March 2009

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atwitter: february/march

March 27, 2009 in atwitter, books, homeschooling, learning | 7 comments

I never got around to writing an atwitter post last month, so there’s more to share this month. A few of the things that have me all worked up these days:

beekeeping. About ten years ago, we planted our front hillside with more than sixty lavender plants. Every July the hillside is smothered in bees, and I’ve always thought we ought to have a beehive. Of course, I envisioned some other beekeeper maintaining the hive, and leaving us with a share of the honey. But several of my friends have been keeping bees themselves–Stefaneener, Susan and Kristin–so I’m encouraged to try it too. (My beekeeping friends are also bloggers–what’s the personality trait that draws people to both blogging and bees? What, did you say geekiness?) My honey is building me a terraced bee yard out amongst the lavender, and I’m reading The Backyard Beekeeper and Beekeeping for Dummies, planning to get my bees in April. And of course I’ve found some fantastic bee bloggers who are already convincing me to do things differently and be a beekeeping rebel: Backwards Beekeepers and Linda’s Bees.

spain, on the road again. I bought this book for my Spanish-blooded husband for Christmas, and we’ve been enjoying the accompanying PBS series on disc. It’s basically a show about Mario Batali, Gwyneth Paltrow and friends driving around Spain, taking in its gorgeousness, and eating delicious food at every opportunity. My kind of trip. They visit many of the same places we visited when we went to Spain in ‘05, along with the kids and Chris’ parents. (Where I had the distinct pleasure of pronouncing my name Pa-tree-thee-a Tha-ba-yosh. And picked up that cute little olive dish pictured above.) We love Mario Batali around here–he’s such a happy hedonist. It’s hard to watch all the food talk without getting hungry, but watching with a glass of Spanish wine in hand helps.

learning how to make perfectly hard-boiled eggs. Just in time for Easter! Why is it that Americans don’t seem able to boil an egg without rendering the yolk grey and chalky? In Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone (favorite cookbook ever), Deborah Madison writes, “When cut in half, the yolk should have a dime-sized moist dot in the center.” Yes! The yolk is so gorgeously gold and succulent when boiled this way. A while back, Clotilde from Chocolate & Zucchini gave directions for perfect hard-boiled eggs, and the instructions are spot on. Follow the ones for a 9-minute egg and you will not be disappointed.

studying india. We’re wrapping up our India studies. Mr. T is anxious to move on to Mongolia, and Lulu to Japan. But I sure loved learning about India and would be happy to linger there a little longer. I’m planning to listen to A Passage to India on disc (which might also be the motivation I need to work up some steam in my knitting and finish that dang sweater coat!) But it’s been fun reading Indian tales, visiting local Indian shops and restaurants and learning how Indians live. Check out this fascinating video on the complex Mumbai system of home-cooked lunch delivery, carried in tiffins, those stainless steel stackable food containers that are now all the rage amongst the green crowd. We finally bought our own, after insuring that the one we bought was authentically Indian.

a new blog. I really like Homeschool. Style. Bytes. It’s sort of a homeschooling blog co-op. Helen gathers beautiful photos and text about homeschooling from Blogland and makes a lovely bouquet of them. I keep meaning to write down our own homeschooling recipe and send it her way.

So, what are you all worked up about this month?

highlights from a history fair

March 23, 2009 in creativity, homeschooling, makin' stuff | 7 comments

Our homeschooling group hosts a history fair every year and I love it.

I love talking to kids who are excited with what they’re learning about.

I love seeing the handiwork of little hands.

(Those are Mr. T’s hands and planets.)

A collection of Native American dwellings.

I love seeing the creativity of their displays.

This was a display on the history of spices. Look at how the seven-year-old creator worked in her love of fabric!

I love seeing kids chat with each other about what they’ve learned.

They had their Trip Through Time “passports” stamped or stickered at each exhibit.

I love seeing how proud they are of their work.

This shot gives a little perspective to the photos of Lulu’s kitchen from my last post.

