First, let me say ‘Welcome!’. Second: ‘Grab your towel!’ (tee hee…as in Douglas Adams’ classic Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy towel, the one with DON’T PANIC written on it in large, friendly letters). Third: ‘It gets easier, but no…those niggling doubts and worries never quite go away.’ At least for me they never have. But I don’t think they would with my kids in conventional school either. Involved parents—whether your child is in public, private, charter, correspondence or home school—have similar concerns: Is my child learning enough? Are they truly understanding the material, or just spitting it back for tests? Any key skills that are weak? Any areas of strength—and are those being incorporated to help my child learn things they find harder? Is my child enjoying learning? Are they curious? Are they burning out, frustrated, or resentful? Is the way the teacher teaches / the material is being presented / the curriculum that’s been chosen a good fit for my child’s learning style? And fourth and finally, let me say right now that you will have days when you doubt yourself, your kids and so on…days when truly the best thing to do is say, “Right…let’s stop there and head to the park / visit a friend / play together and bond / take a mental health day.” But again, I see that with kids in school too.

I wanted to have a particular word about the homeschool blogosphere. It’s pretty overwhelming out there, isn’t it? Heck, MY blog can seem pretty overwhelming in itself, yes? Confession time: I too used to get overwhelmed looking at other homeschoolers’ blogs, or chatting with them in person. The range of things folks do would sometimes send me into a panic: Ack! My kids don’t do enough art / music / cub scouts / travel / history, etc. etc, etc. I spent too much time looking at others HS families, and—being new to homeschooling and unsure of what HSing was going to look like for us—I was mentally comparing others to us, and always, always, always feeling we came up short. I am not sure when that changed for me, perhaps my second or third year homeschooling, where I became settled and comfortable with what our family does HS-wise: heavily math, science, and nature based; we use conventional curriculum and adapt it; we read tons of books; we watch lots of DVDs. The arts are largely handed off and my kids do them in classes—drama, visual arts, etc.—and that’s ok.  I started reading HS blogs for inspiration and to lift the occasional idea, but I no longer felt compelled to copy another family’s approach, or to try to do all the amazing art projects / lapbooks / experiments / outings / lessons (karate, swimming, soccer, aikido, piano, guitar, voice, public speaking, entrepreneurship, need I go on?) out there.

Another thing I wanted to emphasize about my blog is that most of my posts are on very specific topics, and I tend to focus on the positive, both of which were explicit decisions on my part. WE DO NOT DO EVERYTHING ON THIS BLOG ANYWHERE NEAR EVERYDAY! And some days we ‘do nothing’ at all; pajama days are needed for mental health in my view. And note that most of the things I blog about take maybe 30 minutes to 1 hour to do—and often less. Yeah, that Fingers! game is a fun way to get wiggly boys to practice their math facts, but how long does it really take to play it? 5 minutes! I do hope you notice the ‘human flaws’ in my pics, though—I do not stage pics, and have plenty of cluttered background counters and couches to prove it. Beware the blogs where everything looks perfect all the time—that ain’t homeschool reality by a long shot!

So please, enjoy my blog, but look to it for inspiration and ideas, not as a model to copy. You can homeschool quite successfully in a whole variety of ways—including ways that bear no resemblance to what we do here! Want to do arts at home and find tutors or enrichment classes for maths and sciences? Great! Want to learn via a lot of travel, like spending a year going around the continent in a RV? Awesome! Want to use an all-inclusive curriculum, like K-12 or Oak Meadow? Super! Want to eschew curriculum all together, and allow your kids to pursue their own interests, which you carefully support through trips to the library, access to a computer, games, mentors, classes and workshops, and a rich home environment where learning is just part of daily life? Power to you! There are so many ways to homeschool, and all of them have been documented to work, in that children learning with all these methods have gotten into the best universities, started their own businesses, and otherwise are leading happy, fulfilling lives. What matters is that you find the fit that works for your family—your kids AND you (you and your partner’s views and comfort levels count too!). If something is not working, change it. Unschooling may have sounded like the best educational choice, but if your child (or you) and anxious without a schedule and a curriculum, adapt! If a curriculum was raved about by one HS friend after another, but your child hates it and is in tears each time you bring it out, I say try something else. (And sell your used curriculum to recoup some costs!). My kids get a lot of say in how they learn something, but the choice not to learn at all is not one of them. “You need to learn reading, writing, and math (and much more)…but no, we don’t have to use this particular math book if you find it confusing or boring. Maybe online learning would be better…like practicing math facts via iPad apps rather than pen and paper worksheets.”

