Teaching Kids How To Learn

Sometimes I feel like Wendy with the lost boys around here, but it doesn’t really matter how you teach kids to learn things on their own as long as it gets done. If you’ve hung around Classical education circles at all, then you’ve read or heard about Dorothy Sawyer's essay titled “The Lost Tools Of Learning”.  (it’s a quick read and I highly recommend it). I’ll admit, I read and ingested the information while my kids were still in diapers and it seemed like a laughably far off abstract goal, but a worthy one?

Then I had one boy after the other who struggled with writing, reading and everything in between...basically poster children for those who do NOT do Classical education. My personality gravitates more naturally to the Charlotte Mason school of thought (and I still like it in theory and intuitively teach that way), but I was too unstructured of a mom to use it well. Classical Conversations is where we ended up, which is like the McDonald’s of the Classical education world. Franchised and systematized. Not going to lie though, it’s been a struggle. Nothing about homeschooling has come easy, last year Charlie memory mastered for the first time and it was through blood, sweat and tears. I googled ways to make things stick, I sat with him for hours, we tried all of the tricks. Over the years I’ve read enough books to fill a library on how to utilize working memory, how to work with kids with dyslexia, apraxia, auditory processing disorder, ADHD etc. One of these days maybe I’ll write my own curriculum with all of the things I’ve picked up from a hundred therapists, books and research, but for now… if anyone feels like they try to explain a concept to their child a dozen times and it’s not sticking, or if you’re in CC and have a kid who is struggling to memorize their grammar work, here are a few things that work around here. 

1. Flashcards with stick figures and pictures. This was the game changer last year. Last year I had to sit down and figure out where all of the holes and struggles were and then make up silly mnemonics and draw them onto flashcards or white boards. The three rules are: It has to be colorful. It has to be silly/funny. It has to be IN and ON the words themselves and not above it or beside it (i.e. “The Progressive Era” gets turned into a car with a giant ear riding on it). 

2. Laminate things that need to be memorized. Homeschooling moms are like Monica Gellar when it comes to laminators. We will laminate anything. We love laminating. It’s more satisfying than picking dried glue off your hands. Add some wine and a few friends and it’s my ideal party. Laminating memory work was the game changer this year. I let Charlie take it outside, on a skateboard,  in the mud, in the shower or wherever else. Since he’s an active boy, this is really what made the difference this year. But since he already learned how to memorize last year, it was a lot easier this year.

3. Cross the mid line. With younger kids you can do this with hand motions. With older kids, you either have to sit down with them and learn a bunch of Fortnite dance moves, or do those hand slappy things…  or bribe them. Whatever the case, taking a drink of water then breaking memory work into moves that cross the mid line really works. And don’t ask me why the water thing is really important, but it’s a scientific thing. 

I’m so proud of Charlie because while I dragged him through memorizing last year, this year he took ownership of it and did it himself. I remember when Jamie finally figured out how to memorize things and it’s almost better than the moment a kid is truly potty trained...almost.  

It gives me hope for Robbie and Will even though we’re still in the trenches. 

Stuck at home? My top 3 favorite toys (or rather, my kids' top 3 favorite toys)

Since impending d̶o̶o̶m̶ home time may be in all of our futures, here are my top three time-passers that are a much better use of your money than Costco’s toilet paper. Whenever it rains in Southern California (which doesn’t happen a lot), Jim foregoes the motorcycle commute and takes my suburban. (Note, it’s mine even though he technically paid for it..ahem.) My only other option is taking him to work at 5am and then picking him back up in the afternoon. While I wouldn’t want to complain about stumbling into some clothes and staggering into the car like an intoxicated teddy bear who stuck their finger into an electrical outlet (I’m not a morning person), if possible I opt to stay at home and let Jim take the car.

It was a pretty happy, peaceful, chill day around here, but that was probably because rain has an almost sedative affect on native Californians. So take this list with a large grain of salt.

