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| Homeschooling in Losinj |
Every day, we load up our book bags and head to a scenic, peaceful beach, where Adam and I, together, homeschool the kids. The kids start with a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, sing a patriotic or other culturally relevant song (such as Bye Bye Miss American Pie), Jonah zips through his two different math curriculums, reads a little Shakespeare, completes grammar exercises, plays a geography game, and then we discuss the differences between Hapsburgian and Venetian architecture. Lucy completes a similarly rigorous curriculum, while Georgie plays educational preschool games. They play chess in their breaks, which I must urge them to take, because they work so diligently on their assignments and hate to stop school. We finish up by mid-morning, and then have the rest of the day free to spend in coffee shops sipping machiatos and hot chocolates, or on educational outings, such as the art museum, the natural history museum, and the planetarium.
That is how I thought homeschooling would be.
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| Homeschooling in Losinj |
In reality, homeschooling here is not at all a well-oiled machine. It’s a very squeaky process and there are work interruptions, boycotts, and strikes. The union is powerful, and management is weak.
Adam usually has to work so the bulk of the schooling has been on me. We typically start in our pajamas around 9:00AM, after I've cleaned up breakfast, researched hotels for our next trip, and hung a load of laundry out to dry. We're open for business after I've stacked up Jonah and Lucy's books [Jonah's are math, spelling, writing, handwriting, reading comprehension, some sort of novel, world history, an aloud book (I've read almost all of the Narnia series to them), and occasionally grammar and science]. I write their assignments on a sticky note on the front of each book. Lucy has Singapore Math, reading outloud to me, the Narnia book, world history, and writing in her journal (which gets posted to her blog).
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| Command Central |
By far, the squeakiest cog in the wheel is the union boss, Jonah. His most difficult subjects are math and writing. When I say difficult, I don’t mean that they are hard for him to do. He’s a very fast learner and smart as a whip. But he doesn’t like to do these subjects. After a lot of yelling and frustration, we negotiated that Jonah has to complete ten pages of math per day, out of four different books (three books are Singapore Math and one book is Everyday Math for his school, so he won't start 4th grade with any math gaps—we’ll risk other gaps but we didn’t want to risk any math gaps). In a typical day, when the math isn't thrilling for him, Jonah will work on math for ten minutes, then I'll work with Lucy or Georgie on something and lose track of time and Jonah's ipad break has turned into a 20 minute break. I call for him to come and do his math and he yells back, "just one more minute", which becomes five minutes. Then we start the whole cycle over again: math, ipad break, yelling, math, DS break, yelling, math, snack, yelling, math, electronic game, yelling, etc. etc. etc. Occasionally, he'll take the soccer ball and go to the field with a sister for a break, and other times, I'll send him to the grocery store to get bread or eggs for an ipad-free break. With a three bedroom apartment five floors up, an extremely limited collection of toys, no English-language television shows for kids, and three kids who spend way too much time together... there is really no way around the electronics if I am to maintain my sanity. Get rid of the electronics and I’ll need a psychiatrist within a week.
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| Lucy's journal |
Jonah wants everyone to know that lately, he has been doing about 15 pages of math a day (20 today!) with far fewer complaints and requests for breaks. It's true, and it's entirely due to the fact that he likes fractions a heck of a lot more than he likes multiplying and dividing big numbers.
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| Georgie working |
While managing this back and forth with Jonah, I also have to oversee Lucy's subjects. She has fewer of them, and she is a much more conscientious student, so it takes a lot less energy. Lucy is now so far ahead of her cohorts in math, that we're probably going to need to work with her teachers to get her some more challenging work when she starts first grade. Georgie has gone through several pre-K books, but she also enjoys coloring and playing with Lucy during Lucy's breaks. She listens to the Narnia books and the world history, although I'm not sure how much she's absorbing. She loves to compare the clothes worn a long time ago. Corset, crinoline, pinafore are words in her vocabulary.
After an hour or two, when the sloppy answers are made neat and the wrong answers corrected, his math is finally done. Then Jonah will work on spelling. After another break, he may do a couple pages of cursive practice.
Then I'll gather all the kids together and we will read about 2-3 pages of world history, and then I'll read a chapter in the Narnia series. We're up to The Silver Chair, and we aren't planning to read the last book in the series, the preachy one. At this point in our day, I insist that everyone, including myself, get dressed and brush teeth.
After another break, he very grudgingly pulls out his journaling notebook to write about things we've done here, or maybe an essay on some cultural difference he has observed. Good writing is not his favorite thing to do. Getting him to do a good job requires a lot of undivided attention, a scarce commodity. The knowledge that it will be posted on his blog has not turned out to be the incentive for good writing that I hoped it would be. Then he'll have to read something on his own for 30 minutes. When Adam gets home, he will work with Jonah on grammar and identifying parts of speech, or he'll help correct mispellings and confusing things in Jonah's essays.
On rainy days, we can draw out these assignments until 3 or 4 in the afternoon. On nice days, we try to finish early so we can go to a beach, a park, go on a hike or get gelato, but there have been more than a few gorgeous days that we've spent entirely inside when Jonah decides it's a good day for a school strike. On these days, management has the last word, but it can take until dinnertime to get the day’s assignments all done. These are very long days.
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| Reading for 30 minutes, but not at a desk |
So you can see that homeschooling has been a little more draining than I expected it would be. There's a lot of nagging, negotiating, cajoling, bribing, and yelling. Admittedly, it's nice to know exactly what your kids excel at, and where they need extra attention. It's nice to be able to whiz through concepts that take weeks in school. It's nice to be able to take off for a day, or even a week without feeling guilty that you are pulling your kid out of school. It's nice to skip guidance counseling and eliminate all the wasted hours in a regular school day. It’s nice to have art, culture, language, architecture, and world history right at one’s fingertips. What other nine year old can tell you what the Pragmatic Sanction is? There will probably be gaps in his education, but I’m fairly confident that we’ve covered all the main bases. What we’ve missed can be learned later. Jonah might not know what year Michigan became a state, but Adam and I are both hopeful that in the end, this experience will have planted some knowledge, life skills, and a little curiosity about the world that will come in handy some day. I just hope that I haven’t done too much damage with my high-decibel teaching style.
Homeschooling is very hard, but it’s been good, too. One thing is certain. When school starts in the fall, I'm not likely to be the mom in the dropoff line suffering from separation anxiety.
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| Homeschooling |