My last piece of advice is to treat each year as an experiment—some things will work very well, and you’ll probably want to continue with that method / curriculum / class the following year; other things, not so much. So change it. Think about why it didn’t work (“I as a teacher can’t stand materials that require lots of prep time on my part; I’m too busy!” “I as a teacher can’t stand scripted curriculum; I feel too constrained!” “My kid is a whole-to-parts learner, and this step-by-step slow building didn’t work for him” “We all found that book confusing!”) and simply try something different next year. You will NOT screw up your kids for life if you are a caring, involved parent. Your kids WILL come out of HS with gaps—we ALL have gaps, even kids in school—but as long as you’ve covered the basics of reading, writing and math, your child has a “net of learning” that will allow him/her to ‘catch new material’ instead of having it go sailing thought the gaps. I always liked the analogy of a ‘learning hammock’ made of mesh; sure, there are some gaps, but the overall net is strong and will support my child in their further studies.

Hope that was of some help to some of you, and if you have any other questions / concerns you’d like to chat about, please drop me a comment or email me (my addy is under the “About Me” tab), or friend me on facebook and we can chat there. I’m still conveniently the only Risa Kawchuk on the planet.  

P.S. My first year of homeschooling, we did lots of reading, a tiny bit of math, an art class—and everything else was life learning, like watching Mythbusters for science, or visiting Heritage Park for social studies. Otherwise we played games, talked, visited friends, cooked, gardened, and so on. KISS.

Just a short post tonight as I have a lot on my mind. I am realizing that I am at a crossroads of sorts, that what has been so helpful in the past no longer is—I have moved on, grown, changed. I want (and need!) to make room for new things in my life: new experiences, people, work (like homeschool facilitating next year!). Some of the people and groups I have found so supportive and helpful in the past I find myself drifting away from; I am interested in different conversations, topics, idea. Time for some mental / emotional spring cleaning, I guess. What’s that expression about friendship? That friends are friends for “a reason, a season, or a lifetime”. It is becoming clear that some of my reasons and seasons have changed, and that those lifetime friends are so very elusive, and precious.

This morning I wrote this out on our whiteboard so the boys could have an idea of our new rhythm, and we could discuss:

I’m sure this will be adjusted as time goes on, and it’s seldom a day will be quite like this: tomorrow afternoon we are headed to a magic show, for example, and Wednesday morning we’re meeting up with some school friends (who are on spring break) for bowling. But our family seems to do better with a rough rhythm for the day. My day extends outside what you see here, BTW—I was up at 6:00 and got my workout in, got dressed, and sat under the “happy light” (SAD light) for 20 minutes checking my email before getting the boys up at 7:30. The morning went well, they tidied their rooms without too much squawking (and Daegan even did some vacuuming in the kitchen too) before we sat down at the table just after 9am. My focus in the mornings is on math and literacy, with gym (or ‘recess’) in between as a break. Today we did workbook stuff (Math U See, Word Families) and we read some books, both me to them and Gareth aloud to me—from Bob books, Level 2. But other days we play games, do ‘math art’ or puzzles or ‘problem of the day’, watch DVDs, or write and illustrate a story, or send grandma a card (birthday, Easter, thank you cards, etc.). It’s quite flexible. And for gym today we played on the XBox Kinect, but other days we’ll throw a ball / frisbee around at the park, or take a walk / scooter / bike ride around the neighbourhood, or go for a nature walk in a nearby ravine, or go tobogganing, etc. We typically decide on the day what we feel like doing.

