Creative play

I can always count on my kids to come up with new ways of playing. The other day I had the overhead projector down from the loft. I was using it to enlarge the SVI logo onto painted wooden signs to help new registrants find their way to the school. As usual it took me a while to get around to packing the projector away again. Before I knew it, my kids were using it in all sorts of bizarre ways. Almost anything with light and shadow got tried. Shadow puppets made with hands or found objects, beam-splitting tricks using mirrors, colour mixing. Sophie spent an hour cutting out the whole alphabet from paper and the kids had fun projecting weird scrambly messages on the ceiling.

An invention the other evening was "Death Object Duel." It was a game that got played somewhat surreptitiously over the course of time spent also doing other things. Noah and Sophie each picked an object to be their Death Object. Say, the wall-mounted pencil sharpener, or the wastebasket. The idea behind the game is to trick your unwary opponent into touching something that is in some indirect way physically in contact with their Death Object. (Walls, floor and fixed furniture don't count.) Sophie set up a casual-looking pile of mess on the floor, with a beach towel at one end, that she hoped Noah would walk by and accidentally touch with his foot. On closer examination, the mess pile was somewhat linear, and at one end was a piece of yarn ... that looked like it was heading towards the wall with the pencil sharpener!

Today I came home from a meeting with two very worn but still very functional thick school gym mats that had been heading for the dump. What a score! The kids have been asking for real gym mats for ages. I wonder what they'll dream up to do with them.

Out of the dirt

The really nice thing about the Gatto quote I used in my recent post is that it acts as a segué into any of a number of gardening-themed educational metaphors.

This is part of the GRUBS garden. Along this fence run a set of seven beds, each comprised of two 1x1 metre plots. These are the children's individual beds. When we started the GRUBS club we were thrilled to get a huge donation of well-composted horse manure. We put most of that manure into these beds; the soil in them is probably 50% manure.

Each child plants what he wants in his bed and is responsible for tending the bed through the spring and summer. What a variety of beds there are! One is a spare, careful arrangement of a small number of different veggies. Another is a riot of voluntary nasturtiums, radishes going to seed, dill and basil. Some kids have huge lettuces, while others are going for height with the beans, peas and sunflowers. One child planted mostly turnips. Another bed is full of poppies and a massive gladiola. Other kids have planted a little bit of everything. Some kids have a lot of weeds; in some plots the radishes, cress and lettuces are way past their prime and are bolting to seed.

If the point of the GRUBS individual plots was to grow the maximum amount of marketable produce over the growing season, some kids would definitely be far in the lead. But for the children, and by extension for the adults who mentor them here, it's not all about the product -- it's about the experience of having a garden. Every plot is fertile and productive in its own way. Some kids produce lots of attractive and useful vegetables, some produce beautiful flowers, and some produce some of each. But some kids don't grow any of that. Last year Sophie grew almost nothing but radishes, which she doesn't even particularly enjoy eating, and so she let most go to seed. It seemed a bit of a waste -- until the end of the season, when we pulled out the dried-up plants. It turned out that what she excelled at was generating seed, and at planting time this spring, and at this year's seed exchange, she was a hero with her large quantity of easter egg radish seed. The next generation of radishes has had a fabulous year, thanks to her. And then, there are the weeds. This spring one neglected plot became almost completely overgrown with weeds. One day as a favour Fiona and I sat down and weeded it out ... and suddenly realized that around his handful of dwarfed tomato and pepper plants this boy had grown us a bumper crop of sumptuous chicken feed. Our chickens were thrilled.

Do you see where this is going? Classically Gifted Kids are like plots of dirt that produce beautiful vegetables and flowers. But every plot of fertile dirt, like every child's mind, does a fantastic job of growing something. Maybe lowly but lovely turnips. Maybe radish seeds that will enliven countless other gardens in due course. Maybe just weeds, the purslane and lamb's quarters that chickens will enjoy. But incredible, miraculous growth nonetheless.

Cherry picking

Noah is showing some interest in the camera. He notices colours especially, and several times in the past week has gone to grab the camera when he's noticed some interesting colours outside. He liked the red and green together in this photo. It's worth enlarging a bit by clicking to really appreciate the cloud of cherries that are surrounding Fiona.

The GRUBS club volunteers to help pick fruit trees to reduce bear issues in town. We either give the fruit to the tree owner or, if (as is usually the case) the owner has a bumper crop and just wants the fruit gone, we save it to use in our Harvest Festival and/or to give away. This weekend we had a go at this Queen Anne cherry tree. As usual it was the youngest children who were the ones who wanted to spend all their time at the very top of the available ladders.

