I just came across an article of a charter school in Wisconsin that recently participated in an experiment. Central Alternative High School in Appleton, Wisconsin is a charter school for students with behavioral issues. Like most alternative schools, Central Alternative was plagued with problems. Then, in 1997 Natural Ovens of Manitowoc, WI initiated a five-year project to bring healthy food into area schools. The goal was to show that fresh, nutritious food can make a real difference in the student’s behavior, learning and health. And what a difference it has made. Grades have improved, truancy and arguments have drastically decreased. Students are more focused on learning and staying healthy. They have recognized the relationship between good health and the ability to function and learn. All of this was made possible by simply changing the lunch program and eliminating the availability of junk food on the school premises. There are no more vending machines or soda machines. And the school cafeteria provides homemade foods made from old fashioned recipes with all natural ingredients and whole grains. Essentially, they eliminated chemical laden over processed foods the are in most people’s diet.

This is so groundbreaking, not because the idea is new, but because most schools throughout the nation insist on installing soda machines to increase revenue and serving low grade cafeteria crap to students. Remember ages ago when the lunch ladies actually made the food. Those days are long gone. Now all lunches are outsourced to companies that bring in their prepackaged junk and serve it to the kids. My first year teaching was at a high needs school in north county Missouri. Their “nutritious” breakfast was a package of fruit rollups and an orange-flavored drink (NOT 100% juice, but, essentially, a non carbonated soft drink). Yeah, I was totally appalled.

I sincerely believe that diet is the basis for health. Without a good diet, nothing else really matters. And this program just goes to prove how important it is.

If you are interested in reading the case study you can do so here.

Peering out of my rain-lashed window with the cool breeze blowing in through the back door, I wonder how I can call it summer time. Yet, it is almost June, band is finished for the season, and it is time to start planning for the next round of school projects.

We have had a good year so far. Pork Chop has been working on learning how to research and write. His last report on Frank Hopkins was really interesting. He just needs to remember to leave out the contractions in formal writing. He’s also been journeying into the land of physics, Newtonian/Classical physics on motion. He’s been struggling a bit with building his mousetrap car, but once he gets over the hump I’m sure he’ll be okay. He’s also continuing his study of computer coding and web design. I’m surprised at how much he is picking up. Pumpkin is more of a reader than she would care to admit. I think she still likes story time where mom and dad read TO her more than she likes reading herself. So that is limiting her displays of literacy. However, when we sit her down with a book she reads, stumbling over only the more advanced words like anxious and mangled (it was a book on horses). She does struggle with the ‘th’ words. but we are working on those.

So, for the summer… more reading! Of course. Pork Chop will also be learning the basic skills of planning and goal setting as well as a little bit of American history with the Federalist Papers and other founding documents. There will also be a bit of geography for both of them.

And let’s not forget… plenty of outside time, exploring nature and getting plenty of sunshine (keep our vitamin D levels up). Oh it should be so much fun.

Pork Chop has been going to the public school just to attend band classes for the past two years. The poor guy was a real champ jumping through all the silly little obstacles the public school dished out to him. But then… he REALLY wanted to be in band. Oh, he had to ring the bell to get the door to open, then sign in EVERY DAY. He also had to keep track of any time the band class had a change in schedule, like for assemblies, career day, half days. You name it. He also worked with the teacher to get a heads up if there was going to be a substitute teacher so that he wouldn’t waste his time showing up on a day when there would be no instruction.

I have mixed feelings about it all being over. I am sad that he doesn’t have that outlet anymore. I know he loves music, but he’s not continuing on the the high school band for a myriad of reasons. And then at the same time I am so relieved that all this schlepping around is over. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays we’d have to take him for 30 minutes. (yeah, class was 30 minutes long!) Then Tuesdays and Thursdays he’d be there for lunch from noon to 2pm, then back again for after school practice 3:30-5pm. Keep in mind that he is not the only child and we have some still taking naps between 2-4pm. Yeah. It was an organizational nightmare. But it is over. He did so great and I am so proud.

Sometimes I can get really frustrated with home schooling. And it’s not what you think. Home schooling itself is easy for me. I don’t have problems with teaching or disciplining or creating ideas or projects. That’s easy for me. What I find frustrating is connecting with other families who home school. Sometimes I feel like I am in a vast ocean with my family on a life boat and there is no other friendly face in sight.

