Dominion Family

This last week I noticed something unusual happening and I remember now it happened last summer also, although I wasn’t tuned in to why. With school out, my house is cleaner, I am cooking more, reading to the little ones and I even thought I might break out the cross-stitch.

My goal last week was just to enjoy myself and relax when possible. In the midst of that relaxing I suddenly became more productive. Rick Saenz has also just written on one of the hinderances to productivity being busyness. I guess reading his article helped me recognize what is going on around here.

I started thinking back over the school year. It seems by the end of the school year I begin to spin my wheels more and more. I have less and less time to spend on homemaking etc. The funny thing is that I have the hardest time stepping away from the “formal” part of schooling. In a large family with so many intangibles I think “school” makes me feel productive. So every year I wrestle with the idea of schooling all summer and then give up when life’s pressures make that impossible. Then Bingo suddenly I am refreshed and excited about life again.

Both my mil and my parents speak of how much they have grown spiritually since getting older. My mil always tells me how much she is enjoying spending time in the Word. And my mom and dad say the same thing. This is not to separate the sacred from the secular but perhaps there are different seasons of productivity. I am continually thankful for my mil’s rocking chair prayers for our family.

My goal this summer is to see how I can translate that sort of productivty to our school year.

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I wanted to be clever and say, “Wisdom & the Rollins,” but then I would have had to say, “Wisdom & the Rollinses,” and I can’t bring myself to it.

The theme verse for our homeschool is Daniel 1:17a, ” As for these four children, God gave them knowledge and skill in all learning and wisdom…” That became our verse when we only had 4 children but it still applies today. It really is a wonderful homeschool verse to remind us that all that we gain or learn comes from God.

Foremost on my mind this summer, as I plan the coming school year, is how can I impart wisdom to my children. How can I keep our life and our school days from being so full of projects, assignments, field trips and lessons that our knowledge to wisdom ratio is askew?

One area that hangs heavy is the children’s morning devotional time. How can I help them to make that time meaningful and not just completed?

It is abundantly clear to me that I am in way over my head and I am going to need some HELP.
The goals that I have for my children cannot be met by me. I can’t take a big shovel and pound these things into their heads, although I have tried. I am forced to admit that without a Helper I am unable to homeschool. Thanks be to God who has sent me a Helper, the Holy Spirit.

Charlotte Mason says that education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life. In the next few days, Lord willing, I will be writing on how our family succeeds and fails in our atmosphere, discipline and life.

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I wanted to be clever and say, “Wisdom & the Rollins,” but then I would have had to say, “Wisdom & the Rollinses,” and I can’t bring myself to it.

The theme verse for our homeschool is Daniel 1:17a, ” As for these four children, God gave them knowledge and skill in all learning and wisdom…” That became our verse when we only had 4 children but it still applies today. It really is a wonderful homeschool verse to remind us that all that we gain or learn comes from God.

Foremost on my mind this summer, as I plan the coming school year, is how can I impart wisdom to my children. How can I keep our life and our school days from being so full of projects, assignments, field trips and lessons that our knowledge to wisdom ratio is askew?

One area that hangs heavy is the children’s morning devotional time. How can I help them to make that time meaningful and not just completed?

It is abundantly clear to me that I am in way over my head and I am going to need some HELP.
The goals that I have for my children cannot be met by me. I can’t take a big shovel and pound these things into their heads, although I have tried. I am forced to admit that without a Helper I am unable to homeschool. Thanks be to God who has sent me a Helper, the Holy Spirit.

Charlotte Mason says that education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life. In the next few days, Lord willing, I will be writing on how our family succeeds and fails in our atmosphere, discipline and life.

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We are down to 1 1/2 weeks to go until we start school. This time of year I always start to panic. I seem so busy all summer without school, how will I ever squeeze in our school schedule? Somehow every year it works. Even now I am looking over my summer reading goals and feeling let down. With a week and half to go I can only hope to finish 1-2 more books at the most. I had hoped to reread a few CM books this summer but the only education book I have read is Norms and Nobility. Still, I have been reading more to the children and doing some fun things like nature walks. I have also planned out the 3 older students schedule through November. My Morning Time planning is pretty easy since we just do the next thing.

