Happy Mother's Day Eve!

This morning I burst out in a sweat, taking care of laundry, ironing a shirt for a Mother's Day banquet, and cooking a package of bacon to put together a brunch box for Pamela to take to said banquet (Van's gf/cf mini-waffles with syrup and vegan butter, lemon soy yogurt, and bacon). Steve, of course, remarked that, if I did not procrastinate so much . . . then again, David and I spent the evening in Sumter and did not arrive home until 11:45 last night! That's my excuse, and I'm not backing down!

Pamela, my mother and I dressed up somewhat for the banquet. My mother is awesome and it seems like God gave us completely different attributes: I sing and learned to play the piano and recorder; she does not sing and learned to play the harmonica, violin, and accordion. She is an awesome cook and gardener, and I have a black thumb in both venues. She loves to sew and makes the most gorgeous quilts, but sewing makes me cry in frustration. We both knit and crochet, feed the birds, read living books and love the smell of laundry hung outdoors, and we both love the Lord. Her mother was such an awesome woman, that we got her story published in the anthology, My Mom Is My Hero in a chapter called "My Mietze." (In case you don't believe me, my mother spent her childhood escaping bombs in eastern Germany, Russians advancing toward their border, and deathly conditions in a Danish refugee camp during World War II.)



The women of my church put together a wonderful program with the theme of mothers being a light for their children. They decorated all of the tables with oil lamps! The foods was delicious, the music inspiring, and the message a reminder of how much God has taught me since becoming a mother through this journey with autism: the importance of relationships both vertical (with God) and horizontal (with people) which form the shape of a cross, the need to stay in the word and in prayer, referencing God when I feel uncertain, and the joy of friendship with fellow believers (and are surprising hard to find at times).



When we arrived home, Steve surprised me with some lovely presents! If you haven't figured it out already, I avidly watch birds. The latest caper that cracked me up was the brown thrasher taking a bath. After watching it madly splash away, I figured out why they are called thrashers! Later I snapped a shot of a fat mourning dove and an elusive blue jay who is much shyer than I expected and skittish around cameras.






And, what thoughtful gift did Steve buy for Mother's Day?

Well, it wasn't flowers!

It was not chocolate (which is always appreciated) either!

He bought a gorgeous seed tube and a bluebird box! And, yes, I am Snoopy dancing!


My favorite portrait of motherhood is by someone who was never a mother herself: Charlotte Mason.

It is not for nothing that the old painters, however diverse their ideas in other matters, all fixed upon one quality as proper to the pattern Mother. The Madonna, no matter out of whose canvas she looks at you, is always serene. This is a great truth, and we should do well to hang our walls with the Madonnas of all the early Masters if the lesson, taught through the eye, would reach with calming influence to the heart. Is this a hard saying for mothers in these anxious and troubled days? It may be hard, but it is not unsympathetic. If mothers could learn to do for themselves what they do for their children when these are overdone, we should have happier households. Let the mother go out to play! If she would only have courage to let everything go when life becomes too tense, and just take a day, or half a day, out in the fields, or with a favourite book, or in a picture gallery looking long and well at just two or three pictures, or in bed, without the children, life would go on far more happily for both children and parents. The mother would be able to hold herself in 'wise passiveness,' and would not fret her children by continual interference, even of hand or eye––she would let them be. (Volume 3, page 34)

NOW, GO OUT AND PLAY!

Grace in Geometry

Lisa Cadora's blog post on Grace and Learning got me to thinking about David and his checkered past with math. She described the frustrations of teaching herself to crochet a cool, hip accessory and how much more gracious we are with ourselves than with our students. She concludes,

Charlotte Mason said that the only education is self-education. Did she see that grace is necessary for learning, and that we are most graceful with ourselves? If so, maybe it’s not only that we as teachers must create gracious, grace-ful conditions, environments and relationships in which our students can learn, but that we must bring them to be gracious to themselves.

My husband has two engineering master's degrees, and I have one in statistics. For many years, I thought the math gene had skipped my fifteen-year-old, neurotypical son, David. His temperament is very much like that of my father, who has never met a math problem he liked. Teaching David elementary school math frustrated us both. In hindsight, I think I was part of the problem. I think sometimes, if I had shown more grace, we would have shed fewer tears. Fortunately, he finds algebra and geometry a breeze. Was it maturity and a leap in abstract thinking or a more gracious attitude from me?