Whiteboard art

After an initial burst of interest in her Teaching Textbooks Algebra 1 program, Erin's progress has slowed substantially. She's finished Lesson 56, so is almost halfway done the program, and I guess the novelty has worn off a bit. She's still doing a lesson every day or two, but her appetite has definitely diminished. She likes to use the whiteboard for her equations, because easy (cancelling out) simplifications can be done with just a swipe of the finger. The other day she sat down to do a lesson and ended up doing this endless whiteboard doodle instead. (Photo by Fiona)

Common as Dirt

"After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves. "

John Taylor Gatto

That quote is obviously a bit of an unschooling manifesto. My goodness, Gatto turns a nice phrase. But it also touches on something I've been thinking of again in the past week or two. It began when an on-line friend e-mailed me a couple of links and suggestions from the TAGMAX e-mail list, and asked if she should continue forwarding such things, because maybe I was on TAGMAX. Was I? Would I consider joining? She recommended it. Good list -- busy, but lots of great info.

Well, I was on that e-mail list, once, for a while. See, the "TAG" in TAGMAX is "Talented and Gifted." The "MAX" I suppose has something to do with maximizing potential through an individualized, home-based learning approach. TAGMAX is for parents homeschooling Gifted Kids. Upper-case G Gifted. Members of that special club of the intellectual elite.

There was a time, many years ago, when I looked at the things my eldest was doing and felt proud, amazed, special, awed. I realized that there was some pretty unusual stuff going on there -- especially in its manner, depth and intensity. I joined TAGMAX and couple of on-line message board for parents of gifted kids. I admit it felt nice to be part of a 'club' of parents of, well, special-in-THAT-particular-way kids. It was helpful to hear from others who had grappled with barely-five-year-old fluent readers of Young Adult level fiction. It felt comfortable to be in a place where asking a question about explaining negative numbers to a curious five-year-old didn't get you accused of academic hothousing. And I especially enjoyed the stimulating discussion among outside-the-box, creative parents about all facets of parenting and education.

But the good stuff came at a price for me. I found that hearing about early achievements made me want my kids to meet or surpass those achievements. When I heard of kids being fast-tracked academically, of parents advocating long and hard for academic challenge and enrichment, I felt competitive stirrings inside me. I found I was trying to reassure myself that my kids could do this or that, at least if they wanted to. I didn't act on those feelings, but I didn't like having them and it cost me emotional energy to beat them back.

I unsubscribed from TAGMAX pretty quickly. I was pretty sure that in a school situation my kids would meet the criteria for giftedness, but I lost all interest in the label. Gradually I felt much better. I just relaxed into what was working with my kids, and things seemed to flow pretty well without the need for specialized approaches and resources. What I discovered is that it just doesn't matter whether an unschooled child is intellectually gifted or not. There is no poorness of fit with the curriculum, or with the classroom of age-peers. There are no problematic asynchronicities when you step outside the box of a conventional educational approach. There is no need for a label, for testing, for Identification in an unschooling environment. If your child is reading and comprehending at a high school level but doesn't yet print lower case letters, it doesn't matter one whit. If your child relates best to older children or adults with similar interests and is a fish out of water with agemates, that's perfectly fine.

That was the first realization: giftedness is a non-issue in an unschooling environment. That was the easy one. The not-so-easy one came later, more gradually, and it has to do with Gatto's "common as dirt" comment.

First I should say that I know, and understand why, comments like "all children have gifts" raise the dander of parents of highly gifted kids in the school system. That phrase often epitomizes the perspective of a person who seeks to remove individualized educational resources and services from children who are intellectually precocious. It can be a way of saying "everyone's special, so we should just treat everyone the same." Personally I believe if everyone's special, that means we should treat everyone uniquely, including the most intellectually precocious kids.

But I tend to agree with Gatto: genius is as common as dirt. See, I teach Suzuki violin, and over the past decade of part-time teaching I've taught probably twenty or thirty children. And while I haven't seen that spark of genius inside them all, I've seen it in so many of them that I'm pretty certain that when I haven't seen it, the deficiency is in the observer, not the child. It's not always academic-style genius, of course. But neither is it the platitude type of pseudo-genius, the sort of thing you make a point to publicly recognize in people who haven't really done anything exceptional but do have strengths in one area that occasionally let them shine. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about real brilliance. So many children have it!

Some children are like shiny coins you can hold in your hand and you see their brilliance staring you in the face. Other children are like shiny coins dropped on the lawn -- every bit as brilliant, but you won't see that brilliance unless the sun is shining, and you're standing in just the right place and looking in just the right direction.

My children are more like shiny coins you can hold in your hand and admire. They have clear intellectual precocity that people notice easily. Erin and Fiona especially. Sophie is sometimes like that, but at other times is a shiny coin left in the change pot on the kitchen counter, merrily shining away but not attracting as much attention. And Noah is sometimes the shiny coin you put in one of your inumerable jacket pockets and have to search for for a couple of minutes to find. My children are incredibly special and incredibly brilliant. I'm thrilled that I've had as easy a time as I have discovering and nurturing their gifts, and that unschooling has allowed them to soar by, as Gatto suggests, managing themselves. They're exceptional, perhaps, in that their gifts are easy to see and show up seemingly magically in neat and tangible ways. But I don't think they're exceptional in having gifts. Just common as dirt.

