Nice moments in homeschooling

Since Monday, we've resumed our ritual of doing homeschooling around the dining room table after breakfast.  (Or during breakfast, since some days breakfast lasts for 2 hours.)

On Monday my kids just did coloring and jigsaw puzzles.  Yesterday was much the same, except Anya did three math worksheets.  The worksheets were clock math, coin math, and reading thermometers.  I was trying to ease her back into "schooly" stuff.

Today when I got out some math worksheets, Tristan (4 1/2) announced he wanted some too.  He has these worksheets where you count up the number of shapes in a line, and circle the correct number.  Normally he spends like 20 minutes coloring the shapes, and 1 minute circling the right numbers.  But today he did away with coloring altogether and just circled the numbers, and he did worksheet after worksheet until we ran out and he demanded I go print more of them.  That was surprising... and nice.  Sort of like him printing letters randomly on his coloring pages on Monday and Tuesday.  It was a pleasant surprise.  On Tuesday he asked me what "S T" spelled, so I told him the "st" sound, as in "stop".  He had me write "STOP," and then he copied it twice.  I don't even recall if he's ever made a "P" before, but he's now at an age when the brain-hand connection is good enough that you can copy a foreign symbol if you want to.  Anyone struggling to get their 3-year-old to make letters should just chill and wait 6 months, if you ask me.

Now, when Anya was three she could write her name, but I am not proud of that fact.  Actually what I remember is making her write "ANYA" on 17 Valentines and making her do several of them over again because she'd written AYNA instead.  Not one of my better moments.  The biggest mistake I have made with Anya (so far) was sending her to preschool.  Without the preschool, I would never have gotten so competitive.  I'm not excusing myself, I'm just saying that the parents are socialized along with their children, and they want us to be competitive.  It keeps you from questioning their system.  You're too busy measuring your child vs. other children to step back and go "Wait a minute-- why are we doing this at all??"

So anyway, with Tristan I decided I would do total unschooling until he was 6 or 7, and I have stuck to that so far.  He is just learning to spell his name and it is totally, 100% because he wants to.  I only write his name out when he asks me to.  He has also, wholly on his own: asked me which letters were which, asked me to draw letters, insisted on typing letters himself in various computer situations, drawn his own letters, asked me the sounds letters make, asked me what words start with a certain letter, and invited me into little phonics games such as "What starts with D?"  (Or as he puts it, "What spells with D?")  So, to see him write "STOP" of his own volition was nice.  To play the "What starts with Y?" game was nice.  And a few minutes later, he wrote TRISTAN -- the first time he has ever written his own name.  For a long time now, he has marked things simply with "T".  He doesn't like it that there is a T, S, and A in his name (for Tristan, Seth, and Anya) but no "H".  So we have agreed to write a separate "H" in the corner of all his papers so that I might be represented.

Meanwhile, there's plenty of intellectual development with Anya (8 1/2), but it's not easily described.  There is this huge imaginative component, where she considers how anything and everything might have been different.  "I guess it's a good thing fish don't swim in air," she'll say out of the blue, "because when they fell asleep the cats would get them."  Or: "Good thing our noses aren't on our butts, or we'd have to turn around to smell our food to see if it was safe to eat and that would just be ridiculous!!"  She spent an afternoon on "what if there was no gravity," which was amusing since I had to write a report on this very thing in 6th grade science class.  Today it was: "You know, if cats were as different as dogs there would be some the size of mice and some that weighed like 100 pounds... and I don't know which kind I'd want.  I mean, a tiny cat would just get eaten if it got outside, so maybe a big one is better, but if a cat weighed 100 pounds it could probably kill a chihuahua.  Whaddya think, Mom?"

[That last one, by the way, turned out to be a long discussion about breeding, natural selection, and whether it was "fair" that humans spend more time breeding animals they use for work, such as dogs, than animals they merely appreciate aesthetically, such as cats.]

I am also now spending a fair bit of time talking about Star Trek with Anya.  She realllllly likes Spock, but does not care for The Next Generation.  In the tradition of the true Trekkie, she likes The Original Series best.  Last time we went to a play date -- and I kid you not -- she made both the other adults there do the Vulcan hand thing and say "Live Long and Prosper" when we left.  She is all in a tizzy about an upcoming Star Trek exhibit in Detroit, and hopes to buy a Spock poster for her room.  (With luck I can turn this into a physics lesson or something.)

I'll end by saying that I have to believe games & puzzles are beneficial in brain development, because we know they're beneficial in preventing dementia.  I think there is a degree of truth in the idea that your brain is a muscle.  It's not literally true, since your brain is almost totally cholesterol and fat -- but if you exercise it, it works better.  So what does that mean for kids, whose brains are just developing?  What if they spend time at Yahtzee, Quirkle, Apples to Apples, chess, checkers, Blokus, adventure games, DnD style games, word searches, sudoku, mazes, Go Fish, poker, Boggle, Scrabble, etc?  My kids love games, so I know I am biased, here.  But I have to imagine that these games are helpful to children even though they may not be "learning" anything they can regurgitate later, on some standardized test.  I even think that computer games based on solving puzzles, exploring lands, and finding hidden objects are likely useful.

Better than gym class dodgeball, anyhow.  That I can say with certainty.