After lunch we all—even Jim, who is now working from home fulltime—did a chore or two: switching up laundry, scrubbing a toilet and sink, vacuuming the entryway. This seems a good time to get these necessary tasks (short! a little each day!) out of the way before heading back into afternoon work. The other things you see written at that time on the whiteboard are “floss” (flossing at this time of day may not be ideal from a dental hygiene point of view, but unlike at bedtime we’re never “too tired” or "forget”—and I’ve decided to not “let the perfect be the enemy of the good!” And “eye drops” as Gareth’s allergies always flare at this time of year. Jim headed back to his office as the boys and I headed downstairs to watch a couple DVDs I have out from the library, one CG (Canadian Geographic) Kids, and one on wetlands and biodiversity. We finished just before 2:00 and the boys then had some computer time while I attended to various household chores. I also made a batch of muffins and about 4:00 we all had a quick snack, and as the sun had come out for the time in almost a week (no joke! we’ve had day after day of this crazy foggy snow!) the boys headed outside to play while I got dinner started. After dinner everyone chipped in doing tidy-up (Gareth and I did kitchen detail (a million pots and pans!) while Jim and Daegs gathered garbages and recycling and put them to the curb for pick-up tomorrow, and also picked up the basement.) The boys and I then played a game of Sorry! (the classic board game), had some carrot cake, and they’re now upstairs having their playtime. I’ll head up in a bit—my aim is to get to sleep about 10pm most nights.

So anyways, that’s a glimpse into one “typical” day of a homeschool family. There’s lots of variation here, of course—some days are more structured than others, sometimes we get on jags on a certain topic (say, medieval history) and let science slide for a bit, at other times it’s science, science and more science! I find having lots of resources available (books, games, computers, DVDs, art supplies, balls and sports equipment, etc.) that the boys have free access to makes our days generally quite pleasant, as does having both routines (e.g. every Wednesday is drama, every Monday Sportball) and breaks-from-routine (let’s scrap everything and go to the zoo all day with a friend next Thursday!).

What I’ve found works for us came from asking what others did and then using ourselves as guinea pigs—we’ve found what works (and it changes, seasonally, and as the boys get older) by trial and error. So by all means look to what we do as a source of ideas and inspiration, but don’t compare or feel that what I have written is prescriptive! And know that I too have those worried feelings when I see what some other families do. Ack! My boys have not done piano lessons, or Ukrainian dance, or been skiing, or been in Cub Scouts, or studied a second language like French or Spanish…all of which some of our friends do. You can’t do it all, do NOT compare yourself to others in that way. For that was madness lies. As long as everyone is happy and learning and curious, all is well.

So anyone out there brave enough to share their family’s routine / rhythm / schedule?

In the meantime, I’d like to thank you all for reading about our HSing and family adventures, and say again how much I appreciate your feedback and comments. Our family wishes you a very Merry Christmas / Happy Hanukah / Season’s Greetings, and a wonderful new year. I’ll be back to my usual Monday to Friday blogging schedule January 10th after my posts tomorrow and Friday. 

Well, here’s part of our solution…:

…giving each boy 12 buckets to fill with workbooks, games and so on. The buckets are easy to insert and remove, and can be taken out completely if a child wants to take his materials to work in another room—or outside, as we did today, with crazy warm 22C (72F) weather in November! It’s part of the Trofast system from IKEA, intended for children’s toys, but I think a great solution for homeschoolers, or anyone looking for a storage system kids can use themselves. We’re going to live with this for a bit and then see if we need a few more shelves and bins.

I’d love to hear what works for you in your homeschooling to help keep things organized.

On our way down the hill we came to a rocky outcrop, which the boys examined for fossils:

Heading into the well-treed ravine, or “forest” as the boys would say:

What just flew overhead? It landed over there. It looks big, and has black and white feathers, and red on the head:

What IS that? It’s big, whatever it is, About the size of a crow. But clearly not a crow!

It’s a pileated woodpecker! The largest woodpecker in North America!

After watching the woodpecker forage for a while, and chatting with a lady walking her labradoodle, we headed off. The boys were soon running with excitement:

Gareth found an interesting leaf:

And then we heard something rustling in the grass. The odd twig snapping. Can you see anything? (We got a better view than this, but it was oh-so-brief, when it entered a clearing):

Let me zoom in on that patch of white to the left of the white birch tree trunk:

This is a ring-necked pheasant. You are seeing the white neck line, a bit of blue-green head above, and patches of the browny-red body through the leaves below.

Gareth (and Daegan, running at the top) checked out a brick side-path:

And then decided he was too tired and needed a Daddy-back ride:

Daegan, meanwhile, was off finding a bug (he thinks maybe a carpenter bee):

It’s so incredible to have this right in our neighbourhood, just a short walk away. I can’t wait for spring migration next year!