Wrong day in the lake

Yesterday Chuck took the kids down to the lake for a quick swim before supper. I stayed home, ostensibly to work on SVI administrative stuff and start dinner, though I didn't quite get to the latter. It was a scorcher of a day and though our un-air-conditioned house with its log walls and deep roof overhang stays pretty cool, things were getting pretty hot and sticky even chez nous. A swim was a welcome bit of refreshment for them all.

They came back raving about how warm the lake was in the little bay where they swim, in front of the GRUBS garden. "Almost like bathwater" they said. Now, in the context of a glacier-fed lake, "almost like bathwater" just means "cold, but not painfully so." It means it's tough to get wet, but after a few minutes it feels not so bad, at least not until you start to turn blue. My kids, born and raised on this lake, don't mind cold water. At Halcyon Hot Springs they will willingly play in the "cold plunge" pool, which is a mere 50 degrees F. But Chuck concurred -- the lake was incredibly warm in the bay. Actually enjoyable for someone raised in Ontario to swim in.

Today was another scorcher and the kids were eager for a post-supper dip, so I volunteered to take them down. I'm not much of one for ice cold water, having also been raised in Ontario. I'd heard the "bathwater" word the day before, and I was looking forward to a nice dip.

Erin, as always, was the first to hit the water. "Argghhh! It's freezing!!!" she said. At first I thought she was kidding. She's the one who never minds cold water; she normally says "naw, it's not cold," and waltzes right in, even when it is cold. But she wasn't kidding. Even after she stood there, half in, for a few minutes, her legs kept aching from the cold. The rest of us ventured slowly in. Partly.

I grabbed the thermometer from the GRUBS garden to test the water -- a mere 54 degrees Fahrenheit. Yikes!

Slocan Lake is deep, very deep -- as deep as 1700 feet at one point. And so it holds incredible amounts of water. The top few feet will warm up in summer (and cool down in winter) but the bottom 95% of the water in the lake stays at pretty much the same temperature year-round.

Even with winter cold snaps of minus twenty for days on end, the lake doesn't freeze, except maybe just a foot or two around the edges. Except back in '54 (or was it '57? they still talk about it...) it was so calm and so cold for so long that there was ice from New Denver to Silverton.

Calm is what's needed for the air to affect the surface water temperature, and I guess that's what there wasn't between last night and tonight. We live up a side canyon, and we certainly didn't experience any appreciable wind, but clearly something stirred up the water enough to stir the icy depths up to the surface.

We all eventually got in. Only Erin (on purpose) and Fiona (by way of an accident) dunked their heads. No one but Erin stayed in for more than a couple of minutes. Sheesh, did I ever pick the wrong day to be the designated parent at the lake.

Afterwards we ate lots of cherries off the nearby trees for dessert. It's our civic duty to eat as many cherries as we can off town trees to reduce the bear risk. Consider it community service.

FMS Syndrome

In response to the following homeschooling message board query:

"Does anyone feel sad about the good school things your child misses?"

My friend S., a wise unschooling mom of a fully-fledged adult daughter, calls this "FMS Syndrome" -- 'Fraid of Missing Something Syndrome. Then she points out that any time you make a choice, you're missing something. Have Cheerios for breakfast and you miss out on Froot Loops. Marry Bob and you miss out on marrying Bill. Homeschool and you miss out on school. That's how life works. You can't live your life regretting not having the things you didn't choose.

When I was on the threshold of declaring myself a homeschooling parent, I had similar concerns. At that point my only frame of reference was schooling, because I was schooled. So when I envisioned a homeschooled childhood, I envisioned something vague and intangible devoid of those school experiences. But I didn't really appreciate what would go into that void instead.

Now that I'm almost a decade into homeschooling, I can say with assurance that the instead stuff rocks, that schoolkids miss out on a heck of a lot. I can point to zillions of moments, experiences, connections, warm-fuzzies, relationships and adventures that my kids have had that school children could not possibly experience. Every once in a while I pull myself up short, look at what my kids are doing at a particular moment, and think "this is fantastic -- and there's no way this would be happening if they went to school"

To those who wax nostalgic about that sense of belonging to a grad year ... I wanted to say that I think that for all the sentimentality we formerly-schooled adults feel, it's pretty shallow stuff. It was the best we could do, to draw our sense of community identity from our grade-year. It was a contrived institutional pseudo-community, but it was all we had, and we made the best of it. In fact, we were so desperate for a sense of community that we elevated the 'grad class' identity and values to ridiculous and pretty meaningless heights. Sometimes, fortunately, real meaningful human connections formed that transcended the institutional pseudo-community. Not often, but fortunately sometimes.