It’s not that I’m looking for affirmation or advice. I don’t really need that. I just miss the real connections. I do get tired of the weird looks I get from people who think home schoolers are complete nutters. I just want some real community. I’ve tried joining social networking groups and stuff… but they just seem to be filled with whining and complaining. And I don’t want that.

So… if anyone has any ideas on how to connect with other home schoolers… I’m all ears! Let me hear about it. Home schooling is supposed to be the fasted growing area of child education. So, what is everyone doing?

And remember… FREE is good.

My husband and I are about to realize a life-long dream.  Our school is almost ready to open (scheduled for fall 2009 if all goes according to plan).  Yay!  This is a culmination of everything we have been working on since we started training to be teachers.  It’s a totally different kind of school.

It’s essentially based on the principle that each student is an individual with different needs and interests and that learning can easily take place once you focus on those individual needs and interests.  It’s really IEPs the way they are supposed to be.

I always used to get frustrated when dealing with IEPs at public school because I never really understood how it was helping the student.  “Johnny has problems with spelling so teachers will not penalized him in grading for spelling errors.”  Now come on….  How does that help Johnny overcome his difficulty with spelling?  IEPs have just become an excuse to not perform at an acceptable level and helps the schools pass students who are not ready to graduate.

IEPs are used by the school to excuse all kinds of learning lapses.  Grammar, mathematics, dates, spelling, reading comprehension.  Instead of using it as a tool to help the students overcome their difficulties, they are used as an excuse.

And don’t get me started on ADHD.  Yes, there are some (very few) children that have a serious medical issue that require the use of such hard core drugs like Aderall and Ridalin.  But the majority of the children on these drugs are just bored in class.  If you had to sit still in a stuffy classroom waiting for the teacher to handle the classroom management only to get started on some dull rote skill work with no understanding of how it fits into real life, you would be fidgety and bothersome too.

But our school is going to change all that.  A custom-fit education for everyone.

Everything is almost ready.  We’ve even been to the bank and they want to work with us.  We’ve just got to finalize some paperwork and come up with a major down payment.  Sigh.  It always comes down to money.  But I am confident that the money will come…  simply because this school needs to be a reality.

You can read more about the school if you are interested at Pomegranate Gardens School

Pork Chop had his solo and ensemble competition last weekend.  He scored 1st place on his clarinet duet, 1st place superior on his Pep ensemble, and 1st place on his clarinet solo.  The only thing they said he really needed to work on was RELAX.  So that’s a good thing.  I am really proud of him.

He’s also making headway on his independent project.  He’s decided to look into 3D animation and the coding involved in it.  So that’s a lot of research and a lot of work.  It’ll be interesting to see what he comes up with.

Pumpkin is spending a lot of time exploring and it has been helping with her temperament at home. She tends to lash out and be extremely whiney and pouty when she doesn’t get her outside time.  She also has spontaneously started addition and through that is starting to figure out basic multiplication.  Things like 2 + 2 = 2 X 2 and 2 + 2 + 2 = 2 X 3.  Really amazing stuff.

Squirrel is now counting only 2 1/2 and he can count up to 12 and understands that the numbers can represent how many.  He’s a whiz at his colors too.  Purple is his favorite.

And last, but not least, Hummingbird says please and thank you, hello, bye-bye, and yes and no.  She’s learning her routine, especially at bedtime (she loves to brush her teeth).  She’s such a charmer.

So, learning is happening everyday. You’ve just got to know where to look.

With our move to a more unschooled approach we are encountering some difficulties with our oldest child.  Pork Chop is weeks away from becoming a full blown teenager.  Unlike the other children he has been in and out of public school; and when he was home schooled, it was very structured – almost like regular school at home.  The more I learn about schooling and education, the more I realize this was the wrong approach.  How can Pork Chop discover what truly interests and motivates him if we are constantly telling him what he needs to study.  So, we are releasing the reigns.  The problem is that since he has spent his whole life with adults telling him what he needs to learn and how, he is having some difficulty.  But I am not concerned.  We had a talk today and I laid out my delima point blank so that he understands where I am coming from.  The trick is for him to discover what interests him.  Turns out he is really interested in developing some computer programs.  This doesn’t surprise me.  When he was 2, he fixed his preschool’s computer.  Nobody knows exactly what he did except that first it didn’t work, then he did something and it worked fine.

I cannot regret that it has taken so long to get to this place in his education – I was doing what I thought was best, and following the format that is most acceptable to the world.  But I do know that given the opportunity, he will find his own passion and excel.  It is never too late.

