Genius Redefined

A wonderful reminder to all of us as we facilitate learning in our homes, that we must seek to discover the inner genius within each of our children. God created us each with unique gifts and purpose.

French Resources

Someday, when life is less busy, I just might create some of my own French video resources and Ontario curriculum-correlated activities that homeschoolers can access and use. However, this season in my life does not seem to easily lend itself to planning and completing such a lofty project so, for now, I’ve listed a few online French learning resources. Hopefully some of them will be suitable for your family and ages. The great news is, these are FREE

 

• BBC has several streams of French learning depending on your previous experience with the language. Most of what I have seen is created for high school/adults, even the material meant for beginners. Free sign up and you are able to access videos, as well as oral and written practice exercises - http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/french/
• Great site for beginners with many free videos: http://learnfrenchvideo.com/
• Audio French resources including numbers, days of the week, family relationships and fairy tales translated into French, read by a francophone: http://www.thefrenchexperiment.com/
• One of many Open Learning online options, this free French course for beginners created Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative includes exercises, activities and videos: http://oli.web.cmu.edu/openlearning/forstudents/freecourses/french

Enjoy! À bientôt et joyeux Noël!

 

Sharon

saltresource

 

The Story of Gillian Lynne

~excerpted from the book The Element by Ken Robinson

Gillian was only eight years old, but her future was already at risk. Her schoolwork was a disaster, at least as far as her teachers were concerned. She turned in assignments late, her handwriting was terrible, and she tested poorly. Not only that, she was a disruption to the entire class, one minute fidgeting noisily, the next staring out the window, forcing the teacher to stop the class to pull Gillian’s attention back, and the next doing something to disturb the other children around her. Gillian wasn’t particularly concerned about any of this — she was used to being corrected by authority figures and really didn’t see herself as a difficult child — but the school was very concerned. This came to a head when the school wrote to her parents.

The school thought that Gillian had a learning disorder of some sort and that it might be more appropriate for her to be in a school for children with special needs. All of this took place in the 1930s. I think now they’d say she had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and they’d put her on Ritalin or something similar. But the ADHD epidemic hadn’t been invented at the time. It wasn’t an available condition. People didn’t know they could have that and had to get by without it.

Gillian’s parents received the letter from the school with great concern and sprang to action. Gillian’s mother put her daughter in her best dress and shoes, tied her hair in ponytails, and took her to a psychologist for assessment, fearing the worst. Gillian told me that she remembers being invited into a large oak-paneled room with leather-bound books on the shelves. Standing in the room next to a large desk was an imposing man in a tweed jacket. He took Gillian to the far end of the room and sat her down on a huge leather sofa. Gillian’s feet didn’t quite touch the floor, and the setting made her wary. Nervous about the impression she would make, she sat on her hands so that she wouldn’t fidget.

The psychologist went back to his desk, and for the next twenty minutes, he asked Gillian’s mother about the difficulties Gillian was having at school and the problems the school said she was causing. While he didn’t direct any of his question at Gillian, he watched her carefully the entire time. This made Gillian extremely uneasy and confused. Even at this tender age, she knew that this man would have a significant role in her life. She knew what it meant to attend a “special school,” and she didn’t want anything to do with that. She genuinely didn’t feel that she had any real problems, but everyone else seemed to believe she did. Given the way her mother answered the questions, it was possible that even she felt this way.

Maybe, Gillian thought, they were right.

Eventually, Gillian’s mother and the psychologist stopped talking. The man rose from his desk, walked to the sofa, and sat next to the little girl.

“Gillian, you’ve been very patient, and I thank you for that,” he said. “But I’m afraid you’ll have to be patient for a little longer. I need to speak to your mother privately now. We’re going to go out of the room for a few minutes. Don’t worry; we won’t be very long.”

Gillian nodded apprehensively, and the two adults left her sitting there on her own. But as he was leaving the room, the psychologist leaned across his desk and turned on the radio.

As soon as they were in the corridor outside the room, the doctor said to Gillian’s mother, “Just stand here for a moment, and watch what she does.” There was a window into the room, and they stood to one side of it, where Gillian couldn’t see them. Nearly immediately, Gillian was on her feet, moving around the room to the music. The two adults stood watching quietly for a few minutes, transfixed by the girl’s grace. Anyone would have noticed there was something natural — even primal — about Gillian’s movements. Just as they would have surely caught the expression of utter pleasure on her face.

At last, the psychologist turned to Gillian’s mother and said, “You know, Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn’t sick. She’s a dancer. Take her to a dance school.”

