Finnish School - for now

 

We have, as so many other students, had to adapt to a new world of quarantines, distance learning, moving locations and moving schools. After so many of our courses in the States were closed and went to distance learning, we decided the kids should enroll in the Finnish public schools, so they could be in classes that were still meeting in person. The schools are also entirely in Finnish, which will help with their fluency. 

As so many children in the homeschooling community go between traditional schools and homeschool this is not unusual, and we expect them to continue their autodidactic pursuits even while attending traditional school!

Learning in a Different Language

 

Given the rising COVID rates in California, the fact that we were already working remotely (as were all of our colleagues), we decided to stay in Finland for the fall and work from here. After our decision in late summer, we scrambled to find a spot in an English language school for our daughter, but there were no spaces. She was put on the waiting list at one, but ended up attending a public school, taught entirely in Finnish. 

This was not, and is not easy, since, though she speaks fairly good Finnish, she has never read or written in Finnish, and there is a lot to adapt to. The first thing she noticed was that the mathematical symbols for multiplication, division, ratios and so on were completely different. She is compelled to learn Swedish, in addition to Finnish, which is an official language here, and compulsory in school. And, as she has been homeschooled for so many years (with a brief foray into traditional education in 2nd and 3rd grades) she had to get used to things like sitting in rows in classrooms, and compulsory PE. 

Finnish schools start much later than American schools, and when our daughter came home after the first week, she reported that they are working on things she already did two years ago--and especially in Math. so she is doing some classes remotely from here to the U.S. as well, so she doesn't fall behind. 

It's an adjustment, and we are going to try to see if we can get her out of the compulsory Swedish. It's hard to learn a language in another language!

Best schools in the world? Not really

Finns believe that their schools are the best in the world, but in this, as in many other things, they are guilty of what I think of as Finnish exceptionalism, a pervasive problem in Finnish culture. Americans who put their kids in Finnish schools will often tell you how disappointed they were in the schools. 

 My guess is that the best schools in the world are probably in the US, maybe the UK. What Finland doesn't advertise is that it doesn't have the best schools, it has  the best worst schools in the world, a description I originally heard from Helsinki mayor Jan Vapaavuori, and I think is true. Finns strive for equality, not excellence. On average, they have good schools. That is very different from having the best schools. And if you are average, or even, and perhaps especially, below average, Finnish schools are amazing, and make sure everyone rises to an average.

Summer Job at Kahvila Siili

We are spending our summer in Helsinki as usual, and for the last year after opening 6 years ago, are running our café, Kahvila Siili, which in English means "Hedgehog Café".  It is named for the many hedgehogs that run around the neighborhood where we live, Käplyä. We had been fearful that they had been suffering because of last year's drought, and we hadn't seen very many, but we found a tiny baby hedgehog in our backyard, the size of a potato. 

The best part of the café this summer, besides the hedgehogs coming back, is that our daughter is working at her first job there. In Finland, you can work as a "trainee" from the age of 13, and so the week after her 13th birthday, she started working at the café, alongside all the other servers and baristas she's known for a long time, some of them for 5 or 6 years. Learning to dress for work, to get to work on time, to wash her uniform, to have a boss, and co-workers, to earn money and to spend money wisely--all of these are great things she is learning this summer. In Finland, workers are paid only once a month, so it's also a lesson in delayed gratification.

Summer jobs are a rarer and rarer phenomenon, and she is lucky to have this job. I'm not sure she knows how lucky she is. You can't explain it to people: "you're so lucky!!". Uh-huh. Hopefully in the future she will realize it. 

Online resources for homeschoolers

Welcome to homeschooling everybody!

A bunch of people have been asking me for homeschool advice, since everyone's been forced to shelter in place. One of my usual responses, in prior circumstances to the "how do you homeschool?" is "Homeschooling is a misnomer! Homeschooling means your kid is not at home most of the time!" But that no longer applies. This isn't really how homeschooling works. Another frequent question is "are you her teacher?" to which I respond that I'm not--I'm really more of an Educational Director.

We belong to the Low Media Homeschool Group in Marin County, and many of our homeschool friends and fellow students come from that group. Technology is used as a tool, and for creation rather than consumption, and until recently wasn't used that much. Now, like all of you, we are forced to spend a lot of time on Zoom and other video platforms. It's not great. However, we do have some resources we've used in the past. So, a quick list of educational resources we've used online, and I will add to this as I come up with more.

Books are the default go-to around here. So let's start with that.

