Expanding our Horizons in Guatemala Meets Escaping Buffalo in January

Several months ago, at the age of 34, I got my very first passport.  I was always nervous to travel abroad.  I am sure part of it was the propaganda about traveling to certain places.  However, most of the time I think I was intimidated by new languages, international paperwork, and flying. I had a terrible time with Spanish in college and only received some sort of a B (don't remember the exact grade) due to a student teacher who was afraid to look bad.  I hate flying, not because I am afraid as much as I feel sick, both air sick (either I come down with a sinus infection from the pressure or actually vomit on the plane) and it aggravates my fibromyalgia.  Until now, I never felt like I missed out and I certainly traveled otherwise, hitting more than half the states (by car) before I turned 20.  Still, I was nervous.  I have a cousin who has lived in London for quite a while and have never gone despite the fact that I am sort of in love with Britain from its wonderfully made television mystery shows.  In the case of Britain, it isn't a language issue, but a long flight and time change issue.  Anyway, with our kids in the training choirs at church and the regular church choirs traveling to England this August, it hit me that I needed to get comfortable with foreign travel in the near future.

Then a friend of mine who lived in Guatemala for over a year, raved about it to me and wanted to go back, so we decided to go together for the month of January.  It would be a great homeschool trip for her son and my kids as well as a break for my fibromyalgia in the cold.  Of course, if she had only been on vacation there, I never would have been brave enough to go, but since she actually lived there, on her own with her son, I was much more comfortable.  I wanted the kids to be immersed in Spanish as well as see a different culture and experience life very different than the U.S.  The nice thing about Panajachel Guatemala is that there is still a very strong Mayan culture including traditional food and dress.  It is one of the few places left in the world where so much native culture remains.  The climate is also ideal with lows of about 48F and highs of about 72F all year, so it is never cold or hot.

For homeschool, it was a super experience.  First off, the architecture was interesting with buildings open to the outside, sometimes in the middle of the building, since they don't require heating or cooling.

There are churches much older than our church too.

Don't forget the day trip to Antigua where we saw many sites with old ruins including the Church and Convent at Capuchins.

There was the natural wonder of Lake Atitlan with its surrounding volcanoes.

The science of hot springs due to the nearby volcanoes.

The nature preserve was quite exotic complete with banana trees.

We learned about coffee on a tour of the farm and processing.

Forget conventional art class.  The kids took a Mayan weaving class.

They visited a handmade pottery factory.

They visited the Galeria owned by Nan Cuz where they viewed lots of Guatemalan art.

They tried on authentic Mayan clothing from the village of San Antonio.

While we didn't plan on doing a whole lot of math, they kids studied Guatemalan currency and used it buy things including watching Mom attempt to bargain.  Social studies was the strongest area covered mainly because the kids visited the homes of two local families and ate a traditional meal at one of them.  We also experienced the ancient by visiting Mayan ruins.

Modern differences were the most interesting.  On the one hand, there was litter and less than perfect plumbing, but on the other hand there was the tremendous wisdom in simplicity such as the efficiency of tuk tuks on roads without too many cars (no traffic lights), hopping in the back of a pickup truck for longer distances, shopping in a pharmacy with no prescription needed, using ATMs where you can lock yourself in without the fear of someone else with a bank card being able to get in, and eating in restaurants where the owner's chickens roam about the premises.

Physical Education wasn't left out either as we did a horseback ride throughout the village of San Pedro (which I don't recommend for someone with fibromyalgia as due to lack of balance and sensory issues it was very uncomfortable and afterwards I had to rest quite a bit on the couch for several days - but it was fine for the kids).

The kids also went kayaking, but I didn't get pictures.

Obviously, many people in Guatemala don't have as much as we (or most Americans) do, so we had the kids volunteer two mornings doing an art project with preschoolers at Mayan Families.  They really felt great about helping the little ones. 

The First Day of School and Other Missed Milestones

Until my reunion, I checked facebook weekly at most.  It just feels overwhelming.  I am not entirely sure why, but I usually blame it on my fibro since my mother also finds it overwhelming.  However, since I have been spending more time on it, I can't help but notice all the "First Day of School" pictures that people put up.  Should I put up a picture of my kids with a caption "First Day of Not Going to School" or some other like post?  It is very tempting, I can tell you.

