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. 

Time Capsules

Time capsules came to mind when thinking of ways to get to know the children at Sesat School, and also practice some imaginative writing. I have such fond memories of making time capsules with my family and at school when I was younger. The excitement and anticipation that comes with opening one and seeing what is inside is exhilarating, but even more engaging and fun is figuring out what to write. 

During circle time, we spent time talking about what time capsules are. One boy shared that he didn't know what the word capsule meant, so we worked on contextualizing it. When I shared the idea of the project, that we would be sealing and burying them, he added that he thought it was a special kind of jar. This led to a conversation about what exactly was so special about this jar. A girl decided that if it was going to be in the ground, that it would need to be protected from things like dirt and rain. A girl added that bugs needed to stay out as well. We then talked about the time component, that we would't see these jars for some time. That they would represent who we are, but just right now. That we might open them and think that we were much older and bigger than we were then. 

After figuring out that the lid would need to be on tight and that we would put strong tape around the lid, we moved to the table to begin working on what would go inside the jar. The children began by writing their names, the date, and the date that they would open it. As a group, it was decided that a year would be an ideal amount of time, specifically because they would have forgotten what they had written by then. That way they would be surprised!

The prompts asked questions about interests, dreams and wishes. The drawing prompts asked what the classroom looked like, and to trace their hands. A girl asked why we were tracing our hands, and another child quickly answered that they would be bigger when we opened the jar, and that way we could see how much they grew. I added that their classroom might change as well, and so drawing an aerial map would help us remember how things used to be. 

As tempting as it is to share the lovely and inventive responses and drawing that made their way into the jars, it will have to wait until they are opened! One that caught my attention was one child's dreams and wishes page, on which he drew himself flying. 

 Working on filling out our favorite things to do. 

Girl finishing up a trace of her hand. 

A boy writes down his love for building things. 

 Satirically, a girl demonstrates how much she thinks she 

will grow by the time the jars are opened. 

Another girl shares too. 

Marking their jars with permanent marker. 

We gather tools for burying the jar, and choose a spot in the front garden.  

Putting the final pieces of duct tape on the jar. 

Working to dig a whole that is deep enough. 

See you next year jars!