The Birchbark House books - by Louise Erdrich. We read these ages 8-9, as an antidote to the sometimes racist Little House on the Prairie books. Tells the story from the native perspective. There are four of them and they're all good, and get better as the series goes along.
Oishinbo - Comic books from Japan about Japanese Cooking, which we gave to our 10-11 year old, who then developed a big interest in cooking Japanese food.
DK Eyewitness Series. Instead of an old-fashioned encyclopedia, on everything from Leonardo to Soccer

Video
Before you let your kids watch anything on YouTube, install Distraction Free YouTube if you're running Chrome so they don't end up watching self-harm videos or being recruited by ISIS. I wish I were joking. Screen Time on Apple should be set up with reasonable limits you can discuss with your kid, if your kid is reasonable. Otherwise, use your own judgement. :D Here are some useful web sites for edutainment content.

Science
Deep Look by PBS - really brief, but really good science videos

Veritasium  - new developments in science, debunking science myths

Nature shows on BBC Earth - what they're famous for

Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell - animations, clearly explaining complex topics. 

Seeker - updated more often than some of the others, more like news programs

Art

Smarthistory - opening up museums online to teach art history

MoMA - for older kids, with artist profiles, exhibition explainers, of varying quality and utility

General
The Kids Should See This -a collection of "over 4,500 kid-friendly videos, curated for teachers and parents who want to share smarter, more meaningful media in the classroom and at home."

Crash Course Useful for explaining things from WWII to CRISPR
TED Ed - TED, but for kids, mostly animated, on many varied topics
Outschool - online classes on a wide array of subjects, taught remotely online. We have done D&D groups, classes on how to be more productive in studying, music lessons and history.

Languages
Spanish Academy - remote learning classes with native speakers from Guatemala
iTalki - A great place to find tutors, teachers and remote learning partners. I've studied both French and Finnish with tutors here.

Podcasts
Brains On the science podcast was a huge favorite with our kids ages 7-10
Story Pirates - for younger kids, this one takes stories written by kids and dramatizes them with hilarious results. Listen to one of my favorites, In the Car by 5-year-old Leah from Maryland.

Sir Ken Robinson's RSA Animation

 RSA Animate–in which an illustrator draws images to accompany a speech–has Sir Ken Robinson explaining our dominant educational paradigm and why it must change.

Every country on earth at the moment is reforming public education. The problem is, they’re trying to meet the future by doing what they did in the past. And on the way they are alienating millions of kids, who don’t see any purpose in going to school.

Sir Ken is a British university professor and an advocate for the arts, known widely for his books on creativity and human flourishing. He’s a deeply human thinker and this is one of the finest videos in the series, well worth watching!

"Are home educated children as socialized as publicly educated children?"

Since COVID-19 hit, and schools across America closed, I've been asked a lot of questions about homeschooling. Some parents are finding it wonderful, others hate it, and there are a lot of new converts. People are realizing homeschooling parents have long known: that in many, or even most schools, only about 20% of the time is spent learning. The other 80% of the day mostly exists to permit parents to work. 

But homeschooling is best done with others, which is not how things are going in Northern California, which is in lockdown, with social distancing measures in effect. This is not homeschooling, which, in our experience, happens outside the home, and with other students 75% of the time. In a typical week of school, we see 30-40 other students and since COVID-19 lockdown we have seen almost none. In person, that is. We see lots of them on Zoom and other video chats.

I decided to excavate some of my old blog posts about homeschooling on this blog, which we had started circa 2013-2014, but later moved to another blog which is currently offline. So, to start, here is the answer I gave to one of the most frequently asked questions about homeschooling, which is

"Are home educated children as socialized as publicly educated children?"

Naturally this depends on what you mean by "socialized", and this is one of the most common questions and concerns regarding homeschooling. I am not sure how this could be researched, however. Number of friends? Hostile or amicable relationship with parents? Hostile or amicable relationships with peers? Frequency of contact with members of the community? Volunteerism rate? Suicide rate of homeschooled vs. traditionally schooled? Violence and bullying in traditional schools vs. homeschool groups?

However, here are some differences I've noticed, as a homeschooling mother:

Age Cohort & Peer vs. Family Orientation
Most schooled children spend most of their time with children their own age, usually within a year of their age, with a few adults teaching or supervising. Homeschooled children tend to spend more time with their families, siblings and children of different ages. Typical homeschool groups include kids of a variety of ages, from newborns through teenagers, and often you see four-year-olds working side-by-side with 10-year-olds. Related to the age cohort difference is the result of that stratification by age.  The tendency for schooled children is to be primarily peer-oriented vs. parent or family-oriented (see below). There was a study done which indicated that mixed-age groups of children were significantly less likely to exhibit bullying behavior. Children interacting with other children at least 3 years younger saw themselves as protectors and role models, rather than as competitors or rivals. The younger children saw older children as guides and leaders.

Personally I believe our society is broken, in that people mainly associate with people their own age. My relatives in the Philippines, if they threw a party, would include everyone -- babies, kids, teenagers, people in their 20s, 30s, 40s -- and grandmas in their 80s. This was not unusual, and I think, the mark of a healthy society. However I rarely see this kind of intergenerational mixing in the States, except with first generation immigrants.