Of course what kind of picture would capture the homeschooling spirit the most?  A picture of C sleeping in with Dad after he did a late shift?  The kids playing a board game with Dad in the middle of the day before he heads off to work?  A picture from a day trip (more like half a day, I didn't feel up to a whole day) we took to nature trails earlier in the week?  T reading?  The kids working on their lessons on the computer?  A picture from our play date yesterday?  A picture of us getting on the NFTA bus?  A picture of them with one of their dolls with a homemade paper dress?  What about weighing bulk items to buy at the Lexington Co-op?  Cooking?  Caring for the worm farm?  I suppose I will need to analyze this carefully since there are so many choices.  How about this one - sending Dad off to work while we head out to the playground?

Am I a bad person to say that I find the whole "first day of school" and "back to school" somewhat cheesy, for lack of a better way to put it?  It seems like such a manufactured milestone.  Ending a school year presumably means accomplishing something, but at the beginning of the school year kids haven't done anything yet.  If parents were really interested in learning wouldn't they be more excited about their kid learning to read (or swim or paint or sing) than turning a certain age by a certain deadline to be included in a school class?  Is some of the frenzy that everyone does it and that you have to shop for it?  After all, Americans love comparing themselves to other people and shopping is part of it.  I guess this is it, I am just disturbed by the materialism and pressure to be like everyone else, rather than the pride of other parents.

Am I depriving my kids of the attention that comes with these sorts of milestones?  T didn't have a kindergarten graduation, just a trip out for dessert just the four of us (it was last December, not even when graduations normally are).  Certainly, the grandparents would have gotten excited about a graduation.  I suppose that I could have bragged about it online or at the playground or at church.  How would it have been received if I showed up at church in December and told my friends that T finished kindergarten?  I am not sure it would have been the same.  Regardless, I see it more as he completed the skills that are considered kindergarten in conventional school since my research has yielded the fact that the sequence is somewhat arbitrary.  Also, the completion was just the core curriculum we use, but not the things that the kids come up with that are of interest.  Can I really put a grade level on those things?  The paper Barbie dress, the handmade paper skirt?  The perfect freehand drawing of a princess?  Baking?  Making patterns with coins?  Totaling up scores for board games using different methods?  Learning to ride the NFTA bus?  I think you get the point.

Am I doing my kids a favor by focusing more on the learning than the milestones?  It feels like I am.  Since I was so compliant about school and the whole work-hard-and-get-ahead, I always felt like I was living for the next school break, year completion, or graduation.  There was too much pressure to savor the learning.  I don't recall nurturing my outside interests all that well either.  Research supports that focusing on the learning is better.  If you read anything by Alfie Kohn, you will find this out too.  Focusing on reward or punishment always takes away from the intrinsic value of the learning.

This homeschool year (if you want to call it that, since we don't take summers off) I want to do more unschooling.  I am afraid to give up a structured curriculum completely, but we are going to do less of it.  Time4Learning is already pretty efficient, but we are going to, where appropriate, test first and only do the areas that we don't know to free up time for whatever the kids want to do or read.  We are going to read as many of the classic books as we can without overwhelming the kids.  My health permitting, we are going to do more outings and field trips and play dates.

What about you?  What are you going to do this "homeschool year"?  What do you think about "back to school"?  Am I the only one?

Urban Homeschooling: More Traditional Socialization and Weathering Tough Times

WARNING: this may be considered radical thinking by some! I wrote a couple of months ago thinking I would rework it and post it at some point.  Since Dad is out of work again, it seems like a good time to post. 

This past Easter, since it was just the four of us, I decided to make spaghetti.  At first I guilted myself for not putting the effort into a ham or other traditional meal.  For my parents and grandparents, spaghetti is not what you eat on Easter.  I remembered many years of Easters with ham or some other meat-potato-vegetable type food.  Then I thought about my great-grandparents.  Half of mine and half of my husband’s likely ate spaghetti on at least some Easters.  At that point, I stopped feeling guilty.  By being less traditional we were being more traditional.

