Routine

We’ve been in Greece for just over 6 months now, and we’ve developed a routine. Unfortunately, as I realized yesterday, our current routine does not include time for me to write and post on this blog—which would be why I haven’t blogged for half the time we’ve been here! It’s time for a change in that part of the routine, at least.

Here is how our days typically go: Jeff gets up and starts getting ready. Once he’s at a certain point in his routine, he wakes me up and I start getting ready too. Then Alexa wakes up. Jeff and Alexa share a little time most mornings, getting Alexa started on her morning chores. By the time I’m out of the bathroom and headed downstairs, Jeff has left for work and Alexa is playing. She continues to play while I empty the dishwasher, start the laundry, and get breakfast for both of us.

After breakfast, it’s time for school. We do 2 pages of math, then a lesson from Logic of English. I read aloud a Bible story, a page or two from a poetry book, our history reading, and a literature selection. Sometimes I also read a math story, a science book, or a health book. Sometimes Alexa reads to me from her reader. Sometimes school is done at that point. Sometimes we do another lesson in one or more of our weekly (or less-than-weekly, as the case may be) subjects: art, music, science, geography, and health. We try to go for a walk after school most days, though we’ll frequently do it in between subjects instead of after.

After school—or sometimes, after I read but before our less-than-daily lesson—it’s lunchtime. After lunch, Alexa goes to her room to “rest” (in reality, play) for two hours. I can’t compromise on that time; I need it too much for my own sanity. We call it Alexa’s rest time, but it’s really Mama’s quiet time. I use that time to read my Bible, do housework, get dinner started … whatever I need to get done that I have not yet gotten done that day. I’m hoping to start using some of that time to blog again. When Lexa comes back out of her room, usually between 3 and 4pm, we finish any remaining school subjects—today she’s been begging for an art lesson, so we’ll do that—and then she plays, on her own if I still have my own work to do, or with me if I don’t have something else I need to do.

This play time continues until Jeff gets home from work. Dinner usually is ready when he gets home, so we eat, then he gets Lexa ready for bed while I clean up the kitchen. Usually she’s in bed sometime between 8 and 9pm. Depending on what time it is, Jeff and I may have an hour or so together before I need to start getting ready for bed myself.

There are some variations to the routine. Sometimes Alexa plays with one of the neighbor kids instead of me in the evening, or we walk to a neighborhood park where she can play with other kids. Every two weeks, Alexa and I meet up with some other ladies and their kids for a field trip to a museum or archaeological site. Once a week, we leave home right after we finish English so we can walk to our local laiki (farmers market) to buy fresh vegetables and fruit. We often walk down to the kiosk near our house to buy milk and yogurt. We occasionally walk all the way to the supermarket for more substantial groceries, but more often either Jeff or I will go on the weekends, because it’s an uphill walk home from the supermarket and there’s no parking to speak of there. If there’s not much to buy, Jeff often volunteers to walk there; if there’s a bit more, he’ll drive me there and then drive around the block while I shop. Every month or so, we drive to the butcher and stock our freezer full of meat so we don’t have to go every week.

Our lives have settled into a predictable routine. We live in Greece, but our lives aren’t so very different from what they would be in the United States. There are more places for good field trips here, but there’s no homeschool co-op. We most likely wouldn’t have a farmers market within walking distance in the U.S., but we could drive to one, or buy produce in the supermarket that would be comparable to what we can get at the laiki here. The supermarket where we’d buy our groceries in America would have a parking lot, so I’d drive there during the week rather than having Jeff drive me or go without me. But for the most part, our lives here are very similar to what our lives would be in America.

Maybe that’s why I haven’t felt as inspired to blog lately—usually I blog about the things that are different, the things I need to process or figure out, the things I think people in the United States would find interesting. I’m not quite sure how to blog about regular life, when that regular life doesn’t feel as exotic to me as it did back when we lived in Egypt or Cambodia. But I do need to write, for my own sanity, for my own memory, for my own outlet.

So that’s my goal now—to write more often. How often will that be? I’m not sure. Once a week? Once every two weeks? Once a month? Whatever it is, I’m going to try at a bare minimum to make it more often than I’ve been doing … so maybe I’ll see you in two and a half months!

