Teaching without a voice

The title of this post feels metaphorical but it is literal.  I have no voice, literally.  Yes, I whine a lot about feeling like I have very little voice in the grand scheme of things, but as I get older, I continue to realize that change is rarely inspired by those who do the work of the trade.  But, that is another post on another day.

For some reason (most likely seasonal allergies) I woke up yesterday with my voice pretty much gone.  Fortunately, I had already planned my science classes around a few TED talks about pollination.  My students did Ok, but I flailed because I was a bit blindsided by my ailment.  By the end of the day, I had e-mailed every sub in the district (I could not call because I have no voice) with no response to my plee for a sub.  Fortunately I work with an amazing group of teachers. 

My delima was that today is flower dissection day, which means lots of directions and working one on one with groups.  One of my fellow teachers suggested, "put all group directions with labeled diagrams on a power point and have the kids read the slides."  Done, and what a great idea.  Another teacher on my team, volunteered to switch classes with me because her kids were working on a project.  While I have not needed to take her up on this, it makes my heart happy to know that I have meaningful support in getting the great work we do, done. 

How have my students responded?  Well my most challenging class that usually flails during labs did great.  They had to take charge.  I had to delegate my loudest kids to reading directions to the group and explaining directions.  They had to get the classes attention, students had to tell me what they saw when I walked around, and because of my voice, I could not jump in and disrupt my slower thinkers. 

At home it has been fascinating as well.  One of my son's learns 90% on the visual spectrum.  He was born with a cleft pallet which left him hearing impaired until it was repaired at age three.  He also spent his first three years in a world void of verbal communication.  He was not spoken to and thus, when he came to us he could speak 4-5 words.  The point of all of this is to say, that verbal language is not his strong suit.  We have done loads of work with him and he speaks a ton now, comprehends most basic commands.  But, with all that said, he is still a definitive visual learner. 

What has been wonderful about being non-verbal right now is my relationship with my little "I".  Yesterday as I was doing charades to try and communicate without words I got to see him shine.  He was consistently interpreting what I was trying to say.  This is the little boy that regularly looks at me like I am from Mars when I ask him a question.  But, not yesterday.  Yesterday we were on the same page and we were closer than I think we have been in a long time. 

I have also gotten to be reminded of the value of just listening.  Sometimes to the words, sometimes to the silence, and mostly to the dynamic between noise, language and listening. 

Maybe today was my day to get to be the learner, because I sure have learned a lot from being voiceless. 

1st Grade Here We Come

I have done it.  I have ordered materials for teaching my boys next year, and I am really excited.  Yes, I am a teacher with a masters degree and 10 years of classroom experience, and 7 years of leading outdoor science field school groups.  And, I bought curriculum for next year.  But, not just any curriculum. 

Before I go into the details about what we chose and why we chose it, I feel it is important to mention why we home school our boys.  Homeschooling was not something my husband and I ever considered, I am sure I have mentioned this 1000 times on here.  But, once we made the decision, we have not looked back.  Yes, we have been questioned about our decision by friends, family and strangers countless times.  As parents, though, we have to make tough choices about what is best for our kids. 

See, both of our boys came to us through adoption.  Both had spent their crucial early months (for E) and years (for I) missing out on youth, family, direct positive learning environments, or stimuli.  One of our son's spent his first 3 months in an incubator, only to spend the next 5 months in an orphanage with very limited stimulus or interaction with others.  Our other son was shuffled between four homes in his first 3.5 years and came to us with lots of negative experiences, drug addicted, nearly starving, hearing impaired and mute. 

Needless to say, they both had a lousy and damaged foundation.  John and I also believe that kids need to be kids.  We spend a lot of time being grown up in our lives, and well, we don't believe in forcing that sooner than latter.  Also, our kids did not get to be kids when they were supposed to get to, so we feel it is all the more important to foster their imagination, curiosity and sense of wonder. 

For these reasons we have decided to use the Oak Meadow for next year.  I love that it has art, music, and health incorporated as these are areas I am weak in as a teacher.  I love that it encourages imagination, and a logical flow, without a illogical time line. 

We ordered this morning, and I should be getting the whole packet in the mail soon.  I am looking very forward to doing my homework, and then starting the boys this summer on their 1st trimester of 1st grade.  I am thinking that if I do this, they will get to do some cool unit studies in between trimesters and this will allow John some necessary flex time next spring when he is supper busy with the business. 

Well Hello Monday

I ended last week with a bit of a temper tantrum.  OK, who and I kidding.  I threw a huge temper tantrum on Friday morning that made some of Emerson’s pale in comparison.  What about you may wonder… I did not want to go to work.  I had enough of running around, getting up early, bureaucracy, begging for attention from those who have used up all of their attention and will power, issuing of pilot standardize test, learning about giving more standardize test, and just plain old missing my boys and the garden. 

