Journal Entry 4

Tuesday, September 25, 1987

Today I put my foot down and have all three kids sit down, at the table, for breakfast. Unfortunately, Camille pouts a bit (it's so much harder to know how to respond when it isn't your own kid, too!). However, even she eats a little bit.

All three help me clear off the table when they are done. We all troop to the bedrooms so that my girls can get dressed, and I see that Mindy has a surprise for me: she made her bed! Yeah!

While I do the dishes, I encourage the kids to play. Mindy makes a Colorform picture (I notice that she names the shapes correctly as she uses them), Camille listens to a tape on Talk'n'Play, and Lindsey pages through several different dinosaur books (making quite knowledgeable comments).

Lindsey asks if it is her turn with the Colorforms yet, but Mindy says, “No, I want to copy my picture.” She gets out crayons and a piece of paper and begins to copy each shape.

Lindsey says, “I want to sit down and watch you, okay, Mindy?”

Mindy's fine with it, and I feel great. The peace here is wonderful! I think that Camille's presence sometimes causes my two to behave better.

(Except when it doesn't.)

Lindsey is now doing Colorforms on one half of the board while Mindy copies her picture, which consists of a house, snowman, sun, snow, and grass. Lindsey goes for abstract art, with a picture that is randomly arranged shapes and colors. (Actually, it's pretty cool!)

The kids discover the masking-tape number line I had laid out on the floor near the piano. I suppose it is the proximity to the piano that inspires this, but Mindy starts to use it exactly as I had planned to use it, singing “Little Bird” by numbers as she steps on each number. We all join in.

After we're done with “Little Bird,” we sing-and-step to “Thumbkin” and then “Mr. Froggie.”

Camille asks if she can measure herself. She carefully lies down along the number line, her heels at 1 and her head at... Her head is between two numbers, so I discuss the concept of "half" in a measurement. Of course, Lindsey and Mindy want to measure themselves, too. We round everyone's height to the nearest half.

Next we decide to do standing broad jumps. As each girl jumps, I play the interval jumped on the piano (1 to 4, 1 to 5, 1 to 6), and of course the girls compare their jumps, using words like longer and longest and best. I'm ready to defend Lindsey as shorter and younger, if the girls get competitive, but each is more interested in figuring out her own best jump, instead.

I make up a song about their ages, using the tune of “Thumbkin,” and we sing and step and hop and play the piano:

“How old's Camille? How old's Camille?
She is five! She is five!
She is such a big girl! She is such a big girl!
Run, Camille, run! Run, Camille, run”

And so forth...

Finally done with the number line and the piano, I can hardly wait to see what's next. Mindy goes right back to copying her Colorforms picture. Lindsey gets out paper and crayons, too, and starts drawing; she is not copying her Colorforms abstract piece. Camille uses the Colorforms, too, this time. She arranges shapes while saying stuff like, “There are three balls. Guess which one is Mickey Mouse?”

Adventure

The girls are finally well enough to walk to the park. We take our plastic toy dinosaurs, some foil, and a camera with us. At the park, the girls use the wet sand to build volcanoes and swamps. They pick up leaves and twigs and plant these around lakes lined with foil (to hold water), and then they pose the dinosaurs in a scene, chatting about what to do and how to do it.

There are two other children at the park. Mindy says, “Make sure the other kids don't let the dinosaurs eat each other.”



Indeed, there seems to be no bloodshed at all in their play. Camille hides her dinosaurs from Tyrannosaurus Rex; no carnivorous eating allowed. The dinosaurs barely even growl and roar (although there is a little of that). Mostly, they just talk to each other.

Now the three girls have run off from their dino-land and are playing on the swings and slide. They are, of course, pretending to be some sort of characters—I can tell that they are changing identity every once in a while—but then they drop all of that as Mindy shows the others “a new trick.” Everyone happily copies the new trick.

Then Camille shows THREE new tricks. The others try to copy her but do not succeed. Camille does things that Mindy can't do (or won't do, from fear?), but Mindy seems a little more determined today and works really hard to travel across the bars. She succeeds with only a little help—she will probably soon be doing it herself.

Once again, I feel so glad that the kids aren't competing with each other. Nobody compares, nobody pokes fun.