And I absolutely love seeing thirteen-year-old boys try on tap shoes at a friend’s “History of Tap Dancing” display.

It was a wonderful day.

Postscript to my fabulous regular readers: The last two weeks have been ridiculously busy. Hence, few posts here, and even fewer visits to, and comments on your blogs. I’ll be catching up and making the rounds this week–I miss you.

I’d like a thimbleful of channa masala, please

March 16, 2009 in homeschooling, makin' stuff | 8 comments

Lulu is finishing up her project for our homeschool group’s history fair. It’s an Indian dollhouse kitchen inspired, I think, by her fairy house building with Mr. T.

My favorite parts are the tiny clay spice dishes, and the window out to an authentic Indian street.

She wanted to build a modern-day Indian kitchen. It was hard to find resources, but she and I found photos here and there. She used lots of foamcore and Fimo, a few Playmobil pieces, and lots of imagination.

Since it’s a history fair, she plans to point out the Indian history alive in a modern-day kitchen. Not too hard considering India is a country still steeped in its history.

I’d like to crawl in there, and sip a cup of chai tea.

the scribe and the storyteller

March 10, 2009 in creativity, homeschooling, learning, writing | 15 comments

One of Mr. T’s favorite things to do is to tell me a story, and have me write it down. Actually, he’s been adding on to the same story for months now–Scritch and Scratch, about a boy and a girl turned into wolves who have many adventures in space.

Yesterday he was jumping out of his skin when he realized that he had a new story to begin, about a boy named Todding Toddington and his adventures in an alternate world, which other people can’t see. It’s part of what he’s calling The Series of Wonders. (And you know his Wonder Farm mama is lapping that up.)

Mr. T would be happy if I’d take his story dictation every day–even several times a day. But I don’t. It’s time-consuming. And it’s tedious. But I try to get to it a couple of times a week because it brings him such joy. And, I realize, he learns an awful lot about writing in the process.

As prone as I am to making teachable moments of every gosh-darned thing, I try not to lapse into teaching mode when I take down his stories. I don’t say in my Dana-Carvey-as-The-Church-Lady voice, See how I start each sentence with a capital? or Did you notice how I spelled this word? Nope, I just write down what he tells me, and ask for clarification when I’m honestly curious about something.

Still, he’s learning so very much every time we do this. Yesterday I tried to take note of what he was picking up:

He knows that sentences end with punctuation, because whenever he continues a sentence that I thought he’d finished, he sees me erase the punctuation and add it later.
He knows that exciting sentences end with exclamation marks.
He knows how to use quotation marks because he sees me do this whenever one of his characters talks. He’s also learned how to add he said or she exclaimed in the most dramatic places in the dialogue. I assume he’s picked this up from being read to, and from listening to audio books.
He knows that titles are centered on the page and capitalized. He’s even noticed that minor words like of and the don’t get capitalized.
He knows about starting new paragraphs when the story shifts gears. Often he’ll tell me to “start down here now” when he’s ready to move on in the piece. Paragraphing is something that’s often hard for much older kids to grasp; Mr. T has intuited it by watching where I add paragraphs in his stories. Often I’ll simply ask him, “Do you think we should start a new paragraph now? Is the scene changing?”
In his story yesterday, Todding Toddington found a piece of paper with a poem on it. As I wrote down his poem, Mr. T said, “Shouldn’t it be slantways ’cause it’s a poem?” I realized he meant that part should be written in italics; I’m not even sure where he picked that up. So I erased it and wrote it in cursive.
In his story one character said to another, “Are you a windquist?” I asked Mr. T what a windquist was, and I pointed out that his reader might wonder. So he said, “This is the narrator talking now,” and he defined a windquist. I said, “I’ll make a new paragraph, since we’re switching to the narrator.”
He narrated the sentence, “At that second a giant thing of wind blew into the room.” I’m all for writing down lines as he says them, but if he uses vague words like thing, I’ll often check to see if he can come up with a better one. He struggled with finding the right word, so I became his thesaurus and suggested a few: blast, gust. Yes! Gust was just what he wanted.

