Homeschool, and Sleep.
Feb. 4th, 2015 10:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
altarflameI am making slow but steady progress on so many areas of my life. Two things I feel especially good about are Jake and Elise's education, and sleep.
Homeschooling Jake and Elise
Every day we rotate, and Jake either does a creative writing prompt, a free journaling page, or pages is his cursive handwriting workbook. The only thing he really seemed to have a deficit in, in school, was the tolerance to do all the writing fast enough/without misery. I like that the heavy load there has made him super tolerant of/relieved by just a page of solid writing per day, here.
He also does some fill-in pages, daily, from a rotation of a 3rd grade BrainQuest workbook (many subjects, fun presentation), and a couple of Kumon math books - mostly multiplication, lately. 3rd part of his daily rotation is a big National Geographic geology/rock activity book, and Adventure Time Madlibs. He's self directed enough that sometimes he does all of his "seat work" independently while I work with Elise or am out running an errand (on the days Grant's working from home), and just presents me with a stack of things to check when I get back to him.
Elise has print handwriting work that helps her to learn more sight words and copy sentences, as well as beginning cursive (as in, letters) practice, 1st grade Starfall workbooks, and 1st grade phonics and 2nd grade math Kumon. She also does 2nd grade BrainQuest, though that is a lot more effort for her than Jake and requires a lot of assistance.
The main priority Elise and I try to do every single day, though, is get out a big stack of picture books - a few for me to read to her, and one for her to read to me. The "her reading to me" is incredibly tedious and time consuming, as she painstakingly sounds things out one word at a time, and/or I remind her of little phonics rules and we point out sight words. We also double back to make sense of the entire sentence she just pushed through, which usually involves sounding half the words out again, but we do it until she can get through the whole paragraph/page in one go. Something like, "Brother Bear," or "Are You My Mother?" will end up taking AT LEAST a full half hour for her to get through, but I am unswervingly patient and positive, even if I have to go stand in the locked bathroom and take a few deep breaths afterward. Her enthusiasm is awesome - she really does not get tired of it or need nagging at all. She wants to read, bad. And she's made some real progress - the list of words she reads automatically with no hesitation has almost tripled, so that we've been moving up to "Fancy Nancy" and "If You Give a Pig a Pancake" type books, these past two weeks. She's also begun to really understand suffixes, so that for instance once she sees "fish" (the verb), she can figure out "fished," and "fishing," with only brief pauses. The most frustrating part of it for me are the times she is clearly guessing what a word is based on either the first letter or the accompanying picture, and the guess makes zero sense ("chair" when the word is "bench," just because she sees the character sitting would be an example), but whatevs. She also will get used to one word, then get used to a similar word and substitute it for the first word until she gets used to it being the first word again... we read a lot of "Beginning reader" things that heavily feature the same words over and over, so for instance if one has a lot of "like," "liked," and "liking," that will be what she continuously says when we switch to one that heavily features "look," "looked," and "looking." Then once she gets used to look, and we see like again, she's saying look. *shrug*
Jake has Minecraft and PBSKids.org's Design Squad (both highly recommended) for downtimes, though he also draws a lot of comics. Elise has Reading Eggs and old episodes of Between the Lions, though she also spends a lot of time playing with (My Little) ponies. I usually get a chance to read to Harry Potter to Jake, too, during the school day, so then between all the reading to both of them I don't feel bad sending them to bed after tooth brushing and a hug at night, and can just concentrate on Isaac.
We're also getting ready to start a garden, since it's a good planting time where we live.
The big thing, though, the best thing that I feel is the most important part of our little homeschool, is our walks.
Every day I take them out and we just walk for at least half an hour. I go at their pace and I stop every single time they want to stop and answer every single question they ask. Sometimes we take pictures, or sit for awhile, or pet a stray cat. The bring home a ton of little souvenirs (flowers, rocks, leaves, sticks, etc) Every day we get home with things to research on the computer, and/or go look at books about. Some walk highlights from the past week include:
-dissecting fallen pods, collecting seeds, and making bean bags out of them
-sitting in the outdoor chapel of a church and talking for almost an hour about ways the universe could have come to be, and what constitutes "sacred" for different people
-sitting in a mango grove, watching the stars come out, then coming home to get out a kids' book on constellations (that Annie used to be obsessed with)
-coming home to watch videos of (respectively) scallops running along the ocean floor, clams burrowing under the sand, oysters flipping upside down, how pearls are made, how pearls are harvested, and the differences between real and fake pearls.
