The middle ages. And history co-ops

All right, people, it's that time year again. 

The time where I write in a panic, not sure what we're going to do next year, and I over think everything, obsess and re-work everything in my head until it's all a complete muddle and I scream for help.

So, here I am, screaming for help.

Background: Sawyer will be 12 in the fall. I'm going to call him 7th grade, but he could be 6th or 7th according to his birthday.

He's a verbal, story-oriented, history-oriented kid and always has been. We both like school years structured around a history theme with literature, writing, hands-on stuff and field trips woven in around that theme. This year has been ancient history/mythology and we've just kind of been winging it; I've been in baby mode for two years and haven't gotten back to a full stride with school. He's doing "enough" but it's not fun, tied-together and as cool as it could be. And really, if we're homeschooling, why not make it as cool as we can?

So next year, we're going all in on the middle ages.

I'd like to do the middle ages in the fall and the renaissance/Elizabethan England/Shakespeare in the spring.

That sets him up for American History in eighth grade, and then in high school I'm betting he's not going to want to do as many hands-on projects and cool stuff and he's going to want to more on his own, so I'd like to do a lot of fun stuff these next two years.

Sander will be along for the ride. He's NOT a history kid. He wants to learn about animals, and that's all he wants to learn about. History is not interesting unless it's mammoths and dinosaurs, and while knights might hold his interest for a while, Henry VIII's six wives are not going to be something he's into. Though Anne Boleyn's headless ghost might be OK.

So for my Sander, I've been obsessed since a friend mentioned Winter Promise, and I ordered this:

http://www.winterpromise.com/animals_and_their_worlds.html

It's a year-long themed study of animals and their habitats, with a different animal each week to focus on, a study of woods, deserts, swamps and oceans, anatomy and structure and how to observe nature. So Sander's set. We'll do a little on that every day while Sawyer does math, typing and violin, and then Sander can sit in on the middle ages stuff with us and maybe some will rub off.

So, here's the stuff I want to know for middle ages.

There are two amazing, fabulous, wonderful resources to study the middle ages: 

http://www.tapestryofgrace.com/year2/ScopeAndSequence2.pdf

http://www.winterpromise.com/pdfs/QuestfortheMiddleAges-Experience2009.pdf

They're both also so Christian and Bible-centered it hurts. And the Tapestry of Grace has such a political agenda that's SO different than mine that I hate to even think about how hard it will be to secularize it. Honestly, they invite you to have a "Tea Party" with your friends to discuss their curriculum and how wonderful it is and how it fits in with God's plan for your children.

Um, no. I'm not going to have a tea party with all of you. I'm going to write to you, instead, and ask how I take these great resources and use them and make sense of them.

My plan, I guess, is to take the weekly planners, throw out the weeks I'm not interested in, re-work it to use the books and resources I have, and schedule it.

Should I do a co-op with this?

Here's my experience with co-ops: Someone, very gung-ho, starts one. Everyone else gloms on, full of great ideas. There's a great plan, full of great parents and great kids.

The first month is awesome.

The second month, three kids drop out because they didn't realize how far it was, and soccer started, and one of the kids doesn't like all the writing and another doesn't like the playground where you're having the co-op.

So the other moms now have double the work and instead of planning one or two great lesson each semester, they're having to throw together a lesson every two or three weeks, which they didn't plan on.

So one or two of them get overwhelmed and quit.

By January, it's three moms and four or five kids, struggling along, and the moms are throwing coloring pads and crayons at the kids while saying, "Did you read the book this week? Let's just read out loud." And by May everyone is completely over it and vows to never do another co-op.

This has happened every single year. So yeah, I'd love to do a history co-op making sundials, exploring alchemy, going to a Shakespeare play, watching videos on the black plague.

But half the kids don't do the reading/set-up required to understand the lesson plan, and the other half are annoyed that they put in the work and the other kids are just sitting there and can't discuss what's going on!

So how do I implement this great lesson plan I'm working on? It seems like such a waste to have all these resources and materials and use them on one kid, and honestly, half the stuff we won't do unless we have three or four kids at least to work on it.

So, I guess the ultimate question is: How do I run a co-op where people are involved, engaged, stay active and are make sure their kid is prepared for the group and interested in the activities?

If I open up a co-op like this to all of the homeschooling lists, I end up getting a lot of parents who don't want to teach history and see this as an easy way to get a history "check" for the semester. Or worse, parents who know their kids don't like history and who think this will be the way to get them to like it.