My kids draw their sense of identity from deep within themselves, from the real community they live in and from the real work and real connections they form over the long term with other children, adult friends and mentors. They don't need the arbitrary and contrived pseudo-community of agemates / grad year. What they have is very rich indeed. Instead.

Skunk

Not a skunk, the Skunk. Skunk, the chicken, that we've had a soft spot for since he popped out of the post office box as a day-old chick with striking black and blond striped markings. As a youngster he had personality and markings that made me grab the camera. Even as he grew into that lanky adolescent phase we knew there was something special about him. We'd decided quite early on that we would keep a rooster in this flock, and that it would be one of our four Ameracaunas, since we want to hatch more of this breed. So we were thrilled to peg Skunk as a cockerel. He's our keeper.

Skunk has a reputation as the Pinball Clemens of chickens. He rarely uses his wings, but oh my, his legs! He is quick and incredibly agile. He swerves and dekes and is impossible to outrun, though the kids try frequently. The only way to get him from the coop to the corral is to let him think it's his idea. Herding him does not work in the slightest, not even with three or four children, one of whom is operating a remote-control Hummer in an attempt to cut him off as he comes around the corner. Picture the roadrunner of cartoon fame. He's quite something.

It's not just me, either. Noah was the one wandering around with the camera today, and he chose Skunk as his subject. Skunk is now well into adolescence and his black tail-feathers are starting to grow out with a gorgeous green iridescence. His pea comb is the chicken equivalent of a teenage boy's first hint of facial hair. While the photo above shows his philosophical side, the one on the right is quintessential Skunk. His legs are bluish-grey, but you can't see them. They're a Looney Tunes blur and nothing more.

Up she goes

We took the kids climbing today for the first time. Fiona, who had patiently watched the 'big kids' through all their rappelling at Homeschoolers Family Camp without complaint, got it into her head that she would be climbing today. We set up a top-rope on a short easy face, and up she went. The photo takes it all delightfully out of context -- she could be three hundred feet up Half Dome for all you can tell, but in actual fact she's only about 5 feet off the ground. The gear, though, it's all about the gear. The kids' harness, cinched as tight as it can go and still not small enough, but heck, she wasn't going much beyond where we could actually reach her. The regulation rock-climbing helmet. The purple top-rope with its double figure-of-eight knot and two carabiners. The jerry-rigged (pink!) chest harness. Oh yeah, she was thrilled. And when we lowered her off the rock face, she sat back in her harness in that wonderful relaxed rappel position that the older kids had learned at camp. "I knew, because I watched the other kids at the camp," she said. "So I sat down in my harness, and you didn't even have to tell me."

The bigger kids were happy too. The sun was blisteringly hot, and we were climbing with the sun shining full force on the west-facing rock -- next time we'll go earlier. But they still hung in patiently waiting for their turns and were enthusiastic about the experience. Due to unfamiliarity with the area, we settled on a small, conservative climb right beside the main trail. But everyone got at least a couple of climbs in, amidst lots of trading of harnesses, shoes and helmets.

Afterwards, a sandy beach and the refreshing glacier-fed lake was just a few short blocks away. Ahhh!

The Arpeggione

Yesterday I started work on the 1st movement of the Schubert Arpeggione Sonata. It's the top-level audition piece in the Suzuki viola teacher training system. For a few years I've been thinking I ought to document and formalize my Suzuki teacher training, and I got it into my head that I ought to do a video audition of the Mozart A Major Violin Concerto. I did a few trial video runs on my own over the past year or two and was fairly happy, but kept thinking I'd like to polish the last few glitches out and do a better job. It never really crystallized. Timing was the issue. I don't actually play violin a whole lot any more; in ensembles I'm usually a violist. So I kept trying to find a month or two where I could really focus on violin and notch the Mozart up that last little bit to the standard I was aspiring to. It didn't happen.

So then, a month or two ago, I thought to myself "I should do the audition on viola." This made perfect sense except for a few little details. First, I've never formally studied viola. It's similar to violin, so I just kind of learned the alto clef and picked the instrument up on my own -- I've never had a lesson. Second, I don't know the repertoire. The Arpeggione Sonata is a case in point. I'd heard this in its cello arrangement, but I'd never even heard it on viola, let alone played it. Thirdly, I've played almost no solo repertoire on viola. It's very different playing the middle harmonies in a string quartet or orchestra than playing a concerto or sonata solo line. I'm honestly not sure I'm up to the challenge. I know I could pass the violin audition, but I'm a little, er, untested in the viola solo department.

But I ordered the music, and found myself an iTunes recording. And yesterday I set to work. I puzzled over some of the octave leaps in my edition of the sheet music. They didn't match what was in the recording. I checked the cello score -- and that didn't match either version. So then I went onto the internet to try to figure out what was happening with these various edits.