Our composer for the 1st term will be Beethoven per se the Ambleside list but we will skip Michelangelo this term and do the Hudson River Valley artists which we missed earlier.

Here is a sample schedule. The schedule reflects some planning but mostly an acknowledgement of how our days turn out. The older boys follow their own schedule after attending the morning meeting. This is the plan but it will never happen exactly like this. Some days Morning Time will take too long and I will cancel a few things. The reason we finish so late is that we do take breaks for laundry, chores, life & play. We usually average 5 hours of school time on a good day, 45 minutes of play counted. Do not read this schedule as 7:30-4:00 School. The word schedule is like the word diet. We all have a diet and we all have a schedule. This is just a picture of what our days usually look like. Getting up early is about the only real tip that I can give anyone. It makes all the difference.

5:30 Awake
6:00 Bible reading
6:30 Breakfast
7:00 Clean-up
7:30 Math
8:30 Morning Meeting
9:00 Morning Time
10:00 Latin/Greek Alt (Spanish)
10:30 Language Arts (Spelling Monday, Grammar Tuesday, Handwriting Wed, etc)
11:00 Phonics with Andrew & Alex
12:00 Lunch
12:30 Clean-up/baseball/tennisball/basketball
1:00 Recorder (Andrew, Emily, Alex)
1:30 Science /nature walk
2:00 Ambleside: Andrew & Alex (Reading all)
3:00 Reading
4:00 Play
5:00 Supper
5:30 Clean-up
6:00 Evening activities

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We had a busy day today. At our morning meeting we went over our school schedule which we start Monday. Whenever we have meetings it always seems so empty now that Timothy and Nicholas are gone. I was commenting on how this time next year James would not be in our school meetings and I decided to get a visual picture by asking James to leave the room.

I guess you can see where this is going. I then said in 3 years Nathaniel would not be a part of our school and he left the room. It made such a striking picture of the future that we kept on until Alex and I were left alone in the room. Alex really caught on and looked distraught. I wasn’t feeling very happy myself. Alex perked up when he realized he got to leave the room too.

There I was all by myself in the room. I got up and left also leaving the memories of countless morning meetings behind. I do believe I would have made a complete and utter fool of myself if James hadn’t resorted to making fun of my little experiment.

Tonight while telling Tim of my dismal illustration he reminded me that sometime before Alex actually left home and I died we would probably have a few grandchildren. That was a real comfort.

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Today we log in our State required day 1 but yesterday we were learning,too.

180-1 does not equal a lifetime of learning.

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Our first week of school is over. We have logged in 5 days which means instead of 180 days to go, we only have 175. As I have said, philosophically speaking, this is not the best way to look at education; but, hey, it’s a tool that works for me.

Did our schedule work?
Did we have any interupptions?

It went well. Not one day did the schedule happen just as written but over all the schedule helped me stay on track. To tell the truth the schedule is my schoolmaster and not really for the children.

We ended up having major interupptions every single day which was a bit discouraging at first glance but looking back I am encouraged that the schedule helped us keep going in spite of those glitches.

I had to run major unexpected errands everyday except Friday. Monday morning our oven element caught on fire. After trying Lowes, I was told I had to order the part. When the part finally arrived…guess what….it was the wrong part. Oh, you already knew that. I knew it before I opened the box, too. Monday another wrong part is scheduled to arrive so I am not sure when our oven will be working. I am thankful for the grill and microwave, not to mention the crockpot.

I am disappointed we only had one nature walk all week but it is August in Alabama. We took the nature walk on Friday which also happened to be the hottest day of the week. That made me feel like the perservering sort.

My highschool boys told me at least every other day that they had more school work than other kids and I replied, “Doesn’t that make you thankful?” They do have a lot of concentrated school work right now but I have learned, with highschool students, to make hay while the sun shines. Interruptions will come, usually in the form of jobs and baseball teams.

Oh, and after only 5 hours at the DMV Nathaniel got his Permit. Ask Nathaniel why it took so long. The good news is that I got to read John Adams, Nathaniel finished Arabian Nights, and we met all sorts and conditions of people.

I am looking forward to our second week of school, in which we will also help Nicholas move to Ft Lauderdale.

