And so, after 6 years in the Bay Area, we are moving to San Diego!

The past month has been a blur of getting the house ready for listing (what a horrid time to sell!), preparing the kids, telling friends and family, making numerous trips down to San Diego to get a sense of the communities and schools there. Whew!  We are all quite exhausted.  And we haven’t made the move yet!

The kids reaction to the news was so reflective of their personalities.  Woody was not thrilled by the idea of moving.  He said that he was “10% excited and 90% nervous”.   The 10% excitement came from the fact that we would be closer to Legoland!  We moved to the Bay Area from London when he was 6 months old and he has not known living anywhere but the house that we are in.  He will really miss his two good friends here!  Buzz went upstairs packed his little suitcase full of books and insisted he was ready for the new adventure! “Let’s go Mommy!” he said quite cheerfully.

We had a big debate about whether we should finish the school year and then move or whether we should move right away and I think we have decided to move right away.  This will give the boys some time to settle down.  One option we are exploring is homeschooling the boys for the last few months of the school year so they won’t have too many transitions to make.  This will also give me a sense of whether this is something I am able to do well

I will continue to post sporadically until we are settled down there.  Wish us luck over the next few weeks of big transitions!

So all this has turned into a lovely and completely inadvertent lessons in American History that I suspect will continue through the end of the year and perhaps even beyond given how interested they are.  I want to record the resources we have been using and will likely use.  I also want to make a note of some ideas for projects that we will likely be working on very very slowly over weekends.

I am using the History of Us by Joy Hakim to help me guide the boys through this.  I am currently using a copy from the school library but am seriously considering putting this set on Santa’s wish list for Christmas! You can check out her blog here to get more of a sense of some of the chapters in these really wonderful books.

I will likely do have other posts about the Mayflower/Pilgrims, the American Revolution and also the American Civil War further down the road.  This first post is about Christopher Columbus.

There is, understandably, a lot of controversy around this explorer.  What we have did is stuck to the facts about his early life, his perseverance in getting his trip to the New World financed and then we plotted his actual voyages.

BOOKS:

We started by reading  Meet Christopher Columbus and You Wouldn’t Want to Sail with Christopher Columbus.  There are so many books on the topic but I am always on the lookout for books that have a high visual appeal – both boys love pouring over the illustrations and pictures.

Here are some books we have been reading and re-reading:

PROJECTS:

Woody and I then charted Columbus’ different voyages on Google Maps.  This was a really fun exercise for him given his love of all things maps and of Google Maps in particular.  He learned some research skills as he looked up Columbus’ destinations online on these sites as he plotted. Finally he also worked on some Math skills as he calculated distances between ports on the different voyages.

A Christmas tradition in our house if for all the family to work on a complicated puzzle together.  We tend to open the puzzle on Christmas Eve while drinking some good red wine and finishing up the last of the gift wrapping.  Last year I think we worked on a 5000 piece puzzle, we obsessed about it for three days and finally completed it two days after Christmas.  And I wonder where the boys get their intensity from!  It usually tends to be a really fun family activity qith lots of laughter!  My DH and brother tend to be the last men standing as they painstaking finish the puzzle.  This year, given the boy’s interest, I am thinking that we might work on building a replica model of the Santa Maria like the one here.

MOVIES & DOCUMENTARIES:

We are big fans of Netflix and here are the movies that we have in our queue to watch. 

• The Magnificent Voyage of Christopher Columbus: I haven’t got this yet. I am looking into whether this has any scenes that would cause anxiety with two pretty sensitive boys!
• Christopher Columbus:  Explorer of the New World:  You can watch this movie on your computer.
• Great Adventurers:  Christopher Columbus, New World:
• BrainPop Columbus Day:  This site does need a subscription.  You could try out the free trial.  We find BrainPop so good, it is well worth the subscription.

WEBSITES:

We also found a number of fun sites that talk about Christopher Columbus.  We mainly used these to help us chart his voyages.