That was when I got reminded of what I had once known but long forgotten. "Arpeggione" is not the name or description of the sonata. The arpeggione was an instrument -- fretted and tuned like a guitar, but played much like a cello. It was invented during Schubert's time, but just didn't quite make the grade. It was essentially extinct within about 10 years. Schubert's gorgeous sonata was one of the few works of any importance written for it. So the strange edits and odd octave leaps are the result of transcribing the work from an instrument with a wide range and six strings onto one with a smaller range and only four strings.

I love this piece. I've made some decisions about where to jump octaves, and where to head up up up into the rafters of 10th position, and I love how it's starting to sound. I've spoken to my pianist friend about playing the accompaniment. Erin could easily handle the accompaniment, but I think J. would be more eager to undertake this as a project; Erin has copious ensemble and performance opportunities and would likely take it on as an obligation, rather than an opportunity.

This feels like the first time in a long time that I've set aside significant time to do something that's just for me. I love practicing this piece, and I am enjoying working towards the goal of performing it (probably on recital next season, as well as for the Suzuki teacher training video audition). Just for me. Ha!

Maybe that was what triggered my rant last night ... that while the rest of my family had done pretty much exactly what they wanted all day, I had been unable to carve out the little bit of time I wanted to practice my beloved Arpeggione Sonata. I got a good couple of hours in today, by way of payback. I've almost got it memorized, at which point I can start really polishing.

Happy Canada Day

Noah's quartet played five numbers today at the Canada Day celebrations, and then the Suzuki violins & violas did an impromptu performance. It was hot, the audience was small, but it was worth doing.

Afterwards we all had gelato at our favourite café and hung out with our friends. Erin sat down at the café piano and played some lovely stuff -- a jazzy "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," Piazzola's haunting "Milongo del Angel", and a couple of sentimental impressionistic things. People love her playing. Then home for supper, practicing, and chasing the chickens into the coop.

Then it was time to head out to the Day Park for fireworks. There's always Canada's birthday cake to eat, live entertainment, crazy kids and hot chocolate to sip while visiting with scores of friends. Fiona definitely caught the "crazy kids" bug, and was having lots of fun running around and tumbling here and there. Erin happily gave her airplane rides for ages, giving worrywort adults palpitations as Fiona swung faster and faster, higher and higher.

Finally the fireworks began, over the lake, with the booming echoes back from the mountainous shores of the lake. For the first time, Fiona was able to sit smiling, blinking at the flashing sky, without cringing and covering her ears. She loved the show. She was asleep by the time we finished the five-minute drive home.

Small real-life rant

I heard myself say this after supper this evening, in carefully clipped speech:

"You know, there's no rule that says the oldest female in a family is responsible for all the housekeeping and cooking and has to do everything all the time for everyone, unless someone should deign to do her a rare favour by helping out with something."

Alas, while the children were all witness to my rant, the spousal unit was asleep. The total extent of the effect of my rant was that a 10-year-old boy consented to finish sweeping the kitchen floor without mentioning the "slave" word again.

It felt like a very long day and, Erin's lovely performance aside, I am feeling really sick of holding the ball for everything and everyone in this family. All I wanted was half an hour to practice my viola, without things going from bad to worse in the rest of the house. Is it too much to ask that just for once they might even go from bad to less bad? That someone around her might just for once wash a mixing bowl, fold a piece of laundry, wipe their oogy stuff out of the sink, pour Fiona a bit of cashew milk, cook a meal? Apparently.

I need sleep.

Unschooling music practice

While madly deleting items from my "sent items" folder, I came across this message I wrote a year and a half ago. It was food for thought for me all over again, so I figured it was worth archiving here on my blog:

"It is interesting--because it seems that unschooling would mean that if a child loses interest then they ought to be able to 'drop it.' At least that is my understanding. Or, alternatively, you would have to make it so interesting that they wouldn't want to drop it. But, that seems like it would be devastating to the study of an instrument or foreign language that requires every day practice and cumulative skills?"

I think that it is selling kids short to say that if their interest wanes they will want to drop it. From a very young age my kids have been able to understand and express that while they don't particularly want to practice today or this week or this month, they like the violin (/piano/viola) and don't want to give it up. My job as an unschooling parent has been to help them find ways to weather the day-to-day in service of their longer-term wishes.

In fact I think that this is one of biggest jobs of parents in general ... to help children recognize the value of longer-term, more abstract ideals, values and goals, rather than focusing on immediate gratification, and to give them the tools and knowledge that help them stretch towards these things.

Our conversations about how to get back on track with practising usually start with me asking whether they feel they want to quit the violin (/viola/piano). Because I present this as an option, the kids have never used a purported desire to quit as a weapon against me. I think they do have a sense that to quit would let me down, let themselves and their teacher down and let down their social community of Suzuki children (who are extremely important to them). But they don't believe that they study their instruments because I wouldn't let them quit.

