Onto something Big!

"Mama! Mama! They're the same!" He called.
"What? What are the same?" I came into the room where he was holding this little board book, Numbers by Candlewick Press. We picked it up at the library for the animal pictures Ezra was so into last week.
"They're the same as my book. My alphabet book."
Gibbie was excited. He couldn't believe it. He pointed to the letters, turned sideways and
running down the side of the cover.
Yup. I tried to be nonchalant. These are the letters that make up all the words in the books we read.
I opened the Red Letter Alphabet Book and we found each of the lower case letters in the title of Numbers in our cherished Alphabet Book.
I don't normally like Alphabet books much. They are not generally fun to read. We like stories and poems better. But this book is special. The letters are lowercase, like most of the letters we read in stories. The letters are flocked and printed very large, enticing us to run our fingers over them, tracing the path each one makes. The example words use the phonetic sounds of the letters, which only makes sense, but, maddeningly lots of alphabet books don't do.
This was a spontaneous, Eureka! moment for Gibbie--a milestone on his path to literacy. I hope I can share his enthusiasm in these moments without getting all boringly didactic on him. Without being so excited that I take over and make it my moment to teach, dulling the simple sincere pleasure of discovery.
We have these alphabet and number books and a few others that we read when requested, but I don't think that at one and two and three years we need to go out of our way to teach this. Our enthusiasm can detract from the pleasing puzzle that is reading. Kind of like how once when my sister asked Paul and I for our opinion on something. After we stopped talking twenty minutes later she said, "Wow. Next time I want a long lecture on something, I'll ask you guys."
As Gibbie nears the boundaries of school-agedness, I'm really chewing on some different educational philosophies. I read Grace Llewellyn's The Teenage Liberation Handbook in college and it changed my life. I took fully took the reins of my own education for the first time, and it was great! Since leaving educational institutions, I find I'm blossoming. Reading more than ever. Thinking hard, doing, processing with more depth than I did in school.
But I do wonder if I could do so if it weren't for all the time I spent in schools? If it weren't for this broad base of formal classes, all my gifted and talented, international baccalaureate, liberal arts, bachelor of arts hocus pocus. The question is somewhat moot as my time in formal classrooms is largely over anyway, but it's not moot for these kids. The big idea in the Liberation Handbook is that real learning happens best in real life. I don't know that we're going to become head-over-heels unschoolers, but it is promising to see how spontaneously and joyfully Gibbie discovers the world. How he makes this intellectual leap that is often laborious when taught from the top down.

I don't give his little self enough credit. Thank God that we can live a life that is so richly, luxuriantly full of books. It needn't surprise me that if he is as surrounded by the written word as much as the spoken word, he just might come to decode it almost as naturally.
Anyhow, I love these Montessori number and letter books. They are really beautiful in this plain, spare way. The Blue Number Counting Book is my favorite. I just can't resist touching each little shape on every page as I count it. Nothing could be more natural.

Knowing the plants

It was a great moment for me when Gibbie, seeing staghorn sumac with it's drying flower clusters pointing up all over, said, "hey, that looks like fruit!" What kind of fruit, we asked? And he said, "Sumac!" I was particularly proud because the sumac flowers we have gathered looked very different from these, because these had all lost their leaves. Yup, we've been making a tasty juice from the flower clusters, and he's even developed an appreciation for licking the sour fuzzy flowers.
I do hope the kids grow up knowing how to read the land and plants. In the above photo, you can see dozens of different plants. I don't so much care if he knows all their names (I sure don't!) but I'd like to teach him, and learn together, and I'm sure eventually learn from him, all about them. Know how to make baskets from the bark of the white trees, as he calls them. Know how to eat the different parts of the milkweed plant during different seasons. We can dig the wild parsnip, and look forward to the raspberry and blackberry seasons in their turns. We will look around for the jewelweed when we get a nettle's sting and pop the seeds out at each other in the late summer when the pods are spring-loaded.
Here Gibbie is enjoying the tactile beauty of the ready milkweed seeds. Soon he will scatter them in the breeze, as any happy person will.

Fall is a great time for gathering basket supplies; we collected willow and cattail. They are drying on the porch, if one can call it drying with all this rain! I look forward to weaving them up into beautiful and useful things when we are stuck inside later in the year. That's the great beauty of this world; In the plants, seemingly dying back in the fall, are the stores for new life, promises of fresh vigor and growth next year, and abundant material for wild and artisinal beauty. This world is so made that in a deeper sense than I can grasp, dead things are always and everywhere coming to life, greater and better than before they fell. I am thinking of the food we eat, the seeds we sow, the troubled lives we live, and Christ himself.

The very first day of school

A few weeks ago Gibbie had his very first day of school. Ever. We have found a school we are excited about and think will be a really good match for our kids and our family. It's north of us a ways; actually it's farther away from us than anything we regularly do, and isn't accessible to us by bus. That was a real bummer and we almost didn't even consider it just because of that. But then we visited, and they won our hearts.

The school is called Hand in Hand. It's not a conventional school at all, but a new educational model here in Minnesota, they call it a christian montessori homeschooling academy. Gibbie's program is just one short morning a week. He is, after all, only two. We are in the Family Preschool, which is an early childhood family education program. This means it is for very young children and there is a component for parents and children together in the classroom as well as a time when the parents leave the children in the classroom and go to a separate parent education session. We visited last year and Gibbie loved it. ("I'm gonna go to Hand-a-Hand-a-Hand. That's my school.) Then we visited this summer and Paul loved it too. Normally Paul works on the morning of school, but we are hoping he will be able to semi-regularly take the day off so he can come to Hand in Hand too.
Some details about Gibbie's class at Hand in Hand:
-There are nine children in his class
-His teachers are "Mrs. Ronnie" and "Miss Greta" and we like them.
-He shakes hands with them every day when we arrive.
-We are excited about getting to know the other parents. They are a neat group of people.
-His classroom has windows outside.
-He has his own cubby.
-He has his own bag of musical instruments. (He picked the yellow bag. The music program at Hand in Hand is excellent! We all love it. There will be a big holiday music program to look forward to.)
-Ezra has a class also; there is a special nursery for him, and a music class for him. (So far, we haven't left him there yet and he has enjoyed staying with Mama and Gibbie, and participating as much as he can in Gibbie's music class!)
-His classroom has a lovely reading corner.
-In class, he can help himself to water anytime he wants.

This is Gibbie in his new school clothes. He has a special Hand In Hand sweater also but we haven't used it yet, as it's not been cold enough to need it. He wears a collared shirt in white, blue, or red, with navy blue or khaki pants, and can't wear sneakers, but real nice school shoes.
He is also sporting a great belt we got at a nice little store on Randolph Avenue, Practical Goods. It's leather with colored beading and he really likes it!
In this picture, Gibbie is relaxing because we have just gotten home from school. Like most of us when we were just starting school, he seems to like it but is pretty nervous when we're getting ready to go in the morning. We talk and pray together about this, and it's going really well.