Preschool at Home: 101 Ideas (Part 1)

1. Fingerpaint.
2. Catch butterflies with a net, observe, and release.
3. Make edible bracelets by stringing Fruit Loops cereal onto plastic cord.
4. Do simple yoga poses with your kid, like Dog, Tree, or Boat Pose. Here’s Amelie doing Boat and Dog. (Pictures courtesy of Grandma & Grandpa.)


5. Make your own playdough: Mix 2 cups flour, 1 cup salt, and 4 tsp cream of tartar into a cooking pot. In a bowl, add 4 tsp of cooking oil and 4 drops of food coloring to 2 cups of water. Pour the liquid into the pot. Cook on medium heat, stirring constantly, until it looks like mashed potatoes. Cool the dough and knead until smooth.
6. Bake your favorite low-sugar muffins.
7. Sing “The Itsy Bitsy Spider,” with hand movements.
8. Spread some glue on paper and drizzle with sand to make sand art.
9. Plant seedlings.
10. Fill plastic eggs with rice (halfway full) and tape shut to make shakers.
11. Make mini pizzas with premade dough, sauce, and cheese.
12. Make sun tea.
13. Make handprints in paint.
14. Create a scavenger hunt for things in nature like pinecones, feathers, and leaves.
15. Make a fort out of sofa cushions and sheets.
16. Paint rocks with washable paint.
17. Give washable toys a “bath” outside with a small bucket, water, sponge, and lots of bubbles.
18. Make masks (and decorate them) with paper plates and string.
19. Make sunprints! Place a fern, flower, or other object on sunprint paper and set in the sun briefly. Rinse with water and viola - a beautiful image appears. You'll need a sunprint kit; find one here.
20. Have a letter of the day and find things/words that begin with that letter.
21. Put up a birdfeeder.
22. Read books about the alphabet.
23. Trace your child’s body on a huge sheet of paper, and have your kid color it in with clothes, a face, or anything.
24. Go to the library and browse for picture books.
25. Make fun-shaped mini sandwiches with cookie cutters.
26. Sing “Ring Around the Rosy,” circling and falling together.
27. Read books about numbers.
28. Put on a 70’s dance song and rock out together.
29. Go into a dark place like a fort or closet and read books with a flashlight. (Amelie loves a good, dark closet these days.)
30. Play in the sand.
31. Make up a song about the sun.
32. Pick wildflowers.
33. Press and dry your flowers in a heavy book. Use them for art projects later.

Unschooling, Unraveled

Potty pride! Amelie is having a bit of a love affair with her potty these days. How did she learn to use it? I can't really say. She was motivated.

The process of learning, whether it's the potty or long division, is an elusive one. And it differs from child to child. That's why I'm interested in the idea of "unschooling" - the most radical form of homeschooling. Unschoolers toss out all formal methods of teaching in favor of a child-led approach to learning. For example, you're in the supermarket with your kid and he notices a starfruit, so you might take that starfruit home and do some research together and find out that it's native to Sri Lanka. And then your child might want to learn about Sri Lanka or botany or fruit cultivation. Etcetera and so on. A lesson unfolds. Sort of like life.

I have a lot of respect for people who unschool. It's like cooking without recipes or performing improv theater. It has a creative and free-spirited feeling to it. It's about surrender and trust. But I wonder about the lack of structure. Would it work for Amelie, for me, for her daddy? Without structure, I feel unmoored. I'm not sure that we will become card-carrying Unschoolers. Instead, I'd rather see unschooling as just one tool in a big grab bag of homeschooling tools. A fun one, at that.

homeschooling
unschooling

MIA No Longer

Having a blog is a lot like having a pet or a houseplant. Neglecting it brings a guilty feeling. I'm back to water my poor little withering plant, this time from California. We're here visiting the inlaws (see Grandpa with Amelie, above), and since the inlaws are crazy in love with their granddaughter and willing to spend countless hours entertaining her, I should have lots of time for things like blogging. But instead I have been buried alive under a landslide of freelance work. This is both good (having money is nice!) and bad (I have all kinds of strange body aches from hunching over this computer).

