Another Month...

Time sure flies by, doesn't it? I can't believe it is August already!

The Boy is really enjoying his job training program. So far, he's worked on a resume and cover letter; learned about pay checks, deductions, and budgeting; learned about employee rights; gotten his Food Handler's certificate (with honors!); and worked a shift in the on-site cafe. Next week, he'll put in another shift in the cafe, and participate in mock interviews.

The Girl has been reading Ballet Shoes and the original Winnie the Pooh book. She's working, off and on, with her dog -- training does need to be more consistent! I also took her to meet a horse!

Learning about horse care

And a riding lesson

It was a good, and fun, experience for her. Since the junior derby league has pretty much fallen apart, I am trying to find other activities she will enjoy, because frankly, she needs to be a lot more active.

I've been working, and trying to figure out fall, when I also start working as a tutor for the Writing Center at the local university. Whole Foods is okay so far. The people are nice, and all that, but it's not my dream job.

I did apply for what seems like a fantastic opportunity, as a "Literacy Paraprofessional" for a small, local, elementary-middle school district. I would love the work -- helping kids with reading -- and it would be great experience for the teaching intern program I'm applying for in January. Fingers crossed!!!

I also watched Minimalism with the kids, and we are determined to own less stuff.

Math is going well! The Boy is working through The Great Courses Algebra 1 still, and loves the professor. He says the explanations are very clear. We're still using Jacobs Elementary Algebra as additional practice. I found a geometry course for him as well, to tackle next! The Girl is back to Math Mammoth to tighten up a few loose ends, and it is working really well.

The Girl decided also to really tackle nicer handwriting, and better spelling, so I am thrilled with that. They are both working on writing, with me bringing in new elements of the Brave Writer Lifestyle bit by bit.

We're reading both The Hobbit and Homecoming (Cynthia Voigt). Two very different books, but we are enjoying both! We're watching a variety of shows: Eureka, The Flash, Sherlock, and Arrow.

I have let exercise slide the last month. I just don't have time, or energy, or even the desire really, for the intensive workouts that group of friends is doing these days, as they prepare for a physique competition. So, to get going again, I'm looking at these workouts... simple, straightforward, doable. I've also really changed how I'm eating. I stopped counting anything... calories, protein grams, etc. I'm really working at eating more intuitively. Sometimes at first, this process has meant too much junky food, but I'm feeling a desire for more healthful fare again. I am really trying to learn to trust my body. And in this process, I have gained back about 4 pounds, which once would really have stressed me out. Now though, I'm okay.

Our Gulf Fritillary caterpillars are back! We didn't have any last year (the drought?), so we were excited to see them out on the passion flower vine.

I love our passion flowers....

So that's a sort of run down as to our current state of being. Things are going along, good here, challenging there. Still a good summer though! Tonight we're going to see a free (traveling) drive in movie... The Goonies, to be specific. I'm really looking forward to it, as is everyone else. We've gone to a free concert in the park; spent hours and hours at the beach, in and out of the water; spent hours laughing with friends; played a lot of board games; and just enjoyed time together!

Hope anyone who reads this is having a great summer!

This and That...

...Job News...
Ugh. So I posted last time about my job at the junior college being frozen due to decreased revenue. No summer work, and as it turns out, no fall work either. So I had to scramble to find something to keep ends meeting. I started working at Whole Foods a couple of weeks ago. At first, I wasn't sure if it would work out, even for the summer, as I was getting very minimal hours, as in about 10 each week. I applied, and interviewed, for a couple of other jobs, with no real success. Thankfully, today I had my first evaluation, which went very well, and I picked up a lot more hours for next week. By the time I got home from work today, they had called to see if I wanted more hours this week too, since they "really like" me. Of course I said YES! Phew!

I also have a job interview next Tuesday for an instructional assistant position in a middle school. If I can get that, and work as a tutor at the local university in the fall, I may be able to quit grocery again. We shall see!

...Job Training News...
I also mentioned that The Boy will be doing some job training soon. He'll be working in the café at the teen club, and will be learning interviewing skills, resumé building, etc. This program is free to club members, and comes with a $200 stipend at the end. He's got plans for that money already... buying an engine for his 1972 Chevy pickup... or perhaps rebuilding the engine it has, though option A seems more likely. He might also use a little of the money for barista training, so he can work on getting a job.

...In Our Homeschooling...
I've asked the kids to take on more responsibility for their schoolwork. I'm making a weekly assignment sheet, and they have from Saturday mornings to the following Friday at noon to get it all done. Of course, I am available for assistance, and we still read our book of the moment and watch documentaries together, but they will be doing their math, other reading, and writing largely on their own. We've also added audiobooks back into our circulation! We're going to finally finish the Percy Jackson series, then listen to The Lord of the Rings. I'm in the process of updating our Afternoon Basket page at last!