Because we never have our discussions about practising problems on a day where problems have occured and emotions are running high, my kids are always honest ... "I'm not interested in what I'm supposed to be learning, and I don't like practicing at all lately, but I can't imagine quitting." They seem to accept that daily practising is a reasonable expectation that teachers (and therefore parents) hold for music students.

I've portrayed this as a matter of respect. When you go to your lesson it's as if you're asking to be served up a meal of learning material. If you asked for a meal of food at someone's house and then didn't eat any of it but just dumped it in the garbage, that would really hurt their feelings. It's the same thing with learning meals. It's okay not to be hungry, but in that case, don't ask for a meal! So, if you're not going to practice next week, tell your teacher that today at your lesson and she won't give you assignments. But if you have a regular lesson, it would be rude and disrespectful not to eat the meal you've been served and at least make an efforts at the bits you don't like.

So generally my kids and I have been able to establish (a) that they want to continue to play their instruments and (b) that they enjoy their lessons and like being served up new learning assignments. So the trick then has been to work with them to help them connect the dots between what they want and what they need to do on a daily basis to satisfy their general desires. And that's where the solutions become totally practical things like when and where to practice and how much help and of what sort they want, and whether a change in emphasis or organization might be helpful, and whether a new game or gimmick or method of documentation might help.

On occasion I have agreed to use coercion to get my kids to practice over their in-the-moment protests ... but only ever upon their request, and only for one week at a time, until we reassess. There have been times when they've said quite clearly "I want to do my practicing every day but I just hate doing it and I can't get myself to do it. So I want you to make me, even if I say no." And I agree to be the Bad Cop for a week, and then we reassess, and invariably they've decided they want to try something else instead.

Which is fortunate, because I think that a regular pattern of coercing kids into practising tends to produce increasing resistence and a tendency for the kids to proclaim (and believe!) that they want to quit. Maté and Neufeld (in "Hold on to Your Kids") describe this as stimulating a child's "counterwill" and that's definitely something I want to avoid. I believe that in the absence of coercion and the counterwill it arouses, children by and large will make very sensible decisions. So far I've not been disappointed.

Tears in the key of A-flat

Erin sang in a youth choir for two years when the scheduling worked out during our weekly Nelson trip. Then it stopped working out. But soon thereafter, she decided to take the plunge and join the local community choir. Our immediate communities and surrounding region have only about 1000 residents, but the choir pulls in enthusiastic choristers from as far as 45 minutes away. Over the past 15 years or so, the group has grown into quite a strong musical ensemble -- far stronger than you'd expect in such a remote, sparsely populated area. They sing in tune, in four parts, acapella or accompanied, often with their entire program memorized. Erin took this on as her thing. She is extremely independent about it. I'm not even allowed in the door at rehearsals. I'm thrilled that she's found something musical that has nothing whatsoever to do with me -- and she loves it.

This year the director was travelling during the spring and the choir went on hiatus after a stunning holiday concert. But they got together earlier this month to put together three selections for a plaque-unveiling ceremony commemorating WWII soldiers from our area who were killed in battle. Erin was asked to play an unaccompanied violin prelude to a choral rendition of the "Ashokan Farewell" (used as the theme music for the PBS Civil War series, where it rightfully earned fame as a gorgeously haunting lament). The arrangement was in the very odd key (for a folk-type theme, certainly!) of A-flat major. The sheet music had no bowings in it, and no fingerings. I asked Erin if she needed any help working it out. She rolled her eyes and said "no."

So I left her to it. She practiced when I was out of earshot, as is her preference at the best of times. Choir members out and about in the community told me things like "I have trouble singing that piece at rehearsal, because Erin's violin playing gets me all choked up." So I stopped worrying. Today she performed and blew us all away. My mom sat in front of me and was in tears by the first bowstroke. It took me probably half a phrase longer. Her tone and phrasing were stunning. And then she sang too, with such joy and affection for the music and the experience of sharing it.

edited to add the second photo, courtesy of a friend

Milky musings

Our friends are getting a cow. I'm currently torn over the prospect of offering my kids unpasteurized milk. When I was a medical student I helped look after 5 kids who came down with invasive E. coli disease from drinking unpasteurized milk on a preschool farm visit. One of those kids died, another ended up on dialysis with kidney failure. Chuck grew up on a dairy farm, drinking milk straight from the cow, but strangely enough has no interest in non-store-bought milk. Then again, I know that most problems with unpasteurized milk spring from specific problematic handling practices, and that pasteurized milk is 'processed' and nutritionally depleted compared to raw. Maybe we'll buy their milk, but scald it and use it for yogourt. We certainly want to learn to milk their cow, and would love the chance to try cheese-making and butter-making. We've done these from store-bought, but somehow that doesn't seem quite as nifty.