• The Columbus Navigation Page:  Lots of interesting information about the explorer.
• Monterey Institute of Technology and Education:  Contains a short presentation on Christopher Columbus.
• The Journey of Christopher Columbus (Glencoe):  We liked the Voyages timeline that is outlined here.
• Franciscan Archives:  Lots of resources here that I read to answer some of the questions the kids asked about Christopher Columbus.
• Myths about Columbus:  This site works to dispel some of the major myths associated with Columbus.
• Social Studies for Kids:  A whole bunch of Columbus related material.

FIELD TRIPS & PLACES TO VISIT:

We tend to be homebodies but I wanted to start this list of places to visit because we mean to start to travel with the kids a whole lot more now that Buzz is completely toilet trained!  Here are some Columbus related places to visit:

• The Santa Maria, Columbus, Ohio:  DH was just here for business.  If I had planned ahead, perhaps we could have made a long weekend of this trip!
• Christopher Columbus Museum, Porto Santo: One can always dream of a vacation in Portugal!
• Columbus Foundation Replica of the Nina and Pinta:  This traveling full sized replica looks really interesting!  Unfortunately their travel schedule does not include California!

We tend to have a lot of fun reading these books, watch some of these movies, browsing the websites and I know the boys are enjoying it but I am never quite sure how much they are soaking in.  But the other night, I got a full demonstration of their knowledge as they sat taking their bath.  They pretended that three of their toy boats were the Santa Maria, Nina and Pinta.  A plastic Diego bath toy was Christopher Columbus!   Then they commenced a narrative of Christopher Columbus complete with dates, the troubles with financing his trips and the details of his different voyages!

Onto our next American History adventures!

I had a series of follow-up meetings with the teacher.  My basic message to her was very much along the lines of my previous post.   We have also agreed to continue to talk frequently. She was surprisingly open and willing to talk through some of my concerns.

There is a fundamental disconnect in how the teacher and I have been interpreting the idea of the “whole child” which is one of the core concepts the school is driven by.  My understand of this approach (and what we talked at length to the head of the school before we enrolled) was that they would look at my child as an individual and develop a plan tailored to his needs.  The teacher descriptions seemed to point to a “well-rounded” child.  Woody is definitely not “well-rounded” in his development.  Quite the opposite, his development at this very moment is very skewed — very advanced in many dimensions and likely below the norm in many others.

What the teacher has agreed to do is to rearrange the room so that the kids that she feels are “advanced in Math” sit together.  She is then going to give them different worksheets to work on.  She seemed very opposed to the idea of testing Woody to see what level he is at and then giving him worksheets that challenge him.  I am just not sure why.  I know this means a little more work for her but won’t it really help her in the long run?  How do you differentiate if you don’t know what the child knows?  I am not sure what these “advanced worksheets” would look like.

Most importantly, I asked Woody how he was feeling about school.  He responded that he is really liking it.  Most of the stuff he loves about school though is outside of core academics.  He now has one really good friend there, he loves recess now because they build forts and castles together. He also absolutely loves his piano teacher who seems to get him like none of the other teachers do!  His only peeve with school at the moment is with the boring “baby Math” and his old enemy, P.E.!  If he is my son, P.E. will likely be the bane of his existence all through school

I am scheduled to have coffee with another mom who faced something similar with her son who is in middle-school at the same school that Woody and Buzz go to.  According to a common friend, this mom managed to work something out with the school that she is happy with.  I am very curious to learn more about how she did this and maybe I can replicate this.

Right now, Woody and Buzz seem settled in and really happy – which is the most important thing.  Our worry though is longer term, will they grow complacent and a bit lazy in their attitude towards learning?  At some point, when you keep hammering a square peg into a round hole, the wood will either splinter and conform or will just break apart.

There is no perfect solution at the moment.  And in the meantime an uneasy truce prevails.

Buzz’s conference was first and that went really well with a few surprises.  They think he is a lovely addition to the program, avery popular kid (”we have kids ask where he is when he is absent from school”), a very deep thinker and then, this was the surprising bit, a cautious kid (!!!) who observes before he jumps into anything. When he jumps into, “he is a joy to behold because he is so into everything he does”.   I think we are so used to unconsciously comparing Buzz to Woody that he felt bold and adventurous to us but perhaps not so to the teachers!  It was a lovely conference and they had Buzz pegged very accurately.  I continue to really like the teachers and the program. 