I don't want to whine about not having enough time. Isn't it funny how time is a kind of currency in our culture? We're all flat broke; nobody has enough of it. And we're always talking about it. I even heard a retired man recently remark on being "pressed for time." There's a good article in this month's Yoga Journal called "Strapped for Time? Try Radically Changing Your Relationship to the Clock." I read it eagerly, wanting to feel time-rich. The author suggests that we start thinking about time in a new way, focusing on not just chronological time (clocks and deadlines) but also extraordinary time ("a state of intense focus, of being in the moment...what musicians and athletes describe as being in the zone"). In other words, make time when you can for activities that let you do this (creativity, gardening, sports).

What if you simply can't make space for these things? Then you can cultivate "timefulness practices" (like mindfulness practices), such as becoming more aware of the time between activities and taking a break instead of just rushing onward to the next task. And here's one piece of advice I really liked: Spend time with someone who follows their own rhythm, like a child. Kids live in the moment and teach us to try to do the same.

Is it possible that homeschooling our kids can help us heal our relationship with time? I like this idea. I will try being on Amelie time for a little while.

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time

I've Been Memed

When I started blogging several weeks ago, I had only the vaguest understanding of blogging culture. I just chose a topic and sent a few posts out into the ether. So I'm surprised and delighted to find that I'm making a few blogging buddies out there. Virtual friends! It's a cozy feeling. The blogosphere isn't such a scary place, after all.

Anyway, I might be new to blogging, but I do realize that "meme" is not really a verb. It's more like a game of "tag, you're it." I responded to RegularMom's meme post, so now she has presented me with five questions to answer. And then if someone comments on this post, I get to meme them back with five questions for them to answer on their blog. Fun.

So here goes.

1. What’s the funniest or strangest thing that happened on your wedding day? Michael and I wanted to low-key it with a small, secular wedding at home. He is allergic to weddings, and I had already done a biggish bonanza the first time around. So we enlisted a local Justice of the Peace to do the honors. We met her once and she seemed nice enough. She had a sweet little script that she let us read beforehand. So we knew the ceremony would be brief. But we didn't know that it would be a drive-by wedding. It really was. Just when the ceremony was set to start, a car pulls up at our place and out of the passenger seat comes the Justice of the Peace. Her friend, the driver, stays in the car. Was the engine still running? That's how I remember it. So out comes the Justice of the Peace, adjusting her robe, and joins our little gathering on the lawn. She performs this tiny service, three minutes, maybe five, tops. And then she jumps back in the car and POOF - she's gone. But this woman is an artist. By the time she leaves, just about everybody is crying. And Michael and I are husband and wife.

2. Are there any artistic talents out there that you WISH you could do, but just aren’t gifted with? Oh, I tried so hard when I was a kid to draw and paint as beautifully as my father does. With some practice I did passably well. I'm rusty now and can hardly draw a simple horse on demand for my two-year-old. It comes out looking like a demented dog. But what I really wish I could do was sing, really belt it out like Aretha Franklin.

3. What is your favorite time of day? It depends on where I am. When I am in Greece (I have been five times) my favorite time is sunrise. You can see the day break open over the sea in the most spectacular way. But here in mid-state New York, with all these trees and hills, you can't see squat at dawn. I suppose right now my favorite time of day is when I realize that my toddler is finally asleep. Tonight it was 9:35 p.m.

4. Describe what you did yesterday. Yesterday was a good day. Since the hubby was traveling, I took my little girl over to this place called the Sunshine Club Playhouse so that I could work for a couple of hours in the morning. They have great toys over there so she was in heaven. I did some editing work and also managed to squeeze in a yoga practice before I picked up Amelie. I am a much nicer person after I do some yoga. Amelie and I had lunch and I took her to music class with Uncle Rock, our local treasure. Rock-and-roll toddler music. It was a blast. Amelie is not one of those kids who sits still and listens. She rocks out! Then we had some quiet time at home, and later two girlfriends came here with their kids for dinner. We had a lovely little feast with a bottle of Pinot Grigio. Amelie really wanted to taste the wine. She is going to be a party girl.

5. Coke or Pepsi? Coke. Although I have to say, it's been a while. I practically marinated myself in Diet Coke when I was in high school/college. I'm afraid to think of what it's done to me. (Not the Coke part so much as the Diet part. Yeesh. What was I thinking?) These days I grab an Izzy natural soda. Every once in a while I get a little hankering for a Coke. But never that Diet crap. I'm so over it.

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Look at What My Hubby Did!