1. These brain flake things. A friend brought them for William to play with and they were an instant hit. I picked up a few containers for Christmas and they’ve been the most used toy since then. Even the older kids make all kinds of weird ironman armor and laser wrist things. I don’t ask questions, I just duck when I’m told

2. Kinetic Sand. We have lots of different kinetic sand in the house, but this one is the favorite. I don’t think it has anything to do with the sparkles (which are sadly overrated and exaggerated in the picture) but because it’s the softest. Once you start playing with it, you can’t stop. Even adults have been known to pause in front of the sensory bin and then not move until forced.

3. The card game Rat-A-Tat-Cat. This is one of the few card games that even small children can play and it isn’t a form of slow torture for parents and older kids. Death by candy princesses and sneaky squirrels is one of the leading causes of parental demise. Also, if you have a kid who’s missing speech therapy, you can also turn this game into an impromptu session where you endlessly discuss the cool cats and nasty rats (the illustrations are hilarious). It’s won all sorts of awards, including a Mensa one, but I haven’t noticed it making my kids any smarter… granted, I haven’t checked and we may not be the best target audience. Still, anyone can play this no matter where they are on the IQ spectrum. We’re on our third deck.

Not that I’m hoping we’ll all get quarantined by the Coronu, but at least we’re prepared

…and there are plenty of leaves in the backyard if the toilet paper runs out.

Debate Tournaments and Watermelon Seeds

You know you’re getting old when a speech and debate tournament looks like this to you.

When I was a teenager, my cousins did speech and debate, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. They might as well have been James Bond. Now, with my own teenager doing speech and debate, it looks like somebody released a 354 member cast of Spy Kids. I thought the last three days were going to be relaxing…maybe get some writing done, read a book, get some coffee. Nope. It was non stop judging, filling out judging sheets, walking to the next place to judge, freezing, eating, more walking, more judging, more freezing (clearly I didn’t pack well for the yo-yo freeze/heat cycle that is a CA spring). I don’t really enjoy judging, because a) I don’t really know what I’m doing, b) there are some “technically correct” speaking tips/tricks that are super distracting to me, but apparently everyone else thinks they’re the bees knees, c) I really hate giving extremely subjective criticism to sweet kids who have clearly worked super hard. When you judge a round you get to put a little sticker on a giant board as a way to publicly shame you into doing your allotted work. But no judgment, it helps make the tournament work. I of course totally forgot to put my stickers up.

Jim held down the fort while I was gone. I got home to Will very worriedly jabbering about giant killer watermelons. Jim explained later: Will saw him eat watermelon with seeds still in it and was so worried his daddy was going to grow a watermelon inside him, he had been watching for warning signs with a wary sense of impending doom. The only way Jim could assuage his fears was to tell him that because he didn’t eat any dirt there was no way for the watermelon to grow. Crisis averted. Parenting win.

The Spark Of Life

We dissected sheep hearts in class today. When I led this same dissection lab two years ago, I studied and poured over youtube videos and diagrams. This year a Navy nurse friend of mine led the presentation and dissection which made me realize I knew absolutely nothing. I was like a child reciting ABC’s, “Right Atrium, Right ventricle…”. I would have her back again tomorrow just so I could listen to her talk…about anything medical related. It was like having a real live“explain it like I’m five” person.

It sent me down a research spiral. Did you know that the heart of a baby fetus starts beating independent of the brain? I knew the heart always had its own electrical muscle, but I always assumed it went hand in hand with brain development inside the womb. They studied mice fetus hearts to see if they could break down exactly when that first “Spark of life” happens (pun intended?). They thought they had it figured out, but then surprise.

Check it out:

"We were surprised to find that calcium activity preceded the assembly of the machinery that does the contraction. You could imagine that the contraction machinery would have been in place first, waiting for the calcium signal to arrive, but in fact it was the other way around," said Shankar Srinivas, a professor of developmental biology at the University of Oxford, who co-led the study.

Hmmm… it’s almost like there really is a divine spark.

