Spend Time Together, These Days Are Precious

I've recently seen a bunch of stats (haven't had much luck tracing them to the original studies, so I'm not saying they are good stats and I'm not linking here) about how much time families spend together ... and it's supposedly averaging to under 30 minutes a day now!

That's pretty shocking to me. 

And, again, it makes me reflect on how much I love the homeschooling lifestyle. My family spends time together - working alongside one another, but also playing and eating meals and engaging in planned "together" time. My 12 year old, in particular, has been asking for even more together time with me recently, such as a "poetry date" where we went to a local bookstore, picked out a poetry book together, and then took it across the street to a coffee shop and read poems out loud to each other while enjoying a hot beverage.

Or there is a new fad in our house: "doing hygge". We sat down with cups of tea, lit some candles, and chatted about how to create more hygge in our lives. Then we played a couple quick games of Six. 

I won't lie ... I'm just as busy as the next parent and sometimes it's hard for me to carve out this time to be with my kids. But they are growing up fast, and although it's a cliché, soon enough they won't be asking me for this time anymore and I know I'll miss them then. So thank goodness we can spend this time together now. 

Learning by Working Alongside

Before there were formal schools, the way young people learned was by working alongside older people. Families and communities worked together, or apprentice programs formalized that arrangement for learning a new skill.

In general, our society doesn't function this way anymore. Specialization, formal schooling, and increasing age-based segregation all contribute to the loss of this old pattern of learning, although they also introduce new ways of learning.

I like the new ways of learning too. I've always loved "book learning" and really enjoyed college, and I now also love youtube videos, and will happily learn how to prune a rose or pluck a chicken through a video.

But I remember learning to sew by working with my mom, and I don't know that it would have ever occurred to me to try and learn it if no one had modeled the activity and skill for me. 

Homeschooling means the kids are just closer in proximity to their parents' work. They are with me for most of the days, whether they go with me to my paid employment (as I did with my parents when I was homeschooled) or are with me for my domestic housework. It gives more opportunity for them to learn by helping, whether they are making French fries, gardening, building a shed, or ironing their Dad's shirts. 

I love this kind of learning!

Homeschool Book Club

We are very fortunate to have a wonderful group on Meetup.com that we are part of ... but unfortunately we are way out on the geographical outskirt of the group. This means that we see all these wonderful group events posted, but for us to attend most of them would require a one hour or more drive each way.

There are some of us down here on the outskirts, but we just don't have the critical mass. So I decided that I needed to either quit this group this year, or make an effort to host more events in this area. In the summer it was easy, as I could host playground meet-ups.

I tried one event with a high dollar cost, and was pretty burned by folks not able to come because of a traffic problem.

But then we had a book club meeting, in a coffee shop. Most of the others no-showed on us, but we still had a great time with the one other person who did show up. I thought this was great! We read a book for our homeschool, and had fun talking about it with another homeschool family. I'll try this again!

Staying in Control of the Home School

 Homeschooling can be a little chaotic in the best of times, and when I'm also working a full-time job and managing a little hobby farm and being an active citizen, etc. .... Well sometimes the question is "how much of the schoolwork can we get done in this waiting room right now?"

 Starting off the new year I put together a new Life Management Binder for myself, and one of my tabs is definitely "School". I took time during the break to make collage pages for each area of my life, envisioning what I want out of them. I'm envisioning a homeschool that runs smoothly enough to be the very best of what I hope for in education: inspiring, socially responsible, life changing, sustainable, and resilient. 

 And, perhaps most of all, I just need to feel a sense of CONTROL. For some that is a bad word ... that might be exactly why some folks homeschool in the first place, to get away from all the Control and Authority. But the opposite ... total chaos .... I find to be very bad for my mental health. And I think it's important for my children that they have two parents who are taking good care of themselves!

The binder is working out well for keeping this balance, so far. I use homeschoolmanager.com to track assignments and to create weekly check lists, and I print two copies (one for the kid, one for me to keep in my binder). I also have all the quarterly syllabi and other organizational documents in my binder. Then, when I want to check on what the kids need to do still in any given day, we sit down together and go through the checklist marking things off. Since we are working at home, in the car, at the office, and all sorts of other places, a portable system was a must.

It's only a tiny glimmer of control, but it's enough to keep me sane. ;)

A Free Racial Justice Education Game

I want to recommend that homeschooling families check out the excellent (and Free!) work being shared as The Road to Racial Justice Game. http://www.roadtoracialjustice.org

It is most appropriate for ages 13 and up, according to the authors, but my 12 year old was ready for it. I used the game in my Unitarian Universalist congregational setting, but as a homeschooler I think homeschooling families could also make good use of this material.

A Day in the Life of a Homeschooler ....

