Sitting Under Trees

Week One: God in the Yard.

A small space I tend to overlook is the foot of a tree.  I remember sitting under trees during rain showers, swinging from their branches and scraping the dirt away from their roots with my shoes, buring treasures at the base of their trunks... when I was a child.  I remember the different feel of the bark of Aspens, Maples, Oaks. I loved being next to something that was bigger than myself knowing it wasn't out to surprise me.  Once I nailed a sign to a tree and after a while the tree began to ooze its blood through the hole and it made me sad.  My botanist father sighed.

Sitting under trees is an activity left for children.  They don't have a list of pressing things.  They seek rest when they need it.  They follow whims and imagination.  When we encountered this tree last week on a hike through Kasha-Katuwe my children instantly ran to climb the roots.  I stood back to take the picture.

We have three large trees in our yard; a Silver Maple, a Colorado Blue Spruce and an Austrian Pine.  I never sit under them.  I walk around them with wariness like I'm an intruder.  I know they leave hands sticky, let insects move up and down their barked highways, drop things from their branches.  I'm concerned that they too thoroughly shade my garden and might kill our new grass.  I avoid the trees.

Last Friday, I sat under a tree for the first time in years.  It was out of necessity; the grass all around was wet but this young Cottonwood had a broad, dry root protruding from the soil at its base.  I leaned against the bark, velcro to my shirt, and watched my children play at their games.  My freckled skin needed shade for that hour and the heart-shaped leaves provided it.  Having my journal handy I pulled it out and wrote a few thoughts.  An adult friend walking past, taking the children out to the field, whistfully commented that she wished she could be where I was.  I felt childish; perhaps I should have been working too.

In order to grow I feel like I need permission.  To grow as a counselor -- something I've become by default -- I need to feel like I'm allowed to push the one I'm helping.  To grow as a leader I need other leaders to say, "Come on.  We think your growth is a good idea.  Keep trying."  To grow as a teacher I need permission from the world to continue to follow my gut for my own kids.  To grow as a writer I need permission -- maybe just from myself -- to set aside time to write.  To grow as a wife I need to feel like what I'm doing is what he needs me to do.  To grow as a Christian I need permission to grow on my own sometimes without taking a group along with me.

Cottonwoods don't seem to need any permission to grow.  If they happen to park their seed by the water and they have enough space they'll continually grow.  And they don't just do it adequately.  They pile on gigantic branches, gain heights of  nearly 100 feet and are considered majestic and magnificent.  They spend their 70 years thirstily sucking the water from the ground and continuing to do what they were made to do.  There is much to learn from their consistency and persistence.

This summer, I'll practice sitting under trees.  I'll fail sometimes. I'll miss a day.  I'll be misunderstood.  I'll fear that, like Lent, I'll miss the point and the practice will not produce a purpose.  It will be easy for others to label me as "odd".  But something is there to be learned and enjoyed.  I'm not a child anymore.  Here we go.

Cultivate these things. Immerse yourself in them. The people will all see you mature right before their eyes! Keep a firm grasp on both your character and your teaching. Don't be diverted. Just keep at it.  (1 Timothy 4: 15-16)

Right Up To The End

J is front row on the left at his eighth grade continuation ceremony.

My oldest son is in a small charter school.  He was home educated through 6th grade and we had various reasons for making that switch when he entered 7th last year.  This May, he graduated from eighth grade.  I think academically he accomplished some great benchmarks this year.  His teachers challenged him and enjoyed him.  However, his last week of school consisted of watching The Lord of the Rings (in his teacher's defense they had just finished reading and writing essays on the Hobbit), ultimate Frisbee, yearbook distribution, locker clean-out, random school-specific standardized testing, an awards ceremony, continuation ceremony, a day at an amusement park and a school bbq.

S's Kindergarten graduation from his once a week Options class.  S is in the plaid shirt.

My other two sons continue to be home educated.  B finished 4th grade and S finished Kindergarten.  Their last week of school was nothing like their older brother's.  S's final task was to daily read through his last four lessons in Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons.  We played some math card games and he participated in some of what his brother was doing too.  We were covering the Revolutionary War so B was typing up a paragraph on Washington as the first President, creating a book jacket book report on Johnny Tremain that we had read aloud, trying to at least make his over-ambitious rag-rug until a potholder, mapping out major war battles and watching a video about Yorktown.  In addition he continued to do some fun multiplication drills online, finished reading through the book of Exodus with me, and reviewed about a dozen spelling rules.  On our last day, after he'd finished up all of the above, we did our traditional oral review quiz that happened to take over an hour.  Then we proceeded to plant the front garden and map out our family road trip.  The learning never ends.

To say their last weeks were decidedly different is a bit of an understatement.  But I don't have final grading to get done like J's teachers do and B&S and I get to intersperse slacker fun activities through the year rather than cram them all into the last week.  Our last week is always one of productivity and pushing through to tie-up loose ends and wrap-up notebooks.  And our last week is never easy.  When we are a week away from being done for the year we start salivating for the outdoors, taking our work upstairs near the windows or outside on the deck.  We linger over lunch because the sandbox is such a nice place to finish the meal with a Popsicle.  We have to push ourselves back inside because the garden seedlings pushing through the earth are too distracting and steal our focus.  But we make the academics happen all the way to the end.

It's exhausting.  But when that final review is done and the notebooks are complete we heave a sigh of relief.

And then we hop in the car for a roadtrip and listen to Adventures in Odyssey tell tales of early America, visit a few museums of American history, hike through areas of geological peculiarity... I just might count vacation as school days for next year.

Homeschool domination infographic

I realize these ideas are not new to us homeschoolers... but someone has put together a nice looking infographic about how much better homeschoolers fare than their public school counterparts. So, maybe you will enjoy it.



Created by: CollegeAtHome.com

Why am I aligning Math Mammoth to Common Core Standards

Someone recently was wondering if perhaps aligning Math Mammoth curriculum to Common Core standards wasn't a good idea, or at least wasn't going to help them any, because they have found value in curricula outside of American ones.

So why am I doing that?

I have known of Common Core standards for a few years, but in December 2011 I noticed that nearly all states were or are going to implement them. So, they are in essence providing a framework for a national curriculum in mathematics.

So, I decided to consider them, and to take a closer look at the standards. And I realized that Common Core standards aren't that "bad." They are NOT like most state standards have been, "inch deep and mile wide," with tons of topics per grade.

These are "core" standards, meaning there aren't a huge amount of them per grade. So it's a BIG improvement over many of the states' standards.


I also noticed that some of the "core" standards were already in place in Math Mammoth, such as a focus on single-digit multiplication in third grade, or multi-digit multiplication in 4th, or fractions in 5th.


I liked the fact that the standards explicitly mentioned some mental math!

Also, I am not fundamentally changing the teaching approach or style in Math Mammoth. Aligning to the Common core is more a question of reorganizing topics, moving some topics to a different grade, than anything else.

Yes, I've added a few little things they require such as measuring how much longer one thing is than another, or problems with unknowns shown with shapes, or asking children to divide a shape into quarters.  But it is not affecting the development of major concepts.

At the same time, I have also revised many of the lessons and made them better -- this is happening regardless of the standards. It's just when I see my earlier work, I find ways to improve it.

I hope this helps!