I'm looking for the opposite: Kids who love history, parents who are engaged and who want to teach and who know that this is the "spine" of the whole year, not a throwaway "arty" class.

Ideas?

What I really want to do is charge everyone $100 a semester to make sure they're committed. Or hire a teacher/facilitator to run to the thing, so they can be mean about making sure the material's covered.

Has anyone run a successful co-op with older kids that actually lasted the entire 36 weeks?

My latest project

My super-quick, easy project of creating a library out of a laundry room is finally complete, and guess what? It wasn't super-quick, and it wasn't easy.But I'm beginning to see that it was worth it, in at least a dozen different ways.
We took our laundry room, moved our washer and dryer to the garage, and took out the sink, cabinets and shelves.
Then I hired Tex, the slowest, most pitiful carpenter on the planet, and waited endlessly while he sprained his ankle, wrecked his truck, had two episodes where he thought he was having a heart attack, got stung by a bee and finally, slowly, shelves were put up in the space.
And then I took all of my bins of books, which I've been accumulating for years, sorted them by category, labeled them, re-sorted them, re-labeled them, and let the kids at it.
To answer questions: The reason books are in bins and not on shelves is because it saves space, is much less messy and is 3,000 times more kid-friendly.
Bins mean that all books are facing forward. A small child who can't read, or even a bigger kid who could never read the spine of a book, can flip through a bin of books and look at the cover and choose the one she wants.
In one bin, 12 inches wide, I can fit 30-60 books, depending on whether they're softcover or hardcover. In that same 12-inch space, if I put books on the shelf, I could fit about 12-15 books standing on edge.
Also, kids have a hard time putting books back on a shelf if they're on edge. Frankly, I do, too.
It's much easier to replace a book into a bin than it is to find the spot on a shelf where it belongs, shove other books out of the way and replace it. And if it's hard, little kids won't do it.
So they'll take out 20 books looking for the one they want and leave them in a pile on the floor.
This way, they flip through the bin, grab the book they want, and sit down to read.
We have them sorted into categories that make sense to us, and each bin has a label with a picture on it, so even non-readers or beginning readers can see what's in the bins.
We have two huge bins of books on the floor, labeled "Kid's readers."
These are our favorite books that kids like to look at and read to themselves -- everything from "Red Fish, Blue Fish," to "Goodnight Moon," "Sylvester and the Magic Pebble" and "The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig."
One of my kids is a beginning reader, and he likes to sit and read these to himself. My little one is not yet two, and she likes to beg anyone within grabbing reach to read them to her. She also has a huge box of board books just for her, but she's almost at the point where she's ready to move on from those -- she knows she gets more story time from the "real" books.
For homeschooling, we have all sorts of bins. "Romans and Greeks," "Mythology,""Pirates, Knights, Vikings, King Arthur and Robin Hood," "Middle Ages," "Egyptians," "General History, reference," "General History, readers," "Science readers," "American history, non-fiction," "American History, readers and fiction," "General History that's not Egyptian or Greek or Romans or Pirates or King Arthur," "Shakespeare," and others.
Then I have bins for curriculum, workbooks and planning materials -- math, science, writing and grammar, phonics, reading, and a bin for parenting/homeschooling/planning books.
The next part of the plan, and this is going to be a lot longer process than I anticipated, too, is to catalog all of the books.
There's a great website called Librarything.com. The whole purpose of it is to catalog your books online, whether to sell them, keep track of what you have, use it as a lending library or just to count your books.
They have a scanner they sell for $5 that lets you import each book by scanning the ISBN code. It's not as quick and easy as it sounds -- you still have to scan each book, label it with which bin it's in, add tags so you can search for it, etc.
However: The upside of this is that when Sawyer's studying the Romans, as he's doing now, I know what we have. When I go to a curriculum sale or hit Half-Price Books and I see a bunch of stuff about the middle ages, which we're doing next year, I can look to see if we already have the books. I can have friends log in and see if they need to borrow anything for their year, and I can mark books checked out if they're gone.
I've entered in about 500 books so far, and I'm sure I have about 2,000 more to go. I'm doing one bin a day, and there are 48 bins. It's going to be a while.
However: I've been homeschooling for ten years. When I first started, my nephew was 11, I'd never taught anyone to do anything except blow a bubble or ride a bike, and I was terrified. I went and bought a textbook, handed it to him, and said, "Read this and answer questions."
I would have been so much better off if I'd told him to go read some of the books I had on the shelf!
I've been collecting books about things we love or things my kids should know about since then, and my youngest daughter will be two in June, and if all goes well, I have another 16 years homeschooling her.
So I figured I'd get organized now and save myself the trouble later!
And the best part about the library, and a complete unforeseen benefit? The kids, on their own, went and got pillows and blankets, lined the floor, and made a reading nook. They go in, grab a book, and settle in for hours. I'm going to have to put a light in there and make it permanent, I think.
What a great place to read -- I wish I had something like that when I was little! 