But, thank goodness for the weekend.  I would say “Bring it on Monday!”  But, I distinctly remember a presidential figure saying that not too long ago and the results were not that great.  So, instead I will say “Monday, I am ready for you and what you have to offer.” 

I know I am going into 5 days of back-to-back standardize testing (really 4 this week and one on Monday of next week.)  I am prepared to let my students know that they are wonderful, creative, and capable and have loads to offer the world, despite how these test categorize them.  I know that highly successful people (not in academia) who have toughed the importance and value to these test as an indicator of their very successes, but when asked to take the test, they bombed them.   I know that these test are designed by educators, for educators and used to see how good kids are at being educated.  That is great, but we are educating them to become members of the world and this I will remind them of with a simple phrase that I am permitted to say “do the best you can..” 

To the test, I tell you, I will follow your rules, read the script without enthusiasm and I refuse to allow you to crush my spirit or the spirit of my students.  We will have our pencils ready, technology gone, and a creativity and divergent thinking stashed.  See you will be gone in 5 days and we will still be here.  Of course until your numbers arrive and strive to box in my students.  But I say to you, you are paper and we are scissors.  So there….

To my waist line and my jeans:  I say to you, the diet is on and I am ready to be strong.  I am armed with cheese sticks, and toasted pecans, and a cup of no sugar yogurt for the staff meeting that will have lots of forbidden food.  I will no longer carry the pounds of stress eating, that wear me down psychologically and physiologically. 

So, here is to you Monday.  We can work together and I am offering you this declaration, with a few compromises thrown in so let us make the best of our time together as we go forward and onward.

Comming to the end of the year...

As a teacher I definitely see the year as starting in August and ending in May, not the traditional calender, but for me a perpetual ground hogs day of repeating a year until I hopefully get it right.  This year though I am not only a middle school science teacher with 120 students that I have watched grow over the year, but I am also a homeschooling parent of my own children who technically will be completing kindergarten this year. 

I say technically, because I don't particularly like the idea that children develop into a new box because they completed a number of instructional days, or met a list of standards.  When it comes to my own kids, I can't take the ground hog's day approach of go back and revise the year to get it even better for next year.  I have to get it right as we go through, or re-teach the concepts until they are a part of their schema. 

As I come to the end of the year with my students, I am mostly looking forward to getting to be the primary teacher for my boys this summer.  I am often asked if they will have the summer off.  I'd like to think that John and I are keeping the lessons engaging and as closely related to real world skills, that they won't even notice that learning is something that gets turned off for the summer or on the weekend. 

I will also say, that spring is a crazy busy time for my husband.  If there is a season for sit down lessons to be reduced, spring is definitely it.  So, with that, I have had the boys doing a lot of big picture self directed projects.   We have gotten in our required 160 days and the next school year officially starts on June 1.  My goal is to keep moving them along as learners, readers, mathematicians, explorers and good citizens throughout the summer. 

It is crazy to think that this time a year ago I was having IEP meetings, and registering them for kindergarten with hope and anticipation and a bit of sadness that my boys were growing up.  I really did not even imagine a year ago that we would be homeschooling our boys.  Admittedly, we judged homeschoolers pretty harshly. We never could have imagined we would become one of "those families."  We underestimated ourselves, and the ability to teach younger children.  We did not know the power of education outside of the institution, and how for many kids this is the best choice.

Ultimately though, when it came down to making the decision it was the right one for our family and for our boys.  It has not been easy on our schedules, our finances, or on our sleep needs, but looking back, neither was "school-school." 

So here is what our kids can do now, that they really could not do before this year:

• They can read...  I mean like read and act out Piggy and Gerald books and Dick and Jane Books (yes, I did use these because the repetition helped the boys a ton and also built up their confidence) and most level 1 readers.
• They can have great discussions about longer chapter books that I read to them:  Charlotte's web, Magic Tree House books...They know about characters, foreshadowing, clues, prediction and inference.
• They can write all of the letters of the alphabet and know their sounds
• They know about long and short vowels and how to apply the rules to the sound the vowel makes when sounding out a word.
• They are in the process of learning about blends
• They know most of their sight words.
• 2-D and 3-D shapes
• Basics of Measurements
• Addition and subtraction with 0-10
• Counting to 100
• Reading a digital clock and a thermometer and what the numbers mean.
• Know about greater and lesser numbers
• They can build a catapult then redesign it to make it better, and tell you why it is better.
• Design a self cleaning hot wheels track
• Explain how steepness effects speed and distance of a rolling object
• Life cycles of plants and butterflies
• They are starting to learn the states, continents and oceans. 
• We have done loads of art projects
• Tons of facts about wild animals
• And this is just off the top of my head. 