One-on-one attention
Parents also know their children, and can adapt the pace of learning, the subjects taught to the individual child.  Traditionally schooled kids have to keep to the 2nd grade, 3rd grade, etc curriculum as taught, whereas homeschooled kids can go faster or slower as needed. As has been noted in the recent article regarding Khan Academy in Wired (http://www.wired.com/magazine/20...) and in the work of 826 Valencia (http://826valencia.org/about/) among many others -- kids thrive when given one-on-one attention, learn more, gain confidence. 

Community participation
We are able to spend time every week at a nursing home, in conversation with the elderly residents (we visit one resident in particular that we have a close relationship with, but have adopted the whole place). Children and the elderly are almost never seen in our daily lives and are missing from civil society. As such their needs are not taken into consideration in many decisions we make regarding public life.

Closeness to Family
After "better education" the reason most frequently cited for why parents homeschool their children is in order to have a closer family. Peers, media, and other influences commonly drive a wedge between children and parents and homeschooled children tend to have a closer relationship with parents and siblings.

I study communities, especially online communities, so I have thought a lot about the subject of communities and socialization. Here are some of my notes from John Taylor Gatto's book Dumbing us Down too, which makes some similar points.

Determining who in our society is 'well socialized' is subjective. But a friend of mine in the tech industry asked me "Why is it that homeschoolers are so much better socialized than other people?" He mentioned a woman at his company who was always sent out to talk to new employees, meet new customers, talk to "problem" clients. "She can talk to anybody," he said. It might just have been the woman's personality, but one of the reasons I decided to homeschool was I met a friend's 13-year-old daughter, who spoke to me without fear or contempt, as to another person, and not as an adult, as many preteen and teen kids do. She was talking about the radio show that she DJ'd on a local station and knew so much about music, which she clearly loved. She was empowered to pursue this interest by her parents, as a homeschooler.

There is a book called The Well-Adjusted Child, about homeschooling and socialization which I reviewed on GoodReads with some notes from the book. http://www.goodreads.com/review/... 

As there are books about this topic, and this answer is becoming one, I'll wrap it up here, as I could go on.

Memorization, Facts and Learning to Learn

"Never memorize what you can look up in books" is a quote often attributed to Einstein, though what he actually said was somewhat different. He was asked, but did not know the speed of sound as included in the Edison Test. When this was pointed out, he said, "[I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books. He also said, "...The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think." See also Ray Bradbury, in Fahrenheit 451:

"Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.”

The single thing I've found it valuable to memorize is poetry. As a child I learned hundreds of poems by heart, which I can recite even now. I wanted to become a writer, and felt that poetry was perfected language, so having it in my subconscious mind would make the music of language always available to me.

Tinkering as Learning

John Seely Brown, who was the director of the amazing Xerox Parc for many years, and whose book The Social Life of Information was hugely influential in the tech industry in which I work, has a new book coming out soon, The New Culture of Learning, which looks great. You can download the first three chapters from the site.

He talks a lot about one of my pet subjects, Community Mentoring, the apprenticeship model of education:

Where traditionally mentoring was a means of enculturating members into a community, mentoring in the collective relies more on the sense of learning and developing temporary, peer-to-peer relationships that are fluid and impermanent. Expertise is shared openly and willingly, without regard to an institutional mission. Instead, expertise is shared conditionally and situationally, as a way to enable the agency of other members of the collective.

...as well as a dozen other favorite topics of mine: play as a means of learning, constraints as a stimulus for, rather than an inhibition of, creativity, and so on. I wish I could figure out how to get my hands on the whole book. There is a great page of resources on the site as well, for further exploration.

Here is an interview with John from the site, talking about tinkering as a mode of knowledge production, an idea reinforced by my recent visit to MakerBot.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9u-MczVpkUA&rel=0&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3]

(Thanks for the head's up, Scott!)

Teachers dislike creative children

Do teachers dislike creative children in spite of their assertions to the contrary? 96% of teachers say that daily classroom time should be dedicated to creative thinking. And yet they seem biased against the very children whose thinking is most creative. At school, creative children are punished rather than rewarded, and the system seems designed to extinguish creativity. In spite of all the lip service.

The characteristics that teachers value in the classroom are those associated with the lowest levels of creativity. Teachers want students to be responsible, reliable, dependable, clear-thinking, tolerant, understanding, peaceable, good-natured, moderate, steady, practical and logical. Creativity is not moderate or logical. It is associated with characteristics such as determined, independent and individualistic, people who make up the rules as she goes along, divergent rather than conformist ways of thinking. You can read some of the research in this article.