Homeschool Update: Kindergarten Curriculum

I never did finish the series I started last winter about our kindergarten curriculum choices—and what I did finish … well, some of our choices changed over the summer. Consider this post your quick(-ish) and dirty summary of what we’re actually using for Alexa’s kindergarten year, and how we’re doing with it so far.

English: Logic of English

For us to be just starting kindergarten, we have tried way too many phonics programs. In preK, we used Sonlight’s kindergarten language arts curriculum, which incorporates Get Ready/Get Set/Go for the Code, but neither of us liked it at all; Alexa already knew too much, and we found it boring. We started The Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching Reading, and I liked it ok … except for the fact that Alexa quickly came to despise it and cried every time I brought out the book. We used Reading Eggs, which Alexa enjoyed overall, but she had some problems with it because it’s a web-based teaching game, and the controls often were quirky.

This spring, I came across several reviews of Logic of English (LOE). I loved what I saw of it online, and once we saw it at the convention, Jeff agreed. We bought the set of Foundations A and B, to be followed later by Foundations C and D before moving on to Essentials (assuming we stick with LOE once we’re past basic phonics and ready for grammar). The Foundations course is for students aged 4-7, who haven’t learned to read or write yet. It starts before what I always had assumed was the beginning—teaching students to listen for and produce different types of sounds (voiced and unvoiced sounds, for example) before moving on to phonograms, and teaching students to write different handwriting strokes before moving on to writing letters. It’s a very structured and logical approach that appeals to me, and Alexa is doing very well with it. Almost 7 weeks in, she’s reading, writing, and spelling CVC words composed of the letters we’ve studied. She’s confident in her ability to learn to read, which is a vast improvement for her, and her handwriting is improving. She hasn’t even noticed that we didn’t continue with Handwriting Without Tears, which I half expected to buy in addition to LOE because she loved it so much last year. I have no complaints at all about LOE Foundations; it’s the perfect fit for Alexa right now as she learns to read, write, and spell.

Math: Math-U-See

I know, I know, I wrote a whole blog post last spring about the math curriculum we’d chosen, and it wasn’t Math-U-See (MUS). We do still plan to switch to Singapore in first grade, but we decided that MUS is a better fit for kindergarten. As I was reading on some homeschooling forums last spring, I discovered that many parents were disappointed with Singapore’s kindergarten math programs, despite their love of Singapore for grades 1 and above. Several of them reported that MUS Primer level is stronger than Singapore’s kindergarten options at teaching fundamental math concepts such as place value and useful math topics such as telling time. Jeff and I agreed to look at both MUS and Singapore in person at the homeschool convention and make our decision there. I think it took us about 5 minutes to realize that MUS, while not the program we want to use long-term, is exactly what we need for kindergarten.

Again, it was a good choice. Alexa enjoys math—even on those days when she protests getting started, she almost always enjoys it. It started out as review, counting from 0 to 9, then moved into place value. Alexa seems to have a good grasp now of, not just how to count, but of what numbers actually mean: she understands that “10” is actually a set of 10 units; “13” is one 10 and 3 units; “156” is one 100 (which is a set of ten 10s), five 10s, and 6 units. A nice side effect of the focus on place value and how the word “sixty” can be thought of as a shortened form of “six-tens” is that her confusion on some numbers has disappeared—she no longer asks what comes after 59, because she knows that after five 10s and 9 units comes six 10s, which is sixty.

Social Studies: Tapestry of Grace, Evan-Moor Beginning Geography, and Stuff I Add In

Our state of residence lists “Social Studies” as a required subject for homeschool, and it’s a subject that is commonly taught to kindergarteners, so that’s how I listed it here. However, we don’t do your typical social studies. We do history, geography, and Christian studies.

For history, we’re using Tapestry of Grace (TOG), supplemented with The Story of the World. TOG is a unit study that incorporates history, literature, geography, and Bible/worldview, with elements of writing and fine arts. It takes us through history mostly-chronologically (it separates it out by geographical location a bit more than chronological purists do), using the 4-year cycle promoted in classical education. The beauty of this curriculum is that you reuse it every 4 years; it includes assignments for 4 different age/learning levels, so you buy the curriculum once but use grade-appropriate books each time to teach to a different level of understanding. There are 4 years’ worth of curriculum to buy, and after that, you just need the books. We’re studying ancient history now in kindergarten but will revisit it in 4^th, 8^th, and 12^th grades (unless we take a year off to study something else, since we’re starting a year earlier than usual, in K instead of 1^st).