My next step, is I need to really plan out what next.. What are my goals for them next year?  How do I want them to get there?  How do I design their learning experience to match their needs and their interest?  Blog post soon to follow on just that topic. 

Cool New Find

       

I am always on the lookout for great books to read with the boys.  The fortunately love picking out books at the library for entertainment and information.  They are now reading to me each night, from simplistic books that are more about decoding than about the story.  I feel this is a necessary step for them to growing into readers of more complex story lines. 

And, because they love stories not, I love to read them to them to keep their imaginations and love of the story alive, while they are learning the details of reading.  We recently read Charlotte’s web together and we all loved it, but I have had three false starts since then.   So, while I was at the library the other days, I decided to flip through the pages of a Magic Tree House book.  I noticed a note written in the back “great read aloud unit studies K-3.”  Hey, that is what I was looking for. 

So, I picked up Book #1 “Dinosaurs of the Past.”   Three days later, we are done with the book and the boys loved it.  They used other books to prove points about each of the dinosaurs mentioned in the book. We talked about how dinosaurs laid eggs, which character they related to the most, and what they would do in the same situation.  I am wishing I had the time today to go ahead and pick up #2 to keep the momentum going. 

Fast forward to this morning, and I decided to look up and see if there were some good unit studies out there for the series, and I found this web site:  http://mthclassroomadventures.org/index.php?r=site/lessonplans

Wow, is all I can say!  This site has cool lesson plans, activities and extension activities for each book in the series.  This could also be a great way for parents of struggling or reluctant readers engaged throughout the summer.  If you child is already a proficient reader, they can read the books themselves and they are geared for a 2-4^th grade level I believe.    

The general theme is that a couple of kids find a tree house and in that tree house there are a ton of old books.  When they look at the book they are transported into it’s setting, and then the story centers on the setting.  From what it looks like there are all sorts of history and science themes explored throughout the series.

Rage Against the Institution

I have been quite this week on the blog.  For those who know me in real life, you know that when I am quiet in my writing it is because I am filtering, revising, rolling around something complex with in me.  I have started several blog post.  All felt disorganized, judgmental, cynical, and unproductive.  While I love a good rant, I like to think I that I don't rant for the sake of speaking, but because I want something changed.  Improved. A wrong corrected. 

What am I so riled up about?  Well lots frankly, but specifically humanity's treatment towards our youth.  See, as humans we do fall in the scientific category of animals, but we like to think of our selves as beings and not animals.  Yet, what I am seeing in my day to day life, feels like our youth are being raised as animals rather than as beings, and I must say that I also feel that raising them in the wild, would be a far cry better than many of a modern ways of shuffling kids around or off to the side so that the world can go about its business. 

Why am I so disturbed by this right now?  Well I am usually frustrated with this, and it is something that stays in the back of my mind constantly.  See, my own personal children are the victims of being forgotten.  One son was left to rot, literally, in a crib 23 hours a day for 2.5 years, to the point of physical, emotional and intellectual scars that will stay with him for life.  Recently, my husband and I went to see the showing of the documentary STUCK which takes an in depth look at the impacts on children, families and society when kids remain unparented due to bureaucratic hurdles that leave them trapped in orphanages.  Almost all of the footage was something I had seen before, but never had I seen it all together in 85 minutes of back to back fotage. 

What struck me to my core, was seeing the Romain orphanages and the profound effect that emotion, physical and emotional neglect had on the children stuck in the institution.  Kids who were mostly born healthy were exhibiting symptoms of psychosis, autism, ADHD, ADD, PTSD, ODD, PDD, and failure to thrive. 

While I know that there are many genetic variables that can increase the probability of a child to have one or more of these disorders, there was no way that 100% of the children in the orphanage had inherited genes that would cause such wide spread mental and physical impairments.  These cases were clearly caused by the act of willful negligence by society.  We, all of us, caused this, directly or indirectly.  Human beings, were reduced to treatment worse than stock animals raised for consumption and the price was outstandingly high. The extreme example of the Romanian orphanages, felt like a wake-up slap in the face judgment on a problem that is much more subtle, but all too real, with other institutions geared towards youth.

Then there is the here and now.  Me as a parent of two boys, who both survived their early months and years in an institution.  With that come the labels of SPD, PDD, OCD, and PTSD.  Then, there is the other here and now of my life as a public school teacher, and an active member of the homeschooling world  Something I am hearing over and over again is, "my child is not succeeding at school because they are ADD, ADHD, not hearing anything the teacher says, not challenged, has so much homework they feel like they are sinking."  Sadly, I am mostly hearing from parents of young children.  Parents are being told in the masses that something is wrong with their child, and than medication is needed, so that they can become "regular learners" in the institution of education. 

