The O'Donnells

Hi all!

After all my concerns of recent I just have to share with you today's
victories!

This morning started out with my scheduling daughter scheduling once again
- right down to question time and bathroom breaks! Sparing you all the
details the root of the problem came out. The tears started flowing and I
learned that she was so aware that her old friends were back in school -
school buses going up and down the road, not hearing from the few she heard
from during the summer, etc. She was having a hard time with the whole
thing (this is only our 2nd year hsing.) After a much needed talk (this is
what dd is like - a volcano - she builds up pressure, builds up pressure,
manifests it in strange ways (schedules in this case) and then explodes on
me) she started playing joyfully like a trooper. We even turned the whole
schedule thing into an unschooling lesson about scheduling our time and how
not to try to force it on others! In tears she told me "I guess I have
been trying to make our school seem like ps, huh?" Bless her heart. They
go through so much sometimes.

She wanted to tear up the schedule but I wouldn't let her. We talked about
how it had helped her and that having a schedule in her private time was
fine if that is what SHE wanted. But I wouldn't go there! They both
really learned so much from this. Funny how it all worked out.

Then after basically blowing off the day (compared to our other days) we
came home and "did" our math (no, don't throw tomatoes at me :o) Only to
run across an introduction to division problem that my 6 yo took on with
glee. Something we had been doing together that I knew clicked with her in
division I showed her on paper - she lit up like a light bulb and took off
like a tornado with division problems. "Mom make up some problems for me
in division." She learned the two ways to write division problems on
paper, worked about 30 problems, used apples as counters (we picked apples
today as well) and when she got to a problem that needed a decimal point
she mastered that too! Yikes! Try to stop her. She bypassed that math
book at warp speed!

So you Minquon (sp?) math lovers out there - is there a web site I can
visit? I really saw tonight how the text book dumbs the kids down a lot!
DD was really moving along until she started back with the apples and doing
what they did in the book - it is like it gets more complicated than
necessary and boggles their little brains. No wonder my older dd feels
like she is too stupid to do math - she is probably beating her head
against imaginary walls trying to figure out the obvious.

Then oldest daughter was typing and decided she wanted to learn proper
keyboard placement of her fingers - so I wrote her some exercises to start
off with. We will see how that goes. Anyone know of a good source for her
to use in this endeavor?

OK, so Mom had a pretty good unschooling/deschooling day herself! :o)
In His Service,

Laraine
praxis@...