My hand and my attention usually peter out after two pages or so. It would be easier to type his dictation into the computer, but I don’t think it would allow him to notice what I’m writing quite as well. Watching me erase and rewrite as we go seems to be a tangible learning experience for him. And allowing him to watch me write seems like a natural bridge to his writing himself eventually.

I love the thought that my kids have never needed grammar instruction; they’ve picked up the tools of writing by loving to write. Even if it meant that, for a long time, I was the one doing the physical writing.

As I was writing this post early this morning, Mr. T woke up. His first words to me: “What are we doing today? Will you write my story?”

february: notes on montaigne

March 7, 2009 in books, my year of essayists, writing | 5 comments

The next installment in My Year of Excellent Essayists.

Are you up for this? Notes on a sixteenth-century essayist? Before you click away, note that I’ve added a few marginally related photos to hold your interest.

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) is widely regarded as the father of the essay. The word essay originated in the term Montaigne used to title his writings: essais, which is French for attempts, or trials. My Oxford English Dictionary says that the early essay was considered unfinished, “an irregular, undigested piece”. A musing.

I certainly didn’t study Montaigne in the few weeks I allotted for him; I merely exposed myself to him. (Please dismiss the image of me in a trench coat standing before an old French guy.) I read him because I felt I ought to; I surprised myself by enjoying it. Somewhat.

A few qualities of the personal essay that can be traced back to Montaigne:

Essayists deprecate themselves to make up for how much they talk about themselves.

In his introduction to The Best American Essays 2008, Adam Gopnik writes, “The essayist, like his friend the hangman, is expected to apologize for his profession even as he practices it…Alone among writers, he is assigned the self-deprecatory cough, the defensive cringe, the Mister Modesty shrug.” Something has to make up for all those I’s. Way back in the 1500’s Montaigne was pandering to his readers by putting himself down:

“Whoever is in search of knowledge, let him fish for it where it dwells; there is nothing I profess less.”

On quoting others: “For I make others say what I cannot say so well, now through the weakness of my language, now through the weakness of my understanding.”

“The parts I most esteem in myself derive more honor from self-criticism than from self-recommendation…But when all is summed up, a man never speaks of himself without loss. His condemnation of himself is always credited, his praise of himself discredited.”

Humor can make an essay more enjoyable.

Is it just me, or do you sometimes forget that people long ago were funny? I can be reading Austen or E. M. Forster, and I’ll find myself thinking, surprised: This is funny! Of course people in the 1500’s were funny—one only has to read a half-page of Shakespeare to realize that. Still, reading Montaigne’s old-fashioned prose, I was often startled to find myself thinking it again: This is funny!

”If I encounter difficulties in reading, I do not gnaw my nails over them; I leave them there, after making one or two attacks on them.”

On learning better from bad examples: “A good rider does not improve my seat (my riding form) so much as an attorney or a Venetian on horseback.”

“…agreement is a very tiresome quality in conversation.” (I’m not sure he meant this to be funny, but I found it funny.)

Essays are a hodgepodge form—a quote and a digression here; an anecdote, an argument, an abstraction there. Logic and emotion are thrown in by random fistfuls. Montaigne reveled in this.

Leaping and gamboling.

“I go out of my way, but rather by license than carelessness. My ideas follow one another, but sometimes it is at a distance, and they look at one another, but with a sidelong glance. …I love the poetic gait, by leaps and gambols. It is an art, as Plato says, light, flighty, and daemonic.”

Essayists often set out to raise questions, not necessarily to answer them. They want their readers to wonder, to come up with their own answers.

“If other men observed themselves attentively, as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of inanity and nonsense. Get rid of it I cannot without getting rid of myself. We are all steeped in it, on as much as another; but those who are aware of it have a little the better of it—still I don’t know.”

