Adventures in Mama-Land

Well, we're back in the homeschooling saddle, if only for a few days before I'm heading off on a crazy-stupid two-day gallivant across Europe. The entire month before summer vacation, every Israeli parents' WhatsApp group is on fire with camp registrations and plans to ensure that our beloved sweeties don't have to go more than ten minutes without a “misgeret ,” or framework.  It's mostly for the parents' benefit, so they don’t have to miss work, which I get, but I also believe kids need a break.  I mean, school let out last Friday, and on Sunday morning, most of my kids' friends were off to the various "day camps" run by the schools. That one Shabbos can't have felt like much of a vacation. I was wondering how it would go with summerschooling this year, because NR is getting older and GZ is the same amount of stubborn as always, or perhaps more so with age.  But if these last 3 days are any indication, it's actually going better than in...

  So did I mention we’re homeschooling again? At least for the summer.  Does that make me the kind of wannabe / poseur I hate?  Or an earnest parent trying hard to make something work during weird, transitional times… I’m not sure what the answer is, but I thought I’d share a quick update on how things are going this summer with our “homeschooling / summerschooling” plans.  (It was originally going to be quick – sorry!!) It remains to be seen whether we’re going to do this long-term.  But the truth is, it feels very good.  Very, very good. In some areas, we’re picking up exactly where we left off.  But mostly, things slipped a lot during the year.  The only area in which both kids are further ahead (besides Hebrew!) is math. I had a few clear criteria before we started:

Just in case we needed more reminders that what works for one kid does NOT work for others… with Naomi Rivka, manipulatives were the thing for math.  What she sees when she sees the math frogs is “MATH frogs.” They helped her concretize, see it, feel it; they were great.  With a little creative thinking on my part, these little froggies have illustrated so many things – grouping for addition, arrays for multiplication, sorting by various criteria, patterns, weights, measures, division, and waaaaay more. But with Gavriel Zev, it turns out, not so much. What he sees when he sees the math frogs are the “math FROGS!!!!”  With many insane exclamation marks on the end, because who wouldn’t go nuts when confronted with the sheer madness of about a million shiny colourful plastic frogs?  Oh, yeah, and who cares about the math? Sure, he’ll put up with them for a minute or two, so I can regroup the same seven frogs into five-and-two or six-and-one.  But only if spide...

I was snapping pics of the lapbook to share here (that’ll be my next post) when GZ said, “Take a picture of my work!”  I said, “your Mathematical Reasoning ?”  He said yes.  He loves this book; I’ve written before about how it has saved his math year, and I stand by that. [All school has been suspended around here this week except a) Pesach learning, which is mostly via the lapbook, and b) math, because otherwise, it’ll be another 2 weeks before we get to it, and I don’t like to have that long a break.] As I said before , I was fully prepared to hate this book, and did, in fact, dislike immensely th e one I got for Naomi Rivka (oh well).  You may like it very much, so don’t let my experience with it bias you.  By the way, I noticed when I put in this cover picture that it says Age 4… and yes, Gavriel Zev is 5.  Still – for better or worse, we are homeschoolers and that gives me the flexibility to let him work at his own level, without worrying overly mu...