Allow me a moment to crow. My fabulous husband has published a book - a real live hardcover book with this sexy, glossy cover. Rocketeers: How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers, and Pilots Is Boldly Privatizing Space (Smithsonian Books/Harper Collins) made its debut in bookstores nationwide today. We celebrated with homemade vegan chocolate cupcakes after Michael completed his NINTH radio interview of the morning. The media is really digging this book! Check out the stellar review in this past weekend's Wall Street Journal.

Is that cover some kind of sci-fi fantasy, or what? It should serve as a bit of proof that if we homeschool Amelie she will at least have some science exposure from her artsy Woodstock parents. Maybe she'll be the first kid in town to ride a rocket-powered tricycle. Look out, world!

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Rocketeers
Michael Belfiore

But What about College?

I loved college. My school was a beauty, with a rambling, finely manicured campus lorded over by old-growth trees and darkly Gothic buildings with leaded windows. The library looked and felt like a cathedral to the life of the mind; it was impossible to enter without hushing your voice in reverence. I loved padding around the dorm with my friends or holing up with a pile of books, hopped up on caffeine in an all-night studying binge. To me the yearly course catalog was as enticing as a box of chocolates - the class descriptions sounded that good. Now let's see...what will it be this semester: Italian Cinema (dark hazelnut ganache) or 19th-Century Novel (raspberry fudge truffle)?

Recently at the Denim Jumper a homeschooling mom wondered how the rest of us felt about college regarding our kids. Was college consistent with a homeschooling ethos that's often distrustful of big faceless institutions and bureaucracy? Would sending our kids there be a kind of selling out? And if we wanted to our kids to pursue college, did we worry about how homeschooling might affect their chances of getting into a range of schools, as they would have no formal grades or class rankings to distinguish them?

My concern is with the latter question. I absolutely do want college in my daughter's future - only if she is willing, naturally, though I will strongly encourage her to go. I'm sure it's true that universities can get bogged down in bureaucracy and other nonsense (I experienced this in graduate school, at an institution much larger than my cozy liberal arts college). Yet college can be just the place to challenge the so-called establishment. To me, college stood for freedom, creativity, original thinking, autonomy, joy in learning. In short, it was everything that high school was not. College was where I "unschooled" all the BS of my prior schooling.

The other day I called the admissions office at my alma mater, Vassar College, and asked about their policy on homeschooling. It turns out they don't have an official policy; they welcome homeschooled applicants and recently accepted a "handful" for the incoming class. But they do have a few caveats. They want to see that a homeschooled candidate has covered the same kind of material as a conventionally schooled applicant, with no one subject neglected, like math or science. And the applicant has to be "competitive," whatever that means. They mentioned SAT or ACT scores, which I've heard weigh more heavily for homeschoolers.

Interestingly, the admissions officer told me that she's seen an increase recently in homeschooled applicants. Though before receiving my call, she'd never heard from the mother of a two-year-old prospective homeschooler. I laughed. It was true - I was jumping the gun. In the name of research, of course.

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Vassar College

What Does It Mean to Be Well-Educated?

A friend of mine recently told me about two boys she knows who were homeschooled partly in New York City, where at an early age they had incredible experiences like working backstage at the Metropolitan Opera and studying martial arts in Chinatown. Yet when comparing these boys to her own son, who attends our local high school, she said she believed they were "not as well-educated."

I didn't question this comment at the time, but I wish I had asked her what she meant by "well-educated." Is there a measuring stick for a so-called good education, and if so, what is it? Who gets to decide? Is the meaning of "well-educated" the same across cultures? Across time?

I did a quick Internet search today, hoping to find something like an Oxford English Dictionary definition of "well-educated," but I found something better. I found an article by Alfie Kohn called What Does It Mean to Be Well-Educated? In it, he completely deconstructs the word "well-educated," asking those same questions posed above along with many more, until the jig is up and "well-educated" is revealed as the emperor who's wearing no clothes.

Kohn is incisive and thorough, looking at such yardsticks as standardized tests (which he connects with short-term memorization and "a shallow approach to learning") and labels like "cultural literacy" (which "have the effect of taking time away from more meaningful objectives, such as knowing how to think"). Instead he favors schooling arranged around in-depth projects, problems, and questions - schooling that involves active participation with the larger goal of having kids think for themselves. Imagine that.

The quote at top? That's Nel Noddings, professor emerita at Stanford University. Now that's wisdom.

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Alfie Kohn