Entries Tagged 'Alpha' ↓

…I have many thoughts, most not fully developed, rambling about in my head right now.  I think the end result, should I ever reason it out, will be an epiphany (for me, at least).  So forgive me for pouring my ramblings out here…

I often read accounts of home/unschooling projects in which everyone is involved, learning is happening on multiple levels, connections are being made, and there’s just a warm fuzzy glow encompassing everyone.  But somehow, I didn’t see that as being real.  Not that I thought learning and projects would necessitate a “chore” mentality — just that I couldn’t see it working for and involving every one of us.  For example, I figured that if we decided to… say, learn to play chess, I would read about it before hand, find some good sites, and then impart my knowledge to Gamma.  He’d be suitably grateful and enthralled with the knowledge, and we’d both become expert chess players as a result.  So yes, we’d all be learning, but I’d be learning in advance, and then teaching.

Gamma has a long-standing obsession with Bionicles.  He loves to put them together.  He scours the Lego site for information on them.  He has discovered the wonders of YouTube and homemade movies starring Bionicles.  He plays the game on the Wii, and he watches the movie as often as we allow can stand to listen to it.  He asks me what Bionicles I would like for my birthday, and which action figure I like best, and who I want to be when we play make-believe games together.  It doesn’t stop.  Ever.  All…day…long.

(this has a point… I swear it… at least I think it does… I’m not sure where this will end up…)

I really don’t like Bionicles very much.  The storyline has too much fighting for my taste.  But knowing how infatuated he is with these right now, I tried to look at them objectively and figure out how we could use this as a learning experience.  Not turning it into schoolwork, but extracting learning from it, if you follow me.

But I couldn’t see it.  Sure, he was following sometimes 20- or 30-step instructions, intended for kids three-to-five years older than he is.  But he’s just playing. Sure, he’s correctly typing in words like “Mata Nui” and “Rahkshi” and “Vahki,” and finding videos and instruction manuals.  But these aren’t “real” words and he’s just fooling around. Sure, he’s reading things like “do you want to purchase this hint for 500?”  But this isn’t a phonics program, it’s just a video game.

I kept looking for how I could connect this to history, or literature, or something I saw as meaningful.  I just couldn’t see it.

A week or so ago, Alpha bid on and won a huge lot of Bionicle sets and spare pieces.  When he called me from work and told me about it, I admit I was less than thrilled.  Gamma had just been digging in his heels and ignoring some of the “organic” learning I was trying to make him joyously discover.  Instead, he wanted to be playing with his stinking Bionicles.  I was ready to ban them from the house!  But despite my opposition to the war-mentality, and despite the education battles, I really just want my kids to have fun and be happy, and so, when Alpha came home Friday afternoon with a load of Bionicles, I was grinning along with him while we watched Gamma’s ever-increasing joy as he discovered each new set.

Thus began a two day marathon Bionicle session.  For all of us.  Gamma was the lead builder, as he knew the most about the sets.  Some did not have instructions — Alpha and Gamma figured those out together.  Then came the huge bag of assorted parts.  A strange helmet, an unusual weapon or disk or shield.  I’d  use these clues to look them up on the internet, find the correct name/species (???) of Bionicle, and locate a scanned instruction booklet so they could piece them together.  Epsilon… he is the only two year old on earth, I’d dare say, that can say “Bionicle”, let alone name individual characters.

And it was an absolutely awesome, warm-fuzzy-glow weekend.  Alpha is almost as infatuated with Bionicles as Gamma now.  He loves to build and construct, and figure things out with no blueprint, only to find a blueprint later and realize he was dead-on balls accurate (it’s an industry term).  Gamma was in his element, and I think being the resident expert gave him a level of confidence and assured-ness about himself he’d not realized before.  I loved finding that I’m a valued part of the team — that being research assistant/librarian is just as valuable  (if not more)  as being hands on/go-to-girl.  Epsilon enjoyed getting to play with spare parts and simply not being brushed aside in the interest of real learning, as opposed to play.  And both kids got to see that both Dad’s and Mom’s skills (although vastly different) have great value.

Sigh… if I’d taken the time to write this all out in the midst of the epiphany, it might have made so much more sense… but then I’d have missed most of the moments…

I can’t equate all learning to the Bionicle universe.  I still can’t fathom how our history can be traced through this alternative universe.  Or how most math, or history, or science, can spring from this.  But I am beginning to get the picture of how the learning can happen, and the possibilities are enticing.  I still have a long way to go, but I think I’m becoming more open to the possibilities.