...Around the House, Kitchen, and Garden...
Since I'm working shifts that are all over the place, and M puts in 10-12 hour days, I'm working again on actually meal planning. We have a few vegetarian/plant-based dinners a week now, both for health and to save money, and then some meat a few times a week. I need to put my crockpot to good use!

We have a list of things to be done before mid-fall too, like tarring the family room roof to help with leaks, rototilling a big chunk of the backyard and amending the soil, etc. The Boy and The Girl will have to be my primary helpers. Decluttering continues, especially after we've started watching the documentary Minimalism.

We planted several tomatoes this year, along with plenty of peppers and onions, some squash, and some lemon cucumbers. All are thriving! The above-mentioned rototilling is part of our plan to put in a real garden next spring at long last.

...Random Pictures...
Just some recent and random pictures to wrap up this post!

Waiting for fireworks

A recent leaf drawing by The Girl

A trip to the beach on the fourth

Meet Ted, our new caterpillar!

Summer Stuff...

A run-down of what we've been up to, and a few pictures...

The kids won a month's free skating, so they've been skating once or twice a week.

We fixed all the bicycles, so there's been a lot of that too.

My bicycle

I've been working out 3-4 days a week, plus doing steep hill walks with my sister, and regular walks with The Girl and her dog.

We spent a lovely afternoon out at the coast...

The "creek" that runs out into the ocean

Dunes, beach grass, cypress, and waves

A giant dune that we scrambled up a dozen times, and rolled and jumped and slid and ran back down

Sandcastle in progress

You can see how pretty and sunny it was, and then we drove 45 minutes home into a thunder-and-hail storm. Just crazy!

We've been reading The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, and really, really enjoying it. We watched part one of Peter Jackson's movie version, and we all agreed... while we do love the LoTR movies, we just don't feel the same love for The Hobbit films. There was just far too much extra stuff added. ONE movie, that followed the book, would have been so much better.

Documentary watching has been half hit, half miss. We're enjoying our history selections, but haven't started science ones yet. That's okay. We will get there, and we've basically come to accept that we are year-round homeschoolers anyway.

Math is going pretty well. The Boy likes his Great Courses algebra lectures quite a lot. The Girl is making great progress through the Prodigy math game, where I set up problems several times a week to match her textbook.

The kids have taken to biking to the teen club, which saves me time... and gas. They visit it once or twice a week, and spend almost all their time in the art room. The Boy might be doing a job training program there soon, and they both want to take barista training.

I'm taking a very intensive Spanish course at the moment.... online. One semester of Spanish covered in only six weeks. So far, I've kept up. The Boy is teaching himself computer coding (I think javascript at the moment), and The Girl is working on her butterfly identification skills.

I'm also on the hunt for a job, as my position at the junior college has been frozen due to decreased revenue. I was supposed to start back next week, but that is not to be so at this time. I don't know about fall yet, though I am still hopeful. I may fall back on my grocery experience for the summer. Thankfully M is working a gazillion hours, so we're scraping by.

We're hoping to get out to the coast, and the river, soon. We have FOUR boogie boards now, so that will be fun! I plan on teaching the kids to grill -- they've been taking turns once a week to cook a dinner start to finish, and grilling in this weather would be nice.

And there's housework, decluttering, a recent return to fencing (The Boy), and gardening. I have tomatoes, squash, lemon cucumbers, peppers, and loads of herbs going now!

Hope anyone who reads this is having a lovely summer so far! Here are a couple of random pictures to wrap things up, then I'm off to make breakfast.

The local lake during my early morning trail run last week

A two hat kind of day

Unconcerned...

I use to worry about gaps in my children's educations, as if they were somehow in danger of falling into the abyss if they weren't exposed to everything; as if they were dependent on a vast knowledge of every historical event, every scientific principle; as if without a certain kind of education, they would be in danger of losing their grip on the world.

image courtesy of sellinginteriordesign.com

Certainly I read comforting articles like this one, and this one. But still I worried. Was I failing the children because I didn't make them memorize the kings and queens of England? Or the weight of each element?

My worry has definitely faded over the years as I have watched my children become capable of finding needed information themselves, of supporting their own interests. For example, The Girl loves animals. She searched out David Attenborough documentaries, found books at the library, delved into all of it and taught herself more about mammals, dinosaurs, and sea creatures, by the age of 13, than even I know at the advanced age of 43. The Boy knows cars from a distance—old and new—just from their silhouette. As for history and science, we have watched documentaries, read books, talked through the scientific method. We've studied art casually hung on the door of the fridge, listened to music that spans centuries, and enjoyed many period films.

I've seen over the years that if you teach a child to read [and do math] and you model for them how to find information, they become capable of doing just that, finding the information they need.