This time through the cycle, we’re more interested in the stories of history than in exactly when or why things happened. We hit on the things that are most likely to interest a child: pyramids, mummies, the Great Wall of China. We’re just starting a unit on ancient America. After that, we’ll probably take a brief break from history while we wait for more books to arrive (Amazon is experiencing shipping delays to DPO boxes right now) and do a unit study on Christmas traditions around the world. Then we’ll spend several weeks on ancient Greece before finishing up with ancient Rome in the spring. We’re enjoying TOG. I’m not using it to its fullest this year, but I’m definitely using it as a roadmap and a source of recommended books. We’re supplementing with The Story of the World and its activity guide, as well as the Usborne Encyclopedia of World History, but TOG is definitely our primary history curriculum.

For geography, TOG is more of a supplement. Our primary curriculum is Evan-Moor Beginning Geography, a workbook for students in grades K-2. It starts with the very basics: What is a map? Then we learned about compass roses, and now we’re learning about map symbols and keys. We’ll eventually move on to landforms and other traditional geography subjects, but I decided that basic map skills are foundational. We do own a lovely globe, and Alexa loves to look at it and see where we’ve lived, where our extended family lives, and where our history studies took place, but her appreciation of it is increasing as she learns about maps. Alexa enjoys geography, both the workbook and the globe. If things continue as they have been, I expect that we’ll use TOG’s geography assignments next year, after we’ve laid the foundation with Beginning Geography.

One aspect of geography that classical educators often focus on in kindergarten is cultural geography—the study of the world’s cultures, rather than its physical geography. We aren’t doing a lot of that this year. However, we are incorporating a worldview/Biblical/Christian studies element into our homeschool. TOG is a primary curriculum for this, as it presents world history in the context of the Bible. (I reverse the emphasis a bit, presenting the Bible in the context of world history instead, but it’s a subtle difference.) I also will be supplementing with stories of Christianity around the world. For example, this December, we will be studying how Christmas is celebrated in various countries. We’ll study the historical Saint Nicholas, as well as the various traditions that grew up around him. As we approach dates that were important in the lives of famous historical Christians, we’ll read about some of them as well. We may also do some brief studies of Christian holidays that are celebrated in the Orthodox tradition but not necessarily in our Protestant tradition.

Literature: A Monster of My Own Making (Pulled from Several Booklists)

TOG includes literature assignments that correspond with the historical time and location we’re studying. However, lots of them are too advanced for Alexa, and some of them simply aren’t as engaging as I prefer. At this age, I want Alexa to learn to love books, not simply to read a story set in ancient Egypt because we’re studying ancient Egypt. Sometimes we read the TOG-suggested books. Sometimes we read a book about a similar topic, but that I think Alexa will enjoy more. Sometimes I choose a book from Sonlight’s kindergarten package instead. Sometimes I choose some completely unrelated piece of literature, often mentioned on a blog or homeschool forum, simply because I think she’ll like it. Sometimes we read poetry instead of stories. She usually enjoys our literature selections, though her favorites so far are some that I pulled from the Sonlight list: James Herriott’s Treasury for Children and The Story About Ping.

Science: Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding, with Supplementation

For science, our primary curriculum is Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding (BFSU). This curriculum requires every bit as much preparation as I feared when I wrote about it last year, but it’s worth it. It presents advanced scientific topics in a way that is accessible even to 5-year-olds, with guided discussions, demonstrations, and recommended book lists. However, I must admit that I find myself skipping science more often than almost any other subject because it does require so much preparation on my part. Not to worry, though, we still do plenty of science, even when we skip BFSU: Alexa is a little animal-lover, and we have several beginning Usborne books about different animals. We’ve been reading these books a lot, especially since we received a fresh infusion a few days ago. We started with just Dogs and Cats, but now we’re up to Tigers, Horses and Ponies, Wolves, Bears, and a few other titles I don’t recall. She can’t get enough of those books. I’m determined to get to BFSU more regularly, though. It’s a great curriculum that will give her a solid foundation, as soon as I get around to doing it. I’m sure we’ll continue to read about animals every day, too, though.

