I've been tagged

Cathi over At Granny's House has tagged me with a Random 7 meme. So here are 7 random things about little ol' me.

• I am absolutely, positively, completely and utterly TERRIFIED of snakes. I had an incident as a child and now I cannot even watch the slithery things on tv. As a matter of fact, writing about them is making my back crawl right now!
• When I was 18 I spent 3 weeks in Kiev, Ukraine on a mission trip. I also spent a few days in Moscow on the way in and out. This was in '92, right after the USSR disintegrated but the infrastructure had not been replaced. At the time the only way to fly to a city like Kiev was to fly into a main city like Moscow and the fly Aeroflat, the Soviet (now Russian) airlines within the former Soviet block. Aeroflat was, ahem, highly unreliable and unsafe, so we took a train from Moscow to Kiev and back three weeks later. We had old-timey berth rooms, with four bunks that swung down from the walls. Actually, the swaying of the train made for quite a soothing night's sleep.
• The town I grew up in had 2 high schools: the one good in football (you might have heard of us) and the other was the "AP" high school. They got all the AP classes to help students take AP and CLEP tests to get college credit. They really lorded this academic superiority over us. But our senior year, guess who had the last laugh? Not only did our school have more 5's on the AP tests (that's the highest score you could get) than they did, but there was only one National Merit Finalist in the whole town. Yep, it boggled my mind. A reporter even came out to my house to interview me, and he brought a photographer to take a picture of me. It ran as the lead story in the education section with a 3x5 color picture.
• Even though I am also scared of heights, I have always wanted to go parasailing. (I know, that's alot of fears. But I am also almost as claustrophobic as I am scared of snakes, so I really don't like small elevators in high rise buildings! And you can bet I will never, EVER watch Snakes on a Plane!)
• I just don't "get" scrap booking. While I think the finished are products are very cute, I can not imagine spending the hours it would take to accomplish them. In fact, I can't even manage to keep up with putting pictures in a plain Jane photo album with the slots! Those of you who think I have every inch of my life organized, filed, and indexed, DON'T LOOK in the armoire in my bedroom, or all the pictures that need to be put in an album might fall over on top of you! Thank goodness for digital cameras that allow you to copy the images onto cd!
• I think it is absolutely amazing how many problems that Dr. Pepper and chocolate (dark, of course) will solve.
• When I am sick I love to watch the appendices of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. In fact if Kelly comes home from work and I am laying on the couch watching one, he doesn't ask, "are you sick?" He just asks, "What am I making for supper?"

And since "granny" managed to tag nearly my entire blog list, I'll just add June and Lora.

The (school) year in review

Observations of the past year:

• Brynna has learned to read, in spades. We now have to tear books out of her hands to do her chores.
• Kora is able to handle two foreign languages at once, something we did this year on a trial basis. We are doing both at what amounts to half speed. She didn't finish either book, but has reached or exceeded the goal I set for how far she would get.
  
• I can see improvement in both Kora's and Aubrey's writing, something that Kora especially has struggled with at times.
• I started making Kora and Aubrey both write out the spelling rule at the beginning of each spelling lesson, and have discovered that this really helps make it "click." Especially for those who are not natural spellers.
• I like Tapestry of Grace! It has really simplified things for me, and I think it will continue to do so as I add more kids into our "academy."
• Kora and Aubrey have made great strides in becoming much more independent this year, much more than I would have thought possible. This is very good for me as I have Brynna and Hailey coming up hard on their heels, who will need much more attention from me in these early years.
• In the classical education model, dialectic age children take formal logic courses. Although Kora was too young for this, she spent time each week doing a sort of "warm-up" to logic activity - mindbenders. These were a big hit. In fact, I had to put a time limit on her or she would have blown through an entire book of them in a day.
• We didn't get our garden planted yet - between all the illnesses we've had plus a May taken up with family responsibilities, this project will have to be pushed into June (or July).
  

Looking ahead to next year

• It is time to get Kora a "real" piano teacher - so I am in the process of finding a piano teacher for her. I have been teaching her the past 2 years, but I have taken her as far as I feel I can.
• I need to do more hands-on projects for history. This is one aspect of TOG that I didn't do this year, but especially with a 1st grader next year, I need to do more of these types of things. I am pretty good about doing these with science, but for some reason I struggle to do them for history, Maybe it's just because I would just rather read another book about it than do a messy project? But my plan is to schedule time for this each week so I am forced to do it. Tapestry sells lap books to go with their stuff, and I am thinking about buying one to see if we like that.
  