I really do love the lifestyle of homeschooling. Today was an almost perfect homeschooling day, in my opinion:

(I took the day off work today so I could do this)

• Mom is up at 5:45 to start chores and pack a lunch
• The kids get up at 7am for their chores and breakfast. They went out to take care of the chickens and goats, made their own breakfasts, and got ready to go
• 7:30 Dad left for work
• 8:00 all the chores were done and Mom took 30 minutes to do emails for work
• 8:30 departure for a field trip. Audiobooks (Murder on the Orient Express) in the car.
• 10:00 field trip time at a Salmon Hatchery and Hydroelectric Dam with our homeschool group.

• That lasted until 12:30, and then we drove back home, eating our packed lunch in the car and returning to our audiobook
• 1:30 return to our town, grocery shopping together
• 2:30 piano and guitar lessons at the music studio. Kids do language lesson apps while waiting their turn for their music lesson
• 3:30, drive across town with a couple errands along the way
• 4:00 sit down with one of the kids to do our online writing class through Bravewriter, while the other kid goes online to play on steam with friends. A couple shape poems uploaded to the class website and then ....
• 
• 5:00 kids do some chores (taking care of animals, again) while mom makes dinner
• 6ish, dinner is done, Dad gets home from work, and we sit down to watch a movie (The Space Between Us, verdict "eh") together
• 8:15ish, eldest presents his finished report on Frankenstein to Dad, who fills in the rubric Mom created for book reports
• 8:45ish, both kids play some music for Dad from their latest pieces on piano and guitar
• 9:15ish, kids off to bed, final chores of the evening for Mom and Dad, all to bed

Is every day like that? Not at all! Every day is completely different, but that's part of the appeal for me. 

Taking a Sabbath

Part of the "homeschooling lifestyle" that I love the most is the flexibility. There are so many ways to organize and schedule your homeschool, finding the rhythm and routine that is best for your family. We don't have to do school for 9 months and then take 3 off, but instead can take smaller breaks in different seasons and travel on the off-season. Or we can do the "Sabbath schedule" and do school for six weeks and then take every seventh week off. We tried that method last year and loved it in many ways.

However, this year I identified a need I felt to have a day "off" each week. I work for a church, as a full-time Director of Religious Education, and I also homeschool and hobby farm. It's a lot! I found myself just cramming my "day off" from work with as much school work for the kids as I could, and there was truly never a day for rest.

So this year we have scaled back. We are only doing school on four days a week, leaving weekends for scouts, chores, church, family sit-down meals, and community volunteering (sometimes for fun too), and taking a Sabbath on Mondays.

Monday is my day off work, and as much as possible I'm also protecting it from the scheduling of activities, appointments, and errands. There are no To Do lists on Mondays, no appointments, and no fancy plans. There is also no TV watching or computer or video game time allowed, and really limited social media/email (I haven't managed to really go a whole day without checking it, but that's the goal.)

What do we do instead?

Family Board Games

Movie Night

Puttering (different from chores because there is no plan and you don't have to finish anything)

Craft Projects

Read Books

Bake/cook together

Be Bored!

Play Outside/Together

Go on Walks or Bike Rides

Train the Dog to Do a New Trick

Create Music, Write a Story, Make Art

Etc ....

The kids sometimes have a hard time with it. It's boring. They long for their screens. I have relaxed a few of the "rules", so now they can watch the news and play video games that they play together.

I have trouble with it. There is work to do! Time spent this way feels decadent, and hard to justify when there is just so much to be done. 

But yesterday as I spent hours playing a long board game with my children and eating warm-from-the-oven chocolate chip cookies I had helped my daughter bake, I had a thought:

This is a magazine-perfect-moment. You know how we say "my house isn't magazine perfect"? I'm always wishing I could keep my house clean enough and well-enough organized to look like a magazine picture. But that's the space ... what about the way we live our lives within the space?

What if I forgot about making everything perfect so that I could have a lovely perfect moment in time, and just had the perfect moment in time right here, right now, in the situation as it was? In other words, since I'll never achieve the time when all the work is done, and the house is perfectly clean, and we have already learned everything we can learn, and in that impossible-mythical time then be allowed to enjoy my life and my children .... 

Well, since that will never be achieved, maybe waiting for it is a waste of this one precious life we have been given. My children are growing up quickly. Yes, they need to learn their math and their history. But in the end of the day, will we measure our time together as a family by how much curriculum we covered, how hard we worked, or even how many books we read? Perhaps instead we won't measure our time at all, perhaps we will simply remember that perfect moment that was warm cookies and a board game, or the time we spontaneously broke into a dance party because a good song came on.

Maybe carving out the time to just be will let them grow in a way that all the doing in the world was never going to.