Light and Momentary

Books '06: 4, 5, and 6

The Great Divorce. I am planning to read a bunch of C.S. Lewis this year; I started with this one because it was on our shelf. Short, intriguing, and timely in view of book #7 of '06 (which will get its own post one of these days). The narrator describes a bus trip from hell to the outskirts of heaven, in which any interested residents of hell are invited to stay.  They decline -- an artist because he cannot see that "if you are interested in the country [heaven] only for the sake of painting it, you'll never learn to see the country," a mother because she will not subjugate love of her son to love of her Father. Good stuff.  I liked the quote Lewis put in George Macdonald's mouth: "There is always something they insist on keeping, even at the price of misery.  There is always something they prefer to joy -- that is, to reality."

Henry IV, Part 2.  Every year I read a Shakespeare play, in hopes of getting the complete works read by menopause.  In the beginning I loved this plan, but for the past few years I had been enjoying the plays less.  I do a lot of reading, but it's mostly in fits and starts -- five minutes while the water is boiling for the mac and cheese (oh, wait, I mean for the organic brown rice with tahini-miso sauce), ten interrupted minutes while I am supervising the Lego pickup, a few pages at the park.  And it doesn't work very well for me to read Shakespeare like that.

I took the first part of Henry IV with me in December when I went to visit my brother and his wife and baby.  Because of a travel snag I ended up spending a whole day in the city, arriving at my brother's house in the small hours of the next morning.  That day I read Shakespeare whenever Pete slept and loved it.  I couldn't wait for part two, and I resolved to carve out some time for uninterrupted reading since it made such a difference.  But uninterrupted time is in short supply (isn't it ironic that I stopped in the middle of this very sentence to save in draft form and deal with a sibling blow-up?) around here.

Now I wonder:  did I like Part One more because I read it away from the usual clamor for band-aids, snacks, and justice, or is it a better play?  I enjoyed the Hal/Hotspur contrast in Part One, with its reminder that parents need to love their own children and not pine for somebody else's.  (In my head I was calling their opposite trajectories "chiasmus," but apparently chiasmus is only a smaller-scale kind of crisscrossing. Is there a word for it when one character triumphs and another character tanks?)  I'm not a fan of Falstaff on the page (too many obsolete puns about booze and unfaithful wives) -- does he play a bigger role in Part Two or did it just seem that way?

Anyway, resolved:  Shakespeare is best read in larger chunks with fewer distractions.  Maybe that means I'll be past menopause before I finish the complete works after all.

gods in Alabama.  Joshilyn Jackson's blog makes me laugh out loud consistently, and her book is even funnier.  It is also a well-plotted mystery and I stayed up late galloping through it.  Interesting stuff about love, family, and race, and the battleaxe aunt brought to mind my own tough-as-nails Aunt Mary Bob.  I'll be reading her next one when it comes out.

Epilogue, Backstory, and a Few Things About Homeschooling Philosophy

Epilogue:  we got in the van not long after my sad little post and "You Shook Me All Night Long" was playing on the radio.  I cranked the volume until the dashboard rattled and sang along.  The boys thought this was hilarious and it dissolved the lingering tension between my oldest and me.  ("Did you see that lady on the sidewalk shaking her head at you, Mom?" he asked me as we drove down Main Street.)  We went to the park and swam at the Y and everybody was a lot happier.  On a wall somewhere I should post emergency instructions for defusing homeschooling crises:  1) Find something funny in the situation.  2) Reconnect.  3) Go outside.  4) Do something physical.  5) If you climb on that high horse, it only means you fall farther.  Which means a bigger splat when you hit the steaming pile of high-horse leavings.

Backstory:  I gave my 9yo a geography assignment.  He did it sloppily, with multiple instances of a mistake I had told him to guard against.  I told him he'd need to re-do it.  Drama ensued.

The central struggle in my relationship with my firstborn arises from his strength of will.  He doesn't have an iron will; he has a titanium will.  This is a gift, I know.  It will serve him well.  At the same time, it has caused me a whole lotta anguish in my nine years as a mother.  How far do I respect his autonomy?  How often do I say, "Listen, kid, I'm the mom and you need to obey."

As you might imagine, this is a recurring question for us with homeschooling.  How far down the unschooling path are we going to go? How often do I say, "This is what I expect from you and I want it done cheerfully and well"?