I asked Gillian what happened then. she said her mother did exactly what the psychiatrist suggested. “I can’t tell you how wonderful it was, ” she told me. “I walked into this room, and it was full of people like me. People who couldn’t sit still. People who had to move to think.“

She started going to the dance school every week, and she practiced at home every day. Eventually, she auditioned for the Royal Ballet School in London, and they accepted her. She went on to join the Royal Ballet Company itself, becoming a soloist and performing all over the world. When that part of her career ended, she formed her own musical theater company and produced a series of highly successful shows in London and New York. Eventually, she met Andrew Lloyd Webber and created with him some of the most successful musical theater productions in history, including Cats and The Phantom of the Opera.

Little Gillian, the girl with the high-risk future, became known to the world as Gillian Lynne, one of the most accomplished choreographers of our time, someone who has brought pleasure to millions and earned millions of dollars. This happened because someone looked deep into her eyes — someone who had seen children like her before and knew how to read the signs. Someone else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down. But Gillian wasn’t a problem child. She didn’t need to go away to a special school.

She just needed to be who she really was.

Math Videos Linked to Ontario Math Texts

Lately, we have been making liberal use of online math videos. There are some wonderful teaching resources available that make helping your teen learn their high school maths much easier. Of course, many of you are aware of Khan Academy www.khanacademy.org which has copious amounts of math videos on any math topic, from elementary school right through the high school grades.

Recently, I have come across another very helpful site, created by an Ontario teacher and linked to our math textbooks. Since I am not in a position to be able to teach the upper level math concepts to my children, these videos have been indispensable to us.
http://sites.google.com/site/yourmathvideos/

Enjoy!

Sharon

Email Contact Information

Please note: for those of you who attended the Homeschooling Through High School seminar at the Parents’ Guide conference, the email information on my handout has been changed to salt@rogers.com and does not include any periods as printed in the handout.

Homeschooling Through High School – One Family’s Journey, Part 1

Last week, my DD15 and I gave a seminar talk about homeschooling through high school. In a series of posts to follow, I offer a condensed version of our talk.

Disclaimer: This is the story our family’s journey through the high school years so far. We’ve made deliberate choices on how to go about this, and those choices are based on certain things that we have come to believe are true about learning and about what is best for each learner. Each family must find their own unique way of facilitating learning, carefully considering each person’s learning styles, interests and abilities.

For many, homeschooling through high school seems daunting if not impossible. But are you asking the wrong question?

Are you asking?:

How Can I Possibly Teach Government Requirements for High School When I Can’t Possibly Answer All of My Teen’s Questions and Didn’t Even Do Well in High School Myself?

But… are you asking the right question? Are your feelings of inadequacy substantiated?

What if, instead, you asked another question? Perhaps this one:

How Can I Help FACILITATE learning for My Teen So That They Can Continue to Develop Their Deep Interests in Such a Way that they Emerge From Their High School Years Still Full of Curiosity, Open-minded, Imaginative, Fully Prepared for Postsecondary Studies?

How would your teen’s high school experience be different if you were to create a course of study based on the second question?

Thinking of what you do as FACILITATING LEARNING, rather than TEACHING, ie. INCULCATING KNOWLEDGE is a different paradigm and one which opens up many possibilities.

Celebrating Differences…

Foundations for why I do what I do the way I do it:

Before getting into specifics of how we implement our studies through high school, I think it would help for me to first lay a foundation for you, explaining my perspective, my philosophy of home education. This will help make sense of why I feel it’s important to me to continue homeschooling through high school and the reasons we go about learning in the way we do.

Galatians 5:26 ~ Let us not become conceited, or provoke one another, or be jealous of one another. (NIV)

My experience with school both as a student and as a teacher is just the opposite of this. Students are continually pitted against one another. Those who are very academically inclined and get good grades are exulted; those who do not easily achieve academically are made to feel lesser than. How can jealousy and conceit not then be part of one’s daily existence within a school setting? I love how the Message puts it:

Galatians 5:26 ~ Since this is the kind of life we have chosen, the life of the Spirit, let us make sure that we do not just hold it as an idea in our heads or a sentiment in our hearts, but work out its implications in every detail of our lives. That means we will not compare ourselves with each other as if one of us were better and another worse. We have far more interesting things to do with our lives. Each of us is an original. (The Message)

1 Peter 4:10 ~ Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms.

First, we need to discover this gift and, as homeschooling moms, we need to be very closely observing our children’s originality and noticing what their unique gifts and brilliances are in order to help them discover this and live it out.

Thomas Moore says, “Education is the art of enticing the soul to emerge from its cocoon, from its coil of potentiality and its cave of hiding. Education is not the piling on of learning, information, data, facts, skills, or abilities – that’s training or instructing – but is rather a making visible what is hidden as a seed.”