Then we went on to Woody’s class.  At first nothing she said really surprised us.  Academically ahead of grade in many subjects, gifted musician, dreamer who doesn’t finish the work on time on occasions, socially awkward, likes to hang out with 1-2 friends and doesn’t really interact with other kids beyond this.  We had heard this before and were working on the social skills. We have seen huge improvements just this past year and suspect that this will continue to improve.  He will always be an introvert but hopefully more comfortable in his skin than he currently is. 

But then she said two things that initially got me quite upset.  The first was a question she posed to us and I am trying to recall it verbatim.  “Why are you pushing him on Math when he is already way ahead of grade on this subject?”.  Two implications here that really upset me: (1) that we were pushing him in any way.  This is a kid that asks to practice piano everyday and asks for EPGY on weekends.  There are days when I will forget and he will remind me.  This is a kid that thrives on self-imposed schedules and sticks to them.  I am so opposed to pushing him to do anything academic because I was raised in school systems that really pushed a very rigid academic curriculum oftentimes to the detriment of some bright kids!  (2) The second thing that upset me even more was the implication that somehow being at grade level should be the aspiration.  Shouldn’t the aspiration be to make the child love learning, to challenge the child and to make him/her curious enough to keep at asking questions and finding answers.  If that happens at grade level, great!  If that happens at a higher grade, then equally great!  Are my husband and I living in a completely different world with different expections and hopes?

As if that were not enough, she then pulled out a Math sheet that Woody had worked on.  On it was the simplest of simple word problems (what Woody calls Baby Math). He had answered it correctly and then right below that had listed a number of other ways in which you could get to the same answer of 10.  As an aside, this is something he loves to do.  He absolutely loves figuring out different ways in which you can arrive at the same answer using addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.   She pointed that out to us and said the following: ”this has nothing to do with the word problem and I am worried that he doesn’t really understand the concept of multiplications and division, there is no reason for him to use them here”.    Both of us looked at her and I initially thought she was joking.  This is where DH jumped in (thankfully because I was quite literally speechless) and explained that this is something he loves to do.  All he was trying to do was to find different ways to get to 10.  Yes it had nothing to do with the exact word problem but in his mind, he had solved the problem already and now was moving on to stuff that floated his boat.  When we told her this, she suddenly got it but I cannot believe that it took us going on at length about this for her to get it. 

I was quite upset yesterday and I interrupted my mom (who is away on a little trip on her birthday weekend!) to vent about this.  She set me straight and as did my mother-in-law and via her, my sister-in-law who is a teacher.  DH (ever the rational one) asked me to take a deep breath and then to think calmly about next steps.  Now, more than ever, Woody needs us to completely believe in him and his abilities.

So here I am on Saturday and I have been up since 3:15am.  And I have not quite calmed down but am calm enough to write this post.  I am going to enjoy Halloween with the kids.  We have already carved pumpkins, baked and eaten almost an entire loaf of pumpkin bread.  Woody and Buzz will go trick or treating later this evening and likely end the evening on a sugar high! 

Tomorrow, I will take another deep breath, and think about this some more.

The authors have their own website here and there are some good summaries and reviews that will give you a gist of what the book is about here.

Many things that were interesting to me:

• Growing up I remember really having to earn praise from my mother.  I knew, of course, that she loved us unconditionally but I also knew that she was not one to praise constantly.  She was also one to tell it like it is.  I am much more of a “softy” like my dad but I think both my husband and I always been weary of constantly telling the kids how smart they are but I haven’t consciously articulated our reason for this.  The book points to evidence that kids tend to do better with specific praise about things that they have some control over – like putting good effort into something rather than just praising them for how smart they are.  There is a fascinating study included here about the differences between American and Chinese moms.

• The book also talks about the importance of sleep.  The amount of sleep kids get have a direct correlation to their school performance. I now have more ammo to insist on the 7:30 bedtime for the boys!