For several weeks after that, I contemplated that same concept with our home schooling and urban lifestyle.  Our grandparents pioneered suburban living as they became adults and our parents perfected it.  As generation X kids we had nice childhoods of school and church activities, playing in the yard and, of course, riding everywhere in the comfort of a car.  Certainly we had friends and it was a nice childhood, but I don’t remember being particularly connected to neighbors, or the familiar faces at the library, the bank, or the grocery store.  We didn’t even have that much time to enjoy the yard (except for summer) because of the focus on being outside the home at school and work.  School friends eventually became acquaintances or ended up living far away.

What was tradition for us, was a dramatic departure from the life most of my great-grandparents lived.  They lived in small cities either in two family homes with relatives or with their place of business.  While they didn’t home school, they were in walking distance from the school and my grandparents had the time to come home for lunch if they wanted.  Church and local businesses with people they knew were close by.  My great-aunt talks about going down to the local small grocery to get items and my great-grandfather would settle the account weekly on pay day.  If they weren’t friends with everyone in the neighborhood, they certainly knew everyone by face at the very least.  It wasn’t an easy life, of course.  It was a tremendous amount of work and there were hardships in the forms of illness and increased mortality, but the avoidable stresses created by modern life didn’t exist.  My great-grandmothers did the large amount of work it took to run a house with fewer conveniences, but never worried about day care, if the amount of homework was too great, if they followed the right parenting advice or if their commutes were too long.  If they wanted to pop out to the store, they yelled up the stairs to ask auntie to keep an eye on the kids.  My great-grandfathers worked close by, not wasting time on long commutes and sometimes even making it home for lunch.  They didn’t have much, but they also didn’t take on a lot of debt or manufactured stress either.  There was a simplicity and a connectedness.

Expectations for their kids were different too.  Certainly they were expected to be good citizens and work hard as they grew up, but they weren’t necessary expected to achieve the resource intensive independence of moving away from the family that later became the norm.  It was OK to stay in the home if there was room or move to the other apartment in the same house.  This is very different from the way we grew up.  My parents had specific ideas in mind about my leaving home.  My husband made a hasty decision on a part-time graduate school program (while working) to avoid being required to leave home before he could afford it.  Thank goodness he didn’t go into debt for the degree that turned out to not be much help in the job market.

It is about 80 years after my great-grandparents were our age now and we are moving back toward their lifestyles and away from the ones of our childhood.  For reasons that are a combination of conscious choice, health issues, and economic issues, we live in a thriving urban neighborhood so we can ride the bus, and walk to stores, the bank, playgrounds, and the library.  We live in a two family home with no back yard, no cable, home hair cuts, and mostly home cooked meals.  While we don’t necessarily have the whole neighborhood over for a visit, we know a significant number of people in the neighborhood by name or face.  My kids regularly see and talk to the same kids at the playground, tellers at the bank, librarians at our local branch, and cashiers at the local food co-op.  When I popped into the bank early one morning without the kids, the tellers all asked where the kids were (Dad was home that morning) and were relieved to hear that I was getting a new tenant rather than being paid the rent in installments often times.  Some of the cashiers at our co-op ask about our home school activities that day and how I am feeling and if switching to organic has helped with my fibro.  The librarians are always talking to the kids about their homeschool days and telling them about upcoming library activities.  We even say a polite hello to the street guy who sells hand-made jewelry.  It isn’t exactly the lifestyle of my great-grandparents, but it is as close as is feasible given modern life.

While not as bold as moving across an ocean for a new life, we are demanding a new life for our kids as urban homeschoolers.  We have decided on a lifestyle of learning, conservation, and socialization in our urban environment rather than the stresses of conventional schooling.  Like our Easter, we are living a more traditional life by being less traditional.  Our kids learn from reading, games, and hands-on activities as well as being out in the world in our city neighborhood (with a small amount of structured curriculum).  We also take the bus to the museums and attractions Buffalo has to offer, a pretty large number given the size of our city.