I pick up a plastic dinosaur and start making footprints in the wet sand. Mindy notices and comes over to do the same thing with another dinosaur. Camille decides to make her own footprints in the sand.

But wait! She IS a dinosaur!

Soon we're all dinosaurs. The girls decide that we are a family of duckbill dinosaurs. We are peacefully eating when all of a sudden an invisible T-Rex shows up (so to speak). We all whack it with our tails until it leaves. (Strictly self-preservation!)

Home Again

Once we're home, we get cleaned up and then sit down to watch a Disney tape about health and nutrition. When that's done, it's lunchtime. The kids take turns “taking orders” from each other and me, then they carry those orders to the chef (also me) while they set the table. When the food is made, the kids serve the customers and then become customers (me, too!), and we all eat.

With our little outing taking the better part of the morning, and both breakfast and lunch enjoyed at the table, like proper meals, the food situation is working out much better today!

While I do the dishes and put away the food, the girls choose to play outside. Soon Lindsey is back inside and upset. She's being left out. The older girls are mean to her. I sympathize and then coax her into playing a tape on the Talk'n'Play.

I hurry to finish the dishes, but before I get done, Mindy and Camille are back inside, too, Mindy in tears. The girls tell me that they have hit each other with plastic bats!

Yikes.

The lovely peaceful home, gone, just like that.

I suggest to Mindy that she play Kermit's Electronic StoryMaker, and she agrees. Camille takes my suggestion to tape record a message and a song on the piano. Both girls get happy pretty quickly, and soon they trade off activities. When it's Mindy's turn with the recorder, she plays “Little Bird” on the piano, for the recorder, but then also expands on the tune with her own improvisation.

Mindy and Camille go back to the bedrooms to play together. After their altercation outside, I am hoping they play well together this time. I peek in and see that they are combing their little ponies' hair and putting clips into the manes and tails. I decide to try to keep Lindsey busy with me (especially since she is tired and crabby). She agrees to a story, and I pull her into my lap to read to her.

Camille uses her sixth sense, or something, to realize that SOMEBODY IS BEING READ TO—and she comes running in to hear, too.

It seems to me that it is hard for me to do ANYthing with Lindsey without accidentally interesting one of the two older girls, too.

(Oh, well, the next time Lindsey goes to Mommy and Me class with Camille's cousin and aunt, the older girls will get a chance to free play alone without the lure that Mommy is having special time with someone else!)

So we read and read. Fairy tales, The Puppy Who Wanted a Boy, Who Sank the Boat?, When It Rained Cats and Dogs. After a good long reading session, all three girls squeal their way through a game of Raining Cats and Dogs: they gather up all the soft toy cats and dogs they can hold, count to 3 and then throw them into the air. The stuffed animals come pelting down, of course, and the girls gather them up affectionately and come to me saying things like, “Look, I have two dogs and a cat!”

I say, “Where on earth did you find all these animals?”

The girls' answers vary from things like, “It was raining cats and dogs!” to the more practical, “They fell on my head!”

Of course, I'm just using a line from the book, but there really are an awful lot of stuffed cats and dogs in there. I ask the girls to count them, and they do. Twenty-seven.

Good grief, we have 27 stuffed cats and dogs?

We have even more bears and rabbits, and who knows what other sorts of soft-and-cuddly critters? Wow!

The kids proclaim that they are ready for a snack and ask me to read again. This time, I read Jack Prelutsky's Read Aloud Rhymes for the Very Young. The girls are excited that one of the rhymes is about a dinosaur.


Passport for more Adventure

Mindy has been wanting to play “passport” for a long time. Inspired by the passports given out at the Wild Animal Park (in San Diego), she puts all the stamp pads outside, in a line, and then puts one animal stamp next to each ink pad. Each of the girls has her own passport, and the three travel down the line together, carefully inking each stamp before pressing it onto their passports, and waiting “in line” patiently.

Obviously, at any time one or another of the girls could avoid the line and go to another stamp station, but doing this activity quickly is apparently NOT what it's about. They keep together the entire time.

When Maria comes to pick up Camille, we have another session at the piano to show her all our songs. So ends another day.

Musically Speaking

Reading through my journal, written more than 20 years ago, I find myself thinking about music education.