Questions I've been asked today

Published June 20, 2009

If you were Oliver Wood, and you had to kick one person off the quidditch team, but not Harry, obviously, because he’s famous and people come to see him play, who would you kick off and who would you replace him with?

What is the worst thing in the newspaper?

Would you rather be a cyclop’s eye or Anubis’ guts? Why?

Would you rather be trapped in a car at the bottom of a lake, with a hammer to get out, or be trapped on an ice floe, in a stagecoach, before cell phones were invented?

What’s your favorite character in any book, and what book would you move them to if you could?

What’s the best book you ever read?

What’s your favorite character in Star Wars the Clone Wars?

Why can’t we get another dog?

Why can’t we let our dog have puppies?

Can we get a horse?

What’s the most disturbing thing you ever saw?

What’s your worst fear?

Why does everyone have to die and what would happen if everyone came back to life at once?

What if all people were turned into big rubber balls?

What if we all could breathe under water?

What gives you nightmares?

Which one of us do you love better and why?

Why won’t you tell me what the most disturbing thing you ever saw was? 

Why won’t you tell me what gives you nightmares?

How old do I have to be to have a cell phone? Girlfriend? Video game?

Sigh.

My brain hurts.

My mid-term exam

Originally published Friday, March 13, 2009

Garden day. At one point, we had 16 helpers!

In the grand world of parenting, they say, there are no grade sheets and no final exam.

Hogwash, says I. I just aced my mid-term, and I’m feeling pretty good about it.

In the past two weeks, I have:

1. Been on a college tour of Berkeley, where I helped a teenager craft a plan to visit Europe this summer. Told her why traveling alone would be good for her. Had long heart-to-heart about her love life.

2. Talked to another teenager, one year older. Told him why traveling would be bad for him. He needs to stay put. Had long heart-to-heart about his love life.

3. Visited a gay bar. First the tame one recommended by concierge. Then the very scary one where all men were shirtless and had the crack of their ass showing above jeans. Left quickly.

4. Toured Berkeley in pouring rain for an hour and a half. Then got on a plane soaking wet.

5. Placed a $1,500 co-op order for seven homeschooling moms, ordered everything, figured out who got what, met the truck, co-ordinated time and meeting places for all moms, figured out who owed what, and divided up food. Filled my pantry.

6. Bought half a cow, found three other moms who wanted to divide the meat, organized the beef lady and all of the moms, got the meat here, met all the moms and delivered meat. Filled my freezer. For $3 a pound for hormone-free, no-antibiotic, pasture-raised Angus!

7. Had steak for dinner.

8. Organized and rounded up 16 people to put in my garden. Traded food and garden plots for work -- although I actually paid Dylan to help. Dylan was amazing -- coordinated and cracked the whip and within one day, I had 38 garden beds, six feet long by three feet wide.

9. Put up a fence around the entire garden, by myself. More than 100 feet long and 25 feet wide. Plus eight feet tall. Then put in a gate, too. I feel like the little red hen -- no one wants to help with the fence, but they’ll all want to eat the tomatoes!

10. Made enough food to give to all of the people who came and helped with the garden.

11. Went to my aunt’s birthday party in Houston, three hours away. Talked to many interesting “ladies who lunch.” Spent a nice evening with my aunt and uncle at their house.

12. Taught a cooking class to four young people with autism. Designed for teenagers, but two adults showed up. Turns out one of them had a penchant for kitchen appliances. He turned on every mixer, fryer, oven and fan we had in the kitchen, and really wanted to take the mixer paddles home. It went well, but suffice it to say I think there’s nothing heartwarming or sweet about people with autism. I think the whole thing just sucks all the way through. It’s such a tragedy. 

13. Adopted three guinea pigs. Original names were Cinnamon, Sugar and Pig-Pig. They are now Snowball, Messy and Pistol. The boys are in heaven.

14. Disassembled and then reassembled the entire damned guinea pig cage. One stupid one-foot-square piece at a time. Times 80.