Recently someone asked me for more information about unschooling -- here's a FAQ.  Melissa Wiley has a post here with some good links.  (Updated:  right after I posted this, I saw this great piece with more thoughts on unschooling.)  Unschooling is sometimes called "child-led learning."

I first heard the phrase "child-led" in relation to breastfeeding. If you spend any time with long-term breastfeeders, you will hear stories of child-led weaning, in which the child gradually decides that she is old enough to prefer stories and Waldorf dolls to nursing and so she and her mother trudge off into the golden sunset wearing matching Birkenstocks.  There's a fair amount of overlap between moms who are into child-led weaning and moms who are excited about unschooling. There's also some unfortunate animosity between unschoolers and school-at-homers. 

I was all set to be a child-led-weaning kind of mom and it

emphatically

did not work for me.  My two oldest sons weaned at almost five and at five and a quarter, so anyone who doubts my commitment to breastfeeding clearly owns more Birkenstocks than I do, but they were not the ones leading the way into that particular sunset.  And for a while, when my firstborn was a needy toddler, I felt guilty about taking the lead and saying no.  These days when I talk to mothers feeling restless about long-term nursing I always say, "Nursing is a relationship. It's about both of you.  Yes, you're the adult and you're better able to handle frustration.  But what you want your nursing relationship to look like is very important.  Recognizing your limits is crucial."

The same is true for homeschooling, I think.  In both arenas, my goal is to be child-respectful but not child-led.  My kids have lots of unstructured time for pleasure reading and art projects and Lego construction.  They can check out 75 library books at a time; they can go to town with modeling clay; I will help them track down answers to questions they throw my way.  But we have fairly structured school time and I like it that way.

Two of the reasons I am not an unschooler are practical.  I have four children -- whose lead would I follow?  More importantly, I think that unschooling, done well, requires a high level of mental presence and sustained mental presence is one of the things I find hard about homeschooling.  Our schedule helps me to have clear and reasonable expectations for myself as well as for the boys.

I also have two philosophical objections to unschooling.  What if a child is bad at something?  Hardcore unschoolers seem to say avoidance is fine -- he'll learn when the time is right.  This was the heart of our conflict yesterday:  my oldest hates geography but I expect him to have a certain level of competence with maps.  I will respect his learning preferences, but I won't be governed by them.

The final reason I am not an unschooler crystallized just after I wrote this post: unschooling seems lopsided to me.  I've heard it said that trusting your child is the cornerstone of unschooling.  And yet a critical part of learning is trusting your teachers. 

"We can't homeschool happily unless you trust me as your teacher," I told Alex when he complained splenetically about reading Rilla of Ingleside. "Sometimes I'm going to ask you to do things you think are boring, or crazy, or redundant, but after you finish them you'll say, 'Oh, yeah, I get it now.'  I'm not going to load you down with meaningless work. The work that I do give you -- you need to do it well."

We compromised on Rilla.  I said if he read ten chapters with an open mind and still hated it, he could bail.  He read ten chapters and bailed, relieved.  I guess that's what homeschooling, and mothering, will look like with Alex:  sometimes I lead, and sometimes he leads, and sometimes we hammer it out together, with attendant noise and sparks. 

Teaching my son to steward his will wisely is humbling.  Some days I do it better than others.  Yesterday's lesson:  when rhetoric fails, sometimes AC/DC does the trick.

This is just to say--

--that sometimes homeschooling is really hard.  That sometimes instead of starting at 9:00 with the housework done, we start at 10:15 with mom sporting a corona of frizz and deodorant smudges on a too-tight shirt.  That sometimes I struggle to get through three subjects with my patience intact.

Okay, sometimes I struggle to get through one subject with my patience intact.

This is just to say that sometimes it is A REAL DRAG to be the one in charge of their education and character formation, that sometimes I wish those two things weren't rolled into one so effectively with homeschooling because character formation is hard work.  Maybe there are character molds in a homeschooling catalog somewhere.  Add boiling water and stick in the fridge for a while, like Jello.

Could I hear the complaining from inside the fridge, do you think? 

This is just to say that some days I doubt myself, and that sometimes my firstborn drives me up the wall so efficiently that I expect a herpetologist to knock on my door and ask me to donate my digits to science when I die.  Maybe I feel like I am coming unglued because all my inner adhesive is trickling down to my fingers, allowing me to make like a gecko and climb the walls. 

Maybe there's an industrial application for that somewhere.