Health: Horizons

For health, we’re mostly using the curriculum published by Horizons. It requires a little modification, as it’s written for a classroom setting, but so far, we’re doing well with it. We don’t love it, and we don’t hate it. We just do it, sometimes enthusiastically, sometimes matter-of-factly, and usually without protest. We’re also supplementing a little with age-appropriate books on manners, personal safety, and sex ed.

 Fine Arts: ARTistic Pursuits and Calvert’s Discoveries in Music

Art and music are two subjects that Alexa would do gladly, any day, any time, multiple times a day. We’re using the preschool level of ARTistic Pursuits, since she hadn’t done much in the way of art and since there are only three books labeled for K-3 (so we’d need to fill in a year if we started Book 1 in K). Alexa seems to enjoy these lessons. We look at a picture and discuss it, then do a related project. We’ve only done three lessons so far, but no worries, there are only 20-some lessons. We can skip a few weeks and still finish the book by the end of a 36-week school year. Even though we’ve done only three formal art lessons, though, Alexa has done an art project every week—she made a serpent-headed throwing spear one week in history, and she drew pictures of biological/natural-nonliving/manmade things one week in science, and she drew pictures of emotions one week in health, and … you get the idea.

Alexa gets most excited, though, about her music lessons. The set from Calvert came with a DVD (each lesson is about 10 minutes), an instructor’s manual with ideas for enrichment and deeper study, and three musical instruments: a lap harp, a triangle, and a flutophone. I think it was playing the instruments that got Alexa hooked on this subject. I allow her to choose one instrument to play after each lesson. Even without the incentive of playing an instrument, though, she loves the DVD lessons. I don’t do many of the enrichment activities, as I think the video introduction is enough in kindergarten, but I should be able to use this curriculum again over the next few years, doing a little more each time, possibly buying some CDs recommended in the teacher’s guide. By the time she outgrows Discoveries in Music, she’ll be old enough for the other wonderful music resources that are available. Based on her love of this curriculum and some comments she made after learning about “the String Family,” we considered looking into violin lessons for her. However, she made it clear that she thought playing the violin would be easy (“you just get a stick and rub it across the strings”), and she wasn’t willing to put in actual work to learn to play well, so I think we’re going to wait a while longer and see if she’s still interested.

P.E.: Family Time Fitness and Lots of Walks

Physical education is the most neglected subject in our homeschool, much to my chagrin. I know it’s important, but we just don’t get to it that often. We bought a subscription to Family Time Fitness, which offers downloadable lessons at a variety of levels. We’re downloading them, but we’re not doing them as often as we should. We do, however, walk down to the kiosk or to the post office a couple of times a week … that’s nowhere near enough. We’ll do better.

There you have it, our kindergarten homeschool. Overall, it’s going very well. I need to be more consistent in doing science and physical education, but I’m happy with our progress in all the other subjects. Alexa is progressing nicely with her core subjects (reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic). She’s developing an interest in history and literature. She truly loves art and music. I may not do BFSU consistently yet, but she remembers what I do teach her, and she can recite those animal books after only a couple of readings. So far, so good … I’m excited to see what the rest of the academic year holds for us.

Settling In

We’ve been in Greece now for around 3 weeks, and I think we’re settling in nicely. Jeff has been busy at work. He’s grateful that he has some overlap with the person he's replacing so that he can get up to speed without quite so much pressure.

Alexa and I are doing well. I like our housing, though it has its challenges as always. We estimate that it’s about the same size as our house in Kosovo, but it has a larger number of smaller rooms, and some of the design features make it not quite ideal. For example, there’s no good place in the living room for the TV because of the placement of doors, windows, and a fireplace, so we think we’re going to need to angle it into a corner that will still be a little tight. We’re also lacking wall space that would be suitable for hanging our art pieces, due to windows, doors, tall furniture, and a “special finish” that we aren’t allowed to disturb on the wall above the fireplace. It’s an interesting challenge to say the least, but we’ll figure it out. I’m planning to do a blog post about the house hopefully before too long, but unlike at previous posts, I want to wait until our things are here and set up so that the pictures will show the house as we’ll be living in it rather than as it is before we make it ours.