-making up scary stories about why a local apartment complex is now deserted
-taking pictures of a swing set design we'd like to replicate in our yard
-random explanations of all kinds of stuff they'd just not known before, from Salvation Army donation bins and "patio" being another word for "porch," to how traffic lights are timed and the way bulk pick-up differs from regular trash collection in our neighborhood.
They're just SO INTO these walks, can't wait to head out every day, and want to know everything. I love it. I wonder if/when we'll hit a point where they can't keep each being so unique.
As for sleep -
I realized awhile back that the biggest problem I have re: time management is that I'm sometimes too tired to be effective during the day, and then can't sleep at night, repeat as a vicious eternal cycle. I've always been a bit of an insomniac, even as a little kid. It's a glaring unsustainable thing for the past couple of years, though - I'm always playing catch up, and periodically an absolute mess, because I HAVE to get up early and then stay up since we've had some kids in school. It's not like when our lives as a family ran from 11am til 11pm, so it was doable for me to then stay up til 2 or 3 nightly - I also used to be able to nap with babies/toddlers semi-regularly, during the day, which is a long gone possibility. I was able to live on very little sleep as a teenager and I did great in my early 20s with babies-preschoolers, but now I feel like I'm dying, like it isn't funny, like people just don't understand how hard this is, etc etc very dramatic misery of napless life. My alarm goes off and I feel TERRIBLE. And like it's impossible to somehow be presentable for teachers at drop offs, or doctors/dentists/counselors/coaches/etc, from early until late.
So...finally... I've started actually making an effort to do things that help people to sleep and, lo and behold, it's actually helping me to sleep. I still can't just lie down and be unconscious, like Grant, but I'm not tossing and turning all night, getting up at 2 to spend an hour in the main part of the house, etc, either.
It isn't rocket science or anything, I'm basically just not looking at screens for awhile before I lie down, dimming lights for awhile before I go to bed, not bringing my phone to bed, taking a few minutes to stretch and/or have chamomile tea before I lie down...it's all variations on things I tried half heartedly or inconsistently, one at a time, years ago, and have been ranting make no difference for me ever since. I've read a lot recently, though, about melatonin production and health - and mental health - and I really think many of us hugely underestimate what an effect it has on our state of mind to be surrounded by and staring at electric light into the wee hours, night after night... there are neurologists out there making strong cases for it being a huge contributor to everything from depression to diabetes. I was thinking about how late 9pm feels when we're camping, and how incredibly sleepy I get when I'm driving home as the sun sets, and how off everybody initially is when we're adjusting to the time changing, and something just clicked in my head in a new way and all of a sudden I could BELIEVE this science, rather than just shrugging it off as something I know "they say," or whatever.
So yeah, I'm acting like rest is a priority (can you imagine?) and even lighting candles in my room and bathroom an hour before bed some nights, as the only light source, or just taking 15 minutes and a yoga mat to stretch and deep breathe in the darkness, near where Grant is already out in the bed.
It isn't foolproof but it's also WILD how different it feels, vs stumbling straight from the computer to the bed. I'm trying to undo/reframe the way I've internalized not being able to sleep at night as part of my identity, because it is a useless and counterproductive way to identify that makes EVERY SINGLE PART OF MY LIFE HARDER... I even listened to Jeff Bridges' super-weird-but-kind-of-awesome new "Sleep Tapes," one night. And I am someone who, even sleepy, even in darkness with my eyes shut, made it through the entirety of that still awake. But dammit, it was relaxing, and I dozed off soon after! Not, you know, 4 hours later like I might have if I'd been on the tumblr app in bed.
Basically, there is a problem I seem to have, compared to a lot of people, with being able to rest when I should and be on a decent schedule, but I don't need to (and definitely have been) hugely compounding it with changeable behaviors.