The calcium waves start off haphazardly in cells far apart, like lost fireflies. But then quickly—within a couple of hours—they come together to pulse in synchrony at a point when the beating becomes visible for the first time. Researchers want to find out how this switch occurs to be able to make functional heart tissue in the lab and to better understand heart disease.

3 Ways To Spark Your Kid's Imagination

I actually shouldn’t be writing about this, I should be reading about this. Somewhere in my desire to not raise kids as legalistically as I was, we developed an electronics addiction in this house. I need a step by step AA level-esque game plan to kick the habit that doesn’t include never using electronics, and isn’t full of inspirational quotes. I need it to be practical and pragmatic. Does it exist?

In the meantime, this is what works thus far.

1. Put them to work. Trying to lure my children off of electronics never works. All of their toys are boring, there’s nothing to do and it feels like they sort of wade through life waiting for the next opportunity to get on electronics…even if that’s five days away. But if I assign mopping the floor, scrubbing the toilet and raking leaves in the backyard, they all do their jobs and then magically find plenty of things with which to entertain themselves.

2. Play by yourself. Adults don’t usually sit on the floor in a batman mask and start building a giant zoo out of magnatiles and play animals. It’s like catnip. (see previous post on how I get my children to eat their vegetables.) The same mom radar that allows babies to sense when a parent is trying to lay them down in a crib, is still alive and kicking at older ages. If you build it, they will come. Good luck trying to sneak away.

3. Turn off the router. Preferably have your husband turn off the router remotely from an app for the best Deus Ex Machina effect. If they start to read the instruction manual for the router, crawl under the house to see if the Cat5 cable is still intact, and hypothesize with each other on ways to fix the internet, then at least they’re getting language arts, PE and Socratic discussions done.

I wish these were my kids, but it will never be that green here. Ahem.

The Moorish Pirate Named Christopher Columbus and/or The Search For New Blogs

I’ve been on a Christopher Columbus kick lately, mainly because my eldest is on an anti- Christopher Columbus kick and has been regaling us with all of the horrific monstrous things Columbus is accused of doing. Did you know he allegedly was possibly a pirate/privateer against the Moors? (it’s hard to tell…they didn’t have social media and Alexa in those days to track everybody). In fact, it’s hard to tell much of anything about Columbus since so many of the accusations and heroics are steeped in politics and scandal. Not much has changed. Regardless, it is fairly impressive that the landlubbing son of a weaver ended up sailing across the Atlantic ocean before the Middle Ages were barely over. That would be like one of my kids ending up in the NFL.

You can read his actual logbooks here: The Journal Of Christopher Columbus

“Pinta” is not the actual name of one of the three ships, it was the nickname sailors gave it. It means “Prostitute”. Fun to think about next time you’re singing the CC song with a bunch of four year olds. The Santa Maria crashed into a reef on Christmas Eve which I’m sure was a bummer for the crabs, coral and the men who had to bail everything out and haul it to shore while Santa Claus was making his rounds. Fun to think about next time the holidays are a bit tetchy with the relatives.

I noticed the other day that my blog list is getting rather slim and I find myself skimming looking for new ones. Any recommendations? I like variety so the genre doesn’t matter. Or did everyone move on to other platforms. Sometimes I feel like the last person left who still prefers reading things over watching youtube, tiktok, or listening to podcasts.

Beethoven and Migraines

Nothing kicks off a migraine like Beethoven’s 5th symphony.

We finally made it to the symphony this week for the first time in a year or so. We’ve gone with our homsechool group for years (to the field trip version which randomly includes refrigerators, beat boxing and 40 yr old women play acting as children). Migraines aside, Beethoven this week was perfect. Sometimes I can’t relate to the music they play at the symphony (although I always enjoy it), but who can’t relate to Beethoven? He’s the original full range of feels.