For good reason Ken Robinson's talk, Do Schools Kill Creativity? is the most viewed talk on the TED web site as of this writing. "If you're not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original," he says, and rightness and wrongness, as anyone who has ever received a graded paper can attest, is the very backbone of education.

The gulf between rhetoric and reality isn't really that surprising.  It's nearly impossible for a teacher, outnumbered by his charges, to help the rebels and mavericks flourish in an environment requiring more supervision than vision. The system is set up for teachers to prefer the obedient.

Confucius and Learning

"To learn and to put into practice at the right moment what one has learned–is that not joy?"
These are the opening lines of the Analects of Confucius.

Maker Faire - East Bay edition

 
We have been going to the Maker Faire, created by our friends at O'Reilly Media, since its very beginning! Caterina has even written for one of their magazines, Craft. 

 It is just as fun and fascinating as it looks! We have gotten special clay that we used for making models of cells, hula hoops for, um, homeschool sports, little bottles to wear as necklaces for which we made magical potions.  One kid was super interested in the aerodynamics of paper airplanes and entered a paper airplane competition; there were 3D printers everywhere making incredible stuff, robots, sewing, papercraft, you name it. The big one in San Mateo was a bit overwhelming to be honest, so we like the little ones. There was one in Greenbrae, in the parking lot of the strip mall there, where we met the guy who invented those fantastic maze balls, the Perplexus! He even had the original models that he had made out of wood and tubing and tape-- it was amazing.We have a lot of these.

There's something for everyone! Musical instruments, new games invented by kids, sports, cooking, doll-making. I really recommend going if you can get a ticket. It sells out every year.

Self Directed Learning

Many homeschoolers have read the articles by Peter Gray, who blogs at Psychology Today in Freedom to Learn. He wrote an article on the differences between Progressive Education and Self Directed Learning, which I thought was a useful distinction, and wanted to note here that Self Directed Learning is an environment in which the child:

1.  has unlimited time and freedom to play and explore
2.  has access to the most useful tools of the culture
3. is embedded in a caring community of people who range widely in age and exemplify a wide variety of skills, knowledge, and ideas
4. has access to a number of adults who are willing to answer questions (or try to answer them) and provide help when asked

He writes, further, Education, in this view, is not a collaboration of student and a teacher; it is entirely the responsibility of the student.  While progressive educators continue to see it as their responsibility to ensure that students acquire certain knowledge, skills, and values, and to evaluate students’ progress, facilitators of Self-Directed Education do not see that as their responsibility. 

Yousician

Since our dear friend and musician Rose went on tour with Cirque de Soleil, we've been without a music teacher! We pick up our instruments and play every now and then, but haven't found a good way to keep learning and progressing in music. When I was a kid, I found music practice to be tedious, so finding a way to make it engaging and fun has always been first and foremost.

Luckily, our friend Chris in Helsinki started a company a few years back called Yousician. They develop software that teaches people how to play ukulele, guitar and piano, and we've found it to be excellent and enjoyable. We us it primarily as an iPad app, and put the iPad on our music stand as we practice.

We started out learning piano, moved on to noodling on guitar and are now subscribers. You can see a screenshot above of what the screen looks like and how it works...you play along with a kind of tablature, seen above, at a tempo that you can speed up and slow down as you wish. It works well.

At Slush last year we received a Yousician ukulele, which we hadn't been using, but which we picked up and started with this spring. We've used Yousician to learn piano--ukulele was just as easy.

A Trip to Japan

Being able to travel off peak travel times is one of the best things about homeschooling. We managed to get ourselves some last minute tickets to Japan in April and were able to take a trip there. Cherry Blossoms were blooming and Sakura Day happened while we were there. We walked on the grounds of the Palace in Ueno Park to see the blossoms falling from the trees. I'd been a sakura skeptic--what could be so interesting about falling cherry blossoms?--but once there I finally understood the beauty, and the loss of that beauty, and the ephemerality of life. The sadness and the joy. We were inside the haiku.



Japanese culture is very different from ours. As a writing and research project, our daughter was assigned the project of taking photos of, and writing an essay about, all the differnt and novel kinds of food she encountered there. We took a few trips to the grocery store, ate at a variety of restaurants, including a ramen place, a shabu-shabu restaurant, a sushi restaurant, a bakery and a yakitori place. Tokyo is full of amazing restaurants.

Through a friend we met a local teenage girl who showed our daughter to all the special animal "cafes" that are all over Tokyo--the Cat Cafe, the Hedgehog Cafe, the Bird Cafe. There is a huge kawaii culture in Japan--the culture of cute! Even the dogs in Japan are cuter than dogs anywhere else as you can see from this beauty we met while walking through the cherry blossoms.



I want to go back next year! our daughter exclaimed. Me too!