This is also to say that sometimes a person sits down with a cup of coffee to write a quick self-pitying post and is interrupted by the howls of her odd-numbered children, who just bit each other's butts and are wailing in pain and outrage and surprise.

Okay, I am back and I have to laugh at that last paragraph.  I also have to ask:  does carrot cake count as a vegetable?  Because it sounds awfully soothing about now.

Books 1, 2, and 3 of 2006

I am going to borrow an idea from MamaT and do quick reviews of the books I read this year, instead of planning longer posts in my head and then never writing them.  One of my resolutions for this year was to be more purposeful in my book selections.  Not so many random grabs from the shelves by the library checkout desk -- instead I would have a Plan!  Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time! Galsworthy! Proust! In French!

Yeah, well.

Random selection #1:  I grabbed Patrick Madrid's Surprised by Truth 2 while we were visiting friends over New Year's and brought it home to finish.  It's another volume of conversion stories, and it shares the strengths and weaknesses of the first Surprised by Truth.  There's a lot of good apologetics information but there's also a lot of repetition, since the same questions come up again and again.  My favorite story came from a woman who went to Latin America as a missionary and found herself with big questions.  Chief among them: how to foster discipleship among people who can't read if your emphasis is on personal scripture study.  I'd never thought of the importance of the liturgy's proclamation of the word in that light before.

Random selection #2:  SAHM I Am, a pleasant piece of fluff from the library's new books display.  It's a 21st-century epistolary novel, composed entirely of emails from a fictional loop for Christian mothers.  I suppose it's obligatory for a novel featuring email to have an episode in which the wrong name is typed in the TO: field and disaster ensues, but Allison Pearson did it better.  Still, the ending made me laugh and it was a quick read, so I won't complain.

And random selection #3:  Loud and Clear.  My husband snagged this one for me from the sale rack at the used bookstore.  Anna Quindlen writes so gracefully that-- that-- that I am all hung up trying to find a graceful ending to my own sentence.  This is a collection of essays and speeches from roughly 1993-2004, a mix of thoughts on motherhood and calls to political action.  I disagree with Anna Quindlen in predictable ways but I always enjoy her writing.

The three books I am reading now are all Purposeful Selections.  We'll have to see if the purposeful wins out over the random for the year or not.

"A Little Bit Behind"

I did some rearranging of old posts, so that the Homeschooling category now contains most of what I've written here about homeschooling.  Some of the questions that followed my last post on homeschooling have come up before, like what about socialization, and (in that same post) what about subjects I can't teach, and what about unschooling.  (I've been thinking more about unschooling lately, though, and roughing out another post on why it's not a good fit for me.)

Also:  let me be clear that I am no paragon.  As you imagine me going through the morning I described last time, imagine my hair getting wilder and wilder as I run my fingers through it.  Imagine Os glued to my shoulder by means of Pete spit.  Imagine me losing my temper a couple of days a week, and hitting my goals with decreasing frequency as the semester progresses.  All right?  Got it?

Today I wanted to write about how we tackle math.  I left AmyinMotown with the mistaken impression that we just don't do math, and she's probably not alone.  So let me hasten to clarify:  we do math!  We like math.  We just don't use a particular math curriculum, and I don't own any math workbooks, and I would prefer fleas to flashcards.  I am a relaxed math homeschooler. Sort of.

My husband has a PhD in a field that required years and years of math coursework, and his math skills pay our mortgage.  His perspective is skewed, because his professors were forever saying things like, "You all learned topology in junior high school, right?  Vector calculus in preschool?"  We were driving home tonight and he was talking about the boys' math skills.  "They're a little bit behind--" he began, and I immediately began to excoriate myself inwardly.  Because Alex doesn't have his 6/7/8 times tables down perfectly, and Marty is wobbly on his addition, and even though they can both come up with the right answer eventually maybe eventually isn't good enough -- but then I noticed the sly grin on my husband's face as he finished his sentence: "--on differential equations.  They're supposed to learn those in kindergarten, after all."

So maybe we have an anomalous definition of relaxed.

But I like numbers.  They please me.  When my oldest son was four he begged me to play math games with him -- I would tell him a silly story, about when the bedbugs played the roaches in baseball, and he would have to keep score when the roach pitcher hit a surprise triple with the bases loaded.  (Early math skills and the evils of a designated hitter, all in one fun lesson.)