I always knew that I wanted to expose my kids to making music as well as to listening to music. All through homeschooling, I had on hand my old childhood piano along with a small assortment of other instruments, including a balalaika my beloved sister brought me from Russia, a sturdy set of rhythm instruments I bought from an educational supplies catalog, a recorder, and two guitars. With my children tagging along (and sometimes egging me on), I occasionally bought a new instrument to add to the mix: a couple of ocarinas, castanets, more recorders and drums. When Lindsey and Mindy were teens, one got a drum kit and the other an electric bass guitar.

As long as little kids have strings to pluck, drums to pound, and keys to plink-plunk, they will make music (or at least sounds!). However, research conducted since Maria and I started homeschooling has suggested that learning to make music—and by this I mean actual musical training, not just exposure here and there—helps improve intelligence and learning. My kids did have some formal musical training in the form of several years of piano lessons. Later, as a teen, Lindsey had drum lessons. We also continued with some informal self-teaching.

Another important aspect to musical exposure is modeling. Kids who grow up in an environment in which everybody makes music will usually quite naturally want to make music. In our case, the modeling has been at a higher level of sporadic enthusiasm than of dedication or proficiency. I've picked out songs I love on the piano and learned a few favorites by Bach and Pachelbel, and Jim has belted out “Solitary Man” and Simon and Garfunkel songs on the guitar—but we have both indulged our music-making in on-again-off-again fashion. Months of playing daily, then months of ignoring our instruments.

After quite a bit of exposure to music, plus some formal training and some parental modeling, how did this “all turn out”? Certainly my kids are not professional musicians or even dedicated amateurs, but they love music, and Mindy at least has copied my husband and me: she makes music, but sporadically, as an on-again-off-again hobby, on both piano and guitar.

How about Camille?

Camille took formal piano lessons and enjoyed playing from age 6 to 18. She added the Celtic harp to her music making at age 12, and continued to play it most of the way through high school. Obviously, once she went to college, Camille's music lessons and practice routines were interrupted, but she did continue to enjoy playing piano when she was home from college, during the summer. She received an electronic keyboard as a college graduation gift and was well positioned to play the rest of her life--until she was afflicted with Repetitive Strain Syndrome in her wrists. Since RSS is a chronic condition, she basically hasn't played since then.

So did Camille's parents waste their money on all those lessons? Did Camille waste her time?

I never feel that music training is wasted, even if someone ends up dropping a hobby and no longer plays the instrument. When we study music, we learn to listen to music better, and often to enjoy it more. We learn more about learning itself, about coordinating our hands and eyes and feet and brain. We learn to let go, explore, improvise. We learn to memorize, practice, persevere. And hopefully we enjoy the hours and years we do all that learning and playing music.

Journal Entry 2

Tuesday, September 8, 1987

Camille has arrived for the day. She is dressed and brushed and looking good—whereas my two daughters are rocking the jammied-and-bed-head look. But one look at their friend, and they are suddenly motivated to get “homeschool ready,” too. Clothes are soon on, hair is soon brushed, and the girls begin—

Well, not anything that looks like school. Today our homeschooling starts with doll play.

The past few days, Mindy and Lindsey have been very involved with their Cabbage Patch dolls. Camille borrows a doll and joins in as they fiddle with clothes and talk about doll names. Soon the girls are setting up our coffee table with small chairs and a high chair. “Mom!” I hear. When I pop my head into the room, I see three girls and three dolls waiting for service.

I'm figuring they want breakfast, but it turns out they only want some apple juice. I serve three paper cups half-filled with real apple juice and three cups filled all the way up to the top with virtual juice. Everyone drinks (or pretends to) happily.

Her mom has told me that Camille is a bit sick (Lindsey is, too) and that she is leaving early today. So I decide to hold our planned piano lesson early in the day, when everyone is rested.

My kids had asked for piano lessons, and I thought I would try the lessons that John Holt recommended, Mrs. Stewart's Piano Lessons. The first lesson involves playing the musical alphabet (the A-B-C-D-E-F-G sequence of notes), finding all the C notes on the piano, and using a numbered strip of paper on keyboards to help kids play simple tunes.

Camille especially loves all of this. She loves going all the way up the piano keyboard, from the low-low A to the highest C. Mindy does well at the activity, too, but Lindsey poops out about halfway up the keyboard. (She is, after all, only 3!) I suggest that her Cabbage Patch doll might want to play some notes. Invigorated by this notion, Lindsey carefully uses her doll's hand to play the 40-some remaining notes, naming each one in a slightly higher doll-voice.