And I think that – getting how the learning can happen – will be the most important step of all.

Can you find a familiar face amongst the legion?

My head is still spinning.

I have read more about educational theory and philosophies in the past week or two than you can imagine.  I’ve run into a multitude of choices I didn’t even know we had.  Reggio?  Steiner?  Project-based?  Problem-based?  I find it very telling that the choices that appeal to me most are the ones that most closely line up with unschooling. But let me assure you, if we’re applying labels, Alpha will be much more comfortable with the term inquiry-based learning.

The Camp Creek blog has been just a wealth of information and inspiration.  THIS is an approach I think could actually work in our house.  For EVERYONE.  However….

I find it rather ironic that, when I first set up this blog, I made a point on our about page of saying “we don’t label our children.”  So why am I so insistent upon labeling our children’s education?  Searching for an identity in the homeschool blogging community, maybe?  (as if being a secular/atheist homeschooling family isn’t identity enough!!)  I don’t want to be fenced in by a label three years from now, when Gamma decides he wants to, I don’t know, tackle math in a textbook.  Or when Epsilon is a little older and loves phonics and workbooks and lots and lots of structure.  (ha ha ha)

So I have decided to abstain from the worksheets, and the phonics program, and the checklist.  Instead I’m going to more actively track his interests and his questions, and encourage him to pursue them.  And document everything, for my own sanity.  I’m finding that, when I do that, the other things get accomplished along the way.  Let’s see if it continues.

the pack will play, apparently.

Alpha is in London at the first ever TAM London event.  I’m practically rabid with jealousy.  But I’m trying to contain myself.

I had grand plans for the weekend — taking the boys out every day to do something cool and different.  A hike, perhaps a zoo or wildlife preserve, maybe a movie.  But when we woke up this morning, all they really wanted to do was stay in their jammies and play.

So that’s what we did.

I’ve got to tell you… we’re having a hard time over here.  I’m really struggling.  What happened to my sweet, compliant Gamma?  In his place is this moody teenager, trapped inside a five year old body.  And what happened to the endless patience I used to possess?  He’s sullen and rebellious, I’m bitchy and short-tempered and…. well, Alpha may or may not have called me a harpie tonight.  And he may or may not have been kidding.

All my well-laid plans and schedules seem laughable at this point.  I’ve actually seriously considered the local public schools once more.  Are they really as bad an option as we thought?  (yes) What about the local Catholic schools, which are purported to be stronger academically?  Could we abide having our kids indoctrinated, and just do some un-indoctrinating at home?  (no, obviously) Obviously, I was just being a wee bit melodramatic when I started talking public school — it’s not a good fit for our family and we’ve always known that.

But, somehow… somehow I always thought we’d just segue naturally into homeschooling.  Gamma’s curious by nature; I love to research and learn new things.  He and I are extremely close.  I knew he wouldn’t be the sit-and-fill-in-workbooks kid that I was, but I thought I had accounted for that.  Apparently I don’t understand his personality and learning styles nearly as well as I thought I did.

(And how the hell do you figure out the learning styles of a 5 year old, anyway?  Why are all the tests to figure out your learning style geared for those who have already completed the crux of their learning??)

I like to think this is the norm — that all new homeschoolers experience this uncertainty, and have to re-evaluate as they go.  The dreaded term “unschooling” has popped up a few times in the last few days, all met with an immediate negative shake of the head from Alpha.  There is great value, he says, in formal knowledge and structured lessons.  I agree, for what it’s worth.  I just don’t know that they are of value to a five year old, or even a ten year old.  To a fifteen year old, pursuing the path they desire in life, I think formal, structured lessons are well-advised. But to my kindergartner… I think close family relationships and pursuing your interest of the day are more beneficial.

If I choose to pursue unschooling (please, someone, give me a less-volatile title for this concept!), I may be soothing one relationship (mother and son) but irritating another (husband and wife).  I’m uncertain in which direction to proceed.  Do I keep going, and eventually bend my child’s will to my own?  Or follow his?  In which case, bending my own?  And what lesson does that send?

