling unnecessarily.  They get distracted thinking about halacha observance vis-a-vis parental opinion instead of it just being about their values.)