For years I thought I was bad at math, but really I was bored at math.  Halfway through a homework assignment I would start thinking about other things because I GOT THE POINT already; I knew how to multiply two two-digit numbers.  Yes, sustained attention is important, but I know with utter certainty that seven eights is 56.  Any additional drill would be wasted time.  I don't want to waste my children's time.

So here's what we do:  Marty and I just play math games.  For Alex I pick a topic each week.  He works for fifteen minutes on a particular type of problem.  Some weeks it's straight-up arithmetic -- times-table drill or similar.  Other weeks it's something else entirely.  This is how you find the slope of a line.  This is the Pythagorean theorem. This is how you solve two equations in two variables.

I used to worry about this approach.  Was it appropriate to play around with division when he didn't have his addition facts down pat? And then two years ago I read a fascinating article for my professional continuing ed requirement.  Children, the article said, don't learn in pyramid fashion.  You don't have to lay the first row of blocks down like so much granite, and then draaa-aag the second row of blocks up on top.  Learning is more like a spiderweb, in which you make connections all over the place.  You can learn more complex skills at the same time that you're perfecting simpler ones.  (The authors were writing about a different domain, but I think the comparison holds.)

The arithmetic facts are coming along just fine.  My third-grade son can subtract 38 from 64 in his head without batting an eye.  And! Actually! That's a story in itself:  I was trying to encourage him to play with two-digit subtraction in kindergarten and he was reluctant. "You know what 60 minus 30 is," I said. "And you know four minus eight is negative four."  A light bulb went on for both of us.  He knew that 30 and -4 yielded 26.  And I understood, suddenly, why we teach kids to borrow.  For 25 years I had done it by rote, but in that moment I understood what I'd been doing all that time, and that it wasn't the only way to get to the answer.

Recently I was talking to a homeschooling friend who says her boys do ninety minutes of math every day.  I'm didn't say what I thought, which was AAUUUGGGHHH! NOOOOOO!  I'm just not convinced that ninety minutes of math drill is a good idea for an average first-grader. "Drill and kill," Elizabeth Foss calls it. 

My goal as a math teacher is to help them acquire solid skills, sure.  But at the same time I want to impart three other lessons as well:

Math is fun. My husband found a book for Alex called The Number Devil.  He loves it -- he's read it six or eight times.  Who knew you could laugh about prime numbers and the Fibonacci sequence?

Math is interesting.  One day in ninth grade I noticed that squares are separated by consecutive odd numbers.  One night fourteen years later, as I was lying in bed nursing a 9mo Alex to sleep, the explanation dawned on me.*  I love finding patterns and I hope my boys will too.  The order I see in the mathematical world reflects the beauty of creation's order.  It makes me happy.

Math is useful.  If you are saving for a Lego set and there's a 15% sale coming up, how many weeks of allowance is that? 

Math matters.  Math is doable.  That's what I want them to know.

*Some of you will find this obvious and some will find it a snore, but here it is if you're interested:  for consecutive numbers A and B, B² always equals A² + (A+B).  A²+A=AB, and AB+B=B².  So:  consecutive squares are always separated by consecutive odd numbers.  And they say nursing a baby sucks up brain cells.

Mystery Ingredients

More homeschooling stuff coming up soon, but first a couple of quickie posts on other topics.  First up:  food.  I wanted to share two recipes I love.

Miso used to scare me.  Fermented soy paste sounded like something that might take on a life of its own in the back of the fridge.  Some morning you could open the fridge, half-awake, to grab the cream for your coffee, and there'd be an enormous amorphous many-armed blob preparing a coup, in the spot where you'd left an innocent-looking tub of miso the night before.  Why take the risk?

Finally I took the miso plunge and so far there have been no hostile takeovers in my refrigerator.  Sometimes I use it as a substitute for stock -- a spoonful of miso added to hot liquid -- if I have none on hand.  Mostly I use it in a Crescent Dragonwagon recipe for stir-fry sauce.

Combine 1½ T. toasted tahini, 1½ T. red miso (you can also use white), 1½ T. honey or Sucanat (I use a little less), 1½ t. finely chopped ginger, and ½ c. water in a small saucepan.  Whisk it smooth and simmer briefly, until it is slightly thickened.  Serve it over stir-fried veggies and rice.  You can also add orange juice or zest, garlic, or a smidge of toasted sesame oil.  Quick and easy and yum.