Also - even when totally awake/alert - I think it's just ridiculous how I feel myself decompressing and becoming aware of my body and surroundings, when I completely unplug and turn the lights down. It really underlies how rare unplugging is, in a way that's jarring. Being alone with my thoughts and no distractions, for the first time all day, right as I lie down, is apparently not the way to get any rest :p Having some time alone with my thoughts BEFORE I lie down makes a big difference to what happens, though, when I DO get into bed.
I think I used to count the hours I had left til I had to get up, and think about how dead on my feet tired I already was, and feel I just didn't have time or resources to spare for things like launching a big bedtime routine that might involve getting out a mat and stretching with meditation in the dark. Or I'd have so much school studying to do and want to make a list for the next day, so how could I just turn the lights down and do nothing for an hour - did not compute! But taking 15 min-an hour to prepare for bed in these ways ends up being waaaay more efficient than just going straight to bed, slowly becoming more and more alert, gradually developing restless legs, eventually getting my phone down out of the windowsill, waking up in a desperate haze 3 hours after I fell asleep, aaaaaand so forth.
So. That's good. This is way more in tune with reality and way less anxiety driven.
Homeschooling Jake and Elise
Every day we rotate, and Jake either does a creative writing prompt, a free journaling page, or pages is his cursive handwriting workbook. The only thing he really seemed to have a deficit in, in school, was the tolerance to do all the writing fast enough/without misery. I like that the heavy load there has made him super tolerant of/relieved by just a page of solid writing per day, here.
He also does some fill-in pages, daily, from a rotation of a 3rd grade BrainQuest workbook (many subjects, fun presentation), and a couple of Kumon math books - mostly multiplication, lately. 3rd part of his daily rotation is a big National Geographic geology/rock activity book, and Adventure Time Madlibs. He's self directed enough that sometimes he does all of his "seat work" independently while I work with Elise or am out running an errand (on the days Grant's working from home), and just presents me with a stack of things to check when I get back to him.
Elise has print handwriting work that helps her to learn more sight words and copy sentences, as well as beginning cursive (as in, letters) practice, 1st grade Starfall workbooks, and 1st grade phonics and 2nd grade math Kumon. She also does 2nd grade BrainQuest, though that is a lot more effort for her than Jake and requires a lot of assistance.
The main priority Elise and I try to do every single day, though, is get out a big stack of picture books - a few for me to read to her, and one for her to read to me. The "her reading to me" is incredibly tedious and time consuming, as she painstakingly sounds things out one word at a time, and/or I remind her of little phonics rules and we point out sight words. We also double back to make sense of the entire sentence she just pushed through, which usually involves sounding half the words out again, but we do it until she can get through the whole paragraph/page in one go. Something like, "Brother Bear," or "Are You My Mother?" will end up taking AT LEAST a full half hour for her to get through, but I am unswervingly patient and positive, even if I have to go stand in the locked bathroom and take a few deep breaths afterward. Her enthusiasm is awesome - she really does not get tired of it or need nagging at all. She wants to read, bad. And she's made some real progress - the list of words she reads automatically with no hesitation has almost tripled, so that we've been moving up to "Fancy Nancy" and "If You Give a Pig a Pancake" type books, these past two weeks. She's also begun to really understand suffixes, so that for instance once she sees "fish" (the verb), she can figure out "fished," and "fishing," with only brief pauses. The most frustrating part of it for me are the times she is clearly guessing what a word is based on either the first letter or the accompanying picture, and the guess makes zero sense ("chair" when the word is "bench," just because she sees the character sitting would be an example), but whatevs. She also will get used to one word, then get used to a similar word and substitute it for the first word until she gets used to it being the first word again... we read a lot of "Beginning reader" things that heavily feature the same words over and over, so for instance if one has a lot of "like," "liked," and "liking," that will be what she continuously says when we switch to one that heavily features "look," "looked," and "looking." Then once she gets used to look, and we see like again, she's saying look. *shrug*
Jake has Minecraft and PBSKids.org's Design Squad (both highly recommended) for downtimes, though he also draws a lot of comics. Elise has Reading Eggs and old episodes of Between the Lions, though she also spends a lot of time playing with (My Little) ponies. I usually get a chance to read to Harry Potter to Jake, too, during the school day, so then between all the reading to both of them I don't feel bad sending them to bed after tooth brushing and a hug at night, and can just concentrate on Isaac.