Camille easily finds all of the C notes. Mindy's turn next; she hesitates several times, either not finding the white-note/black-note pattern as easily as Camille did, or perhaps just wanting to be sure she's right before pressing the key, but she finds them all, too. I don't ask Lindsey to do this task (she is, after all, only 3), but instead I introduce the numbered paper keyboards and a new song: “Little Bird.” We sing the words, sing the numbers, and play our paper keyboards as we sing. (Most of the time, while Mindy, Camille and I sing and “play” the numbers, Lindsey continues to sing the words.)

“Now,” I say, “can you be little birds?”

The girls jump up. I tell them that, while I play the piano, they can fly around the room. But as soon as I play “Little Bird,” they should nestle into their nest (the sofa) and, as the song says, “go to sleep.”

Major enthusiasm from all three. I play some tunes, and the girls' arms start fluttering up and down as they stampede around and around the sofa (birds never made such thudding sounds!). Suddenly, I stop halfway through a song and shift to the “Little Bird” song. “Little bird, in your nest, goooooooooooooo tooooooooooo sleeeeeeeeeep,” Lindsey sings as the three girls jump up onto the sofa, curl up, and abruptly stop moving.

What a hit this game is! They want to play it over and over.

And over again.

I find it fascinating that the kids seem so wound up and excited as they fly around, and yet they still manage to instantly recognize the song that they hadn't known just a few minutes ago!

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

When we stop the piano lesson, I notice that Camille is looking a bit bleary. Her nose is running, so I help her with that. As we all wash our hands, I try to think how I can help Camille and Lindsey get some rest today.

Well, there is always TV...

I ask, “Who wants to watch Dumbo?” The kids agree and sit down to watch.

While they are watching the movie, I give Mindy and Lindsey some breakfast. (I try to urge Camille to eat, too, but she doesn't want to.) They have some cereal. Soon Mindy asks for some cinnamon toast. Lindsey decides she wants some, too. So I give each a slice. Camille still turns down any and all food.

Lindsey asks for some more cinnamon toast. I'm surprised (hey, she's supposed to be sick!) but when Mindy chimes in, too, I make half a slice more for each girl. Before they can ask for more food, I say, “Now the kitchen is closed until lunchtime!”

Camille and Lindsey are resting nicely, with all of their attention on the movie, but Mindy seems to want refuge from something. (The movie? The other girls? The girls' colds?) She uses pillows to arrange a private corner to sit in. I watch her carefully, wondering if she is coming down with something, too.

After the movie, the kids seem filled with purpose and ambition. Mindy suggests using a computer program we have on loan—Kermit's Electronic Storymaker. Each child makes a grand story—exactly one sentence long!

All this story stuff has reminded the girls that they're in “school” now, and they're “studying” dinosaurs. “Let's play the dinosaur game, Mom,” Mindy says.

“Dinosaur game?” Camille asks.

The day before, Mindy and I had made something new for our “unit study” on dinosaurs. I had suggested making a dinosaur game. Mindy wanted a track on which they could move game pieces, “like Candyland.” So I drew a big loopy track divided up into squares, and Mindy found our smallest plastic dinosaurs for game pieces. I scrounged a die from another game, but Mindy wanted game cards, too. (Candyland has game cards! Must keep up with Candyland!) So I cut up some three-by-five cards and wrote things like “Forward 2” and “Back 3.” Mindy carefully wrote “START” at one end of the gameboard track, and I wrote “END” at the finish line. While I colored a few spaces on the gameboard (the cue to take a card), Mindy colored the backs of the game cards. For the final decorative touch, Mindy went to town putting dinosaur stickers along the sides of the track. Now she is practically dancing in her excitement to show off our new game.

Camille says, “I'm first!” and apparently that's fine with the others. As the girls play, Mindy and Camille take turns well, follow the rules (such as they are), and have great attitudes. Lindsey is less capable today of playing in this big-girl way (being sick and all, plus she is only 3!). She really wants to be with us, though, and to be a part of what we're doing, so I help her cope as well as she can.

