A Literary Love of Flowers

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So, I think one of the perks, if not one of the outright goals, of educating little kids yourself at home is that you get to choose what to stuff into their little brains. Maybe that sounds nefarious, but aren’t the early years mostly just about learning how to learn, and learning to love learning? That’s why I used a saint-based curriculum this year for Police Preschool and it’s why as the school year winds down we are focusing on nature and birds and most of all, flowers.

Because maybe someday Pippin will be a police officer and Scout will be something totally depressing, like a dentist, but they’ll keep these memories of the difference between a dandelion and a daffodil and the way robins dance beside the turned-up garden soil and how grape hyacinth smells like Concord grapes (and maybe a fact or two about St Thérèse, too).

And on our quest, there are plenty of books to light this love of flowers.

The Police Correspondent

Since August, I’ve had Pippin write one letter a week. While much of my approach to schooling has evolved through the months as I get to know my student and myself, letter-writing has been a cornerstone of Police Preschool.

Papa’s Police Preschool

This month, J returned to work after a full two months home with us as a new family of five. It’s been such a gift for us for him to have a long parental leave — and a perk for taking what amounts to a six-year low-pay apprenticeship.

We all recovered quickly from the whirlwind birth of our Elizabeth Ann, since I didn’t have any injuries this time and we are slowly figuring out how to handle this newborn thing, three kids deep. So we returned to Police Preschool sooner than I would have expected, and it was such fun to see how different homeschool looked with the papa on the premises.

Although we’d talked often about why we might homeschool and what we’d like it to look like, when J was actually home, it became clear he didn’t actually know what our day-to-day looked like. He hadn’t realized where our co-op was held, for instance, or what I do with Scout while I’m trying to knock out lessons.

7 Quick Takes: 7 Weeks Into Police Preschool

I’m linking up again with This Ain’t the Lyceum for a 7 Quick Takes to celebrate having finished seven weeks of Police Preschool.

1. Pleasingly Flopped Field Trips

• Bees: Pippin mostly just played with our friends’ Duplos and gobbled up their cherry tomatoes. Still a fun evening!
• Ducks & Doughnuts: It poured rain, but everyone got a doughnut and Scout chased ducks to her heart’s content, so I’m counting this a win.

1. • Eggs: Pippin was afraid of the chickens, but Scout loved collecting an egg and was rapturous about eating it next morning.

1. • Frogs & Fish: See below.
   • Goats: Unbelievably hot, but both kids relaxed into it a little more. It may have been the influence of the goat owner and her kids, folks I know from the homeschool co-op.

2. Saint Stories. I have a friend with an amazing stash, and she’s been way more helpful than the library, frankly. Every week I add more books to my “Homeschooling Maybes” Amazon list, but because of her, I haven’t had to spend a fortune on supplementary readings — does anyone know a good site for child-accessible stories on the saints, when I can’t find a picture book version?

3. Outside Everyday. I kind of hate this right now, and the kids did at first, too, but are now gaining steam. If we have a playdate for the day, I count that as the outside time, as long as they’re out a bit; if we don’t have a playdate, we just head down to our neighborhood park, and there are usually kids there to recruit onto the police squad. I am not a great all-weather person and the kids definitely resist on rainy days, but especially when they’re really playing happily and I can just sit and watch and maybe read a bit, I know it’s the right thing to do. On the days we miss, I definitely notice it in their behavior.

4. Poetry. Our current favorite is The 20th Century Children’s Poetry Treasury edited by Jack Prelutsky. Pip particularly likes funny ones and riddles, but is occasionally fascinated by more…poetic…poetry, like the selections this collection has on bats. Any recommendations for us?

5. Letters. I have Pippin write a letter to a friend whose name starts with the letter of the week each week, and I love it, and mostly he does, too. “Write” is pretty loose here; he usually signs his name and scrawls the recipient’s. Sometimes he decorates with stickers, usually with police cars. Sometimes the recipient writes back.

6. Rosary Updates. So, he’s kind of hooked at looking at art associated with the day’s mystery on my phone, and it’s kind of disruptive, though it does lead to good conversations about how religious art works, why there are varieties, what medium the artist used, etc. My tentative solution is to cut him off when he turns five next week, and we can just look at the art in a book we have of rosary art, or he can color.

7. Doubling the Fun. So, I know I’ve got it easy right now. Homeschooling baby steps: no newborn (coming soon!), only one child in school, the child only in preschool. I took a friend’s school for Police Preschool recently because Pippin begged me, and it was fun, but utter chaos. Two kids, two months apart, and their skills and interests are so different — Other Kid isn’t writing yet, but pays way more attention during the Rosary and is much more agile on the playground. And everyone had fun on the playground, and going on a walk to look for frogs and fish, but then I lost my keys, and they got to solve a Real Detective Mystery and help me find them as I waddled grumpily along. (#thirdtrimesterhomeschool)

Happy Michaelmas, y’all!