Our expectations for their futures are different too.  College and resource intensive independence at any cost are not what we have in mind.  Certainly, debt will be out of the question since one never knows what will happen with one’s health or place in the job market.  We wouldn’t be surviving with our current problems if we had student loans.  Obviously, we expect some sort of productivity and societal contribution from our kids which will hopefully be natural with the community values we are instilling.  However, there are more options than high stress careers.   There are many types of work, businesses to start, staying at home with kids, and volunteering.  We fully accept the possibility of their remaining home or moving to the upstairs apartment and sharing the lower expenses of a house that will be paid off by then.  With lower expenses, they probably have a better chance of going to college if they choose because they will more likely be able to pay for it as they go even if part-time.  They will have a better chance to stay home or have their spouse stay home with kids since there won’t be the pressure of high expenses.  Rather than the traditional milestones in life, there will be life-long learning and thoughtful family centered choices.  Of course, if they want to pursue what is now the traditional resource intensive life, they are free to, but at least not expected to. 

Of course, if it is the latter they choose, we won’t be much help.  It just won’t be possible for us.  While our parents generously made sure we had at least an undergraduate education (we paid our own graduate school as we worked and went part-time), all we will be able to provide our kids are more choices in the way of less stress, less pressure, and perhaps more of a chance to find their true selves.  I think many generation Xers and Yers are feeling a pull this direction for many similar reasons.  The best thing to do is to embrace these more sustainable and family-centered ways to benefit their family’s health and life.

Speaking of health - what is more of a physical education: team sport skills or establishing a true active lifestyle of moving by walking and working?  Given the less modern healthcare 80 years ago, my great-grandparents lived relatively long lives because of the healthier food and more active life including less reliance on the door to door transportation of a car.  My kids seem much healthier for this type of lifestyle than many supposedly sports involved kids I see.  Just another aspect of urban home schooling to think about!

We believe that life can be more family-centered and less stressful which is becoming more important in light of economic and educational trends today.  I hope you continue to check in with us!

Homeschooling for Different Learning Styles

While I am very proud of the fact that by homeschooling I allow my children to learn at their own pace, I don't spend a whole lot of time contemplating their learning styles.  The unschooling portion of our homeschooling seems to meet their needs since they are learning more than enough and are happy most of the time.  I still am not sure which style I would assign them to or how to use it to consciously customize our program.

I first started to notice differences when T practiced reading from some of the level 1 readers we get at the library.  He meticulously sounds out phonetically each word.  It is obvious that he really has a handle on phonics, but sometimes longer words or words that don't follow the rules trip him up.  C, on the other hand, sometimes guesses the word before him out of context even though she doesn't have all the phonics tools yet.  I am not sure what this means.  Perhaps one is more visual and one is more auditory.  Both are certainly hands-on learners.  I think most kids are.

As far as hands-on projects go, one of the most interesting examples of learning differences happened this past Saturday.  We went to the Crane Branch library , they had a great flag making program where they drew a design on Styrofoam to make a stamp for paint onto the flags.  It was fascinating to see how each one handled the project.  They were given six flags to put designs on and string together.  C was the only one at the class who completed all six and strung them together.  However, the creativity level was low compared to the others.  The teacher demonstrated a simple red flower.  C made five simple red flower flags and one basic red heart one, but again was the only one to complete the whole project:

T, on the other hand, made a painstaking picture of a princess to stamp onto his flag (blue to be my favorite color).  For the next ones he began an elaborate picture on the Styrofoam of a laptop computer with pictures of princesses on it.  Because he ran out of time and the fact that he became enamored with keeping the Styrofoam itself, he left with only one flag on a string (and his beloved Styrofoam computer):

For several days now, I have been wondering what this says about their learning styles and personalities.  I wonder if I could find some books to help me sort this out.  Is it important to know?  Would the information help me customize their learning better?

Have you experienced these phenomenons with your kids, homeschooled or otherwise?  What advice would you give me?

Skipping the Mall

I haven't been too big on malls generally because I hate shopping and the setting is pretty artificial compared to shopping in a thriving urban setting.  There have been times in my life though that I have gone to malls more often.  One time was when the kids were babies and we wanted to walk during the winter.  When I used to work, I went a little more often to shop too even though I still thought of myself as less of a mall person than many.  Recently, though, I have gone very rarely and hadn't been in several months until this last time.