As for knowing every detail, I can honestly say that never in my life, since childhood, has anyone quizzed me about which president served when, or the order of the the periodic table of elements. To function, as a teacher at the college level mind you, I don't need to know who Marie Antoinette's sisters and brothers were, or in what year a specific battle took place.

I do think children, and adults, should be aware of the general flow of history and the basic tenets of science. They should have a basic familiarity with names, countries, events, and such. They should know who Napoleon was, or Hitler, and why we celebrate every July 4th. They should know where major countries are, how weather and seasons work, the basics of physics, and how plants grow. 

There are so many things overlooked when we focus on strictly an academic approach. As well as being able to write a decent essay and understand geometric proofs, they should be able to balance a checkbook, change a tire, cook a meal, sew on a button, do their own laundry. They should be able to follow their interests, and above all, learn how to find information. I'm not advocating a hands-off approach with learning, rather that perhaps priorities need to be reviewed and shifted on an occasional basis.

If my children graduate able to communicate easily both verbally and in writing, able to understand higher math (at least to a certain point, that being whatever level it is they need), can generally take care of themselves (life skills), and are able to search out the next pieces they need, I think I'll be comfortable. Learning doesn't stop when I stop explicitly teaching them. They will continue learning throughout their lifetimes, and surely that will allow them to fill in some "gaps". They'll leap, with my support and the support of others, across any abyss, or chasm.

image courtesy of apsalar.com

Monday Musings... Metamorphosis...

Susan Seddon Boulet, Dreamworlds, 1990

I think my approach to this blog is shifting. For years, I have put up planning posts, Wordless or Wordy Wednesday notes, Weekly Reports, and so on, and so forth... but it doesn't feel natural or necessary any more. Our approach to learning has shifted so much, and so many times, over the years, that I think it is time this blog shifts a little with it! We've tried classical schooling, Charlotte Mason, unschooling, unit studies, and more, and I like to think we have found our own little path through all of it.

I'll likely still share book lists, as I love compiling lists of books I hope to share with my children. I'll gladly post accomplishments and milestones, as well as challenges and struggles. But there might not be so much focus on what I'm planning in homeschooling, or what approach I might try, as all that has more or less slipped by the wayside.

Oh, we still do math. We still work on writing, spelling, grammar, and more. Just not in such a regimented way, or necessarily as separate from everything else. We also experience life together in so many ways that can't be quantified strictly as homeschooling. I know, I know... that sounds rather esoteric. But I just don't feel the need to separate things quite so much into categories of this is homeschooling, this is gardening, this is playing a board game for fun.

So how about I just post about life?

Here's what we're up to, just living...

With weather in the 80s, it is no wonder my thoughts keep drifting to summer! This picture, though older now, is to me the epitome of summer satisfaction with my children...

Weren't they cute?

Now they're all tall, and older, and all that, though they still love watermelon!

I finish with my secretarial position in a mere three weeks, and while I'll be working at the junior college this summer (starting the week before I finish secretarial work), it will be a lighter schedule, since much of it, at least half, is done from home—the grading, the email consultations/advice, etc. So I've been thinking of fun things to do with the leisure time...

Work on transforming our yard into a certified wildlife habitat

Go to one of my soon-to-be-former coworker's house to swim

Head out to the river for swimming, and the beach for bodyboarding

Take a picnic to Golden Gate Park, where we can visit numerous attractions, such as the Botanical Garden, the Garden of Shakespeare's Flowers, the Japanese Tea Garden, the Conservatory of Flowers, the Carousel, and of course, the California Academy of Sciences (a day's worth of activities on its own), and the DeYoung Museum, another day's worth on its own.

Walk across the Golden Gate Bridge, and visit Fort Point

Go to the zoo (we have two in the Bay Area to choose from!)

Read aloud to the kids... a lot

Play around with The Private Eye 

The Girl will keep playing on Prodigy all summer, and The Boy will be working on math a couple of times a week (still TabletClass)

Spend some time on my own in the hammock M put up in the backyard, reading, daydreaming...

The Girl spends too much time playing with her Kindle, so it will be nice when I am around more and can get her doing other things

The Boy has visited a couple of car shows lately, and is working on compiling videos for his YouTube channel. While I love that he enjoys filming/editing, he's spent a lot of time on the computer lately, and I'd like to curtail that a bit

The house is a mess, as always. When both parents work full time plus, and kids are home all day, that seems to happen. I really want to get a better system in place before fall!

Keep working out. I use our Bowflex and treadmill pretty regularly, as does The Boy, and we plan to keep that up

The Girl might try volleyball this summer, in addition to roller derby

We have a follow-up with the podiatry specialist scheduled June 13th for The Boy, as he is still having ankle pain