Book Club: Five Children and It

The first book of our homeschool book club this September was Five Children and It, by E. Nesbit. We've read so many excellent books this past year, and this one wasn't one of my favorites, or my daughter's. But for each book club we have a project, based on the book. Some of the kids make dioramas of certain scenes, others make games based on a books' themes, and once one of the girls wrote an entire rap, which she performed, called The Rap of Nimh. It was so good.

My daughter made a model in clay of the "it" in the book, the sand-fairy. It was an ugly little thing, but the sand fairy was not meant to be pretty. He was grumpy, reluctant and scowling. I wish I had taken a picture of it before it got broken!

Setting Goals

This week we are learning about setting goals, and how it is that people achieve the things they set out to do. We talked about how without setting goals you don't have a road map of where you are going and could end up just anywhere.

We talked through our goals for Sesat School this year, which are:

• Mastery of Fourth Grade Math
• Speak Basic Spanish
• Reading 200 books this year (then we discussed whether or not this was possible, or even desirable!)
• Play 6-8 songs on the piano with two hands
• Finish writing a story and Submit to Stone Soup

Then we set 15 year goals, 10 year goals and 1 year goals. These were fun! Dreaming about what could be, where we'd want to live, who we'd have in our lives. Do we want to have a lot of friends, or just 2-3 really good friends? Do we want to live in the country or the city? Where do we want to travel?

We've been continuing today with more learning about goal setting, and how you achieve things a little bit at a time, by working every day. We watched this video about this:



Then, to really drive the point home (and because my daughter has expressed an interest in learning how to play the violin) we watched these videos from a Norwegian woman who taught herself to play the violin, and videotaped her progress as she improved. She went from being a complete beginner to being able to play extremely well in two years. It is quite impressive!



We wanted to learn more about how she had done it, how much she had practiced, so we watched her follow up video. Turns out she practiced sometimes an hour a day, sometimes 15 minutes, and sometimes, not any practice at all. She took a total of 8 lessons during the two years, and taught herself to play by watching videos on YouTube. But she kept at it day after day.



 This has been a really great area of study for us! And it's only been two days. Looking forward to the rest of this week as we work more on goal creation, and getting closer to them every day.

I love a good planetarium!

While we were in Salt Lake City, we visited the Clark Planetarium, and the kids loved it. There was an exhibit where you could construct your own rockets and see how they fared after launch -- if they were able to get into orbit, or break free of Earth's gravity. Another exhibit was a scale that you could stand on and see what you weighed on various planets.

We had originally come to see a movie about extreme weather, which was so-so, but stayed to experience all the interactive exhibits.

We spent several hours there.

PhysEd, Homeschool Style

Oh how I dreaded Phys. Ed. when I was a kid. I hated everything about it: changing my clothes in the locker room, being the least athletic kid in the class, coming last in the foot races, and even though I had always been the best kickball player during recess, and could chase the boys faster than any other girl, I never excelled in anything in Phys. Ed. After school sports I liked: tennis, ski team, even archery and dance class. But ugh, Phys Ed.

So as a homeschooler, there are both fewer and more chances to engage in physical activity. You can run around outside all the time, even take your classes outside, or learn while walking (which we adapted from our grown-up "walking meetings"). Hikes are doable during the weekdays, even. Dancing class happens. And whenever you want you can go skiing.

We just took a week and went skiing in Utah. We skiied and skiied as much as we could. Our legs were sore. We learned to keep our skis parallel. We graduated from Green slopes to Blue (with the grownups and the more adventuresome kids breaking off to do the occasional black diamonds.) The best kind of physical activity: fun, exhilarating, exhausting.

Llamas in Port Angeles, Washington

We went up to Washington earlier this week to visit Rachel, who had been, until a couple years ago, our childrens' beloved nanny, and teacher. She was my daughter's first teacher, starting from birth. So warm and loving and kind and full of life and wisdom and sweetness. The very best kind of teacher to have.

We were lucky enough to stay in the Arcadia Farm and Inn in Port Angeles, where there were dozens of animals--7 dogs, 2 llamas, 2 horses, 16 sheep, chickens, about a dozen goats--baby goats, even!--cats. It was wonderful. The llamas even came to our window looking for snacks, and we were allowed to help out in the barn, feeding and caring for the animals.

Oakland Zoo Visit

A spontaneous visit to the Oakland Zoo with some of our homeschool friends. We met this delightful turtle, and saw for the first time actual hyenas! Our daughter has been studying and admiring hyenas for a while, and I'd been promising her we'd visit this zoo in Oakland where we'd see some.

We also heard the lion roar.