We don't drink a whole lot of milk, at least not the kind of quantities I was raised on. My kids drink mostly water with meals and for quenching thirst during the day. They like milk with breakfast cereal, but it's a bit of an exception for my kids to actually pour themselves milk in a glass to drink. They did develop a fondness for Rice Dream a year or two ago, though. And they've always loved almond milk, warm or cold. Oy, the tetrapaks, though! Only the juice tetrapaks can even be "recycled" around here, and even with those I know in my heart of hearts that the sarcastiquotes around "recycled" are well-deserved.

I experimented with making almond milk when we first started ordering bulk fruit and nuts from Rancho Vignola each fall. It worked beautifully, but the grinding and filtering was messy and time-consuming. Almond milk was a rare treat. Cashew milk happened a little more often, since filtering wasn't necessary, but the pre-cooking of the millet was enough to prevent nut milk making from becoming part of my routine. I also tried making rice milk. Again, an acceptable end-product, but messy and time-consuming.

So, after kicking the idea around for a while and doing some research, I bought a Soyabella. It has vastly simplified the making of dairy-free milks, and has totally eliminated our use of tetrapaks. We use it in equal proportion for nut milks, rice milk and soy milk ... and various combinations thereof. The night before I measure out the raw ingredients, in this case a combination of cashews and soybeans.


Then I dump them into the milk-making screen cup, set that into the utility cup, and fill the whole thing with water.

In the morning I remove the metal cup and its soaked beans and nuts from the water, and attach the cup to the grinder part of the Soyabella. The grinding blade doesn't look too impressive but it certainly does its job. The cup twists on to make a cylindrical unit that is below the lid of the Soyabella jug.


Then I set the lid into the jug which has been prefilled with water. I plug it in, press "milk" and wait. For a few minutes the unit warms up from an element hidden beneath the bottom of the stainless steel jug, heating the water to just below the boil. It goes through four grinding/filtering cycles, steeps a little longer and then beeps to tell me it's done.


I add whatever flavourings inspire me -- often 1/4 tsp. of salt, two or three tablespoons of honey or maple syrup, sometimes some vanilla extract.


A quick stir, and we're ready to decant into a container for the fridge. Most milks keep 2-3 days in the fridge. Most l.6 L batches of alternative milks disappear around here in 24 hours, long before the thermophils get to them.

Mmm, mmm! I'll even confess that with my cashew-millet recipe, I empty out the paste that's left inside the screen cup, add maple syrup and milk, call it 'porridge' and enjoy it immensely by the spoonful. My kids think I'm nuts, so it's only the worms who are sad not to get their serving.

Camp photos

Some more photos from the homeschoolers' family camp we attended this past week.


That's Noah up on the high wire, easily walking between the trees. None of my kids seems to have the slightest concern about heights. They shrugged and said it was "easy" to walk high beams, drop themselves off rock faces, or strut the high wire.

Fiona wasn't directly involved in any of the activities, but did enjoy making some limited supervised use of some of the equipment, including the tarzan ropes, which she absolutely loved.

They all rappelled like this, my kids. Supremely comfortable, looking very relaxed, sitting well in their harnesses. Erin got the chance to practice hopping down the cliff face on rappel. Chuck and I climbed lots before kids. Now that they're pretty much all old enough, I think it's time to start climbing as a family. While "unclimbing" (rappelling) is serious fun, it's more of a ride than a skill. They want to start climbing.

Erin and a couple of the other older kids, watching another group member struggle across the tarzan ropes. She looks comfortable with this group, doesn't she? They were really nice kids, which certainly made a big difference. And interesting, too! The one on the right owns his own Hobart mixer and has his own bread-baking business. The one on the left has lived off the electrical grid since he was a year old.

Archery was the activity that convinced Noah to hop aboard the whole camp idea in the first place. I wondered if he might be disappointed. He was convinced archery would be for him, but he'd never tried it. He was not disappointed in the slightest, and seems to have a pretty good natural feel for the bow. He would like to pursue archery as a sport. We shall see.

This was a pretty fun co-operative game. The platform is actually a giant teeter-totter set on a large log. The object of the game is to get all the kids to step in pairs onto the platform, such that it stays balanced and doesn't hit the ground. And then to counter-balance one child who travels alone to the extreme end of the platform -- each child venturing solo to the end of the platform in turn -- maintaining the balance the whole time. In the photo the platform is tilting madly and kids are over-compensating and screaming. Lots of fun. We might want to build something like this at home.


Here's another one of my oh-so-relaxed, gravity-defying kids. Yep, climbing is definitely on the agenda for the summer for this family.

Homeschoolers at camp

For the past three days we were away at a Homeschoolers Family Camp. What happens when you bring together a couple of dozen homeschooled kids for a few days of games, activities and being together socially? Well, a lot, as it turns out. I found the whole experience pretty interesting. We had a lot of fun. The kids tried a lot of fabulous new activities and did really well, coming away feeling confident about themselves and their abilities. We were able to stay together as a family in one cabin, so my introverts had the crucial no-stress parts of their quiet bedtime routines preserved. My "less introverted" kids seemed to have left any vestige of their introverted tendencies at home. Sophie and Fiona quickly and happily became part of various packs of active friendly busy kids and even when I thought they'd surely be flagging, in need of some recharging, their energy and interest in group activities was always up for one more round of capture the flag.