The kids were long overdue for new sneakers and I exhausted the really close to home places.  Then our coffee maker broke.  Tom and I decided to take the kids shopping at the Boulevard Mall to buy the items we needed.  I am not stupid in that I know that certain stores have sexually suggestive ads in them.  When you walk by Victoria Secrets there are exploitive photos of women.  When you walk by Hollister, there are pictures of teenagers (thankfully at least female AND male) engaged in intensive kissing.  This time, however, it seemed worse.  The ads for some stores were in other parts of the mall, not just their own store.  Perhaps it had always been like this, but now that T & C are 5 and 4, I am noticing it more.

I am not big on shielding kids from everything because that just makes them more curious.  I am probably less apt to worry about hiding the occasional racy content in movies than many parents are.  I would rather them encounter things with us than not with us.  However, exposure to sex or nudity in art or even in movies (providing it isn't gratuitous) as part of the story is completely different from the blatant, in your face, way it is used to sell products.

That's when I was thankful for homeschooling.  It is bad enough that kids see these things when visiting the mall to buy near necessities, but what about the pressure in schools to go to the mall.  In schools there is a lot of pressure to fit it which includes hanging out at the mall or at least buying the right things to wear to fit it in.  If I am uncomfortable about C seeing pictures of women in underwear all over the mall on the rare occasions it happens, how bad is our society that many girls, who spend all week in school away from their parents, go more frequently to the mall (than C) and even feel pressured to do so?

Many would argue that parents should just restrict how often their kids go to the mall.  I am not sure that is the complete answer.  With the level of peer dependency so high, the peer pressure of not fitting in may cause more stress and thus more harm.  Not fitting in may seem like nothing to parents who know better, but to a kid who is couped up with peers full-time, it is everything.  Explain the many child/teen suicide stories on the news.  Eliminate the peer pressure with homeschooling.  That is the answer.

Board Games with the Grandparents

You just can't beat them as an educational activity, board games: reading or math many times, principles like good sportsmanship, and socialization, yes socialization.  Being able to get along with people of all ages, including the older adults like their grandparents.  It is a great way to learn.  Since I hadn't played Chutes and Ladders in many years, I forgot how great it is for math with all the spaces marked with a number 1-100.  By advancing through the board, kids get in the habit of seeing what happens to the larger numbers as they add numbers between 1 and 6.

Board games are a great, simple, low cost, low stress winter activity that can reinforce valuable skills and provide for hours of fun.  In our modern times of overscheduled children, it is something that warrants rediscovery.  Homeschooling can give you the time to use them more often and enjoy family time too.  Any way that we can teach our kids with less stress and more fun is a way to reinforce lifelong learning!  How often do you play board games with your kids?

Reinforcement of Materialism: Parents vs. Peers

Today was the kind of day in Buffalo that it was so cold that you wouldn’t venture out unless absolutely necessary. Except for the little bit of shoveling I needed to do, I (Liz) did as much housework as I could handle and listened to a lot of NPR in between our lessons today.

On “Tell Me More” on NPR today, there was a segment on when parents should give in to the desire of their kids to wear expensive brand names. Overall, the segment was very good. It talked about the way people are treated based on their clothing/appearance as well as the inverse relationship between altruism and wealth. Definitely things that are of interest to frugal homeschoolers especially those concerned about the character of their kids.

However, one thing was very interesting about the program. One of the experts made a statement that the parents are the main source of socialization in this area with peers as a close second. I don’t know about you, but it seems that kids are concerned about what they wear more because of their peer group, at least if they go to school. Certainly, parents’ priorities affect kids. If parents want the latest brands in order to fit it, it certainly sets an example; but it seems that the core amount of pressure in this area is peers. Is this an accurate observation? If not, are parents broadly deceiving themselves about this peer influence and similarly the effect of full-time peer immersion in schools?


http://www.npr.org/2012/01/03/144621365/when-to-put-the-brakes-on-brand-names-for-kids