Or say your child is the most demanding person. He greets you every morning with a list of what he expects from you all day. It’s downhill from there. When other children come around, the child flips on a dime and becomes indecisive, insecure, and meek.

Maybe your child is sweet, compliant, and shy. He doesn’t ask for anything you don’t already supply. He grabs your leg and hides behind you every time anyone new comes around.

Or you don’t have one of these extremes. Your child is moderate and well-adjusted. They watch the neighborhood children go off to school, and sigh. They run outside to meet the school bus after school.

All of these children want society. The word, society, originally meant partner, comrade. So I’m really talking about a group of friends for your children.

I don’t know how we got them, growing up. Maybe we collected folks from school, or clubs, or teams, or orchestra other organizations. It didn’t seem as intentional as forming a society.

But when you homeschool, your kids don’t find themselves falling into groups. Everything you do is intentional.

So you advocate for your child. You find like-minded people at church, or co-op, or sports teams… Wait a minute! I just said your child doesn’t just fall into groups when you homeschool.

Let me back up a bit. You yourself are not isolated. You go to the store. You go to the post office. You go to church… you get the idea. So when you’re going where you go, you’re on the lookout for other people. You’re searching your mind for people who have children, you’re having conversations. You can figure out pretty quickly whether you’d be interested in getting to know someone better, and whether your children would hit it off.

Also, while where we live there is an active homeschool community that is growing. I know we are fortunate. I am sure we’re not alone. You could look at a support group or a co-op with a mind toward making connections. Of course, there’s also the academic component to the co-op, but keep your eyes open for connections while you’re volunteering or dropping your child off, or what have you. Ditto with sports are arts groups.

Before you know it, you will have connections coming out of your ears. You may have to use a (Microsoft) Excel program to manage all your contacts. You are on your way to building a community.

Next, you must have something to do with all your people.

This post is part of the carnival of homeschooling, this week hosted by smallworldathome.blogspot.com. I’m sorry, I can’t put links in my posts like I used to be able to do.

I know I said that the Grand Old Duke of York was a favorite last night, but Beehive must be a close second. The babies get so excited about being bees at the end. Stay tuned for more fingerplays from Recipe for Reading!

Imani, who never had problems with spelling, spelled 19/20 words correctly today, including ‘absence,’ which she had practiced incorrectly: ‘absense.’ She added a ‘d’ to admission, or some such word, which was disappointing to us both.

Joyous, who usually struggles with spelling, initially misspelled 6 words out of 21, but was able to correct enough of them to have missed only 2.

Esteban, who has a strong ear, will likely be a strong speller. He misspelled a few words on his spelling test, but corrected his way to 15/16 properly spelled words.

I don’t know if the painting and ball bouncing, jumping rope had any effect on spelling scores or not! I want to try having Joy act out her spelling words, whatever that means on video next week. She was able to memorize Bible verses by acting them out, so maybe this will help.

As for math, Imani started her week with an 86 on her 100 multiplication fact sheet, but finished strong by scoring 100 on her next 100 multiplication fact sheet, her 90 division fact sheet, and her 100 addition fact sheet.

Joyous started out strong, scoring 100 on her first three fact sheets–100 addition facts, but she narrowly missed the standard today on her 100 subtraction fact sheet, by scoring a 95.

Esteban’s fact sheet performance actually declined over the course of the week. He scored 17/25 on his first fact sheet of the week/year, and 15 and 14 on his subsequent quizzes. This is Esteban’s first year of timed fact sheets, and we haven’t figured out what works best for him yet. I did notice that he got his top score on the fact sheet he took at the dining room table, instead of in the seclusion of the ‘testing center,’ aka the library.

We started our math drill last spring to pull up fact sheet scores, and it has worked well for the girls. Esteban’s routine may need to be tweaked before we have success.

The upshot of it is that I called my sister in law and asked her how she potty trained her girls–before 2. She said something very simple. Too simple, it seemed to my confused, complicated mind. She said she rewarded the child with candy for using the potty, and punished them for willfully going in their pants.

I thought ok, what did I have to lose? I might as well try it. And then my husband reminded me that he’s been telling me to do that for years. I reward desired behavior and reward undesired behavior; different rewards, same system.

I was shocked and humbled at how quickly Chanya went from being oblivious and unconcerned with the potty to going every few minutes. “I want some candy, so I’ll go potty!”

I’m real quick, so I needed more information. What about if she lied about going to the potty? I had to see evidence that she actually went, or no reward. Oh.

So far, the hardest thing has been keeping the older kids away from the candy rewards.

