Three Plus Two

Logistics makes my head hurt

I just wanted to say: I have hit a wall.  Any woman with six children should be able to buy executive functioning (the part of your brain that helps you plan stuff) over the counter when she needs it.  You know, like vitamins.  Say, when she is trying to prepare for a vacation and a new school term at the same as she is researching the probability that her twin toddlers have sensory integration difficulties and she is also trying to decide whether or not to bring all or only some of the tomatoes in, because the forecast changes every fifteen minutes.  In this scenario, without supplemental executive functioning, she is likely to give pride of place to the tomatoes.

My wonderful husband bought me a fancy new laptop to replace the one I burnt out at the beginning of the summer.  This fancy new laptop came with Windows Calendar, which I am using to make up a schedule for our fall term.  My goal is to start up again on September 22.  I'm not sure we're going to make it that long, considering that my kids are reacting to this "break" the way they react to all breaks -- in other words, not very well.  But I still have a few things to do.  Like clean off the table.  And the hearth, which is full of potatoes and onions.

But back to Windows Calendar.  I like it, but I am not using it in the way that its authors intended.  I started out by using a day to make Gareth his own schedule.  Gareth's schedule is easy.  Gareth likes to work independently.  He does not like anyone hovering over him while he does his work.  This means that all I need to do is give him the books, let him know what my expectations are, and spend about thirty minutes or less going over his work when he's done with it.  After we get past the rocky adjusting-to-the-new-routine period, my responsibilities overseeing his education are not that hard.

After I did Gareth's schedule, I went on to Katydid's.  Here I ran into trouble.  Katydid will be in the fourth grade this year, and she does not always do well when asked to work independently.  She needs me to work with her in a few subjects, most notably math and Latin.  It should be easy to work two subjects into my day, right?

Um.  Have I mentioned that I've been researching sensory integration issues with the twins?  It's gotten to the point lately that I can't do much else when they're awake but be with them.  If I try to read aloud, even while they're eating, one or both of them will yell, fight, throw blocks, dump toys, hassle the baby, and just generally make it impossible for me to read.  (By now I'm pretty good at reading over and around chaos.  Believe me when I say they are making it impossible to read.)  Behavior of this general sort goes on all day.  The boys have always been just a little MORE than your average kid: MORE intense, MORE active.  But lately it has escalated to the level of breakdown -- which would be mine and Andy's, thank you very much. 

Anyway, the sensory integration road is no stranger to us, although when we have trod it in the past it's been for sensory defensiveness, not sensory-seeking.  Still, I know the drill: behavior improves when appropriate activity is built into their day.  In the case of sensory-seekers, a lot of jumping, swinging, heavy lifting, pushing, pulling, stuff with weight to it. 

Okay, so when the twins are awake, I need the older kids to be very independent.  What about when the twins are asleep?

By the time the twins go to sleep, I'm shot.  I need a break.  And, oh yeah, Chipmunk naps in twenty minute intervals in the afternoon.

Sometimes it feels as if my day is a special needs roulette wheel.  We'll just give it a spin and see what turns up next.  Sensory defensiveness?  Got that.  Sensory seeking?  Got that, too.  Visual processing problems?  Yep.  ADHD? Yep.  ADD without the H? Oh, yeah.  Tourette Syndrome?

Now, where does math go?  Windows Calendar doesn't seem to have a function for this.

         

Summer Schedules, or King Routine

Several people have asked me lately if we will be taking a "break" this summer.  (At coop you can tell that all the moms really want to pick each other's brains about the nitty gritty of their day-to-day lives but are too polite to say, "Sit down and tell me everything.  But first let me get a pen and paper."  The physical therapist just wanted to know if we had school every day from 8-3, and if so, weren't we going to take a break from that?  I hope she wasn't discouraged by the look of horror on my face when I contemplated a seven hour "school" day!)

My answer to "will you be taking a break this summer" usually runs like this:

"Well, my kids don't consider a lot of the stuff we do to be "school".  I read aloud to the kids a lot, and of course we keep that up year round.  And my kids are always involved in lots of projects of their own, which they don't consider "school" either.  As far as more formal academics go, we might not work on them as intensively as we do other times of the year, but my kids really need their routine.  And they don't like having to go back and review things because they've forgotten them over a break."

What I don't have time to explain to people in a thirty second sound byte is that when I say the kids really need their routine, what I mean is, a change in our routine can really make Gareth fall apart.  And when Gareth falls apart, our house can be a very unhappy place.

This isn't to say that the rest of us don't benefit from the routine.  I have seen homes without routine, and I wouldn't want to live in them.  People of all ages and dispositions like to know when meals are, for instance.  We all benefit from having a regular bedtime and a quiet time in the afternoon.  But Gareth is one of those children termed "chronically inflexible".  For him a fairly unchangeable routine is the lifeline that gets him through his days.  A change in plans can be frustrating even for those of us with more laidback temperaments.  But for children for whom even the slightest bit of frustration can be overwhelming, a change in plans can be a catastrophe.

Unfortunately, it is easier to slip out of a routine than to get one going.  In case I didn't already know it, I learned it again this week when I forgot that the kids were supposed to do their chores right after lunch before going outside.  It was one of the first warm, sunny days in weeks, and my stated goal all day was just to get the kids out the door.  But as they ran outside to play, I looked around at all the dirty dishes lying on the table and realized I had made a mistake.  I couldn't do the dishes or wipe out the sinks or get the laundry myself because I had to feed the babies, and I wanted to get them outside, too.  And I knew it was going to be really, really hard to get the kids to do chores at 2:30 when they were used to having a rest in their rooms.