I notice that all three girls are in slightly different places as far as ease of use of the die. One dot is easy for all of them. If Lindsey rolls anything other than one, however, she lets me announce the number, and then she carefully counts aloud as she moves that number of squares. When Camille rolls any number higher than one, she points to each dot on the die and counts. This point-and-count behavior is called pecking. For example, Camille rolls a two, pecks, “One, two,” and then picks up her dinosaur and counts as she moves, “One, two.” Mindy is already somewhat used to using a die. She is able to glance it and immediately announce the number (although the first time she rolls a five, she does peck like Camille). I know that she has played games with a die before and suppose that perhaps Camille has not. Mindy also seems to be reading the cards, but I think she probably merely remembers that the long word that starts with “F” means go forward, and the short word that starts with “B” means go back. Camille is happy to let me read the cards for her.

The girls seem so actively interested in playing games that I wonder if they want to try a matching game, too.

I had some electrical equipment from a science class Mindy took—some covered wires, a battery, and a tiny little bulb fixture. I got a file folder and inserted brass fasteners, evenly spaced, on each side of the fold. Next to each of the fasteners on the left side , I had glued a picture of a dinosaur. On the other side, in a mixed-up order, I had written the names of the dinosaurs. I connected the brass fasteners of the matching items with wires (first carefully stripping about half an inch at each end) and taped the wires firmly to the file folder. The girls could hold the covered wires that were attached to the light fixture and battery and then touch each metal end to a brass fastener. They would only complete the circuit and see the light go on when they matched the correct name to a dinosaur.

Now I bring out this homemade marvel and ask if they want to play. They do! I read the names of the dinosaurs to the girls, and each takes a delighted turn in being the one to touch the wires to the fasteners. Camille seems to know half of the dinosaur's names from the very start (Tyrannosaurus rex, of course, being one). But all three quickly figure out the matches using this little gizmo.

Mindy keeps turning the folder over to look at the back side. I assume she is wondering how it works, but she doesn't ask, and I don't interrupt their excited play.

I expect the kids to run off and play on their own after they tire of the matching game, but instead they decide to draw. Camille starts off tracing around her hand and making a turkey. Mindy and Lindsey each have a circle template and color various sizes of circles on their papers. Then Camille decides to make her own new gameboard. She draws a large heart- shaped track and then divides it into spaces. She is numbering the spaces when Mindy asks if she wants to make a really BIG gameboard with her. They start the project in grand style, using one of my pieces of posterboard, but Camille soon gets bored, and eventually Mindy drops the project as well. Lindsey has persevered with her circles all this time.

It's finally lunchtime. Camille, who has had nothing all day long, except half of a small cup of apple juice, eats half a pancake and drinks two glasses of milk. My girls eat a fair bit more in variety and quantity.

After eating, the three girls go off on their own. Every time I pop my head into the kids' bedrooms, they are playing “make believe” and, by the way, making a gigantic mess! A few times I notice that they have a disagreement as to how the pretend play should proceed...but each time they work things out with compromises and discussion. I am surprised and pleased; I'd expected a bit of emotional meltdown from the sick kids.

Mindy asks me to make apple dinosaurs for them, as I had for her the day before. I suggest that she help me, and she eagerly washes her hands and abandons her playmates to do so. We get out three brightly colored plates and start arranging apple slices and chunks to make rough pictures of dinosaurs. Camille gets a triceratops, Lindsey gets a stegosaur, and Mindy gets a tyrannosaur.

Camille and Lindsey are very pleased to be presented terrible-lizard-shaped food. All three chomp through their dinofruit.

While they eat their snack, I read to them. I decide to read another of the dinosaur books we'd checked out of the library (Dinosaurs Are Different, by Aliki); then I read three more library books that are not about dinosaurs.

Mindy finishes her snack early and decides to illustrate her Kermit Storymaker story.

Something in the last book, which is about a pony, reminds Camille of some books she and her mom read together. She decides to share with us some of the things she learned. I cannot believe how old she sounds as she tells us, “Cowboys wore clothes that were very practical.” Later she sounds a bit more young-and-innocent as she assures us that buffaloes (she means American bison) “were very big and could almost knock you over.”

Yeah, almost!

Camille's mom comes to pick her up at this point, and so our lesson on Cowboys in the West is over, for now. Another day of homeschooling is over, as well.

For now.