What We Are Not Sorry to Leave: No Child Left Behind

My daughter entering her new school in Canada

When educational policy turns teachers into taskmasters, no one wins.  Not the students, who are forced to spend most of their time on practicing what is going to be on the test.  Nor is teaching under the current policy in the U.S. that fulfilling for teachers, who are constrained to improve student test performance, rather than trusted to find ways to tailor their time in the classroom to engage the minds of their students.

So we are thankful to be away from those constraints, and have hopes for greater educational freedom in our new elementary school.  Children are eager to learn new things.   Most teachers genuinely want to help their students learn.  Our kids were blessed to have some excellent teachers in the U.S.  However, No Child Left Behind still seemed to hinder a love of learning among students, and it has driven many teachers to leave their profession after a few years or retire early.  While we wish that policy makers would GET A CLUE AND REPEAL NCLB, in the mean time our children and their teachers have been losing out on the best parts of education.  So our family is not sorry at all to be rebooting our children's school experience in Canada.

Every school has some shortcomings, but fewer top-down constraints means more room for learning and growth. And learning, not test scores, is what truly counts, right?  Meanwhile, K-12 education in the U.S. is pushing a generation of children to jump through hoops rather than fostering children's natural ability to learn and discover.  What our world needs are young adults who are truly educated, with the ability to think critically and continue to learn and innovate on their own.  We as parents are committed to working with our children and their teachers to make that more possible.  And without the shackles of NCLB up here, we believe our prospects are much better.

For families who are still in the U.S., the best thing to do is to urge policymakers to make real changes. Especially in an election year, let politicians know loudly and clearly that dissatisfied parents, teachers and children should not have to endure NCLB any longer.

Crafts from Family Nature Night

For weeks, my daughters have been looking forward to their first Family Nature Night.   This evening event was sponsored by the area Natural Resources Department and hosted in the gym of our elementary school.

The kids got make:

1. Beeswax candles

2. Fish with backbones

3. Shell and sand bracelets

4. TP roll binoculars

5. Butterfly wings

6. Soybean necklaces  (not pictured since it was our last craft of the night)

My children were jazzed about all the craft and live animal demonstration stations.  There was also a "fossil" dig and a hissing cockroach tractor pull.  Here's one of the racers in action:

Overall the evening was a smashing success.  I only wish they had more hands-on interaction with nature at school on a regular basis.  The focus on achievement tests basically sidelines such pursuits--at least for first and second graders in our local public schools.   Reading, writing, and arithmetic take up most of their school days, with only a few spare minutes for science and social studies.

Bad educational policy notwithstanding, my husband and I still have many opportunities to encourage our children to explore nature on their own, whether we're foraging for berries or interacting with insects in our own backyard.  It's up to us, the parents, to make sure their education is well-rounded and help keep their love of learning alive.

Find other adventurers this week over at Try New Adventures Thursday.

Class Field Trip: Going as a Parent for the First Time

Last fall my husband offered to watch our youngest while I volunteered in our daughter's kindergarten class every other week.  Getting to know her classmates and seeing her teacher and classroom in action has been invaluable.  A few weeks ago,  it was announced they were going on a field trip in May.  I wondered if I should try to go. 

There have been many class field trip opportunities for each of my daughters, especially when they were in preschool.  They've visited apple orchards, pumpkin patches, museums and nature parks.  But since younger siblings weren't allowed on the trips, I had never gone along as a chaperone. Until last Thursday. I decided to step out in faith and sign up to go with them to the farm. 

 

If I went, however, I needed to find someone to watch my son for most of the day.  Thankfully, a kind friend from church was willing and available to take him.  This enabled me to go on my first field trip ever as parent!   And it was a perfect day of sunny skies and adorable kindergarteners and animals.  I am so glad I was there for it all!

Passport Party Activity with International Foods

We celebrated another birthday this month, and I added another twist at the last minute.  One might even call it a theme.  But I'm not usually a theme kind of party thrower, so bear with me.

Since we like to eat Asian foods around here, I thought I would serve some of our favorite internationally inspired dishes.  Plus, since we were expecting a dozen children, we would serve hot dogs frankfurters.

So here was what I came up with for our global tour dinner:

1.  Frankfurters (Germany)
2.  French Bread (France)
3.  Steamed Sticky Rice (Vietnam)
4.  Potstickers / "Jiaozi" (China)
5.  Dried Mango and Pineapple Slices (Thailand)


Not having any veggies was regrettable, but I was trying to keep things simple.

Of course, making a pinata and passports on the same day as the party does not qualify as keeping things simple.  Anyway, here are the passports:

Guests were instructed to eat and sample the different dishes first and then come back to collect "stamps" for their passports.  The stamps we used were obtained from free resources at the LCMS website.  My daughter cut them out.   We provided glue sticks and school glue for the adhesive, though printing the images on sticker paper would be a great time saving option.

Time constraints limited us to six country stamps, which turned out to be plenty.  However, for more stamp opportunities I thought of adding:

• a pinata for Mexico
• some origami shapes for Japan
  
• some South African rooibos tea

This passport activity could be used at a variety of occasions, from an educational meal with family and friends, to a potluck event, or even as part of a geography lesson.

Have you ever sampled cuisines from multiple countries in one meal?  

What was the occasion?

Summer Begins!

