Smrt Lernins

Fifteen weeks in really makes our school year sound well-established, doesn’t it?

We had another good homeschooling week, despite the cold/chest congestion thing blazing through the family and making us all grumpy and snotty. It’s sort of read-write-cough around here at the moment. From Wednesday onward, we stayed a little curriculum-lite, in order to let the kids start feeling better, but we have finished or are nearly finished with so many things that I’m starting to feel a bit giddy.

I have great and exciting news about Life of Fred: Fractions. Captain Science finished his very last chapter today! I really want him to work through all the tries of the Final Bridge next week, for that last extra practice, and then after Thanksgiving, we’ll move on to Life of Fred: Decimals and Percents (with Key To… books to augment it). It feels so good to be finishing things!

In other “wrapping it up” news, we’re also nearly done with Growing With Grammar Grade 4. We covered chapters 7.4-7.6 this week, which included diagramming prepositional phrases. We have one more section after prepositions, “Words and Punctuation,” and then *cue celestial choir* done, done, done! We’ve started Editor in Chief A1, for a little variety. Captain Science is unimpressed, as I made him rewrite his paragraph twice (for three total versions) due to lazy spelling, usage errors, and sloppy handwriting. I think he’ll enjoy the change from GWG once we get further into it, though.

Onward and upward, once more. This week, we bid farewell to Ancient Greece. On Monday, Captain Science reviewed all his essays from the unit and on Wednesday, he took a quiz in the form of a word scramble. That was a little less than successful due to illness, but I’m satisfied that Captain Science has actually retained enough about Ancient Greece for us to move on to Ancient Rome. I need to go book shopping at Patchfire’s house to get ready for that!

We did science on Thursday as usual w/ Patchfire and Eclectic Girl, continuing the seemingly endless light and color unit. Apparently, they made a spectroscope, but only Eclectic Girl looked through it before disassembling it. Why Captain Science didn’t speak up, I have no idea, but he’s been told that he needs to make sure he’s both pulling his weight and ensuring he takes his turn with all the experiments. We’re talking about moving on, right? I’m ready to move on from this particular unit.

Tuesday was our very last co-op day for the semester. I was sad to say goodbye to my students, but eager to start preparing for next semester, when I’ll be teaching Intro to Creative Writing and an advanced writing course on short stories. I’m so excited about that one, because it’s only open to students who have either taken a course with me before or who submit writing samples, and I get to sign off on anyone taking the class.

Captain Science had his film festival on his last day in co-op. His film was…creative. It was called Nuclear Train and while I couldn’t actually hear the dialogue, it did end with a drawing of a nuclear explosion, so I glean that the train blew up. I am looking forward to getting a copy of the movie on DVD, so I can crank up the volume and hear what they were saying.

The Tank had his last day of class before Thanksgiving holidays. In lovely example of political incorrectness, the children dressed up as “Indians” (for the letter “I” of course) with multi-colored feathered handbands and partook in a Thanksgiving feast that included chicken nuggets, tater tots, macaroni and cheese (perhaps left over from the macaroni art?), and grapes. He came home with a bag filled with pictures of cornucopias and pilgrims, crushed leaves, and a laminated place mat.

Babypie is recovering from her illness very slowly. She seems to feel fine, but she’s still covered in a rash that comes and goes. It seems to flare back up every time she eats wheat, so we’re only offering fruits and vegetables at the moment, along with nursing. I guess she’ll have a trip back to the doctor on Monday, because this is just going on and on. Why can’t we wrap this up as easily as the academic stuff?

In final happy news, Officer Daddyman was accepted at the local university and returns to school in the spring. He’s unsure about his major, as he transferred in 80+ hours of credits from another school, 50 of them in computer science, from his pre-law enforcement days. Another student in the family? This will be a fun addition to our family scheduling issues!

I’m not a very crafty parent, which is somewhat incongruous, as I am a crafty person. I sew, knit, crochet, make Waldorf-style dolls, dabble at quilting, but I don’t really do kid crafts. It should come more naturally than it does, because I’m also a 12-year veteran of Girl Scouting, including several years as a camp counselor to 2nd and 3rd graders. I know how to finger weave, make paper bag hand puppets, make my own candles and all of those great crafts, but it just never occurs to me to do them.

I never sit down and think, “Gee! I sure would like to have the kids make their own crayons today!” I don’t make tomato sauce and make that mental leap to, “Wouldn’t it be fun to use this as finger paint on butcher paper?” I seldom, if ever, come up with holiday, seasonal, or weather related craft ideas on the fly. Even things like painting and working with clay don’t pop into my head as an idea for filling time. The Tank came home from preschool yesterday wearing a beautiful necklace made from dyed, dry pasta of different shapes and sizes, and I never, ever would have thought to make something like that.

Why are some parents like that and others aren’t? I have friends who routinely set up seasonal sensory tables for their children, who make their own playdough on a whim, who always have an idea for something like paper pumpkins or turkeys to provide holiday-relevant activities, who festoon their mantels with garlands made from paper leaves colored and cut out by their children. I’m an intelligent person. I daresay that I’m at least a moderately creative one. I like to think I’m even a fairly fun mom at times. Why don’t I even think about making designs from glue and shaking cinnamon and glitter on to them? Why don’t I make felt “paper” dolls with my kids? Why don’t we make and bind our own books?

Am I missing a creativity gene? A parenting gene? Am I somehow wrong-thinking and a right-thinking parent would do these things? I feel guilty when I see all the crafts my friends do with their children, because I worry that my kids are missing out on some special part of childhood that a better or more progressive/involved parent would offer them. I don’t remember my mother providing us with endless craft activities as we grew up, at least, not outside of Girl Scouts. I always thought that was what Scouting was for. My boys don’t do Scouting (Captain Science tried, but we quit half a year in, because it was every bit as bad as I’d thought it would be, and then some). I know I’ll want to lead a Girl Scout troop for Babypie at some point, and I’m sure we’ll do make all the milk carton ice candles, clothespin reindeer, and paper plate masks there that a little girl could desire, but what about my boys? Are they going to suffer and be uncreative individuals for a lack of crafting in childhood?

How do I find the motivation for this? Do I even need the motivation for this? Will macaroni jewelry be the dividing line between the wise and the foolish, the enlightened and the worldly, the creative and the dull? Does so much depend upon a tissue paper mosaic of a red wheelbarrow, glazed with homemade finger paint, beside the pipe cleaner chickens?