Book Club: Five Children and It

The first book of our homeschool book club this September was Five Children and It, by E. Nesbit. We've read so many excellent books this past year, and this one wasn't one of my favorites, or my daughter's. But for each book club we have a project, based on the book. Some of the kids make dioramas of certain scenes, others make games based on a books' themes, and once one of the girls wrote an entire rap, which she performed, called The Rap of Nimh. It was so good.

My daughter made a model in clay of the "it" in the book, the sand-fairy. It was an ugly little thing, but the sand fairy was not meant to be pretty. He was grumpy, reluctant and scowling.

Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo

We really enjoyed our visit to the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo when we were passing through on a layover from Finland to the U.S. There are dozens of outdoor sculptures around the museum, and a guide to them made for children to find them--it was quite a game to find them all, especially the Gormley sculpture attached to the side of the building. We learned about sculptures of Louise Bourgeois, Udo Rondinone, Paul Kelly, and even Damien Hirst, whose sliced up cows were not particularly appreciated by the art lover pictured here. We talked about all the art we saw--we spent hours there--and what they could mean, what the artist could be trying to tell us, what we saw in them ourselves. A perfect day of art.As

Big Tables

I love big tables, much needed for homeschooling. In this picture you can see our workbooks, handwriting practice, my Roberto Bolaño and I Ching, storyboards for a proposed vampire movie starring child vampires, drawings inspired by our latest reading about London evacuees from WWII, and a diagram of the parts of a mushroom.

If you can have a table that doesn't need to be cleared off, and projects can go on for days, even better! Right now we have a painting project that has gone on daily for five days in a row. That was one of the things I immediately appreciated about homeschooling: if you got into something you could keep working on it for days without having to clean up in between! 

Visiting the Peruskoulu in Helsinki

Our daughter's friend Kerttu invited her to join her for a day in the Finnish elementary school she attended, so she went. School only lasted half a day, for about 4 hours, had lots of breaks to go outside and play and involved a lot of art projects, such as finger-weaving. The teacher was friendly and welcoming.

Finnish schools don't have iPads, or smart boards or anything our 'advanced' schools in the US have--and yet they are famous for being the best-ranked schools in the world. This classroom could have been set up in the 1960s: not a computer in sight!

String figures

There has been a mania for string figures recently, with the kids mastering Jacob's Ladder, Cat's Cradle, the Witch's Broom, and even the dynamic Walk the Dog. You can learn most of them by using YouTube videos.

There is also a book about String Figures by Harry Smith, the guy who created the amazing, weird, and wonderful Anthology of American Folk Music and who served as Shaman-In-Residence at the Naropa Institute.

Playing Chess

Clas Olson was having a sale on a 5 game set (chess, checkers, backgammon, five man morris, and dominoes) so I bought it, and the children wanted to learn to play chess. I taught them the basic rules, and they got the hang of it, playing many games over the summer.

I never was a very good chess player, but I remember wanting to play well, because the smart kids played chess. I even joined the chess club in 5th grade. It’s a great game.

Primo math game

Today I backed Primo: the beautiful, colorful, mathematical board game on Kickstarter. It looks cool. We'll try it out at the school when it ships.

In the meantime, see if you can follow who owes who what in this scene from All in the Family:

Park Pen-Pals

A friend of mine is the creator of the SF Postcard Project, now the Neighborhood Postcard Project. The project encourages individuals from lesser known and marginalized neighborhoods to share their favorite parts of their neighborhood or what changes they would like to see. These are written on a postcard and sent throughout the city to spread awareness, and illuminate the beauty that exists in these neighborhoods. For the children, I thought about what would be a local and representative adaptation of this project. Alamo Square Park came to mind for it's diverse visitors and the familiarity the children have with it. What else could we learn? Who are the people that spend time in this park?

We crafted messages to post in the park, inquiring about individuals spending time there. We ended our message prompting them to send us an email that answered our questions.

Our messages read: 

Hello! We are a small school of first graders in San Francisco, and we are curious about who is around us! If you find this, send us a short message to tell us who you are!

Where did you find this note?

Where are you from?

Are you visiting?

Living here?

What do you like to do?

What do you love about San Francisco?

We then took the the park and began scoping out ideal places to leave our notes. Simotaneouly talking about what kind of people might respond and if we thought anyone would respond at all. 

The children place the first message in a popular bus stop at the edge of the park. 

A closer look. The children brainstormed and decided that an illustration accompanying the message would draw people in and make it more likely that they would want to participate. 

Puppy makes an appearance! The children thought about places that people spend time in the park and where they would most likely come across our messages. The placement of these messages included a picnic table, a park bench, the entrance to the playground, a garbage can, and the garden fountain (above). A child mentioned the environmental impact that leaving paper in public might create, and we decided that we would go back in a few days and remove the papers to make sure they did not become litter. 

Two of the children look on to see if the people sitting on the bench have found the message we left there. They decide that once they have left, we should come back and move the sign to the top of the bench so people don't sit on it. 