We're also getting ready to start a garden, since it's a good planting time where we live.
The big thing, though, the best thing that I feel is the most important part of our little homeschool, is our walks.
Every day I take them out and we just walk for at least half an hour. I go at their pace and I stop every single time they want to stop and answer every single question they ask. Sometimes we take pictures, or sit for awhile, or pet a stray cat. The bring home a ton of little souvenirs (flowers, rocks, leaves, sticks, etc) Every day we get home with things to research on the computer, and/or go look at books about. Some walk highlights from the past week include:
-dissecting fallen pods, collecting seeds, and making bean bags out of them
-sitting in the outdoor chapel of a church and talking for almost an hour about ways the universe could have come to be, and what constitutes "sacred" for different people
-sitting in a mango grove, watching the stars come out, then coming home to get out a kids' book on constellations (that Annie used to be obsessed with)
-coming home to watch videos of (respectively) scallops running along the ocean floor, clams burrowing under the sand, oysters flipping upside down, how pearls are made, how pearls are harvested, and the differences between real and fake pearls.
-making up scary stories about why a local apartment complex is now deserted
-taking pictures of a swing set design we'd like to replicate in our yard
-random explanations of all kinds of stuff they'd just not known before, from Salvation Army donation bins and "patio" being another word for "porch," to how traffic lights are timed and the way bulk pick-up differs from regular trash collection in our neighborhood.
They're just SO INTO these walks, can't wait to head out every day, and want to know everything. I love it. I wonder if/when we'll hit a point where they can't keep each being so unique.
As for sleep -
I realized awhile back that the biggest problem I have re: time management is that I'm sometimes too tired to be effective during the day, and then can't sleep at night, repeat as a vicious eternal cycle. I've always been a bit of an insomniac, even as a little kid. It's a glaring unsustainable thing for the past couple of years, though - I'm always playing catch up, and periodically an absolute mess, because I HAVE to get up early and then stay up since we've had some kids in school. It's not like when our lives as a family ran from 11am til 11pm, so it was doable for me to then stay up til 2 or 3 nightly - I also used to be able to nap with babies/toddlers semi-regularly, during the day, which is a long gone possibility. I was able to live on very little sleep as a teenager and I did great in my early 20s with babies-preschoolers, but now I feel like I'm dying, like it isn't funny, like people just don't understand how hard this is, etc etc very dramatic misery of napless life. My alarm goes off and I feel TERRIBLE. And like it's impossible to somehow be presentable for teachers at drop offs, or doctors/dentists/counselors/coaches/etc, from early until late.
So...finally... I've started actually making an effort to do things that help people to sleep and, lo and behold, it's actually helping me to sleep. I still can't just lie down and be unconscious, like Grant, but I'm not tossing and turning all night, getting up at 2 to spend an hour in the main part of the house, etc, either.
It isn't rocket science or anything, I'm basically just not looking at screens for awhile before I lie down, dimming lights for awhile before I go to bed, not bringing my phone to bed, taking a few minutes to stretch and/or have chamomile tea before I lie down...it's all variations on things I tried half heartedly or inconsistently, one at a time, years ago, and have been ranting make no difference for me ever since. I've read a lot recently, though, about melatonin production and health - and mental health - and I really think many of us hugely underestimate what an effect it has on our state of mind to be surrounded by and staring at electric light into the wee hours, night after night... there are neurologists out there making strong cases for it being a huge contributor to everything from depression to diabetes. I was thinking about how late 9pm feels when we're camping, and how incredibly sleepy I get when I'm driving home as the sun sets, and how off everybody initially is when we're adjusting to the time changing, and something just clicked in my head in a new way and all of a sudden I could BELIEVE this science, rather than just shrugging it off as something I know "they say," or whatever.
So yeah, I'm acting like rest is a priority (can you imagine?) and even lighting candles in my room and bathroom an hour before bed some nights, as the only light source, or just taking 15 minutes and a yoga mat to stretch and deep breathe in the darkness, near where Grant is already out in the bed.