I need to notice what it is that is hiding, waiting to emerge in each of my children, finding ways to inspire them to learn deeply and enjoy the learning in those areas and to create a unique educational plan with and for them accordingly.

My Job is to…

Notice

Each of us is created a unique human being. I believe this must necessarily mean that each person’s uniqueness must be honoured, even in their educational path. What this means to me is that I, as a homeschooling mom, must make it my business to notice what is unique about each of my children. I have the opportunity like no one else, to spend time getting to know my children, how they react in various situations, what they are especially interested in, what they are naturally good at. I then, am the best judge of how to help forge a unique path for them in their educational focus and pursuits.

Inspire

I am careful not to pile learning onto my children as much as inspire them to learn. As I notice what they love most and do best, I actively look for ways to continue to spur them on in these interests. I don’t feel it’s in their best interest to spend the majority of their time getting better at what they can’t do well naturally. I don’t mean they shouldn’t spend any time at certain things that they are not interested in pursuing, but I do mean they should be allowed to spend the better part of their days on their deepest interest.

Unique Person, Unique Path

I don’t believe God’s plans are exactly the same for every person. In the same way, I don’t think every person’s path to fulfill His plans for their life looks the same as the next person’s.  So why carry out an identical course of study for each person, causing most to have to spend inordinate amounts of time on things they are not naturally gifted at in order to ‘keep up’? Long ago I dispensed with the sentiment that one must ‘keep up with’ or ‘exceed’ one’s peers academically. I no longer believe in ‘keeping up with’ or ‘falling behind’; what I actually believe is that those who appear to be falling behind, have actually not been given the opportunity to explore their areas of brilliance or perhaps their learning styles haven’t been considered; they only appear to be falling behind.

I’d like to close with a story a humourous yet powerful story which illustrates the importance of focusing on one’s strengths:

The Underground

“Once upon a time, the animals decided they must do something heroic to meet the problems of a ‘New World.’ So they organized a school. They adopted an activity curriculum consisting of running, climbing, swimming and flying. To make it easier to administer, all animals took all subjects.

The duck was excellent in swimming. Better in fact, than his instructor, and made excellent grades in flying. But he was very poor in running. Since he was low in running, he had to stay after school and also drop swimming to practice running. This was kept up until his webbed feet were badly worn and he was only average in swimming. But average was acceptable in the school, so nobody worried about that… except the duck.

The rabbit started at the top of the class in running, but had a nervous breakdown because of so much make-up in swimming. So she dropped out.

The squirrel was excellent in climbing until he developed frustrations in the flying class. His teacher made him start from the ground up instead of from the treetop down. He also developed charley horses from over-exertion, and he got a C in climbing and a D in running.

The eagle was a problem child and had to be disciplined severely. In climbing class, he beat all the others to the top of the tree, but insisted on using his own way of getting there.

At the end of the year, an abnormal eel that could swim exceedingly well and also could run, and fly a little, had the highest average and was appointed valedictorian.

The prairie dogs stayed out of school and fought the tax levy because the administration would not add digging and burrowing to the curriculum. They apprenticed their children to the badger and later joined the groundhogs and gophers to start a successful private school of their own.”

~Anonymous, excerpted from A Call to Brilliance, Brown, 182

A Unique Education for Each Child – Finding Your Mission

Confessions of a Book Lover

I have a confession: I deface books. It’s true. I write in them, underline copiously, and fold the corners of pages. I take pleasure in this. And my DD 15 is appalled that I could do this to a book. You see, she loves books, but what she is becoming aware of is that I, too, love books, and that is the very reason I deface them.

When DD15 was very young, perhaps one or two years old, I placed baskets of books among her toys. She played with the books with as much interest as she did the rest of her toys. A friend dropped by for a visit with her little boy who was about the same age as DD was at the time. She wondered aloud about putting books in a basket with the toys.

‘Aren’t you worried the books will get wrecked? I always thought it was good to teach my son to respect books.’ My friend, a teacher, was concerned about my choice.

I agreed that I want my DD to respect books, but I also want her to love them and enjoy them just as she does everything else she is beginning to discover. How can they be well-loved if they’re always to be treated gingerly? How can she come to the point of loving them and being at home with them?

As it has turned out, DD15 loves books just as much as I do. In fact, we tease her that her life motto is, ‘So many books, so little time,’ since she easily devours 15 or more challenging books a month. Yet she won’t deface them despite the fact that I eagerly encourage her to do. Instead, she takes notes in her binder as she reads, the tiniest, neatest notes you’ve ever seen.