Then I would go after color correctness, and spoil the whole assignment for them. The assignment would say, “How many apples? Color them red.” Innocuous enough. Surely, picking out the crayon was part of the assignment. Then I’d say, “That’s orange. The red crayon looks like this.” I was splitting hairs at best. We had crayons that ran from the orange red to the red orange to the pure red variety.

Imani and I would argue about what was orange and what was red, and I was sure I was not only correct, but this was a very important issue. I won, and she began doing things my way.

Joy wasn’t as set in her opinion about color, and is not as strong willed as Imani, so she accepted my definitions of color.

Enter Esteban, a boy of a different stripe altogether. He likes coloring more than Xay did, but he doesn’t like to use every crayon in the box. His pictures often look like something out of P.D. Eastman, where there’s never more than three colors per page.

Esteban also moves very slowly, and selecting crayons is excruciatingly slow, often involving unsharpened colored pencils, etc. So when he picks up anything close to red, I’m not trying to argue whether it’s true red or not. Imani didn’t get that memo. She started arguing with Esteban that the crayon he used to color his apples was actually orange, and she proceeded to find the right crayon for him.

I thought how unattractive his page would look with two different shades of red, and then wondered further whether having perfect color mattered at all. I regretted having saddled Imani with all this color correctness baggage.

I started wondering whether color perfection ever mattered, or rather it just wasn’t such a big concern in First Grade. Surely, if the kid was involved in the fashion or interior design industry, there would come a time to split hairs on color.

Now, I just want him to finish his math.

Joy is working on the ‘oddball addition facts’ in her Saxon 3 math. The idea is that she already learned all the addition facts that had a pattern: the doubles, the doubles plus 1, the plus 2 facts, and so on. What’s leftover are those facts that defy categorization, like 7+5 and 3+6.

It is hard to study for fact sheets of these random facts, and I thought there must be some kind of pattern, some kind of rhyme or reason to these oddball facts. Last year, I set up this elaborate memory game, where we matched cards that have the same answer, like 8+4 and 7+5. That didn’t work so well with facts that didn’t have the same answers.

We did other set-ups involving flash cards and magnet numbers. Nothing worked to pull up Joy’s score, and believe me, I know, because one day I had her take the fact sheet three times in a row just to see if any of our methods worked.

Discouraged, I just had her quiz herself with the cards, and muddle through until third grade.

I lay in bed, thinking about what game would teach these facts. And I remembered speed.

So we take four fact cards each and lay them face up in front of us, and I deal out the rest of the cards. We put one card from our hands in the middle of the board, and play the four cards from our hand on them. We must know the answers to the facts in order to play, and we place them on the cards in front of us in either ascending or descending order. The answers to the oddball facts are pretty sequential: 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14. We can put a 9 on an 11 or visa versa to bridge the one gap in our counting.

I usually beat Joy in the game, but she must add quickly just to play. It makes answering 25 math questions in 45 seconds easy by comparison.

I wonder what game the next fact family will inspire?

I didn’t write in the journal every day, and I never could be sure whether I’d heard from God or not, so I eventually abandoned the whole idea, delight-based learning, seeking God for the children, etc.

I revisited the journal in the same spotty fashion this fall, as I try to find out how the children learn best. It turns out I learn best by obsessive journaling. Who knew?

I’ve written my recent discoveries in the journal, as well as my educational experiments. Today I went back and read what I’d written about the children from 2004 until 2009. Many of the things I wrote down from God were very loving. Many of the things were very challenging. Based on how many times I wrote some of the things, it was obvious I didn’t do them right away.

Reading through the questions I had and the answers God had, it’s hard to believe I doubted it was God. I still have to convince myself that God told me to do some of the things I ended up doing, as well as other things I never did do.

I wish I’d been more diligent about it. I should be on my 6th journal this year, at least. I think I’ll make it my goal this year to use up this whole journal and start on another.

I wonder how far into this project I’ll get before I know all the best ways to reach the children?

I have another book for piano lessons. I pulled that out today, and saw that we’re due for another recital. And, unrelated, I’m sure, my 15 year old son practiced piano without my telling him to today.

Do you journal your children? How has it helped you?

He was doing math at the same time as his three younger siblings this morning, and noticed that I was struggling trying to get two of them to pay attention. The 10 year old was literally staring off into space when her 15 year old brother challenged her. “I’ll bet I can get my math, which is WAY harder than yours done before you can.”

Mind you, we have a math challenge between the three little kids daily to see who can finish math first. The winner gets a sticker. The 10 year old has been complaining lately that her math is way harder than her younger siblings, etc. She couldn’t say that today. She took up the gauntlet, put her head down, and worked until she was done.

Usually, she stops to play with the baby, make lunch, do her hair–anything is more interesting to her than focusing on her studies.

