Oh well.

We’ve been studying clocks now since Kindergarten, all right? You’d think we’d have gotten tell time sort-of-down by now. Nope. Have you ever tried to explain the concept of a.m. and p.m. to a child? Really, military time DOES make better sense. And why do clocks NOT have numbers for the minutes (other than them being so small.) ?

There’s another thing few people tell you. Just because you diligently teach a child something one day doesn’t mean that he or she will remember it tomorrow, or next month or next year. Even if you review it, they may still forget.

What’s worse is when they look at you with a blank stare, like you’re speaking Greek.

I think that’s why I have trouble with a lot of the great-looking, in-depth, intensive “lesson plans” I see posted on the internet for elementary school-children. Any teacher can probably tell that just because she teaches or lectures to children about a subject doesn’t mean that they really UNDERSTAND or LEARN the subject. It just doesn’t work that way. I know from my personal experience that sometimes you have to present a subject in many different ways and then review it over and over and over for even a single child to really comprehend it. Development, interest and even health have a lot to do with learning ability.

Except for swear-words. Someone should do a scientific study on that. We can work for months on math facts and pronouns and still draw a blank stare, but let a child hear a swear-word ONE TIME and it’s in his brain FOREVER.

It’s a mystery, I guess.

You know, it really IS hard to think outside the box as regards education, especially for people like me. I’m a pretty cut-and-dried person: read, learn it, take a test on it.
Sarah is more like: listen to it while wiggling, sing about it, maybe remember NOTHING about it the next day, maybe remember it perfectly or maybe remember some trival fact you didn’t even know she heard. Her homeschooling has been as much an education for ME as it has been for her.

Right now we’re studying the Colonial Period in American History (in this household you KNOW she’s going to get plenty of history). She’s having fun with it, I think, because one of our books has lots of crafts.

Today we talked about Colonial dress (17th century), tomorrow we’re going to talk about 18th century dress and about occupations. We’ve learned a cute song about the 13 Colonies to the tune of Yankee Doodle.

As for math, she’s tickled that she can so easily multiply by 0 and 1…..some of the 2s are even easy. This is good because math facts are still pretty slippery. The math stories we’ve made up work the best.

She aced her spelling test today. I almost wish the words were a little harder. The hardest ones today were “barn” and “road.” That’s not a challenge. I may start taking her spelling words from words that she has trouble reading.

Her Bible Reader is still missing, but we have plenty of other readers. She’s been reading some folktales in one reader, and we’ve also read out of the Pathways (Amish) reader. She likes me to read her out of a vintage book called Animal Babies. Sometimes she’ll read a paragraph and I’ll read a paragraph. Reading still seems to tire her alot.

We’ve been studying Christmas Carols, too. She’s learned a few new ones, and we’re working on a puppet play for church. She’s a natural.

Her puppet is a coyote named Alpha. She’s really great making him move…sometimes too realistically. Today she was making him lick himself. I told her if she DARED do that when we were in church I wouldn’t be responsible for my actions.

No one tells you these things BEFORE you become a parent.