• The chapter that really got me thinking was the one on “The Search for Intelligent Life in Kindergarten”.  I remember when Woody was enrolled at a local preschool some years ago.  He had just turned 3.  This was a school that came with great recommendations from parents in the area, it was our first interaction with schools of any kind, they had a great story to tell about meeting the needs of the individual child and we were full of hope that this would be the place that would challenge our (even then) precocious son.  A few weeks into school, I got a call from the head of the school asking for a meeting.  Both my husband and I went in to see her.  She first asked us to observe the class for a little while.  And then she pointed out to us that Woody just would not sit still for circle time and that at age 3, this was something that was expected of all their kids. She went on about lagging gross and small motor skills — he showed no interest in playing ball with the class and was completely not able to thread some small beads through a wire.  Never mind that he could read and do some pretty advanced Math at that age.  My son, the quiet introvert and the dreamer, would never have been tagged at bright/gifted at that school – he just didn’t fit their profile.  We did of course pull him out of that school and fingers crossed have found something that (while not perfect) is actually working well.  But it got me thinking about Woody and the many other Woodys out there and the disservice we are doing by having these moulds and types.

• Finally in the chapter called “Can Self-Control Be Taught?” the authors talk about insights from a new preschool program/method called Tools of the Mind that is showing some great results.  I am going to look into this program a bit more and perhaps pass along material to Buzz’s teachers who love reading about stuff like this.

Overall this was a good book.  What was even more useful was that we were able to discuss the book with the author and a group of parents at the school.  I talked to my friend H about the book and she asked me to send it to her and I said I would.  But just realized that I have this on my Kindle. The one (and perhaps only) downside of a Kindle!  Sorry H!

The Book of the Week @ Our House

Believe it or not, the Rand Road Atlas 2009 was the book that got the most mileage and was poured over this week.  We were checking out at Safeway when Woody spotted this near the checkout counter and turned on the big brown eyed pleading look that he knows that I always succumb to!  Given that it was on sale for $2.99 I did get it for him.  Boy has this Atlas been put to use this past week!  Woody has spent about 5 hours on this over the course of the week.  It has led to his creating all kinds of quizzes where he has asked me and Buzz, “which two main Interstates meet at St. Paul, Minneapolis?”  Usually these questions are met with blank stares from the two of us. He then shakes him head at our ignorance and provides us with the correct answer.  A $2.99 well spent is all I say!

Other books read and movies watched this week include:

Monday Oct 19th.  My husband calls this book, Have You Filled A Bucket Today, my Kumbaya Girls Scouts book but I love the lesson in this sweet book.  Your bucket gets filled when others are nice to you and when you are nice to others.  You are a bucket dipper when you are mean to others and also when others are mean to you.  This book is very basic in terms of reading levels but has generated many a rich conversation at night about people who are mean, why they are mean and how the boys can be “bucket fillers” and avoid being “bucket dippers”.

Tuesday, October 20th. King of the Playground is about how to deal with bullies.  This is (fingers crossed) not an issue at the moment.  His strategy currently is to avoid anyone he labels as “too kooky” which is code for aggressive and this has worked to date.  But given how different Woody is I wanted to make sure he is prepared.  This is a book that we had Woody read to Buzz.  Woody feels really important assuming the night time reading duties and I find that Buzz tends to ask Woody more questions like “what is this word” than he asks me and so I am really encouraging this reading.

Wednesday, October 21st. Woody did some reading about Christopher Columbus at school recently and I find that he is fascinated by him.  I am sure there are many other books on Columbus but I bought this one a while ago at one of those buy 5 books for $1 sale.  And I read this aloud to him.  Little bit of a warning note in here:  there are a couple of references here to people dying and this side-tracked us to a discussion around how they died and why they died that I wasn’t at all equipped to have at that moment.  Luckily for me Buzz flipped ahead to a page where the Santa Maria runs into rocks and distracted the boys.

Wednesday, October 21st.  The Henry and Mudge series are a very basic set of children’s books.  Woody read this to Buzz and both boys enjoyed it tremendously.  I kept hearing giggles from their room and Buzz would then shout, “read that part again”!  Buzz then spent a good 10-15 minutes pouring over this book on his own before bed time and he asked Woody to bring home the next book in the series from the school library.

Thursday, October 22nd. Usborne Illustrated Book of Stories for Boys is a book that one of the boys got on their birthday. I found it while I was dusting yesterday and though this might be a good one for Woody to read aloud to Buzz.  There are a whole bunch of stories in here that cater to boys (and girls).  Stories like The Masked Pirate, Robot Racers and Attack of the Swamp Monster seemed to appeal to both boys.