Our two furry family members have rejoined us. One week ago, Jeff flew back up to Prishtina, where Cleo and Isis had spent the summer with friends and our car had spent the summer in a friend’s driveway. Jeff left Athens on Friday night, overnighted in Istanbul, arrived in Prishtina Saturday morning, and was on the road with the car, the cats, and their stuff by noon. He arrived here around 9 o’clock that night. The cats seem to have adjusted pretty well to being back with us, and we’re happy to have our little family all together again.

Alexa and I each have found a friend. Our next door neighbor grew up in the same state as me, and she has a 4-year-old daughter. The mom has been an invaluable resource for me, taking me to a huge laikey (farmer’s market) and to the supermarket, in addition just to being a fun person to be around. Alexa bonded with the daughter the first time they met—even though Alexa called her simply “the little girl” for the first couple of days until her name stuck—and they enjoy playing together as often as they get the chance. Best of all: they’ve only been here for a couple of months longer than us, so unless something unexpected happens, they’ll be here until just a couple of months before we leave.

I’m slowly figuring out how to cook in Greece. The laikeys are wonderful, with fresh fruits and vegetables. It looks like I’ll finally learn what’s in season when, as options appear and disappear over the year. My neighbor took me to an awesome butcher shop where I was able to stock up on all the beef, chicken, and pork we’ll need for perhaps the next month (we have a good freezer). I still need to explore the supermarkets a bit more—I’ve only been to two, and in neither case did I really have time to go slowly and look at exactly what’s available; I was on a mission each time to get what I needed and get back by a certain time. It does seem, however, that there should be plenty of options here. Once all my kitchen stuff arrives, I should be able to put together good, healthy, familiar meals. Until then, I’m able to feed the family basic meals involving meat, vegetables, and minimal seasonings … and there is a wonderful Android app called “ClickDelivery” that enables us to see English menus and order a huge variety of delicious food to be delivered to our door. Our wallet and waistlines will appreciate the arrival of my slow cooker, though.

Speaking of, we’re hopeful that our stuff will arrive within the next couple of weeks. There were some snafus on the part of the shipping company in Kosovo that delayed our shipment, but those seem to have been worked out now. It has been reaffirmed that they cannot simply put the uncrated boxes in the truck, drive it down, and contract on their own with a company here to deliver those boxes—the boxes accordingly have been placed in lift vans, which will be put on the truck, driven down, and then delivered by a company that’s actually been approved by our security people. Yeah, we're silly like that ... we like to vet the people who have access to our stuff ...

We were able to start school at approximately the same time the international schools here started, though we didn’t get to start all subjects the same week. We had to wait for most of our curriculum to arrive—we have the history curriculum in digital format on the laptop, and we’d ordered history, geography, and literature books to arrive around the same time we did, so we’re on week 3 of our 36-week planned year for History, Geography, Literature, and Bible. We’re on week 2 of Art and Music, and we’re just starting Health, Science, Math, and Language Arts this week. The art and music curricula arrived at the same time as the other books we’d ordered, but I needed to review them a little, and I also didn’t want to add too much at once. Our remaining materials just arrived a few days ago, as we’d purchased them in the States but left them with friends to mail to us here—they wouldn’t fit in our suitcases.

School is going fairly well so far. Alexa is enjoying my literature selections—instead of following any particular curriculum for that, I’m pulling books from multiple reading lists. So far, she has not wanted to read any history books until we got started, and then she was interested. The science books, on the other hand, are a source of great fascination for her, especially the ones about animals. We haven’t officially started our curriculum yet, but that hasn’t stopped us from reading about 10 of our science books already. In addition to science, Alexa has been excited about music and art. She seems to like the math and language arts curricula we’re using, too, although that may be because they’re beginning at a level that’s very basic review for her. I’m hopeful that she’ll keep enjoying them once we hit the new material. I’ll try, in a few more weeks, to do a more comprehensive post about our curriculum choices for this year and how they’re going. I realize that I never did get around to finishing my series about kindergarten curriculum last year.

We're enjoying life in Greece so far. If I can find a way to take language classes (childcare is an issue), I'll enjoy it even more. We're looking forward to connecting with another homeschooling family once they return from vacation later this month. We also have plans to start visiting churches soon. We're settling in, figuring things out, and making connections. We're going to have a good three years here.