It isn't foolproof but it's also WILD how different it feels, vs stumbling straight from the computer to the bed. I'm trying to undo/reframe the way I've internalized not being able to sleep at night as part of my identity, because it is a useless and counterproductive way to identify that makes EVERY SINGLE PART OF MY LIFE HARDER... I even listened to Jeff Bridges' super-weird-but-kind-of-awesome new "Sleep Tapes," one night. And I am someone who, even sleepy, even in darkness with my eyes shut, made it through the entirety of that still awake. But dammit, it was relaxing, and I dozed off soon after! Not, you know, 4 hours later like I might have if I'd been on the tumblr app in bed.
Basically, there is a problem I seem to have, compared to a lot of people, with being able to rest when I should and be on a decent schedule, but I don't need to (and definitely have been) hugely compounding it with changeable behaviors.
Also - even when totally awake/alert - I think it's just ridiculous how I feel myself decompressing and becoming aware of my body and surroundings, when I completely unplug and turn the lights down. It really underlies how rare unplugging is, in a way that's jarring. Being alone with my thoughts and no distractions, for the first time all day, right as I lie down, is apparently not the way to get any rest :p Having some time alone with my thoughts BEFORE I lie down makes a big difference to what happens, though, when I DO get into bed.
I think I used to count the hours I had left til I had to get up, and think about how dead on my feet tired I already was, and feel I just didn't have time or resources to spare for things like launching a big bedtime routine that might involve getting out a mat and stretching with meditation in the dark. Or I'd have so much school studying to do and want to make a list for the next day, so how could I just turn the lights down and do nothing for an hour - did not compute! But taking 15 min-an hour to prepare for bed in these ways ends up being waaaay more efficient than just going straight to bed, slowly becoming more and more alert, gradually developing restless legs, eventually getting my phone down out of the windowsill, waking up in a desperate haze 3 hours after I fell asleep, aaaaaand so forth.
So. That's good. This is way more in tune with reality and way less anxiety driven.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2015-02-04 07:46 pm (UTC)I hesitate to suggest this, since putting the computer away is by far better, but if you have to be on it at night, have you seen this? https://justgetflux.com/ Paul wears goofy orange sunglasses when he works at night. I have another LJ friend that battles insomnia (and who uses the thing above), and her current experiment is getting more exercise every day. She has a sitting desk cycle thing to get exercise while homeschooling. She thinks it helps.
no subject
Date: 2015-02-05 07:56 pm (UTC)I was newly prioritizing 30 minutes of walking for exercise every day before I started walking with Jake and Elise. Walks with them are waaaaay more leisurely, but I don't always manage to do both.
no subject
Date: 2015-02-06 05:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-02-10 12:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-02-04 08:55 pm (UTC)Those kids of yours are so lucky and you are lucky also for the awesome bonding time homeschooling has provided. Those walks sound amazing. I would've loved that when I was a kid. Or even now, really.
no subject
Date: 2015-02-05 07:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-02-05 03:49 am (UTC)You have the most awesome patience with Elise's reading. And those walks you guys do sound brilliant.
no subject
Date: 2015-02-05 07:59 pm (UTC)Thank you.
no subject
Date: 2015-02-05 09:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-02-05 08:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-02-06 08:13 pm (UTC)I've been struggling with the whole bedtime/screen time issue for myself and the girls for months now. Everyone is getting harder and harder to rouse in the mornings and Zoe and Luci both complain of not being able to go to sleep at night. A lot of it is, I'm sure, that they are all moving into teenage sleep patterns. But I've also gotten terribly lax about screen time. Everyone is on their phones in bed, including me. You have inspired me to crack down on this and be more intentional about bedtime routines for all of us.
no subject
Date: 2015-02-09 10:40 pm (UTC)Ananda and Jake are my only kids who ever go to bed with lit screens in hand - she has an iPhone and he has a Nook that's used strictly as an ereader, mainly because we'd burned through a dozen book lights and I was done taping books that had fallen down his bed's cracks and edges.
Something I've talked about at length with Isaac, can FEEL is true for me, and may also impact you, is research that shows smart phone use increases anxiety. It's worth thinking about. Aaron seems so mature to me for NOT wanting one/understanding he'd be instantly addicted.
Missed reading you
Date: 2015-02-08 11:24 pm (UTC)I haven't been on LJ in forever. I used to read you all the time. Hope things are going well for you.
Keila
Re: Missed reading you
Date: 2015-02-09 10:34 pm (UTC)