I’ve been encouraging her to deface them as I do for a few reasons. First, although her tiny, neat little notes are a wonderful resource for her to refer to later on, she would be able to do the same had she simply underlined an important passage, adding her tiny notes in the margin and folded down the page for future reference. I felt very proud of my powers of persuasion when I noticed her recently reading a book, underlining the faintest line very neatly with a ruler. She said, ‘See mom. I’m writing in my book.’ She didn’t seem completely convinced that it was a good thing, but she was willing to give it a go. She still refuses to fold corners of books down, and becomes furious at anyone who does so in a book that is a particular favourite of hers. I’ll work on that.

Find this idea offensive? Let’s look at a quote from The Velveteen Rabbit, one of my favourite children’s stories:

“Weeks passed, and the little Rabbit grew very old and shabby, but the Boy loved him just as much. He loved him so hard that he loved all his whiskers off, and the pink lining to his ears turned grey, and his brown spots faded. He even began to lose his shape, and he scarcely looked like a rabbit any more, except to the Boy.”

And then later when the nursery magic Fairy came to visit the Rabbit, she says:

“ ‘I take care of all the playthings that the children have loved. When they are old and worn out and the children don’t need them any more, then I come and take them away with me and turn them into Real.’
‘Wasn’t I Real before?’ asked the little Rabbit.
‘You were Real to the Boy,’ the Fairy said, ‘because he loved you.’ “

Just as the Rabbit became real because the boy loved it to life, so we can encourage our children to interact with, engage, and even ‘love to life’ the books that they are reading. It is not enough to skim through the pages, to read the words yet not begin to think through the ideas and question what is being written. It is when I begin to ask questions, or begin to see a relationship between what I am currently reading and other readings or experiences I have had, that I truly begin to engage the author’s ideas. Reading must really be an organic experience, that is, one in which there is give and take, a wrestling of ideas, a kind of relationship between the reader and the author.

We have a favourite phrase in our home: “Some of my best friends are books!” and this is quite true for each of us. I remember when I was first dating my husband, he loaned me a devotional book by Charles Swindoll he had enjoyed. It was delightful for me to discover that he had written notes about things he was learning as he read through the book. I felt like I had been given a gift, a window into his spiritual and emotional life that I might not have had otherwise. Like my husband, my ‘best friends’ are easier to discover than DD15’s however, because I have ‘loved them so hard that I folded all the pages of interest, with underlining marked in messy pencil, and brown tea spots apparent,’ to loosely paraphrase The Velveteen Rabbit. The soul of the author has somehow touched mine, changed how I see, and exposed a part of me that I hadn’t known about myself before. All of my new discoveries and ‘aha!’ moments are recorded so that the next time I open the book, I can readily see what I had discovered in my reading years before. My notes are also there as a kind of personal offering to the next person who reads the book I had once loved.

As homeschoolers, one of our loftiest aims should be to help our children fall in love with learning. This is a much harder task than simply helping them to learn a prescribed course of study. Fostering a love of reading greatly facilitates the learning process. I have always wanted my children to love reading as much as I do. I model reading; I engage my children in conversation about the things I’m learning from my reading; I eagerly read large portions of my current read to them at the table, in the car, or when tucking them into bed at night. They cannot help but notice that this is something I enjoy. I know that my love for learning and reading books has rubbed off on them and I’ve seen in each of them to varying degrees, a growing love for books. Books are a very natural part of our lives and, in our home, books can be found in every room.

Each of our children can readily point to books they have loved, that have touched and changed them in some way. And although they may not deface their books like their mother does, they would all agree that ‘some of their best friends are books.’

Sharon

Winter Classes

All winter classes – French K-3, French grades 4-7, French grades 8-12 and both writing classes – are now underway and closed to new participants until the spring session. Anyone wishing to take part in our spring classes (as listed above), please email me at salt@rogers.com to register or to inquire.

 

The recent seminar, Empowering Parents to Teach Writing, will be offered again in the spring, depending upon interest. Please email if you are interested in participating in this workshop and we can determine what day of the week best suits those planning to join us.

Writing Seminar for Parents

Empowering Parents to Teach Writing

Join us for a fun, hands-on seminar for parents homeschooling children of all ages. Enjoy a shared writing experience and glean practical ideas to help your child gain writing fluency, filled with original, interesting ideas. Discussion will include how to assess writing projects.

 

You will leave this workshop with a grab bag of fresh writing ideas and projects.

 

If you are interested in joining us for this seminar, please contact Sharon at salt@rogers.com.

Space is limited, so register soon.