I don't know why, but I had never bought saffron until this year.  I also don't know why I finally tossed one of those little vials into my shopping cart, but I did.  And I learned something I should have figured out years ago:  saffron is a wonderful thing.  That one vial made two batches of the recipe below, plus a panful of risotto Milanese to go with my husband's birthday osso buco, as well as beautiful sunshine-colored icing for stelline d'oro (a fun homeschooling project -- star-shaped cookies flavored with orange-flower water).  I'm hooked. 

In particular, I'm hooked on this recipe:  Moroccan Chicken with Green Olives and Preserved Lemon.  To make it, combine ½ t. ground ginger, ½ t. ground cumin, ½ t. black pepper (I use less because my kids complain fiercely about even mild heat), ¼ t. sweet paprika, ¼ t. crushed red pepper flakes, and a pinch of crumbled saffron threads.  Set aside.  Cover ½ c. green olives with water and set them aside too.

Next put 2 T. olive oil and 1 T. butter in a deep skillet over medium-high heat.  In two batches, brown 3 lbs. of salt-sprinkled chicken parts (either a whole chicken, cut into serving pieces, or else 3 lbs. of legs and thighs).  Remove the browned chicken to a platter.  Pour off all but 1 T. of the fat in the pan and return to medium-high heat.  Add one onion, chopped, and three cloves of garlic, likewise.  (I use more onion and garlic and leave a smidge more fat in the pan.)  After about 3 minutes, add the spice mixture and stir for a minute.  Pour in ¾ c. water and scrape up the good stuff from the bottom of the pan.  Return the dark meat chicken pieces to the skillet.

Cover the chicken and turn down the heat; simmer for ten minutes.  Put in the breasts at this point if you're using a whole chicken; turn the other pieces over.  Add the juice of half a lemon and sprinkle with 2 T. chopped fresh parsley.  Cover again; give it twenty minutes more at a gentle simmer.

While the chicken is simmering, drain the olives and pit them.  (This is not onerous if you know the trick of putting them underneath the flat of a knife and giving it a firm thump with your fist.)  Rinse one salt-preserved lemon (this is optional if you don't have a specialty-food store nearby, but it's delicious) and chop it into half-inch pieces.  Add the olives and preserved lemon to the chicken; turn the pieces once more.  Give them ten more minutes.

Check to make sure the juices run clear, and remove the chicken pieces to a platter.  Cover them so they don't get cold while you reduce the sauce.  Add the juice from the other half of that lemon, and let the sauce cook down for five minutes.  Add another 2 T. chopped fresh parsley.  Serve the chicken with sauce on top and something on the side to soak it up.

I have to end this post now so I can go eat the leftover sauce out of its tupperware with a spoon -- that's how much I love this recipe.

All Right, Here We Go: Resolved, and Logistics

Sometimes blogging is good for you.

In a few different deleted posts, I tried to figure out why I was so reluctant to blog about homeschooling.  It's my parents, those posts said.  Their opposition to homeschooling really touches a nerve.  My parents disagree with most of my out-of-the-mainstream choices, but it rarely bothers me.  When it comes to homeschooling, their disapproval really gets under my skin.

They disapprove for three reasons:   (a) they think I am consigning my children to a life of freakdom since homeschooled kids are weird (both Mom and Dad), (b) they have heard that homeschooled children are so used to doing their own thing that they can't function in the workplace (mostly Dad, and one of these days I need to tell him, "You know, increasing their tolerance for soul-sucking boredom is not on my list of educational goals for my children, and I'm not ashamed of it"), and (c) they think a mother can't be an effective teacher for her own children (mostly Mom, based in part on trying to learn piano from her own mother). 

But I think they also disapprove because there is some old tension between us on the subject of education.  My own school experience was frequently miserable, and they seemed to expect that I would just suck it up.  I suspect that their unwavering insistence that my kids should learn to get by in public school arises from their previous unwavering insistence that I should learn to get by in public school.

Somewhere I read that you're never really grown up until you let go of your need for your parents' approval, and in this series of drafted and deleted posts I have been feeling like a flunkout from emotional maturity kindergarten.  I don't know why, exactly, I get so sad about their attitude.  Maybe because I try so hard to do it well and they remain convinced, in a "don't confuse me with the facts" way, that homeschooling is always a bad idea.

For a while I was thinking, "I should have one of those low-key Harriet Lerner kinds of conversations with my parents.  What was it like for them when the boy in junior high set my hair on fire?  What was junior high like when they were kids?"  But something inside me would seize up at the prospect and say, "Ha! As if! Maybe in ten years, if Alex is cruising through Harvard and I am vindicated at last!"