Tomorrow… tomorrow we are making cookies, and dog food (home-roasted turkey, rice, and veg — nothing but the best for our Border Collie/mutt), and perhaps making a trip to the library to look for crochet books for me, and Wii games for loan, and whatever perks the interest of my boys.  Tomorrow we are taking a break.  A break from the fighting, and the nagging, and the 5 year old pretending he can’t spell “not” in his phonics  program, but completely able to sound out “La Flûte Enchantée” and figure out that was French for “The Magic  Flute” and beg to go to it because he loves the music.

JJ, please move to Belgium and be my best friend for a year and help me figure out how to do this!!   Because the only homeschool support here is unabashedly christian (good for them; if you’re going to take a stand, take it unabashedly), and I find myself completely on my own.

Beta has covered the three states of matter with Gamma (at least the ones we can touch).  He understands that the same substance can appear differently.  Particularly water.

He also knows the distinction between matter normally progressing from solid, to liquid, then to gas as it’s molecules move faster and faster as they gain energy from heat.

Further, he also knows that a few water molecules in ice can actually move fast enough to go straight to a gaseous state.  How does he know this?  We tested it.

Water frozen in an open bowl kept in the freezer can never be in a liquid state, it’s too cold in there.  But, after weeks of weighing a small bowl of ice every few days, we graphed the loss of water.  The bowl was a small bowl I’d call a monkey dish (I don’t know why, that’s what we called the small bowls we used at the restaurant I cooked in a lifetime ago).  We’ll have to see what we can find out about that name’s etymology.  That ice had to go somewhere, and it couldn’t have turned liquid and poured out.

Gamma now knows that water can go straight from a solid to a gas.  It’s called sublimation.  He knows this because we measured it.  He saw it happening over time.  But wait, there’s more.

What if the bowl were bigger?  Would the ice sublime away any faster?  We talked about the differences between the small bowl and the big bowl.  The only difference that Gamma decided mattered was the surface area of the ice in the bigger bowl.  He thought the ice would sublime faster.  So, we tested that, too.

A few more weeks of measurements, and we had our data.  Not only does Gamma know that water molecules in ice can go straight to a gas (sublimation), he knows that it happens faster if there is more surface area of the ice.  Here are our results:

Sublimation of water in our freezer

As you can clearly see, the ice in the large bowl sublimed at a much faster rate than the small bowl.  The X-axis is the number of days in the freezer, the Y-axis is the weight of the water in the bowl, in grams (I did mention to him once that water is the standard for grams and volume [1 gram of water = 1 cubic centimeter], but we’ll expand on that later).  Obviously, I drew the graph, this wasn’t an art project.  But Gamma was there while I drew it and made the actual measurements.

Now, of course I didn’t bother explaining graphing, domains, and ranges to him.  We haven’t done Cartesian coordinates just yet.  But Gamma did understand that the steeper curve meant that what we were measuring  happened faster.

My point in this was to expose Gamma to having an idea, figuring a way to test that idea, conducting the experiment, and then making conclusions about the idea based on the results.

This month, Alpha is taking an immersion French course at the local université.  He says it’s kicking his ass and that it’s a complete waste of time, obviously geared for someone with far more French experience than he.  And yet he’s coming home with all kinds of new words and phrases daily.  I think he’s getting more out of it than he realizes.

Rather than driving into the city daily to drop him off and pick him up, or him attempting to find parking within the city limits, we purchased bus passes for the month.  Unlimited travel within our zones for an entire month for just 27 euros each.  Both kids travel for free.  We find this to be a remarkably good deal.  Aside from the obvious savings on fuel and parking fees, you simply can’t beat the convenience.  I don’t have to worry about parking, or loading and unloading Epsilon from his stroller.  So many times I’ve wanted to take the kids out and about and go exploring in the town, Mons, Belgium, but haven’t wanted the hassle of getting there.  It’s been wonderfully convenient — so much so that we’re considering getting a yearly pass.

So a few days ago the kids set out to really begin exploring the city.  Here’s a teaser photo — the local collégiale church — St. Waudru.  We didn’t venture in today, but I’ve visited before.  It really is a beautiful gothic church, and not the tourist throng that some of the larger European churches can be.

That’s Gamma in the picture, more interested in running around than in getting his picture taken with a piece of history.  Also in the background is the Belfry.  More on that in coming posts.  Today we simply walked around, seeing what there was to see.  It’s high time we really learned about our local area and took advantage of all that it has to offer.  While we’re educating ourselves, we’ll give you a brush with European History as well!  Come back soon to read about our exciting European adventures!