The kids poked around the edge of a pond before the walk started, looking for water bugs, shells, and the like:

Daegan found a snail shell, and a large blob of that green algae jelly:

Off we headed on our walk:

First stop, a beaver pond. The instructor showed the kids how several of the trees were wrapped with wire mesh to prevent beavers gnawing them down, and she pulled a beaver skull out of her bag to pass around:

We headed further on into the forest, passing a woodpecker hole in a dead snag, and then played  a nature game. The kids gathered round to pull a paint chip out of a bag…:

…and then matched the paint chip with an item in nature. Daegan found his red on a few red leaves still clinging to a bush (sorry about the reflection in the pic!):

We then headed on further, using our senses to see, hear, smell, and feel (but not taste!) the forest, and came to a clearing where the kids played a squirrel survival game. Each child was given a bag with 8 pasta spirals (“peanuts”) to hide, as squirrels do to survive the winter. After hiding them all in limited area, they then needed to find 3 to survive a snowstorm, 2 to have the energy to escape a coyote, etc. The vast majority of “squirrel kids” did not survive the winter. Here’s Daegan hiding his “peanuts”, scampering on the ground:

After pointing out some friendly chickadees, we headed to the next clearing where the kids played my favourite game of the afternoon: bat and moth. The bat child wore a blindfold, and the moth child jingled some bells, while the other children stood in a circle making an enclosed space for the game:

The bat had to listen carefully to catch the moth:

We then looped back to the beginning, noting bird nests, lichen, moss, berries, seedpods, and so on en route. The kids once again gravitated to the pond’s edge, where Daegan found a frog! Hardly a common occurrence in Alberta in October!

And on our way back to the car, he rescued a grasshopper (or was it a cricket?) from the pathway:

As the song goes, “No doubt about it, he’s a nature nut!”

When we got back to the hotel, we went for a swim. This was our first time staying at this hotel in Edmonton (the Hampton); it’s quite new and there was a good deal on rooms. And the pool area was fantastic! There was a little kid splash pool that Gareth enjoyed, a larger pool for swimming and playing volleyball, and a large hot tub. No waterslide, but IMO, if you’re gonna do waterslides in Edmonton, you’re heading to the waterpark at West Edmonton Mall anyways.

We had lots of fun. Gareth created a game he dubbed “Dino Ball”, that if you are familiar with “Calvin Ball” from the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, seemed to have the same rules (or lack of them–you just make ‘em up as you go along). There was throwing and catching:

‘alligator wiggling’:

running and kicking (with the occasional ‘hand ball’)

and general chasing around:

Daegan and I spent quite a bit of time in the larger pool too, as he is now able to swim and LOVES to race me:

Gareth still needs to be in parental arms in the deep pool, and loves goofing around (Daegan practicing his back floats behind us):

He also likes practicing his swimming kicks:

Jim preferred the hot tub:

and Daegan joined him from time to time too, clearly enjoying his birthday trip:

After our swim we headed off to Padmanadi, our fave veggie restaurant in Edmonton. The boys drew in their travel journals to pass the time as we were waiting for our food; it was clear the bug class left an impression:

We stuff ourselves silly with delish food, like this kung pao chick’n (wheat gluten based):

And on our way out, who should we bump into but Katie, the instructor from our Insect class, who was having dinner with friends! How odd in a city of a million people, don’t ya think?

Daegan walking and chatting with the instructor Katie as we headed to the greenhouses. We found out that she’s taken all of John Acorn’s classes at the University of Alberta, and as he is one of Daegan’s entomological idols, they found plenty to talk about:

Katie explaining how the butterflies climb out of the boxes behind her once they emerge from their chrysalises:

Looking for butterflies in our favourite butterfly house in Alberta—it’s so lush!:

The class getting our instructions for the scavenger hunt in the arid greenhouse. We were to find tallest cactus, the cactus that looked like a hairy old man, the one of the prettiest flowers, the one that did the best camouflage job, etc.: 

Here’s the smelliest flowers, from the “carrion plant.” By smelling like rotting meat, the flowers attract pollinators like flies. And yes, we all got close and smelled it—once was enough!

We then moved on to the “plants and people” house, which showcases a wide variety of plants humans use for all kinds of purposes, including papyrus, black pepper, mint, banana, and more. There was even a plant that made your hands smell like peanut butter when you rubbed it! (nut allergy-safe!)