The real trouble, however, didn't show up until the next day, when Gareth wanted to go outside right after lunch.  "No," I said.  "It was too hard yesterday.  Do your chores now.  It will take thirty minutes and you'll be able to spend a longer time outside."

But the routine had been broken, and the next thirty minutes was taken up by stomping and shouting (and unfortunately, not all of it was Gareth's.)  The next day was a repeat, and the next.  By the fourth day, we had an uneasy truce about chore time again, but if I hadn't thoughtlessly broken the routine, none of those battles would have been fought.

So that's why we don't really break for the summer.  On the one hand, if you were to tell my kids that we weren't going to have read aloud time in the morning because it's "school", they would wonder what horrible thing they had done to deserve such a punishment.  And on the other hand, Gareth and I would be faced with a battle come fall when we tried to get back into math and cursive. 

Of course, our routine does change a little with the seasons.  (It's too cold here during the other seasons of the year for us not to take advantage of summer!)  But if we don't retain the underpinnings, the whole structure has a tendency to fall apart.

Taking attendance in the homeschool

Now that this school year is winding down and I have to start thinking about what I'm going to write for the kids' quarterly and yearly assessments (required by law in New York), I've been trying to get all my record keeping a little more organized.  When we lived in Missouri and I only had to keep track of what boyDragon was doing, I used to enter what we had done that day as "completed assignments" in Homeschool Tracker because it would automatically compute the hours for me and the list of "completed assignments" functioned as our legally required learning log.  The state of Missouri also requires homeschoolers to keep a portfolio, so I put two Rubbermaid containers down in the basement and used them for anything solid that the kids produced.  I always meant to also take photos and make a scrapbook, but never got around to it.

When we got to New York, my whole routine changed.  New York requires an attendance record along with a certain number of hours completed, but it doesn't require a learning log or a portfolio.  Homeschool Tracker was installed on the desktop computer we stored for three months after we moved, and the Rubbermaid containers were stored, too, so I couldn't use them.  I kept a written learning journal for a while, tried out the various homeschool journals on the market, had twins and got really spotty with record keeping for much too long a time.  So Friday I cleaned out the file drawer in my computer desk and made room for new homeschooling files, including the satisfying stacks of math and handwriting papers boyDragon is producing without too much complaining.  (He likes learning cursive now, he says.  Could have knocked me over with a feather.)

I also fixed up our attendance calendar with the help of my updated version of Homeschool Tracker.  (Although I don't really write lesson plans or use the software to give my kids assignments -- which is really one of the main things it's designed for -- I really like this version of the software.  By using its attendance feature, I don't have to count days like I would on a paper calendar.  I can click on the journal feature and keep my learning notes right there, too.  If I input the activities of the day as assignments, the software will keep track of hours spent for each kid, too.  It also keeps track of resources used, goals, chores, has a schedule feature, and a weekly planner.  If you input topics for each assignment/activity, you can also print out your very own scope and sequence, which is going to come in handy for me when I have to write those quarterly and yearly reports.  But I digress.)  This involved some tricky memory work, because my memory was pretty fuzzy for most of October, November, and December.  After being conservative and not counting weekends (on which much learning often occurs) or those days when the kids were primarily learning what it's like to care for newborn twins (another valuable skill), we're still going to get in our 180 days well ahead of the June 30 deadline -- probably by the end of the week.

Switching states has made me think about what constitutes "attendance", though.  In Missouri, there were no attendance requirements, only hour requirements, which suited us pretty well.  Now, however, it seems like I have to do a lot of math in my head to figure out if the kids are present or not.

900 hours a year, 180 days present, so "present" means 5 hours a day... or 2.5 hours a day for 360 days... or....

But what does "present" really mean?  Due to illness, boyDragon's adjusting to his medication, and the proliferation of PT and doctor appointments lately, our Montessori-inspired "choice time" has dwindled so that now our structured time is down to 1-2 hours of reading aloud in the morning and the 45 minutes that I spend with each child in the afternoon working on basics like math.  Add to that the thirty minutes or so each child spends working independently on math, handwriting, and spelling during quiet time in the afternoon, about 30 minutes of more read aloud at bedtime, and it's not 5 hours of what most school officials would consider "school".

But then add Katydid's birdwatching, which she does on her own, field guide in hand.  And add the time we spend listening to literature on CD in the car.  And the time the kids spend listening to their books on CD at quiet time.  BoyDragon is immersed in his Bionicles right now, not playing with them but constantly inventing new ones and putting them together.  Some of his constructions are quite complicated and contain many moving parts.  He's obviously learned some engineering principles along the way.  But do I count the time he spends working on these as being "present"?  Lots of boys his age do Bionicles.  The difference is, boyDragon has more time to spend figuring them out.

Of course, my dilemma is nothing new to many homeschoolers who have to deal with state requirements like these.  The kids have been making great progress over the past few months with our mix of structure and delight-directed learning.  Katydid is not reading as well as I had hoped when we began the year, but she's on her way.  BoyDragon has begun to like the physical act of writing, which is probably the major achievement of his year, and something I never would have predicted.  We have all learned a great deal about what it means to come together as a family as well, lessons that are far more valuable than learning the times tables on "schedule". 

There are things I would like to change for next year, subjects I would like to add -- Latin, for one -- and certainly a prepared schoolroom would help, but overall I think we managed to attend to our learning pretty well.