Friday, October 22nd: A Bug’s Life was the first movie the kids watched on Movie Night as they waited for their dad to come home from a business trip.  I picked up a whole bunch of insect related movies because Woody is currently doing an insect unit at school.  This movie got a very lukewarm reception from the boys.

Friday October 22nd: The boys then talked me into a second DVD as they waited up for their dad.  This Magic School bus DVD on bugs got a much warmer  reception than the previous DVD.  They loved the episodes on ants and bees.  They watched this twice and were fast asleep on the couch when dad finally got home.

We are now enjoying a lazy Saturday morning having consumed a hearty breakfast of waffles!  Yum!

Finally this past week, I feel like we have settled into a semblance of a routine with Woody and Buzz.  When I mentioned this to my good friend H, she retorted that this was a good thing since we are almost at Fall Break and Christmas!    There are a couple of things working well this year and a couple of things that are not working as well and I thought I should jot them down here more as a reminder to myself:

What’s working…

Buzz is settling down well into preschool.  He loves the teachers and already has a horde of friends.  There is a little girl there who calls him her boyfriend.  He is having a blast which is really nice to see.  The only downside is that my laundry loads have increased tenfold since he has started.  He comes back home with his clothes covered in dirt, mud, play dough, paint, shaving cream, wood chips. One day he came home with his pockets filled with small rocks and he had painstakingly named each rock!

In Woody’s 1st Grade class the kids get to learn a poem each week and also have to recite the poem in front of the class.  This actually is a really good idea and is working really well because it exposes kids to the wonderful world of poetry and importantly, it gives them an invaluable lesson in early public speaking in front of a very safe audience.  They get to learn 30 poems by the time they graduate to 2nd Grade!  In addition to the poem, we also make sure to look up the poet and learn a bit about them.  Woody really enjoys these and Buzz is also learning the poems and gets to recite them at home on Sunday when his grandparents come to dinner!

Another routine that is working well is a Reading Record that the school is asking the kids to maintain.  This is a log of the books that they are reading at home each day. They sent a blank schedule home and I have found that Woody is quite motivated to read so he can fill the schedule out!  You get to choose the book which is also really good.  This should help me keep better track of what we are reading at home.  I plan to add a page to the blog to capture this.

3 sessions a week of EPGY for Woody is going gangbusters!  I will be talking to the teachers at the parent-teacher conferences next week about perhaps pulling him out of class to do this.  Fingers crossed that they let him do this!

What is not working…

We were ridiculously over scheduled for the first few weeks of school.  I took a long hard look at the activities on our plate and it was a choice between cutting back to one piano class a week OR stopping swim classes and picking them back up in the Spring.   Piano won because Woody so enjoys it and absolutely loves his teacher!

I am also looking into how to augment science learning at home.  Woody’s school covers two topics on science this year: insects and animal habitats.   Earlier in the year, I asked the teachers how these topics got picked and she replied that this was what the kids tended to be interested in at this age.   While I like the idea of this being interest driven, I was not completely comfortable with that answer but was not able to articulate why until a few weeks ago. Let me see if I am able to explain my thinking here:

Science to me almost consists of topics that are very related, almost like overlapping circles.  The the reason I was not completely happy with the teacher’s answer was that the topics picked seemed a little random and lacked an overarching guiding framework.  I was not looking for a textbook (or even a set of textbooks) because that would be way too confining.  But rather what I was looking for was a broad framework of topics that would serve as more of a guide for me about the topics and how they overlap.    Now this is likely just me being neurotic but I feel that with this framework in my head, I would feel a bit more confident to then have the topics be guided by the child’s interest.  So I have been researching augmenting science for Woody and will have a longish post on this soon! Would love any thoughts you might have on this!

I am off now to build a scarecrow with Woody’s class!   The theme the kids picked is WICKED WITCH.  The kids and parents have been collecting stuff to build the witch and today is the day that we actually get to build this!  At the Halloween party, the different class scarecrows are evaluated on different criteria.  Everyone ends up getting a prize.  It is tons of fun!

It struck me a few days ago that we could actually convert this into a rich lesson for both boys!