We received many wonderful messages, that the participants have kindly agreed to let us post here. The children gathered in circle time to read the responses and share their thoughts about what our next step should be. Some of the children's favorites are below. 

1. We are Victoria and Kadar and we found your message by the painted Ladies in Alamo square. I (Victoria) am from St Albans (very near London) and Kadar is from Paris. I live here and Kadar is visiting. I volunteer while I await my visa and Kadar works in PR for Levis. I like to hike, watch and play football (soccer), brew beer and listen to music. Kadar likes to play soccer, spend time with his son and take photos. I love the architecture, food and feeling of this city. Kadar loves the architecture, embarcadero and the weather!

2. I found your note today in Alamo Square. I live in the neighborhood, and was visiting the park with my friend because the day was so beautiful and we wanted to be outside. I like to do yoga.  Sometimes I like to do headstands!  I took a picture to show you.  I'm not always good at them, and I fall over a lot, but it's fun so I keep trying. I love that San Francisco has so many hills.  It means that there's always a great view at the top, and it makes my body strong by walking up so many hills. If you ever want to learn more about yoga or meditation, I'd be happy to share.

3. My name is Griffin and I'm a first grader at Clarendon.  I live near this park, and I came here with my little brother, Rocket.

4. Hello, I'm Sara, I'm 3 and a half and I come from Ancona, on the east coast of Italy, in the centre.I saw your note at the entrance of Alamo Square playground. I live in Ancona, but I came to San Francisco with my parents to visit my uncle (mummy's brother) and auntie, who live here and work for Twitter. I love this city, it's full of fun things and there are lots of playgrounds, which I enjoyed very much! I love traveling, seeing new parts of the world. I love eating spaghetti and pizza. I love going on the swing, cycling and swimming. While in San Francisco I had so much fun at the Academy of Science which I thought was AMAZING. I enjoyed a ride on the cable car and visiting its museum. I absolutely adore the Golden Gate park, where we spent 2 whole days just cycling and walking around. I had lots of fun going up and down the piano steps at the fisherman's wharf and saying hello to the sea lions. Alcatraz was a bit scary, but I loved the boat ride. I think you live in a fantastic and vibrant city and you are very lucky! I wish I could come and visit your school, but we are going back to Italy tomorrow, so maybe I'll see you on that part of the world in the future.

After reading the notes, two of the children decided to write to the woman that offered to come and teach us yoga. We eagerly await a reply!

Architects and Engineers For The Day

Dreaming big and overcoming obstacles are the consistent themes that weave themselves through David Robert's, Iggy Peck Architect and Rosie Revere Engineer. Both of these books remind the reader that building taller and brainstorming without limitation can create beautiful and inventive projects.

For Iggy Peck, his affinity for building came at a young age. When he was only in diapers, he built towers from diapers (dirty ones, to his mother’s total dismay). He piled pancakes, and made castles from chalk. His parents were proud, but upon entering second grade, his teacher, Miss Lila Greer, had other ideas. At the age of eight, she was lost on a field trip in a skyscraper, and found herself stuck in an elevator with a circus troupe. Since that day, she made sure that there would be no building, and definitely not in her classroom. Iggy, saddened by this news, gives up his passion.

That is, until the day that the class heads over a bridge for a field trip. At the last moment, the bridge collapses, and Miss Lila Greer, too, collapses to the ground. While unconscious, Iggy orchestrates a plan to build a bridge from shoestrings, a pair of underpants, and fruit roll ups. When the teacher finally wakes up, she is delighted to see what Iggy has done, and it changes her perspective. From then on, Iggy is welcome to build in her classroom and goes on to become a successful and innovative architect.

Miss Lila Greer travels the bridge that Iggy designed. She imagines it to be the Golden

 Gate Bridge. The children were particularly excited to see a local landmark!

Rosie Revere is also in Miss Lila Greet and Iggy’s classroom, and has a knack for building elaborate and quirky inventions. She engineers them by night in her attic, making sure that they are hidden away by the time morning comes.

Rosie builds by night. 

When her great-great-aunt comes to visit, and Rosie hears that her dream is to fly, Rosie gets busy. She brilliantly engineers a flying device for her aunt. When the day comes to fly it, it falls after a short bit in the air. Rosie is devastated, but her Aunt laughs with excitement. She then assures Rosie that you only fail when you give up. That this attempt is just the beginning of something great!

We decided to be engineers and architects for the day, with an open-ended goal to create. I intentionally left this project open to interpretation to create space for any kind of structure.

 A final creation.