Seriously!  If I was a CEO of a company and 30-40% of my staff needed to be medicated to perform their duties asked of them, I would not all of the sudden assume that the work force was falling apart.  I would re-think my company model.  I feel like we (society) consider our youth to just be shorter adults.  Not true!  Kindergartners are not just smaller adults.  They are goofy, wiggly, unsure of where their body ends and another person's body begins.  Some of them are physically ready to read and write, some are not.  Being ADHD is basically acting like you are a kindergartner when you are not one. 

Unfortunately, I am finding that in this day and age of standardized test, and efficiency and constantly being technologically plugged in, we do have an epidemic of attention deficit.  There is a deficit of people truly being present and paying attention to the people and places around them.  I have yet to hear of a natural system where 30 animals would be put together in a small confined space that were all the same age with a non-relative in charge.  Of course our kids apear to be hypervigilant, hyper aware, agressive, territorial, dissacociated.  My son, who is extremely sensory aware, might be labeled as ADD in such a situation, or I would say, I want him watching my back in a crowded place, because no one is going to sneak past him.  I feel like we are going in the wrong direction with our educational system.  I re-watched a TED talk "Bring on the Revolution" which implores us to really think how we should be teaching today. 

I don't feel like the initial idea of educational institutions were originally terrible.  And, I feel like sticking with it in this day and age is unconscionable.  The epidemic of emotional and psychological acronyms seems to correlate directly with the widening gap of how the "real world" works today in the 21st century, and the way we operate the educational institutions for our youth. 

So now what?  Well, I am sure I will have more on that later. 

What a week...

What a crazy week it has been.  Normally I have down time, which is my time write, reflect and post.  Not this week.  We are in the throws of spring planting in our many veggie gardens, our business "The Backyard Pantry," is swamped with orders from people who want our ready to plant raised bed gardens.  On the homeschooling front the boys have been very busy building a wildlife sanctuary for their cheetahs and lions.  They wrote wonderful stories about why their animals needed help at their sanctuary.  For me, at school, I have been busy planning out the rest of the year.  It seems strange to say that I can actually know day by day what I need to cover up until summer begins. 

Gardening has been a wonderful way to have the boys be involved in leaning about their world.  They have watched as we have used our chickens to weed garden beds and eat harmful bugs.  The boys have had to use fine motor skills to help gently tease fragile plants out of their containers and then transplant them into bigger containers.  They have measured and mixed soil and experimented with what ingredients to add to soil to make it "just right."  One of my favorite things about living in the SE is the abundant growing season.   I have loads in the ground including, potatoes, garlic, onions, carrots, tomatoes, mustard greens, kale, spinachh, and Swiss chard.  I am looking very forward to time this weekend getting a bunch more stuff moved outside.

Homeschooling this week turned out to be very fun.  We even made friends with a few other HS families, and one of them has a farm just down the road from us.   Yesterday, I even got home early from work due to threatening weather.  As a result, I got to teach the boys most of their lessons.  I love the time I get to work with them one on one.  I just can't imagine trying to cover such foundational skills in a large group setting with kids who need so much guidance.  As I worked through math with the boys, (one at a time) I could change the next problem based on how that child did on the current problem.  I could push each of them to the next level or work on something they were struggling with. 

As far as classes go for next week, well, they will be crazy, but they will be based on real life.  Our business is in the height of its season and strawberries are ripe, so we are doing week two of the animal sanctuary plans, and going strawberry picking.  Yes, there will be math, spelling and reading lesson throughout the week, but they will be in the context of life.  Next week look for a great weeks worth of strawberry lessons:)  as we will hopefully have gallons of strawberries to put up for the year.  Our swimming pool is also opening up for the year, so the boys will start gearing up for lots of great exercises at the pool and climbing on the facilities rock wall for PE.

Then there is the third part of my life right now.  Middle School...  I love the spring curriculum as it is all focused on the natural sciences and that is my specialty. Ecology and botany are my last two units of the year, and I have been happily working and reworking my curriculum map to squeeze in lots of wonderful inquiry labs, and modeling of systems labs, and content for the rest of the year. 

Here is my latest TpT item for sale.  I will be using this lab to kick off my ecology unit and I am looking forward to doing it next week with my kids.  I have designed this lab for middle schoolers based on my work experience of doing rain forest ecology survey work in Central America. 

Abiotic Variables Effecton Biodiversity Lab $3

Are you searching for an engaging inquiry based lab to hook your students into your ecology unit? I was, so I created this lab to provide my middle school students with the opportunity to do an ecology survey on three locations around our school. Students get to go outside and collect both quantitative and qualitative data. The second day of the lab, students complete their data table by hearing from the other groups in the class. I have also included basic reflection questions, higher level questions and an extra credit opportunity applying what they learned. Feel free to check out my blog at http://backyardlearning.blogspot.com to learn more about my products.

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Abiotic-Variables-Effecton-Biodiversity-Lab