Erin coped beautifully and without any apparent stress as the sole 'new kid' in the teen group of six, comprised of two sibling pairs and another girl, all of whom knew each other prior to the camp. While she held back for recharging time during unstructured interludes, during the scheduled activities she was right into whatever was being offered, smiling, cheerful and enthusiastic.

Noah was a little slow to warm to the social stuff. He gets easily intimidated by groups of agemate boys, since (as he has explained to me) there's an implicit expectation that he should be just like them, just as capable, interested in and knowledgeable about all the same things. And the camp was certainly dominated by boys in the 10-12 age group, all of whom knew each other and had the same toys along. So he hung back until he figured out who the more approachable boys were, and gradually found his stride by the last day. But he participated beautifully in the new activities he was looking forward to, without any concerns about the group-learning format.

I guess I came away feeling like "hey, my kids could cope with public school just fine if they had to." I mean, I've always been confident that they could cope academically. It's the social and temperament stuff I wondered about. I probably don't need to wonder about that anymore. It'd be okay. Not ideal, but okay.

Other, more general, enlightening observations:

• homeschooled kids know how to line up
• homeschooled kids know how to take turns -- waiting for their turn at the fun stuff, volunteering to take their turn for the not-fun stuff
  
• homeschooled kids know how to work together co-operatively, both in play and in work (washing up in the kitchen)
• homeschooled kids develop social hierarchies that can veer subtly towards exclusionary cliques when levels of parental supervision are low
• homeschooled kids do fads (diabolos were huge -- coincidentally Noah and Sophie had just bought themselves some of these before the camp, but hadn't brought them)
• homeschooled parents in the BC interior are almost all idealogically left-wing
• school kids vacating a camp facility before a group of homeschoolers arrive may say that they cleaned out their cabins, but they're lying about the hundred and twenty thousand spitz shells and candy wrappers and potato chip bits tucked underneath the mattresses

Quartet Concert

Erin and I performed last night as part of the Osprey String Quartet, to an always-enthusiastic crowd of locals. It was the first truly big program Erin had done with us, with a classical and romantic quartet on the program, complete, a little over an hour's worth of full-on playing. It was exhausting but so much fun. Here's a little bit of the development of the 4th movement of the Mozart. Erin certainly holds her own on second violin, don't you think?

Practicing Musette

(Disclaimer for benefit of violin teacher / grandmother: Yes, we know she's not really been assigned to learn Musette yet. She's supposed to be polishing Gossec Gavotte, and she is! But she loves Musette, so what can I do? And she's learning the right bowings, I promise.)

Look what we can do now, on a warm June day? We can practice outside, because there's no Abominable Dog to own the outdoors, to jump up, knock down and traumatize any four-year-olds. Every few days someone in our family remarks "I so don't miss Freya," and everyone else laughs and agrees.

So Fiona takes her violin outside. She stands on a big log round. It makes a perfect stage for her. It's in the shade, it's stable, and is at a good height. It's actually the log that the kids stand on to grab the Big Rope (tethered high in the trees overhead) for a swing. She plays a repetition of Musette. She fixes a bowing and practices it four times. Then she passes her violin to me for safekeeping.

Then it's time to use the stump for something else -- a swing on the Big Rope! Out she goes, way out over the lawn. The rope is 20 feet long, so it carves a marvellous slow arc. Fiona's dress flies, her legs splay, out, out, out she goes. And then, after a weightless instant, back, back, back she comes, right back onto the log. She takes her violin from me, and plays Musette again, and works on another few repetitions of an exercise.

And so it goes, over and over.

Morning surprise, again

Yesterday the bear surprised me. Today it was these alien children in our dining nook. Who are they? My children don't get up at 5 or 6 a.m.. Mine sleep until at least 9:30, sometimes well (well!) past noon. And when they eventually do get up, they laze around on the couch or in front of the computer or reading. At 7:30 a.m. these odd specimens had already been outside for some exercise, had come back in, cooked breakfast, and were cheerfully doing math.

This is definitely one of those "who'd of thunk it?" homeschooling occurrences. It'll probably never happen again. All the more reason to take a picture. Sophie finished Singapore Primary Math 4B this morning and will move onto the Grade 5 books at her leisure. Erin is now about halfway through Teaching Textbooks Algebra I. She likes working her problems on the whiteboard, because she can do straightforward simplification with a simple swipe of the thumb, rather than laboriously rewriting. She has completely abandoned the computer CDs and is using the textbook as her choice of resources. Whatever works!