School's out!  Summer vacation for my 6-year-old starts today.  While I am looking forward to spending more time with her, managing all those hours together is a daunting challenge.  That's why I was delighted to find some spectacular ideas for "No More Summer Mush Mind " over at How Does She?  Basically, it seems like a morning homeschool plan, which is lovely way for my kids and I to spend the next couple of months.


With our current schooling setup, I think I get the best of both worlds.  Fall, winter and spring, I am partnering with the public school to teach my children; then in the summer months I get to do "funschooling" with my three kids!  Plus we can focus more intentionally on Christian discipleship, starting with the user-friendly summer calendar I mentioned last week.  Now it's time to get my head out of the clouds and actually implement all these ideas!


Here are some of the "field trips" and other fun outings I hope we can attempt this month:


1. Strawberry Picking
We did a spur-of-the-moment outing last year on my other daughter's birthday; we all hope to enjoy an outing to the farm again this year.
 



2.  "The Mammoth Museum" 
Morrill Hall offers free Thursday nights all summer long; my kids had a blast exploring the place last July. 

3.  Jazz in June and/or International Festival
I have always wanted to go to these downtown events but still haven't made it after two summers.  Third time's a charm I hope!

4.  The Farmer's Market
We made it to the market twice already this season; it has become a Saturday morning tradition for us.  Even my 2-year-old son looks forward to going, especially since there are trains.  He adores trains.  I love the personal interactions with the farmers; it reminds me of the daily open-air markets in our neighborhoods when we lived in Asia.

The Reality: Honestly, it's been a tough week.  Fun events and happy feelings are not what will encourage me at the deepest levels.  In order to feed my children spiritual truth, I need to return to the Source of true strength and wisdom.  From my recent study of John, there are so many lessons and insights that I have noticed but not fully applied to life yet.  That is probably my most important summer project. 


Big or small plans, what's on your list this month?

Craft of the Week: Scrap Wood Geoboard

When I realized I had a small supply of scrap wood from a defunct door frame, I took the opportunity to make own own geoboard at home.   While a larger board is nice, the size I made is more portable;  I tossed it in the van as an activity option for our recent road trip to Oklahoma.

For my kids, manipulating the geoboard usually holds their attention for about 10 minutes or so.  When we play with it together, parent and child, they enjoy it even more.  It's fun to create and rearrange all kinds of geometric shapes with those stretchy bands.

I have an additional piece of wood about the same size as the one in the picture; I am contemplating laying a second board next to the current narrow geoboard to create a double-sized version.

Materials Used:

Scrap wood
Nails
Hammer
Rubber bands (we used colored hair bands, but latex rubber bands are best)
Paint, optional

This project idea is linked to Motivate Me Monday at Keeping it Simple and

Teaching My Child to Read: What is the Best Way?

My oldest child was extremely eager to learn how to read before she entered kindergarten.  I had never taught anyone how to read before.  I wasn't sure how.  So, since we were opting to send her to public school, I thought we would leave it to the experts and she would be reading in a couple of months. After all, she knew her alphabet and the sounds of the letters very well.

Every day for the first two months or so, she would come home impatient that she had not learned to read yet. In her kindergarten class they worked on the alphabet and the sounds of the letters so that everyone in the class could first master these.  They also worked on learning to write--a lot.  Each day they would busily trace letters on worksheets and copy words from book titles.  But these activities did not seem to be propelling my daughter toward her goal of learning to read words.  These were pre-literacy tasks for the children who still needed them.  Meanwhile, we tried to encourage my daughter to be patient.  The reading would come.

After the first quarter we started hearing a bit about sight words.  Finally!  Perhaps during these weeks of waiting,  I could have taught my daughter to read.  But I felt I lacked the know-how and that she might be bored if she were suddenly able to read while the many in the class lagged behind.  So we let it be.  Oh, we still read together every day, just like we were told we should and wanted to do anyway.  My daughter was constantly writing words, asking us to spell them.  But at six years old, she was still on the cusp of reading, not quite there yet.

Neither my husband nor I quite remember how we learned to read. My husband is a doctoral student in the field of education, and he has said that from everything he has read, literacy is still, in some ways, a "black box."  No one knows exactly how that threshold of being able to read is crossed.  But after observing the process my daughter went through, he and I are in agreement about some of the practices that might slow down the learning-to-read process.

1. The emphasis on writing.  Based on our experience and knowledge of language education, writing is the most difficult of the four skills to master.  The receptive skills (listening and reading) are easier than productive skills (speaking and writing).  So we think that just like children understand what they hear before they are able to speak, they can be taught to read before they need to write.

2. The approach of sounding it out.   Slowly sounding out the letters is not always the most effective or efficient way to tackle new words.  If children are used to hearing the word, when they try to read it, they can use a variety of clues to say or even guess the word without focusing on each and every letter.

So there.  This is my emerging philosophy of how reading should be taught.  I have much to learn still, and I would love to know what more experienced parents and teachers have to say on the matter.  Perhaps I'll do things a little differently with my second and third child as my knowledge and confidence grow.  Or maybe now that my oldest knows how to read, she'll be able to teach her siblings. I wouldn't be surprised if she did.

Have you taught a child or children to read?  What do you think is the best way for a child to learn how?

This post is linked to the Moms' 30 Minute Blog Challenge at Steady Mom.