CatchyNameHomeschooling

Last week I got quite sick for a few days. Monday my kid woke up with extreme sensitivity to sound so I think she's been sick. Physical illness led to going way off schedule which indirectly increased our stress. I think physical illness also directly increases emotional stress.   I had been joking about the homeschool substitute teacher not showing up. Today I'm thinking about all the physical and habitual things public schools have for getting people back on track after being sick, comparing that with how at home the only thing keeping us on track is me, and wondering how long to expect us to be off kilter after I've been sick.   Today is going smoothly! My first Wordle guess only had one grey square, my kid woke up easily, a new registration and a re-registration for online classes went through instead of needing more steps.   What I've been reading lately: How we told our daughter we were switching to homeschooling  uses an analogy that uplifts both the student a...

  Photo by Katrin Gilger from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Salad_(4447935276).jpg For many students, challenges are the tomato slices in a salad whose lettuce is familiarity and whose cucumbers are support. When some students are judged as not being able to handle challenges well, often the unacknowledged context is that their salad is entirely tomato slices and blue cheese crumbles.  My kid is still unwinding habits and emotions from all the ways school didn't realize how many tomatoes she had every day. A lot of my homeschooling energy is going towards designing salads that are mostly lettuce and modeling being a very easy-going cucumber. (That analogy was brought to you by the fact that our local pizza delivery place hasn't had salads in like three weeks and I miss them.)   This morning that included working together on reading the instructions for seed starting mix, gathering implements, experimenting with dividing the brick, and planting a few ol...

  What I've been reading: The Stress Continuum  might be the best thing I've read about how continual stress, all by itself, can lead to anxiety, depression, and thoughts of suicide. It was written to help assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on health care workers.  Multitudinous book synopses. My 13-year-old is extremely discriminating in what she's willing to read. I created a spreadsheet to start tracking which ones I've read, whether and why my kid might like them. (video) What Does It Mean to Have "Burnout"?  also relates to continual stress. Emphasis on speed or competition engages some students and stresses others.  It’s time to stop using Kahoot as a whole class review tool. Since I don't spend all my time parenting and thinking about parenting, here is a blog post about sewing from 2013 which, believe it or not, was nine years ago!  Tutorial: Altering Sleeves That Bug You This video has excellent, very solid examples of learning and coachin...

 What went well: Wordle, spelling (!), looking at code, drawing, D&D, stress level, eating. What went badly: Cutting cardstock, Mom's sinuses.  What I've been reading: Load Bearing Habits  Related to this, my kid asked to do more bike riding but I have not yet checked tire pressure Autism Checklist of Doom   Recipe Books and Learning  This post and some weekend fire pit use got me thinking that we don't learn in an orderly way, we follow instructions, we ignore instructions, we experiment, and all these things help us understand the concepts more deeply. People almost never go directly from learning concepts to successful implementation.

A lot of sticky parenting problems get easier to work on if you separate things that we assume go together. I feel very smart for having delineated twelve double-ended axes of parenting, but really I just said "examine your assumptions" with a lot of extra steps.    There's a lot written about autistic children needing routine provided by their families strictly adhering to a planned schedule every week, every day, every hour. But the actual support some autistic people need is being clearly notified of changes ahead of time, like a breakfast discussion of, "We'd planned to go to the lake this afternoon, but the weather forecast means that will probably be unpleasant so we'll try again Wednesday" and easy-going  acceptance that they will show some emotions about it.    Sometimes we avoid yelling at a family member by keeping our voice quiet , but we're still trying to chastise , control , or judge them for breaking the plate or spawning too many ...

  Early last week I was pondering a meme  “We can’t ‘train’ a child to have different responses to disappointments, we grow it through personalized, customized co-regulation” by Dr. Mona Delanhooke. If my current goal is to lightly guide my 13-year-old through small hurdles while I am calm, maybe I should pick something neither of us have school associations with. I had just settled on tablet weaving when weather and power worries took over.     I aspire for homeschooling to become so routine and engaging that doing it is a comfort during a crisis.  But right now everything is novel and many aspects are still being trialed and decided.   Last year during February 2021, Texas suffered hundred of deaths, billions of dollars of damage , and a huge disruption to school, work, shopping, pretty much everything. Repairs in our home weren't finished until like September and we're still (slowly) unpacking and rearranging from all the rooms we had to empty.   So...

Part of why homeschooling is starting so slowly is the difference between “routine decisions” and “novel decisions”. I have four pairs of shoes by the back door and solid reasons and habits for which I choose when I'm leaving the house. That's a routine decision.   Should I decide to take up vegetable gardening I would have novel decisions to make: container, raised bed, or in ground? start from seed or tiny plants (with hidden task learning jargon for "tiny baby plants") which vegetables to grow to start with?  how many vegetables to grow?  where to buy them? use start dates listed in the catalog or look up Texas-specific dates? how often to water? Those decisions impact each other and have consequences. If I put a lot of resources into a fancy stone border for an in-ground garden I don't have to buy a lot of dirt, but it'll be hard to expand if I want more room in a year. How often I'm willing to water probably impacts which vegetables I should grow, but...