Building Skills

I recently finished reading a book called The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle which discusses the neurological means by which genius is built. In other words, how do you myelinize the right nerve pathways to make a skill come easily? The author suggests three parts to the process:

Deep Practice—specific strategies to make practice really count

Ignition—motivation which triggers passionate commitment

Master Coaching—teaching traits which inspire the previous two elements of genius.

I wonder, of course, how I can apply this to teaching my children. Coyle discusses the Bronte sisters: geniuses who started out as very ordinary children writing “little books.” He even includes an excerpt from one of their books. There are huge spelling and punctuation problems, and not much talent evident. Coyle concludes

“The unskilled quality of their early writing isn’t a contradiction of the literary heights they eventually achieved—it’s a prerequisite to it. They became great writers not in spite of the fact that they started out immature and imitative but because they were willing to spend vast amounts time and energy being immature and imitative, building myelin in the confined, safe space of their little books. Their childhood writings were collaborative deep practice, where they developed storytelling muscles.”

It makes me happy that L loves to write novels! Maybe I don’t have to wade through and edit all of them, if I can help her to apply the principles of deep practice while she’s writing.

What about math? Part of deep practice is making mistakes, then backing up and correcting the mistakes before forging onward. To apply that, it seems I need to sit with my children as they work their problems. When I see an error, we will correct it immediately and then practice another similar one. (That keeps Mom busy, but it’s worth a try!)

In the epilogue of the book, Coyle speaks specifically to how the talent code can be applied in various disciplines. The “Education” section mentions the Phonics vs. Whole Language debate, and Coyle points out that each is an incomplete part of building reading skills. “Phonics is about building reliable circuits, paying attention to errors, and fixing them. It’s about chunking: breaking down a skill into its component parts, and practicing and repeating each action involved in that skill….Whole Language, on the other hand, is about ignition, about filling motivational fuel tanks by creating environments where children fall in love with reading and writing.” Both are needed for reading success.

This book has certainly given me a lot to think about. I hope you will comment on how you feel these principles can be applied in homeschooling.

Do I Get Any Time For Myself?

The past few weeks have been some of the busiest of my life! The busy-ness wasn’t just homeschooling, but a combination of back-to-school, harvest and food preservation time, and beginning chicken raising. Also, maybe I’m just not as good at multi-tasking as I used to be when I was younger. Anyway, I have had the topic of “time” on my mind of late.

The actual “school” doesn’t take much of my time: about one hour per day in the lower grades to about three hours a day in middle school. My high school students spend more time than this, but only some of it requires my attention. (Actually, the children usually get more and more independent once they learn to read.) I find that the best way to keep from being frustrated about time for school work is to never schedule anything else during the morning. I often have to remind other people that I have a full-time job teaching school and am not available until the afternoon.

Another time consideration involves housework. When the kids are home all day, the house gets messier than if the kids were at school! I spend a lot of time with cooking and laundry, and have my kids do most of the cleaning. We work mostly on one section of the house each day (Monday is kitchen day, etc.) so we can more or less work together. I spend time with younger children who are learning skills, but mostly the kids do the housecleaning. It’s an important part of their education.

Next, is time for planning. I usually spend 20-30 minutes on Sunday laying out the specific assignments for each child that week. In addition, I've found that planning unit/block studies can take a lot of time when I do it the way I described here. I think my greatest desire is for uninterrupted quiet time. Not only do I need time to plan my curriculum, but I need to be able to ponder—about spiritual things and about the needs of each family member. Unfortunately, I seem to only get this time late at night or early in the morning—when everyone else is in bed. I do recognize that early mornings may be almost impossible for young mothers who never get enough sleep. (I remember!) A daily quiet time might not be achievable, but I feel that a regular time away—with husband or friend watching the kids--is incredibly helpful.

And this leads to the big question: do I have time for my own needs and hobbies, or are they just swallowed up in the needs of my children? The answer is….yes and no.

There are things I want to do that I rarely get around to. I’m sure that is true of every mother—not just homeschooling mothers. And yet I find that my needs and hobbies have evolved somewhat over the years to be more about my children. Homeschooling is such a passion for me that much of my reading (of which I do a lot) is about topics I want to cover with my kids. I probably read three times as much as they ever hear about in their lessons! And this isn’t out of a sense of obligation, but because it interests me. When I’m chauffeuring to lessons or sports activities, I always bring along needlework (something I didn’t used to do before chauffeuring) or reading. Waiting in a car can be a great “quiet time!”

Also—though you’ve heard it many times before and it doesn’t seem true when you’re in the middle of it—remember this is just a short time of your life. With nine children, I had 23 years of nursing (some of the most time-intensive care—right?), yet it doesn’t seem very long in retrospect. With my youngest now in 2nd grade, I’m realizing that these homeschooling years will be over before I know it. Then there will be time to make quilts and learn to play the harp. I may even have too much “quiet time.”

Harvest Unit

Good heavens! I just realized that I skipped posting for the whole month of August! It must be because it was more fun to be outside in the garden than inside at the computer.

But now it's time for school--yet I'm still not ready for book work. It's so hard to do academics when we're trying to do canning, dehydrating, and freezing! One year I realized that this was just as educational as math, so I call it our "Harvest Unit" and count it as school. Today we dried basil and froze peaches. Tomorrow is applesauce....

We spend our "days off" at the park or in the mountains with our sketch books. We'll add in the academics gradually so that we're covering all our subject areas by the time the rainy days of winter are here.