“…such frequent cutting up into chapters, which I used at the beginning, seemed to me to break and dissolve the attention before it was stirred…In addition perhaps I have some personal obligation to speak only by halves, to speak confusedly, to speak discordantly.”

Okay! Check off Montaigne with a flourish! And in his honor I will put myself down and note that I my study of him was rather pathetic. Moving on…

the plan for march:

I’m reading the work of Sue Hubbell. She’s probably not so well-known as most of the essayists I plan to read–but she wrote a wonderful book called A Book of Bees, about a year in her life as a commercial beekeeper. Since we’re planning to start keeping bees ourselves this spring, I figured that rereading her book would be doubly useful: I can study her writing style, as well as learn a few things about bees. I’ll read some of her other essays as well.

And if you’ve read this far down, you deserve a Best Blog Reader Ever award. You indulged me with Montaigne. You’re a peach.

making space, literally and figuratively

March 4, 2009 in homeschooling, learning | 8 comments

The ever-wonderful Lori has a truly inspiring post up over at Camp Creek. It’s called Making Space For Their Ideas, and it’s all about how to help kids facilitate their own projects. How to let go of your own ideas, to make space for them to have their own ideas.

If you haven’t read it yet, do.

It goes right along with my last two posts. Makes me realize how far I’ve come with child-led learning, since my days as a teacher–and how far I still have to go.

Take Mr. T’s planet project. We’d talked many times of the papier-mache planet models that H made when he was Mr. T’s age. So when I asked if he might want to make his own models for our homeschool group’s upcoming history fair, I knew he might be interested. He was happy to go along with my idea for a project.

Just yesterday he started it. But I didn’t let him guide things at first. I just assumed I’d show him how to do it; then he’d take over once it came time to do the papier-mache and the painting. I hadn’t yet read Lori’s post, you understand (she says sheepishly).

But here’s something I love about my kids: when I start taking over their projects, they stop me. I must have done something right, because they know what they want.

First, Mr. T explained that the book I showed him giving scale explanations for the planets–if Jupiter is a large cabbage, then Earth is a walnut–was wrong. He led me to a video on Flixxy about the scale of planets, which was forwarded to us by my friend, Carrie. It’s a fascinating video, and Mr. T has watched it dozens of times, and studied the scale pictures below the video.

“That book shows Uranus and Neptune too big. And Uranus and Neptune should be almost the same size.”

He was right. The book I’d so carefully tracked down from another library system, the one I used back when I was teacher, was published in 1977. It’s outdated–and Mr. T didn’t need it anyway. He could have figured out how to make the models himself, based on the video that’s enchanted him so many times.

Earlier, he’d tried making a foil ball the size of a walnut for Earth. He tried to trace the shape of the walnut on to the foil, so he could make a walnut-sized foil shell, which he would then fill with foil.

When forming the shell became difficult, did I ask if he wanted help? Nope. I just blurted out that it might be easier to make a small foil ball and keep adding to it until it was the size of the walnut.

I knew when I said it that I shouldn’t have. I knew I was hurrying him along, wanting him to make progress on the project–because our history fair is in two weeks.

About an hour later I read Lori’s post. Just when I needed it. As much as I’ve learned to follow my kids, I need to step back even more. I want to step back even more. I want to see what Mr. T’s wondrous imagination comes up with, when I don’t climb in there and muck things up. Even if it means his history fair exhibit might look like it was made by a seven-year-old with a wondrous imagination.

I think I’ll print out Lori’s post and hang it beside my desk.

I’m glad I read it before Mr. T got deep into his project. I haven’t taken it from him yet–there’s still time to let him grab it from my hands and run with it.

And the other good news? He didn’t take my advice on how to make a foil walnut. He did it his own way.

March 2009

atwitter: february/march

highlights from a history fair

I’d like a thimbleful of channa masala, please

the scribe and the storyteller

february: notes on montaigne

making space, literally and figuratively

a little background

ever-changing list of wondrous links

posts about writing with kids

a smattering of creative inspiration

comments make my day!

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