They have a stick insect living in this greenhouse, which many of the kids got a chance to hold. Here’s Gareth holding “Georgia”:

We then headed outside to a scrubby meadow, past all the showy flowers, like these lady slipper orchids. BTW, the white stuff on the ground isn’t snow, it’s poplar fluff—yup, not a season goes by without white drifts on the ground in Alberta!

This was the kids’ favourite part of the class—the bug hunt! They had bug nets for all of us, some with shorter handles for kids, some with longer for adults, and off we went to collect bugs. Though no one in the class caught more than a handful, by sending the 20-plus of us out into the meadow, we caught a decent variety and number of bugs. And I did mention Gareth being excited, right?

We caught bugs for a half-hour or so, bringing our nets to Katie who put the bugs into catch-and-release jars for “show and tell” later. We then gathered around and got a mini-lesson on insects and spiders. Here’s Gareth and two other young volunteers demonstrating the characteristics of most insects: 3 body parts, 6 legs, 2 antennae, and 4 wings:

And here’s the characteristics of spiders: 2 body parts and 8 legs:

Katie then showed the class what we caught, and passed around the jars for a closer look. Here’s a Hunt’s bumblebee:

Gareth with caterpillar and then bluet damselfly:

Daegan checking out the entire collection a second time:

Gareth with the butterfly and moth cage, which contained several species. The one in the picture is the Canadian Tiger Swallowtail, one of the most striking large butterflies you’ll find in these parts:

And right at the end as folks were heading off, Gareth found a wolf spider on Katie’s backpack. We learned it was a male wolf spider, which you can tell by looking at its palps (short leg-like/antenae-like things near its face). Male spiders have “boxing gloves” (clubs) on their palps, female spiders have long, smooth palps (“manicured palps”, as Katie put it).

We had a great time at this class, and are headed back for another in the series, on Animals of Alberta in July, and then one on Frogs and Pond Life in August. I’ve got a few more pics of our birthday weekend in Edmonton to share…to be continued tomorrow.

Here’s some photos of our “inside adventures”. Here’s Daegan just outside the interpretive centre:

There are LOTS of hands-on items at the centre, and interactive displays, keeping kids happy:

The welcome sign to the Interpretive Centre, which also functions as a field station for the Royal Tyrrell Museum. Ongoing palaeontology digs and research happen at DPP, and the most recent displays at Tyrrell on ceratopsians (triceratops, styracosaurus and the like) feature new species from DPP found AFTER the birth of my kids! This is a very active field of science where we live, and I am hard-pressed to think of a better place for our boys to grow up, given their interests.

Daegan by one of a handful of large dino skeletons on display:

This bone, which rather reminds me of Rocky the Flying Squirrel, is in fact a vertebra from a quetzalcoatlus, the largest pterosaur species (flying reptile) known. It had a wingspan of 12 metres (almost 40 feet)!

Both Daegan and I found this next display, the “dino diversity wall”, quite interesting. It lists the species so far found in the park, grouped by order / family / genus / species. 42 different species by my count:

As I mentioned, there was far more to the centre than dinosaurs. After walking through a mock palaeontology camp:

you came to a large section that was about the park as it is today. There were many displays on wildlife, one on how hoodoos are formed, some on First Nations Peoples and their views on the badlands, etc. They had a box with the different kinds of sedimentary rocks found in the park for you to touch: sandstone, mudstone, bentonite clay (which is insanely slippery when wet!), etc. But the boys’ favourite display, by far, was the “Badlands Diversity Wall.” It had several 3-sided panels that could be flipped around to reveal information about various lifeforms found in the park (bugs, birds, plants, etc.), and when you let go, it flipped back to the panoramic scene. You can see one of these walls behind Jim and Daegan at this hands-on display (there were two such walls):

Here are the boys turning the panels around seeing / reading about what critter lurked behind:

The boys had me take gajillions of pics as they found some of their favourite animals, bugs and plants, but I’ll just share their two absolute favourites right now. Gareth with the northern scorpion, and Daegan with the prairie rattlesnake:

Gareth just wandered over and insisted I show you the 10-lined June beetle as well:

And here’s one last one of the boys and I goofing around, making T rex claws and roaring at each other. Just adding to the ambiance for the other visitors.

It was a wonderful mini-vacation!