Tag: elementary school

Me and My Spanish Class

Have I told you all about the Spanish class I’m taking this summer? It’s kind of a crazy story. 

Sometime in the spring the school sent home a notice for the parents. They had a grant to do some kind of community outreach to the parents and they sent home a list of options of things they would like to offer. One of the things on the list was Adult Spanish Class. It looked interesting. I checked the box, Yes I am interested, and sent it back with my student. A couple months later, another notice was sent home. Ok, we’ve narrowed down the options of what people want, we are offering these things: Adult Spanish Class…and a couple others I don’t remember. So, I again checked the box, Yes, I am interested in the Adult Spanish Class. Then maybe another month later, they sent home another notice. These are different times available for the Adult Spanish Class, which ones could you do? I checked off the right boxes and sent the notice back. Then a bit later, I got an email asking me to confirm that I wanted to take the Adult Spanish Class at THIS time, on THIS day. I sent back an email confirming and wrote it down on my calendar. 

So, this was my thought process. It looked like a fun way to get to know other parents in the community, and it would be a great chance to brush up my Spanish and maybe get some better grammar skills. I lived in Chile two different times and I picked up a lot of Spanish, but my grammar is pretty poor. I did not study Spanish in high school, I did French. So, I have a lot of gaps. I also haven’t had to speak Spanish for almost twenty years so I had forgotten a lot of what I had learned. I knew it was a beginning class so it would be easy, but maybe I’d learn some new things, meet some new people…

I signed into the first class via Zoom and met the teacher. We sat and chatted while we waited for the other students to sign on. But no one signed on. The teacher was puzzled. She said she had eight confirmed students signed up for the class. We waited, chatted. After twenty minutes, we finally decided to just move on with the class. By the way, this is a two hour class. She ran me through the paces and started figuring out where I was in my knowledge and what my goals were. And we spent a lot of time talking in Spanish, me frantically racking my brain trying to remember very old vocabulary. But it was fun. She gave me homework and said she really wasn’t sure what we would do the next week when, hopefully, other students showed up, but she assured me she would find a way to keep it challenging for me. Yay. 

I signed into class the next week and again, none of the eight confirmed students showed up. Just me. And so began my weekly, free, two hour, personal Spanish lessons that will go all summer. She started off keeping it pretty simple, but this week I am having to memorize the Preterite Verb conjugation and be able to use it easily in conversation next week. Yikes. But, it’s nice to be challenged. 

I am, of course, a little nervous. This feels like a set up.  Like God just flung open this door and let me have this opportunity and now I’m nervously looking around me, pretty sure that sometime in the near future I’m going to be having some non-English speaking people show up in my life. Cause we get blessed so we can bless others. Right? I’ll let you all know when these people show up. In the meantime, I’ll be practicing my verb conjugations. 

How do I Keep Up?

This week I ran into an old homeschooling friend. Though we are often in the same vicinity, we haven’t stopped to have a conversation in a while. I was asking how homeschooling was going and we talked about that for a while, then she asked how public schooling was going for me. I said it was going great. She asked how on earth I keep up with everything. I said something along the lines of, “It’s easy, I just don’t care.” Which, while flippant and funny, probably did not really convey how I feel. It’s kind of been nagging me, and I keep thinking of how I should have clarified that statement…So, my dear friend whom I’m going to tag in this post, I’m going to expand a bit. 

 

Homeschooling is all-consuming, and mentally exhausting. Especially if you are trying to homeschool multiple children. In your mind, at all times, you have a working knowledge of each child’s abilities. You know what they can and can’t do in Math and English and Science. You have a list of things you are worried about for each child, and also a list of things you are proud of. You can’t have a casual interest in your child’s education because YOU are the Educator. It’s a big load to carry. It was too big a load for me. I went through a long depression and in the middle of it, completely fizzled out in my ability to school my children. We put our kids in public school. We’re in our third year with our younger kids. My oldest two kids homeschooled through eighth grade and then went to public high school. My third daughter is in her fourth year of public school. 

 

My view of public school is, my children now have teachers. I no longer have to keep up with all the minutiae. That’s the teacher’s job. Yes, I look at all the papers sent home. I ask my kids what they learned today. I go to Parent/teacher conferences. I look at report cards. But as far as knowing how well they are doing in multiplication or whether they are mastering their fractions or whether they used proper punctuation in their writing assignment, I have no idea. Since their report cards all say that they are getting good grades, I’m presuming that they are learning what they need to learn. 

 

As far as homework is concerned, I don’t believe in homework for elementary school kids. I’ve been upfront about it with the teachers. Sometimes my kids choose to do their weekly “homework” packets because they want whatever award the teacher is offering. And sometimes they choose to not do it. That’s fine. I think that several hours of running around our yard, playing make believe games, and creating things with legos is going to help them a lot more than sitting down and doing a page of math reviews. I do expect my middle-schoolers and high-schoolers to do their homework, but they’re old enough to be in charge of their own work, so I don’t stress about keeping up with it. 

 

Of course, you have to ask the question, What if they aren’t learning what they need to learn? What if they are getting good grades, but are still getting major gaps in their education? 

 

Well, this is where my philosophy on learning helps me out. I am a reader. I have been a bookworm since second grade. While I can remember a handful of odd facts that a teacher taught me in a classroom, most everything that has stayed in my brain, came from an interesting book. I believe that if I can foster a love of reading in my children then I’ve won half the battle for educating them. 

 

We are a reading family. I always have a book on my kindle app that I pull out whenever I have a spare minute. My husband reads a book most evenings to unwind. My older teenagers have long, loud discussions about characters and events in various book series that they have all read. We have eight large bookshelves in our house and books are scattered on every surface. My kids go to the library at school and bring their books home and have fights about whether they have to share their library books with each other or not. 

 

I have one child whose brain is wired differently. In three years of homeschooling I was not able to teach him how to read. In public school they put him in a remedial program and the reading experts got him reading pretty quickly. (YAY!) But, he still struggles. It doesn’t come naturally to him. He’s still getting extra help in this area. But, he read books. Maybe not at grade level, but he still wants to read. This past week I had to take him on a rushed trip to the library because he needed the fourth book of the series and we only had the first three books at home. So, while I know he may struggle all his life to read easily, I’m not worried about him. My kids all have a natural curiosity about life, and they know that reading books is an easy way to learn about whatever they are interested in. 

 

I see public school as an opportunity for my kids to learn about different cultures. It’s a chance to be with the kids from our neighborhood. Learn how to make friends. Learn how to work with all kinds of people. It’s an opportunity to put into practice everything that we’re trying to teach them at home about “Loving your neighbor as yourself”. It’s a chance for them to think about people’s stories. What are some of the reasons why that particular child might have a hard time behaving in class? It’s an opportunity for them to learn how to be problem-solvers: if you see a problem at school, what can you do about it? All of these things naturally come up in our daily conversations, so I get a good gauge on how the kids are doing in these areas. 

 

So, how do I keep up with everything? I don’t. But, it seems to be working well for us.