My son conceded defeat in math, his 5th grade sister the victor, but he extended the challenge to the day’s school work. It was effective. Everyone was done with school before 2 o’clock, except for the 3rd grader, who had patiently waited for her lesson after I’d worked with the distracted children.

The 1st grader won the whole challenge, finishing his school before lunch.

We had to pull out the microscope in order for the fifth grader to finish. The microscope and I have a dramatic relationship. I really struggle to see anything with that thing, and it’s been like that since my oldest was a fifth grader, 8 years ago.

Today was the day we were to look at blood. I dreaded it 8 years ago, and I dreaded it today, but I read the directions carefully, and dove in. My fingers are too tough to prick, my child was too scared to prick her fingers, so I tried my wrist. I couldn’t prick that skin either. I eyed my 10 year old with desperation in my eyes. Maybe she would reconsider? When my oldest stepped in and took the needle.

She had been too scared to draw her own blood 8 years ago, and she wanted to make up for it today, she said. Back then, I’d managed to pierce my skin, possibly even my finger? But the only thing we saw under the microscope was the table cloth. (I have no idea. Don’t ask).

The college freshman squeezed a tiny drop of blood on the slide, and I did what the directions instructed, scraped it so it was flat on the slide, then stained it with iodine, then let it dry, and then rinse that mostly off. I think you are supposed to rinse off the excess, not the actual specimen. Any which way, I prepared the slide the best I could, and slipped it under the microscope.

After some adjustments, we were able to make out something! It was iodine colored, and it was a blob of something! Just blurry. I quick grabbed the fifth grader and told her to draw what she saw.

Then I had to take my oldest daughter to work. I left the microscope out so I could check it some more when I returned. I even called home to make sure nobody put away the microscope so I could check it.

I returned, sat down to check the microscope, and I was adjusting it when my first grader told me he’d broken the slide by accident. I looked down at the slide, and sure enough, there was broken glass spilling onto the microscope and table.

So much for all that trouble of preparing the slide.

For a while there, it looked like she did worse the more we crammed. Cramming was not the answer. She needed to know this stuff cold. I started trying to get her to organize the facts in terms of their answers. We would organize the cards in piles: every fact in this pile = 14, etc., for example. Then I made up this elaborate memory game involving the plastic numbers. . .

The elaborate game didn’t do anything but eat up a lot of our time. It did not improve her scores.

This year, I found the cramming method failing again, and I wanted to find something that tapped into her learning style. I’m not sure what that is, but I know that she’s really into doing things with her hands. She likes origami, knitting, crocheting, typing, and drawing. She is also drawn to patterns. This is the child who drew maps and grids with rulers on the blackboard and every piece of paper she could get her hands on when she was in Kindergarten.

So I thought she would appreciate seeing the facts. I represented the facts problems with teddy bear counters, so she could see what they looked like. I tested her again. Same score. Then I had her do her facts with the teddy bears herself. She improved her score by 1 point.

I thought that was a lot of trouble for negligible results, but I was willing to stick with this to see if it really helped. I’m glad I did! She used the teddy bears all last week, and again today, and she has significantly pulled her scores up. Today she scored 24/25 on her fact sheet.

I am sticking with this method until it no longer works. Then it’s onto something new. Maybe we’ll identify a learning style along the way?

It seemed an innocent question enough. I knew someone who’d already started school. And the babies were bored. What harm could it do?

So I set out to start school two weeks ago.

First I had to hunt down all the curriculum. Problem: Imani’s 5th grade math book still hadn’t resurfaced. I had had to reorder. Good news: The new book arrived ca week 2. Problem: neither the answer book nor the test guide had arrived yet. So I gave Imani a 4th grade fact sheet. Fail.

Problem: The leap from Kindergarten to first grade means MUCH MORE busywork. Esteban’s school went from being a cute little play session here and there that was easily made up to an all-day work session, one of us ending in tears. Fail.

Joy reads much better this year, and cheerfully dove into her school work without me. Problem: she still needs me to help her understand assignments and tests. We started the second week reviewing week one. Fail.

Problem: it was still hot out, and we still had another fruit-picking trip to plan, and everyday I was pushing and waiting for school to be done so I could get on with my life, the whole while screaming inside that I was not ready for this. . .

So, we did a week of school, then a Monday. And as I was a hysterical maniac, I decided to stop school until I could mentally and physically prepare for it. I thought that the little children wanted to start school because they were bored. I bought more crafts, and started the origami and needlepoint craft sessions.

I took a personal day last week. That was very restorative.

I’m looking forward to starting afresh on Tuesday. Are you ready for school?