Once, when I was super postpartum with one of my kids, we all went to the symphony… during that stage where the ergo is permanently tattooed to one’s hips, and all of the tears and things are still flowing like the opposite of the land of milk and honey. I couldn’t go in because the sweet, rule following ancient ushers didn’t want the baby to be inside the inner sanctum. I completely understood and so pawned my older children off on friends and listened to the music from the lobby. About halfway through, a kind extra ancient gentleman usher had pity on me and let me go sit in the back. I vividly remember sitting in the chair, jiggling the ergo (hoping the baby didn’t realize I’d sat down), not really paying attention to the music, but something snapped. Sometimes when you’re not paying attention to the music, the music is still paying attention to you. I don’t even know what piece it was, but nothing compares to hearing a live symphony. It wraps around you, and comes up the bottoms of your feet. It’s nothing like listening to the same piece on even the most expensive sound system., and so I started bawling. Every phrase and line was like balm to my poor, traumatized post partum self.

I’m passed that phase (thank goodness), but the magic of the symphony never ceases. My more musical kids were almost frozen (the boy version of frozen) with the awe of it.

Beethoven wasn’t to blame for the migraine (luck of the draw), but I’m seriously at my wit’s end with these things and will try anything if anyone has any suggestions. So far I’ve got a pantry full of different prescription meds. I’ve tried acupuncture, chiropractic, various forms of magnesium, supplements and cbd topical cream. They all help in varying ways, but not enough to make a dent. I end up wearing sunglasses, puking in the random trashcan and praying I don’t decapitate a student for clicking their pen off and on or breathing too loudly.

I’d blast Beethoven’s 5th at anyone who dares misbehave if that wasn’t super counterproductive.

Mendelssohn and Spaceships

On the orders of an urgent care doctor who gave me instructions to de-stress my life , I'm attempting to start writing again (perhaps dubious advice since it came from inside a very glass house, the doctor being a self-professed stressed out mom herself... ahem),  Like half the country this year, we've spent the last two months in bed, coughing our lungs up, puking, blowing out radioactive gunk or trying to recover long enough to catch whatever new virus is trending that week.  All New Year's resolutions have been traded in for survival tactics.  Sometimes when we've eaten cold cereal for all three meals, gone through three loads of towels in a day, and bought stock options in paper plates and Clorox wipes, I wonder how anyone ever survived in the pre-Costco/Walmart days. 

It's embarrassing.

I cope with the guilt by pinning healthy things on Pinterest and liking Instagram pictures of beautiful people lifting weights and running on the beach.

But today we were all well enough to go on the symphony field trip and it was healing balm... literally, since the techno base in the spaceship piece was so heavy and vibratorious it worked as a legit medical procedure.  And for the first time William was able to sit through the whole thing which makes me feel like we hit a major milestone. He's been cracking us up lately. Ever since he started bawling his eyes out whenever he heard Pentatonix's "Hallelujah" we realized that he's super sensitive to music.  I'm not sure what career requires the ability to slowly choke up and sob on demand, but so far we have a repertoire of Brahms lullaby,  Gershwin's "An American in Paris", the Getty hymn "In Christ Alone", and Disturbed's "Sound of Silence". He can also keep a beat and count a rhythm better than any of his older brothers, but we seem to have been shortchanged when musical genes were being passed out, so there are no expectations on him to be some sort of prodigy.  Still, it was nice to sit in Copley auditorium and watch him laugh, cry and sit wide eyed through the whole performance. 

The grammar and theory of music is just starting to click for my two older kids. I think they're finally reaching the age where explanations make sense to them.  The San Diego symphony put out a great lesson pack for their current concert and it's a fantastic resource just as a quick dive into any sort of musicology. I highly recommend it.  You can find all of the pieces on YouTube. And you can download the Symphony curriculum for free here.

In the 21st century it's so easy to feel like everything is at your fingertips all of the time, but there is really no comparison between hearing Mendelssohn via an electronic device and hearing it played right in front of you in a large hollow space with hundreds of pieces of wood, stretched out sheep guts, and oddly shaped metal. 

It seeps into your actual bones.