I think grace in learning might be related to masterly inactivity (wise letting alone). Elements of masterly inactivity include "authority, good humor, confidence, both self-confidence and confidence in the children," which I lacked because I assumed David would always struggle with math like my father. I stopped looking him as a unique person and saw him as a mirror image of my father because they have so many personality traits in common.

Charlotte Mason believed that we should be gracious enough to let children take personal initiative in their work (page 37-38):

In their work, too, we are too apt to interfere with children. We all know the delight with which any scope for personal initiative is hailed, the pleasure children take in doing anything which they may do their own way; anything, in fact, which allows room for skill of hand, play of fancy, or development of thought. With our present theories of education it seems that we cannot give much scope for personal initiative. There is so much task-work to be done, so many things that must be, not learned, but learned about, that it is only now and then a child gets the chance to produce himself in his work. But let us use such opportunities as come in our way.

On the flip side of this coin, we hurt our children by letting them get so frustrated that they develop the habit of tears. I think we also must keep in mind scaffolding, being alert when to step in and support the child and when to step out a la masterly inactivity. The geometry problem above is a great example. David had to figure out the measurement of each angle in the problem, based upon the diagram and information provided. He had to apply the definitions of bisected angles and right angles, the relationship between vertical and supplementary angles, and the sum of interior angles for triangles (180 degrees) and quadrilaterals (360 degrees). What made this problem difficult is that one wrongly calculated angle would create a domino effect of errors.

Applying masterly inactivity, I left David to his own devices. He worked his way through the calculations and figured out the angles for about five shapes before coming to me because the problem stopped making sense. Then, I switched to scaffolding and congratulated him for recognizing when he was stuck. I studied his work and noticed an error. I erased all of the mistakes and highlighted what was correct, and he went back to work. He went back and forth with me several times, getting frustrated at himself for his errors. Rather than joining him in his vent, I told him about Lisa's blog post about giving yourself grace when making mistakes. I even emailed it to him later in the day. I reassured him that the problem really was challenging and got him back on track.

In the last round, he made another little mistake and I decided to put all of the formulas into a spreadsheet to make sure I was on the right track, too. As I built the spreadsheet, I realized how complicated the problem was. At that point, I was so thankful to have read Lisa's post that morning and let grace win the day.

Pamela's Poem Marathon

I thought I was too tired to blog today, but then Pamela goes and ruins it for me by doing something wonderful. She was upstairs and I called her to come down, so we could finish reading. She sneaked off to the porch very mysteriously while I got out the books. I walked over to her, sitting in a rocking chair, writing intently. Without my asking a thing, Pamela looks up and announces, "I'm doing a poem marathon." I had no idea what a poem marathon was. After she finished, I learned that a poem marathon is copying all the poems you learned last year on one sheet of paper. She had gone through the trouble of going through her language art's folder from 2006-2007 to find all of her copywork sheets! She wrote the following ten poems for her celebration:

"Growing Up" by A. A. Milne
"Daffodowndilly" by A. A. Milne
"The End" by A. A. Milne
"Cradle Song" by Alfred Lord Tennyson
"Pirate Story" by Robert Louis Stevenson
City by Langston Hughes
"Big" by Dorothy Aldis
"Two Friends" by Nikki Giovanni
Acclamation
Psalm 117

By the way, we started The Story of the Trapp Family Singers today, and Pamela is thrilled for she adores The Sound of Music. We came across an interesting word combination that reminds me of how the brain learns. At the 2006 ChildLightUSA Conference, Dr. Carroll Smith said something that has stuck with me. For knowledge to be stored into long-term memory, the child must connect it to previously learned knowledge. Clearly, Pamela will be connecting new knowledge about Maria von Trapp to what she knows from the musical. While whistling and running up the stairs were familiar troublesome behaviors, Pamela narrated that Maria slid down the stairs [bannister] and jumped over chimneys on the roof! Near the end of the passage, Maria talked about carrying a guitar and leather satchel. Up until a month ago, the words leather and satchel meant very little to Pamela. We have learned a great deal about the making and uses of leather from The Brendan Voyage and the meaning of satchel because of a chapter by that name in The Winged Watchman. To take the whole thing full circle back to the poem marathon, we came across the word afloat when Tim got his leather boat, The Brendan, afloat for the first time and both of our minds leaped to "The Pirate Story." This is why we have not done formal vocabulary lessons.

For a better view of the poem marathon, click the pictures.