Commonplace Book, 36 (Week 31)

What is a commonplace book? For me, this is a space where I post interesting links, reflections on what I’m reading, and the newest recipes I’ve been trying out — a collection of miscellaneous micro-posts.

What I’m fixing:

• Refried Black Bean Soup: Note: it looks sinister in prep. It looks a little better when you’re done, but mostly like sludge. Delicious, delicious sludge.

 

 

Yum. Right?

 

 

• Slow Cooker Breakfast Casserole: I made some rookie mistakes that made it salty: I used too many pre-seasoned hash browns and subbed breakfast sausage for plain bulk sausage, which I couldn’t find. But it was still a small miracle: a food-safe, hot, hearty breakfast ready for a breakfast potluck right when I woke up. Highly recommend, just follow the recipe more carefully than I did!
• Elephant ears. We are baking something most weeks for Police Preschool to fit with the letter of the week (last week was dog biscuits) and WHY CAN’T I MAKE ELEPHANT EARS? They are puff pastry, sugar and cinnamon, rolled out and baked. I’d say I’m an intermediate baker and these are categorized as easy and we ended up with kids wildly gobbling sugar and the dough not slicing as thinly as I wanted and not a single convincingly elephantine ear. But hey. Sugar and cinnamon and puff pastry still tastes good, no matter the travesties committed against it.

What I’m reading:

• Always and Forever Lara Jean. Fluff, but just the kind of teenager I kind of was, and wish I knew, in high school. And set in Charlottesville just up the road!
• “Our favorite audiobooks” at LMLD: Pippin has been listening to hours of audiobooks each day. Is this normal?! Is this OK?! Mostly he’s been working through Karen Savage’s Librivox ouvre, so E. Nesbit and the What Katy Did series, and I’ve been trying to encourage him not to meditatively chew on the old iPhone while he listens.

Last year I was thinking about:

• I was making pizza, apparently, and not sleeping nearly as much. We are pretty solidly in a frozen pizza season much of the time now, especially when we were sans kitchen sink.

Police Preschool in a nutshell: a worksheet from Children’s Church with PRAY FOR POLICE scrawled in.

Police Preschool, the First Fortnight

 

Ground rules

Day 0: The Friday before, Pippin is encouragingly excited about homeschool. I ask him if he wants to come up with a name for our school and some rules, and together we draft the above document. I am killing at this. 

Day 1: There’s a mad rush to get a decade of the Rosary in with J before he races off to work. We are starting school a couple weeks before local places so I don’t feel as shirky if the kids experience a stretch of televised education when Roo comes in late fall. Pip and I are both excited to start, but disaster strikes: I have heard that preparing things to distract the toddler is almost as important as engaging the learner, and soon both kids are vying for a bin of beans, making a mess and squabbling. Ugh. I try to remember that the start of last year, at traditional preschool, was tough, too, but at some point, I’m yelling “NO ONE HERE IS BEING VERY AMIABLE” as I try to go back to our lesson on the virtue of amiability. Then I load up the kids and take them to play at a local wading river with friends because, hey, this is homeschool.

Day 4, End of Week 1: Each morning, Pippin asks me to read to him or play for awhile before we start school, but I keep starting (and finishing) early. He seems to enjoy once we are gathered around the table, and asks when we will homeschool again over the weekend. I’m learning to be firm, kind, and not panicky in making school happen each morning. We have decided that at the end of each week, if we’ve both behaved, we get a special policeman activity, and this week it’s some random worksheet I downloaded off Pinterest. He loves it.

Week 2: It’s Letter B in the house of Bowers. He writes a letter to my sister Beca, using butterfly stamps and bear stickers that were mine when I was a kid. We don’t make it to the library this week, but we do go on field trip to a neighbor’s house to learn a little about her bee hives (mostly he plays with Duplos). We read the story of St Benedict, but he mostly just likes the attempted poisoning bit.

I am relying on my phone more than I feel great about: playing Benedictine chant, showing him paintings of the various Mysteries of the Rosary. But if I were using a library CD, somehow I’d feel more wholesome, so I try to get over it.

 

Writing his aunt

Scout is usually content to sit in her high chair and play with special toys (including the dreaded bean box), and our lessons are always extremely quick — maybe 30-45 minutes, all told. Sometimes we revisit a memory verse or talk about the letter of the week later in the afternoon, but often it’s the usual old mix of park visits, reading aloud, and entirely too many trips to the grocery story. Everyday, he tells my parents over Skype some of what he’s learned, and repeats it again for his papa after work. I feel like that’s reinforcement enough.

 

This week, I think we’ll add in coins, sorting them and using them to count by 5s and 10s and 25s, but that’s the height of my ambition. It can be rocky when everyone’s yelling and I’m just trying to get through a poem, but it sure beats the tar out of Pip’s preschool adjustment last year.

 

Enrichment. Maybe. Also, imprisonment.