Catching Up

We are almost 5 months into 2015 now … and I haven’t written a single blog post this year. Pathetic, I know. Rather than explaining and justifying and apologizing, let’s just catch up, shall we?

January started off with a bang—we’re in Kosovo: the New Year is celebrated with countless not-so-mini family fireworks displays. I continued enjoying our last true winter for the next few years, while Jeff continued looking forward to its end. (I can’t blame him; he has to drive in the snow and ice, whereas I stay home and enjoy the winter wonderland.)

Toward the end of January, we finally made it out to Gadime Cave, not too far from Prishtina. The Community Liaison Office organized a trip. We decided not to go with the large group—caves plus large groups equals lots of echoing noise, which would not be a great introduction to caves for our sensitive girl—but we did take advantage of the reservation to go a little early with a smaller group. It can be difficult at times to know when the cave will be open, so this opportunity was not to be missed. It was a great morning! The caves were much larger than we anticipated, and Alexa loved exploring them. She didn’t even notice that she also was learning, as she asked question after question about the cave, its features, and the life it contains. I found myself wishing I had an age-appropriate book about caves that we could have read before or after the trip. I’m hoping to correct that oversight and then find another fun cave to explore with her within the next few months.

We spent most of February in the United States. We traveled to Washington, DC, for some appointments and to see some friends. Unfortunately, we only saw about half of the friends we wanted to see—as we landed, my ears grew pillows where my ear drums should be; the next morning, my ears were better but my sinuses were awful, and it only got worse from there. I became so congested that my entire face hurt, even my teeth! After a week, I gave in and went to an urgent care doctor, because I was afraid of what would happen if I flew again 10 days later without treatment. I was diagnosed with a sinus infection and a double ear infection. The antibiotics started helping immediately, so I felt much better for the rest of the trip, but we’d already missed out on visits with a few friends. We hope to see those friends this summer instead.

We arrived back in Kosovo on schedule in late February, but a week later, Alexa and I were back on a plane. There was a medical situation back home with a close family member, and my help was needed. Jeff was needed at work, especially since he’d just returned, so he remained in Kosovo. I am thankful that the medical situation was not as bad as it easily could have been, and my family member seems to have made almost a full recovery. Alexa and I spent our time in the United States helping with everyday tasks and transportation, but we also were able to do fun “America” things like celebrate my sister-in-law’s RN pinning, go to my niece’s football soccer games, and entertain random passersby with Alexa’s TCK questions and comments (for example, “Does everybody in America know the name of that store is Wal-Mart?” and “Why is there more than one McDonald’s?”). We returned to Kosovo just after Jeff’s birthday, at the end of March.

After our second return to Kosovo this year, I realized just how close we are to the end of our time here. I spent a few days getting over jet lag, then dove in and finally started preparing for packout. So far, we’ve rid ourselves of almost all of Alexa’s baby clothes, most of our “we severely overestimated how much Kleenex we’d use” consumables, and several bags of my ill-fitting or unflattering clothes. We’ve sold the elliptical machine for which we expect to have no room in Greece, and we’ve made arrangements to sell our second vehicle once we can get the paperwork in order. I’ve organized several full drawers of small items into labelled gallon-sized Ziploc bags. Now I need to start focusing heavily on my list-making, which has been sadly neglected due to all the travel earlier this year. We’re leaving in less than a month, and I’ve never been so far behind on my preparations.

At some point during and between all these other activities, we completed the Sonlight P4/5 preK curriculum. We ended up dropping a couple of workbooks that were too advanced for Alexa at the time, and there’s still one book in which she has shown no interest whatsoever. I left that book in South Carolina back in March, assuming we could try it again this summer and see if she’s interested then. She’s still working through her Mathematical Reasoning workbook, which she does not do every day—but when she does do it, she wants to keep going and often does 10 or more pages! That is quite the change from when I required her to do it daily, when she resisted and often did no more than 2 pages. We intend to continue working through this book over the summer until it’s done, as well as continuing to “play” Reading Eggs and Math Seeds. I’ll have to do another post about our plans for homeschool next year, as I never finished that series, and we’ve changed our plans for language arts. 

That’s for another time, though.

Right now I have some lists to make.