First we talked about the idea of a hypothesis as a proposed explanation for some observed phenomenon. And that hypotheses needed to be tested.  This was  a concept that the boys got immediately.

Woody’s Hypothesis:  Route B was faster than Route A

Mommy’s Hypothesis:  Route A was faster than Route B

Buzz’s Hypothesis:  Route A and Route B were equally fast.

And so we started our test of this hypothesis.  On Thursday we took Route A and it took us 6 minutes and on Friday we took Route B and it took us 7 minutes.  So I turned to them and declared myself the winner.

“But wait a minute”,  Woody said “on Friday, Route B had a lot of construction that slowed us down a bit and we stopped at more red lights than we normally do”.  And so, I pointed out to them gleefully, one data point for each road was not a fair test of which was faster.

We needed more data.

Woody then pointed out to me that ideally we would need to compare the time taken on each road at the same time and on the same day because on Fridays there tend to be fewer cars on the road than on Tuesday or Wednesday. Which led to a discussion about the best ways to design the test.  We finally have decided to gather at least 3 data points for each route or 6 days of data in total.

We have started to put the data collected in a table and have also started a graph of the time taken on each road.  We will be calculating average times from this data.  And my DH has promised them that once the data is collected and the graph done, he will help Woody put it all in Excel and produce a professional looking table and graph. Woody is thrilled at the idea!

So much learning….and from such a simple but Woody initiated idea. Priceless!

And perhaps because I am sick, I am being more than usually introspective…

I realized again this morning how different Woody is from the rest of the kids in his class.  We walked up to class and there were kids everywhere.  The boys were playing ball or chasing each other.  The girls were talking together in small groups.  Woody walked up to the Four Square area and starting pacing and measuring the sides of the square.  He was there all alone and so Buzz and I walked up to him and asked him what he was doing.  Turns out he thought that the square wasn’t really a square and two of the sides were slightly longer than the other two.  And so he was measuring. And if he was right, he claimed that the game should be renamed Four Rectangles.

Remember a couple of days ago when the teacher thought he really wanted to play Four Square, well it could be that he was actually just was interested in measuring the square!  I’ll ask when he gets back home today.

And here is the thing that I have to keep telling myself, it is completely OK for him to be different and unique.  When I was in school I worked so hard to belong and I was such a chameleon, changing personalities for the different groups I interacted with.   It got to a point where I wasn’t really sure who I was leaving high school.  And it wasn’t until college that I felt that I could be myself and be appreciated.

So unique is good.  Woody will just be who he is and he is wonderful.  And while I will always worry about kids teasing him for being different, I also know that he will (and is) making friends who will appreciate the unique and the quirky.  And who also happen to be unique and quirky in their own way!

Ok, I will stop now.  I can always blame the NyQuil for the rambling in this post !

But I have been trying to figure out what about historic farms would float Woody’s boat and think I stumbled upon an angle that I can use with him based on a conversation we had over dinner a few days ago. Woody’s class had been discussing the trip at school and he was fascinated by how they did laundry back in the 1800s!  The idea of big buckets of heated water, a wash board, the wringer and hanging clothes up to dry on a clothes line was the topic of conversation over dinner.  And so I got thinking that perhaps he would like it if we talked about other “then” and “now” experiences of farm living in the 1800s.

Here are some questions that we came up with together:

• How did they know when to get up in the morning without alarm clocks?
• What did they get the cooking done? What did they eat?
• What tools did farmer use on the farm?
• Did they go to school? What did the schools look like?
• What did the family do for entertainment?  What games did the kids play?

Here are some resources I will be using with the boys to answer some of these questions:

Pioneer Farm:  Living on a Farm in the 1880s.

A Pioneer Sampler:  Daily Life of a Pioneer Family in 1840

Life on a Pioneer Homestead

Eyewitness:  Farm

Our recent trip to Columbia Historic Park in the Gold Country also helps bring this era to life a bit. We ate at the local saloon…

And we boarded stagecoaches…

Got held up by bandits…

We could also dust off the Little House on the Prairie DVDs that we have and have a series marathon but I suspect that will be more for Mommy and less for the two brats!  Hey, maybe I can convince DH to do just this tonight once the boys are in bed….