A girl elaborates on her structure. Their is a town at one end that leads to a body of water that is filled with sharks. There is a device that you can climb into that attaches to a rope that brings you to safety. After crossing a bridge made of straws, there is a playground with a sandbox, climbing tube, and a resting space. The resting space will fix any ailment in "just two minutes and then you have to rest on the feather bed," There is also a trampoline that will take you to a tall yellow feathers where you can learn about all of the "magic from Asia," which is where the fairies live and keep their magic. 

A boy works to maneuver a piece of thread into a straw.

His invention aims to move feathers at the end of a straw when it is blown into. The angling of the straw had to be just right to move all of the feathers, and required many attempts and adjustments.

A girl explains that when you are stuck on the rock (button) there is a component that opens up with a voice that says, “You are okay and safe. It will be okay,” and then moves you to safety. She specifically noted that if you are not yet married, the voice will be of the person that you will fall in love with and marry after you are safe. 

The Dam Keeper

A local homeschooling family invited our school to the San Francisco International Film Festival as they were hosting a day of children's short films. The children were captivated by one film in particular called The Dam Keeper. 

The dam keeper is a young pig who lives in a windmill above town. His sole responsibility is to wind the windmill every eight hours to keep "the darkness" away, otherwise it will hurt the residents. He does this religiously, and wears a mask (depicted in the first storyboard slide below). 

He comes down into town and is made fun of by his peers while waiting for the bus to school. Many of the children taunt him and make fun of his pig nose. One day, a new student boards the bus and walks back to sit with the pig. She is a fox that has an affinity for drawing, and the pig is smitten with her. 

He goes to school and notices that she is drawing satirical portraits of people at school, and in a forgetful moment she leaves her notebook in their classroom. The pig looks through it and begins to feel that he has a friend, and that he is not alone. 

The next day, the fox boards the bus and looks worried and sad, but is relieved to see that the pig has kept her notebook safe. In the afternoon at school, an alligator and hippo take the pig into the bathroom and put all of his things in the toilet. The fox walks by the bathroom, and goes inside, finding an embarrassed pig. She helps him to his feet and dries his things. She then teaches him to draw the animals that were unkind to him, which seems to be calming and helpful to the pig. Both of them look into the mirror and giggle, realizing that they have charcoal from their drawings all over their faces. 

After school, the pig, with a new dose of confidence, walks over to a bench where the fox and many other animals are laughing. He looks over their shoulders and sees a paper that is half blown over in the wind. The visible letters say "dirty p-" and it has a drawing of the pig below it. The pig is saddened and snatches the paper away. 

In his sadness, he misses his eight hour alarm and "the darkness" rolls over the hill, covering the town. Young animals are afraid and everyone begins to cough. When he finds a seat on a tree swing, surrounded by "the darkness", the pig removes the picture from his pocket and fully unfolds it to find that it says, "dirty pals" and has a drawing of both the pig and fox below with charcoal on their faces. 

In a panic, he starts running towards the windmill to push the darkness away. He is successful, and the fox soon arrives at his door to give him a hug. 

The eighteen minutes of film are made of more than 8,000 individual paintings!

During circle time, we began by looking at stills from three movies from the festival and placing them in chronological order. We discussed animated films and live action films, as well as fiction and non-fiction. All three children chose The Dam Keeper for their storyboard.

We then discussed the moral of the story. One child mentioned how helpful the pig was, and how mean all of his peers were. The children seemed unsettled about this fact, so we talked about peer pressure and being unkind. A girl said it made her feel sad to see the pig feeling sad. Another girl felt that as well and said it was very nice of the pig to protect the town, even when the town was mean. 

The peer pressure component began when we broke down why people made fun of the pig. A boy thought it was because he lived so far away and had a dirty face sometimes. One girl believed that maybe one person was mean to the pig, and everyone else thought it was funny, so they were mean too. 

I asked the children if it was okay to be mean, if someone else was doing so. They all said no. We talked about what you can do when someone else is being mean. A girl said, you can say that you are not going to be mean too. A boy said to tell them that it doesn't feel good, so they should stop. 

We then talked about times that we feel nice and not nice and how that feels. One girl said that when she feels mean, she feels sad. Another girl agreed. A boy said that he feels scared when he feels mean. 

We then discussed what we could tell the pig when he was feeling sad. It was agreed that being his friend and listening was a way to make him feel happier. Also, going to his house to visit and see his windmill and special mask.

The children begin to sort the frames into piles pertaining to each of the three movies. 

Working on placing the frames of The Dam Keeper in chronological order. 

Drawing the frame depicting the arrival of "the darkness"

Discussing the pig snatching up the fox's drawing, but being confused about her intention. Ella emphasis that the fox was trying to be funny, not mean. 

Storyboard. This student challenged himself to draw each frame upside-down. 

Storyboard. This child paid extra attention to making sure the 

pig was the right size to turn the windmill. 

Storyboard. This child emphasized telling the whole story and 

diligently worked through each frame.