• Although I love Tapestry of Grace, I think their year 2 plan covers too much territory. TOG covers all of world history in four years, but I think year four spends too much time on the 20th century. Many families take 2 years to go through year plan 2 because it covers so much, but in order to keep within the 4 year time frame, my plan is to take a year and a half to go through Year plan 2 (roughly 400 AD through 1800). Then a year in Year plan 3 and do Year plan 4 in one semester. That's the plan anyway. In three years, I'll let you know how it turns out. ;) This also gives me time to tweak the plan further before Kora hits high school. That is a great plus about this curriculum - very flexible.
• I didn't do as much read alouds as I had intended to this past year. We did do some, but this is not something I did on as regular a basis as I'd have liked. So next year I need to find a way to do so more consistently.
  
• I hereby take a solemn vow to never, NEVER again go through an entire semester without any breaks. We did so this year for family reasons, only taking a single day off here and there, but not a whole week, because we needed to. But NEVER AGAIN! We will go longer into the summer or start earlier if need be.
• I want to concentrate more on cooking and sewing skills this year, especially for Kora.

Anyone else willing to 'fess up?

I just have to brag a little...

on my 10 year old daughter Kora. A few days ago, she completed The Lord of the Rings trilogy. And no, I don't mean the movies. She read Tolkien's Fellowship of the Ring, Two Towers, and The Return of the King in just under three weeks.

When she first approached me, asking if she could check them out from the library, I was skeptical. I told her that I thought they would be too hard for her, that they were quite a bit more difficult than The Hobbit. But if she wanted to try she could. But if she struggled or didn't like it, we'd put it aside for a year or two. Well, after reading Fellowship, she informed me, "Mama, this isn't nearly as hard as you made it out to be. I was expecting it to be much harder."

Next year: War and Peace.

Oh, wait. Then I would have to read it too...

How it all started, part 3

Once I began to understand this vision Kelly and I had for our children, I had to step back and ask, what is the best way to go about this? Thus I began to have a change of heart. Instead of looking at homeschooling as "more work for Mama," I began to look at it as God's provision for us to help us achieve this. I was excited about watching our daughters grow and mature. I began to focus on the privilege that we were given in being stewards of these girls by the Lord, for just a few short years. It became imperative to me to use the time wisely.

I also became excited about the thought of being the one to introduce them to Roman architecture, knights and castles, the Civil War, to planets and star systems, art, music, and even the internal workings of animals. I had a built-in opportunity to share my love of learning and books. As I was around more homeschooling families, I noticed that almost without exception they were extremely close knit, because they shared so much together. They enjoyed being together, and other people enjoyed being with them as well. I wanted these things for our family.

I realized that I had come full about, that I no longer wanted to send them away, even to a Christian school. (Personally, I believe Christian school fulfill an important need. I didn't want there to be any ambiguity on that point.) But not only did we feel that we were the best ones to educate them, private school would have been a financial strain for us, perhaps forcing me to work outside the home. This was not a sacrifice we were willing to make. I now saw Christian day schools as a second-best option for our children.

It was a long process, and wasn't as cut and dried as I've made it sound in this reflection upon it, but by the time Kora was 4, I was wholeheartedly on board. I was so excited to start, I could hardly wait for her to be old enough to officially begin. It was quite the change from where I had been just a couple of years earlier, scared to death and fully convinced I couldn't do it. And I have to admit that there had been a great deal of selfishness on my part. I thought it would be easier to ship them off to school every day, and I couldn't wait to "get my life back" once I didn't have kids in the house all day. I say this to show that only God could have shaken me out of this mindset and set me on this path, as it was not my will. Thank God for His infinite wisdom and patience with his children!

Now I won't pretend that there weren't other considerations that went into our choice to homeschool. Kelly and I were often bored silly in school growing up, so there was also the attraction that we could tailor their education to our kids, keeping them challenged; but also having the freedom to slow down when they hit a trouble spot in math or enjoy a particular part of history. But while academic achievement is important, it is secondary to the real reason we have traveled this road. In fact, I would now say it is a side benefit, rather than a reason for it.

And I also don't believe homeschooling is cure-all for all the wrongs of society, the church, or families. Nor do I believe that homeschooling will ensure that our children will be Christians or stand firm in their faith as adults - homeschooling is not salvific. Obviously, salvation through Jesus Christ is the answer God has provided to the world. And even believers are not perfect this side of eternity. However the Bible has given some simple instructions to parents as to the best way to share the gospel with their children, to model the Christian life to them, and instruct them in it. And our family believes the best way we can follow these instructions is to homeschool.

As I look forward to the next school year, I realize that we only have 7 more years with Kora before she graduates from the "Smith Academy," even if she remains under our roof beyond that. It's a sobering thought, and an exciting one. In one way I can't wait to see the woman she grows into, and the other part of me will miss these years terribly. It's also sobering because there's so much I want to teach all our children, to convey and pass on to them. What an awesome privilege and responsibility it is!