15. Planted the entire garden, with plants I’ve grown mostly from seeds: tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, squash, herbs, pumpkins, watermelon, squash, strawberries, blackberries and fennel. And cardoon. What’s cardoon, you say? It’s an Italian vegetable I ate in a a salad at Chez Panisse. It looks like celery and tastes like artichoke. I was fascinated by it, and then when I came home I found some at the garden center and planted it. Only then did I look it up and realize it grows to six feet tall!

16. Kept my children alive, well-fed and happy. Taught the difference between obtuse and acute angles, dealt with two colds and coughs and two visits to the doctors.

17. Transported to Boy Scouts, gymnastics, vision therapy, violin, birthday parties, theater class and friend’s houses. Bought and wrapped birthday presents, found gym clothes and Scout uniform, kept up with violin practice, vision exercises and theater script.

18. Rented the back kitchen. Met almost every day with renters, went over rules and expectations, figured out finances and kept the kitchen clean and organized.

19. Played the role of big sister while my sister looks for a car and a job with a steady income. 

20. Kept my husband happy while he had a very stressful couple of weeks at work.

21. Kept alive three guinea pigs, two tadpoles, four chickens, two cats and a dog. I must admit they were on the far back burner, though. I’m not sure I would have noticed if a few of them dropped dead.

I have not:  

1. Lost weight

2. Stopped drinking coke when I’m stressed out

3. Learned to be frugal, despite my best efforts

4. organized my closet

5. done any laundry

6. been very nice to my husband, who deserves more attention

7. started running or exercising

8. come to terms with the fact that I’m turning 40 in three weeks

Frankly, I can live with that.

And who knows, the next section of parenting might kill me off, and you never know when there’s going to be a pop quiz.

But I’m pretty happy with my mid-term grade.

The Cost of Costco

Originally published February 8, 2009

Someone asked me tonight what we buy at Costco.

Well, everything. And way too much. In fact, I’ve decided to stop going so much because I spend too much money, but I haven’t figured out where to go shopping instead!

Costco has LOTS of organic veggies, all frozen. They have a huge bag of mixed organic frozen veggies that's our staple -- corn, peas, carrots and green beans. I think it's five pounds for $12 or something close to that.

They usually have frozen organic green beans and soy beans. Their organic eggs are cheaper than I've ever seen anywhere else, and they sell them in packs of 18, for about $3.50. Whole Foods sells a dozen for $4.50!

They have lots of organic fresh fruits and veggies, but only in season, which is how it should be, I suppose. In June, they have organic strawberries. In November, they have organic apples, and in February, well, I guess you buy canned or frozen stuff.

I did buy a big (another five-pound bag) of frozen organic peaches that I'll turn into cobbler or smoothies or ice cream. But there's not always a lot of fresh organic stuff.

They have lots of staples that are cheap and organic: tomato sauce, rice milk, soy milk, juice, juice boxes, bottled water (if you buy it -- we don't,) coffee, peanut butter and crackers. Oh, lots of stuff like oatmeal. If you're not gluten-free, Costco is the bomb! Even you are gluten-free, they still have a lot of good stuff. But my kids always want to buy the organic pop tarts, and I keep having to turn them down. And I’d like to buy the mega-bag of steamed dumplings. And I always buy two books I don’t need.

Three big drawbacks:

1: You spend WAY too much money, because there's all sorts of stuff that you think you need and don't. There are books, movies, iPods, clothes, tools, lightbulbs that will save the planet and cut your electric bill in half, a gadget you didn’t know existed but you must have NOW, and oooh, look, there’s a vacuum sealer, just like on TV, and there’s a labelmaker that will organize your whole life. Yeah. It’s always $300 to go to Costco.

2: There's no organic meat or cheese to speak of. They have $14 organic chickens. Pass!

Or they have hormone-laden, antibiotic-pumped, poison-fed pork and beef, really cheap!

No thanks. They do have organic ground beef sometimes.

3: It's CROWDED. Really. Since we homeschool, we can go during the day, but if you go on a weekend or after 3 p.m., it's just pure mayhem. There are old people fighting for the last handicapped spot, and the cafe in front (drinks are like 50 cents and pizza's super cheap) is always packed full of baskets and sulking husbands with whiny kids.

Other than that, we love Costco!

They never do more than 11 percent markup on any item, ever. They give almost all of their employees health insurance, the average pay is like $15 an hour, and they always have the same people working there, so you get to know them and they're friendly and they seem to like kids. Completely different feel from Sam's, and you’re not supporting WalMart!