So the plan thus far…

Pork Chop figures out what it is exactly he wants to accomplish, then how to achieve it, and then what he needs to learn to do it.  It’s pretty simple when you break it down like that.  But as I am learning, life really is not that complicated.  It is simple.

My husband and I take education very seriously. Both trained public school teachers we quit the profession because of some undefined discontent with the system and an inability to affect any change. Now in a somewhat rocky financial situation, friends, family, and total strangers keep prodding us to return to public school or even private school. And yet we continue to hold back. We know deep down that there is something inherently wrong with the whole set up, even though we, as yet, lack the experience to voice the problem in any coherent manner. We started home schooling our children. We would surge forward in a flurry of structure and scheduling and curriculum writing only to have to stop and take what seemed like a step backwards. Our experience and training told us that we needed to follow certain guidelines, that we needed to be told what to learn. But it wasn’t working and we could see it. More learning took place when we were out on family trips or hanging out at home just being together. I felt like a bad teacher and a bad mother. Here I was ruining my children’s hope for the future by screwing around with their education. We were slowly inching our way to the concept of “unschooling” but I worried that my oldest child (almost 13) needed more rigid lessons in order to succeed in the world. Part of me knew that those lessons would only poorly develop specific skills that may or may not be used in life; but the other part of me felt compelled to DO something, anything, just to show that we were doing school the “right” way.

 

Then I found The Call to Brilliance by Resa Steindel Brown. Hope, inspiration, confirmation all flooded into me. To see that someone else is living and has experienced what I have suspected to be possible is truly motivating and inspiring. My theories about education are accurate. My suspicions of the effectiveness of schooling and disappointment in schooling’s poor performance are not rare and isolated moments. It is a failing that is pervasive throughout our society. Ms. Brown shows from her experience not only what is possible, but how it should be.

 

The Call to Brilliance is not a how-to manual for setting up a school. Nor is it a pedagogical argument on established educational theories. It is a memoir of this mom and the journey she took with her children to becoming complete people – whole in spirit and knowledge. Through the book she goes back and forth from the past to the present talking about her journey and what she has seen her children do. I watched the children, and even the mom, grow. And I grew right along side them. I grew in strength and courage. I am on the right path. I am not alone on this journey. My children will be fine; they don’t need me to micromanage their education. I can trust that my children will find their true path in life if I just let them live their own way. All I need to do is provide encouragement and support when they need it.

 

“We have become conditioned to this system that we do not question it at all. We willingly submit our children without much reflection or hesitation. Whether they win or lose, we are desensitized. But we can choose a better way. We can choose to have all kids win in their own manner and in their own time frames. All we have to do is take back our power and do it.” (Resa Steindel Brown, The Call to Brilliance)

I just received The Call to Brilliance from Fredric Press. Big thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy of the book. Keep watch here because I am starting to read it and will be writing an in-depth review.

“The Call to Brilliance shows concerned parents and educators how to turn children’s challenges into strengths and their gifts into passions. It devastates the concepts of learning disabilities. It dissolves the artificial barriers of grade level. It unveils the pretense of standardized testing and reveals how our children really learn. but above all, it shows us how all children can succeed to brilliance.”

I am excited. The ideas stated above (taken from the back cover of the book) are exactly what I have been saying about education for years. So stay tuned…

Get The Call to Brilliance from Amazon.com

One day at a group function I listened to a mother shouting across the gym to her kids, “Have you ate yet?”  Ack!  The grammar snob in me wanted to scream, “Eight what?  It’s EATEN! Have you eaten!”

Language development is an interesting thing.  Have you listened to your young kids try to work out their speech.  It is really amazing.  Verb conjugation is especially neat.  Listening to such phrases as “I eated my dinner.” and “I goed to bed.” are just small steps to the ultimate goal.  At first glance it may sound like your kids don’t get it.  But take a closer look.  They are actually mastering the basic elements of conjugation.  They have already figured out that -ed tacked on to the end of a verb denotes the past tense.  And while they may be stumbling over the quirkiness of some irregular verbs they actually do understand the basics.

Another fun thing with speech development is a child’s ability to come up with unique phrases that clearly express their real meaning.  For example, my two year old often declares (loudly and with great joy!) “I burped in my poop!”  He of course means that he farted.  But what an expression!  Clearly, he understands where his farts originate and that poop also comes from the same place.  He also understands that burping relieves many of the same discomforts that farting does.  I take it as a sign that we are one step closer to potty training.  But that is another story.

So, take a deep breath and relax.  People want to communicate and will quickly learn the most effective way to do so.