May the Lord help us all, be with us and bless us as we bring up the next generation of believers.

How it all started, part 2

Kelly and I spent several months discussing this off and on, until we moved to San Antonio. We received orders to move down here... and ended up in a church with several homeschooling families, including two women about my age who had been homeschooled themselves. I think inwardly I groaned. Here I was running away from what my husband wanted us to do, and I land in a place like this?

So I picked their brains, asking so many questions, I am sure they were sick of me. :) I read books, I prayed, I went to their houses and looked at what their kids were doing. I learned two important things during this time. The secondary thing I learned was that the "how" of it is not as difficult as I first thought. There are so many options out there for homeschooling, that the real issue is narrowing down the choices of curriculum and books.

But the most important thing I learned was the reason why so many people, especially in that Christian community, have started keeping their children at home for their education. The longer Kelly and I talked about it and studied what the Bible said about parenting, the more came to firmly believe that God has entrusted parents with a sacred responsibility to raise their children "in the nurture and admonition of the Lord." It is listed as either the father's or parent's job to teach their children the ways of the Lord. The books of Joshua and Judges is full of examples of what happened when fathers neglected this instruction. This goes beyond taking them to church every Sunday, but encompasses so much more.

We believe that this includes talking about the Scriptures and about what Jesus has done for us "while we sit in our house, and when we walk by the way, when we lie down and when we rise up." That this should be as "frontlets before our eyes." (Paraphrase of Deuteronomy 5:7-8). This means not just reading the Bible, but demonstrating how the gospel changes us, shapes our thinking, how it guides our thoughts and actions. This also means we should glory in His creation, wonder at His complexity and logic in the way he fashioned the universe, and how He shaped and guided history. It also means preparing our children to be released into the world as adults who can not only get and keep a job, but who have been equipped for the life God has called them to; to be able to stand firm against all the flaming arrows of the evil one.

Once I came to this understanding of our jobs as parents (a little later than my husband who had obviously arrived here well before me), I realized that my earlier reason for not wanting to send the kids to government school was incomplete. Rather than just not wanting to expose them to all the bad stuff, I looked at it from a different angle. If the above is our goal as parents, is sending them to government school going to help us toward this? Will it keep the Scriptures as frontlets before their eyes? Will the government schools teach them about the wonder of creation? Will they teach that the laws of physics and chemistry are the works of an infinitely intelligent creator? Will they teach history in light of His plan of salvation for men from before the foundation of the world? When our children graduated from high school, would they be prepared to enter the world with a heart wholeheartedly given to the Lord? Would the government schools strengthen their faith?

These are sobering questions for any Christian parent to consider, and our answers cemented our course away from government schools. More about our journey in part 3!

How it all started, part 1

As I have been looking over the past school year and gearing up for the next one, I am amazed anew at the journey that we have been on for the past 6 years. Yes, we have just completed our sixth year of homeschooling! This has been an amazing blessing for us, but it is one that I didn't see that way at first.

When Kora was 1.5 years old to about 2 years old, Kelly and I started talking about options for her formal education. We were living in Oklahoma City at the time, on Tinker Air Force Base. Kelly was a lieutenant in the AF and we weren't sure where our future homes would be. What we did know was neither one of us thought we should send her or any other children we might have to public, or government, school.

At first this was a reactionary decision. Actually decision is probably the wrong word, because it was never an option for us. But we knew what the schools were like when we went through them, how we were taught so many things that went against what the Bible, our parents, and our churches taught us. We knew what the social atmosphere was like, and had seen the double life so many "Christian" kids - including ourselves at times, we admit - often led as we were torn in two from the completely different values and expectations we lived with: one at home and at church, and one at school and with friends.

The stereotypical homeschooling family is one in which the mother wants to homeschool, and the father has to be convinced. However, this is the exact opposite of how it came about in our house. From our earliest conversations, Kelly said he wanted us (read ME, I thought) to homeschool the kids. I balked. I was voting for a private Christian school. I was pleading for Christian school. I tried every way I could think of to figure out a way to pay for it and talk Kelly into it. After all, we only knew one family who homeschooled. I was completely unfamiliar with it, and just knew it would just mean more work for me. And after all, didn't everyone send their kids off during the day?

Besides, I was a very unlikely candidate to be a homeschooler. I excelled at the academics in school. To this day I still miss college. :) I thrived on the competition for grades, scholarships, and awards. Wasn't that what school was all about?

Well, I'll have to continue with how God brought us to this point in a later post.

Parenting Rule #248

For however many days a mom is sick, it takes twice as many days as that to catch up. So if I am sick and laying on the sofa for 2 days like last week, it takes 4 days to fully catch up.

I don't know how you moms who have had to be on bed rest have done it.