On Paper

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I'm sitting on my front porch sipping coffee on the first cool we've had in months. My littles have pulled out every bike, trike, scooter and skateboard we own and are building a "store."  Right in the middle of the front walk, of course.

I have paper and pen and am trying to write out a schedule for this year's school. This year marks the largest range in levels and learning styles that I've ever tried to teach at once. It's not just the age range that has me a bit stumped but the need that everyone will have this year for one-on-one instruction.

Long gone are the days of sitting snuggled with my three eldest, reading aloud their history and literature and everyone doing the same science experiments. Also gone is my ability to keep everyone doing the same subject at the same hour with me as wandering tutor. This year I'm going to be teaching "conference" style.

Johanna Gilbert calls it block scheduling and wrote a fabulous description of it in her blog, Life Of the Gilbert Gang.

I can't wait to give it a whirl.  I think this it will help sort out a schedule complicated by not only multiple levels and abilities but also multiple teen part-time jobs and extra-curricular activities. 

Time will tell.

Year-Round

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We started back to school last week.  Phew.  Just in time.  Summer break was wearing me out.

We used to school basically year round because with our Charlotte Mason approach it just worked for us. 

Then a son took a dual credit course and a daughter started taking piano on a college campus with college schedules. Not to mention part-time jobs... It quickly became evident that I needed to start considering schedules other than my own.

Sigh.

Everytime I get a system down that works I revel in it.  I think it will work always, for all time, forever.  I often think that everyone should try my fantastic new system which could bring about world peace.

Then something changes, and I flounder and fuss until I realize that once again I must tweak schedules to meet life.  Not life to fit schedules.

I would have made a grand Pharisee.

Generation Gap and Walrus Ears

I was reading Polar Bear, Polar Bear What Do You Hear, by Eric Carle to my Littles when the 3 yo asked about flamingo ears. We chatted about bird ears for a while. When we got to the walrus page he had similar questions, plus he wanted a detailed explanation of what a walrus ear looked like.

I've read this book dozens of times over the years. If I include the number of times I read it when I taught preschool the number triples, at least. Yet, I had no idea what a walrus ear might look like.

So off we trotted to my computer to do a search. At Marine Science is an article full of walrus pictures. Including walrus ears.

It hit me as we left the computer that when my 18 yo was a baby we didn 't even own a computer, and even if we had, the internet was not what it is today. If my 18 yo had asked about walrus ears I would have had to: remember the question and gone to the library to look up a book with a good picture.

My oldest child is in a different generation than my youngest two children. So strange, I knew that sippy cup technology had changed from first baby to seventh baby but I never thought about how much the world itself had changed.