But do you know:  around the fourth deleted post I began to feel a little calmer.  I began to think that maybe I could actually have a conversation with them that didn't leave me tied up in knots.  And even if I don't have that conversation with them, I am at least feeling more peaceful myself. 

I knew, before, that I couldn't handle any trollery on this topic.  You want to tell me I'm a nut for giving birth at home or tandem-nursing?  Feel free.  You want to tell me I'm a nut for homeschooling my children?  Watch Jamie curl up into a ball and doubt herself one more time.   This is why I've written so little about something that takes up so much of my life -- I was staying out of the kitchen for fear of the heat.  While I'm in a better spot these days, I'm still feeling a little tentative about this post.  (If you want to tell me about any areas in which your parents can push your buttons effortlessly, it would help me to feel less alone here in remedial emotional maturity kindergarten.)

Moving on:   I am resolved to post semi-regularly about homeschooling.  Why don't we use a math curriculum?  How do you teach Latin to a kid in kindergarten and make him think it's funny?  Where is the baby during all of this?  (Hint:  not under the haystack, also not fast asleep.)

Here's a bit of the logistical side of things, with more to follow.  I don't use a packaged curriculum.  I like parts of the book The Well-Trained Mind and I use their approach to history and literature.  The authors divide history into four chronological periods; using their plan you complete three four-year cycles, looking more deeply into the material with each one.  We started with the ancients in the fall of 2002; we just arrived in the 20th century last month

Each week or two I sit down with my materials and my spreadsheet software, making a plan for the next week or two.  (I have used less structured approaches in the past, but this is my first year with two students and I have to say I was really unhappy with our foray into unschooling last year.  Ergo, more structure.  So far it's working a lot better for all of us.)

Someone left me a comment which I can't find at the moment (sorry, Someone!), about wanting to homeschool but having a husband who disagrees.  My husband disagreed for a long time and now he is 100% behind homeschooling, so there's hope.  Unity is critical, I think -- I simply could not do it if he weren't on board.  I need help with the kids during my planning time; I need to be able to vent about a bad day without worrying that he will say, "Obviously, they should be in school."

I think it was Rachel who asked about what happens with the little kids while the three of us are working on school.  They are usually right in the middle of things with us.  One of the distinctive things about homeschooling is its organicity.  This is our life -- we learn together, we eat together, we fold laundry together, we read together, we fish Legos out of the baby's mouth together, we learn some more things together. 

Sometimes it's a bad thing:  if somebody wakes up on the wrong side of the bed, you'll be dealing with it all day long.  But often it's a really good thing.  One night I was tucking in my oldest son and he asked me a question about the imperative mood in Latin.  I answered his question and BING! I saw the line jump from dot A to dot B.  He understood, suddenly.  Or on Immaculate Conception -- we read Rev. 12 right before we went to noon Mass at the Newman Center.  At the end of Mass we turned around and I said, "Look, boys, look! The woman clothed with the sun!"  I hadn't remembered the enormous image of Our Lady of Guadalupe painted over the chapel doors.

So what do we do with the little guys?  We flow, mostly.  We've set up our schedule, about which more below, to accommodate a 3yo who needs attention.  I do a lot of reading aloud with a baby on my hip.  Sometimes we take a ten-minute break to get a fussy Pete down for a nap.  Sometimes I smack my forehead in frustration when he wakes up fifteen minutes later.  But in between we learn a lot, not only about WWI and German pronouns, but about doing unto the least of these, and about being patient with each other.

It works best for me to have a schedule, and it works best for me to plan on 15-minute lessons.  I'm running out of minutes, so I'm just going to type in our Monday-Thursday schedule here:

9:00 writing for Alex, reading for Marty
9:15 Latin/German (each one gets two days per week)
9:30 history/science (ditto)
9:45 Alex learns more about our history or science topic on his own, using library or internet resources, and I read a picture book to the middle boys
10:00 Bible
10:15 art/music

At 10:30 we take a 30-minute break.

11:00 memory work
11:15 math

That's it for the morning.  After lunch I read aloud to everybody.  Twice a week we work on geography; twice a week Alex is supposed to work on a writing assignment.

I could make this a huge post because there's lots more to say, but I'll stop here for tonight because my bed is calling loudly.  Questions?  Comments?  I'll try to get back to you soon.