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Over the years I have been amazed at how so many people come to think the same silly things. Homeschooling seems to draw arcane comments from the unlikeliest corners.

How many times has someone looked you in the eye and said, “Your children seem to get along so well, I wish mine would,” following it up with, “My real concern with homeschooling is socialization ?”

Homeschoolers frequently joke about socialization but truthfully it is scary how many people have this as their number one concern, almost as many people as, “only watch PBS.”

We had a visitor rave about how our daughter was making dinner and setting the table and then asked if I would be able to implement a home economics class at home. I wasn’t even able to reply. I just stared dumbly or maybe I stared at Dumbly…JK.
I wish this were laughable but it such a sad, sorry picture of how our culture thinks.

Reminds me of the prophetic story of people using calculators so much they forgot there was “real” math behind the machines. Then one day someone figured a calculation out on his own and people thought it was a technological advance….or something like that. ( I know I just butchered that story…please feel free to correct me…I can’t tell jokes either.)

In NJ we used to walk around our block very early every morning. Every day, a boy at the bus stop, said, “Hi,” to us. One day another guy was standing there with him and when we gave our usual, “Hey,” the boy didn’t say a word. I turned to my son Timothy, privately, and said, “People think you need to be in public school to achieve that boy’s social skills.”

I wonder where it all will end.

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One of the reasons I do our Morning Time is so that I can fit things in that may get lost in the shuffle. Really I don’t have this system in place to make my life harder but to make it infinitely easier. Over the years I have found ways to make it easier and easier. I am sharing those things on my blog but I wouldn’t want you to misunderstand why I do them.

One of our earliest memorized poems was :

Little drops of water,
Little grains of sand,
Make the mighty ocean,
And the beauteous land.

Can you guess how often some one in our home says, “Little drops of water….?”
Almost daily. It has even shown up in timed SAT essays.
That is the sort of sentiment that applies to everything I do as a mother.
One of the reasons I love blogging is that my whole life comes in little pats of time. I can write a blog post while waiting for the children to clean-up or finish a test etc. I can read a blog post while my Latin scholars get out their books.

My Morning Time is a way to collect little grains of sand. It should not be a way to complicate life but a way to simplify it.

My parents gave me the gift of personal daily Bible reading. That is probably the most valuable gift I could have ever received from them. As a mother, you will find me on an occasional Saturday morning studying Matthew Henry or reading Keith Mathison, but my true spiritual reserve comes from a lifetime of daily Bible reading, not complicated Bible study.

If you have something that you want your children to assimilate like poetry or scripture or music or Shakespeare, forget the grand schemes, forget what the Konos mom is doing down the street, start giving that thing one or two minutes of your time daily and watch the years roll by.

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On the church calender today is the feast day of St Nicholas. If you haven’t started your Advent season yet, today is a great day to begin.

We have a busy day planned. I am not especially fond of busy days especially when they involve me driving but some days are like that.

At 8:00 am ( I better hurry) I have to drop 2 of the competent boys off to help the Health and Human Resources lady organize Toys For Tots. Apparently tots get lots of toys and the HR lady loves homeschoolers. I wonder why?

Then we head to the ice skating rink for a Christmas party. Friends are fun. Andrew went ice skating last week with his granny which has made him an expert. He has spent the morning telling his siblings how many pairs of socks they should wear.

We will come home in the afternoon to celebrate St Nicholas day with a party and gifts. One of us will be getting gifts today. Can you say chocolate cheesecake?

Then I am off to a Christmas ladies event at a nice restaurant without any children at all. I tried to take Emily but they said it was just for adults. Do you know I used to be a loner? Now I dread going anywhere without at least one child to talk to. I have found letting my older boys drive me around to be the most efficient way to get to know them.

While I have been known to be calm around the house when boys are shooting at mice on the christmas tree with bb guns (Did you know mice love popcorn and cranberries?), I am not at all calm when going off the side of the road into a ditch or being confronted with a Mack truck. I think it gives the boys a better picture of marriage to drive around with me.

Well, I am off to brush my hair and get a coat on. It is cold outside. Our bradford pears are still orange but the ground is frozen solid.

Enjoy your holy-day.

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