What We're Learning, 1st Edition...

My friend over at Grateful for Grace is starting a new link-up called "What We're Learning." It's fun to read her list, which has both silly & serious, and then to go and read the stuff people have blogged and linked up with. (clearly, grammar is not on my WWL list today!) Being a good friend, I can't resist joining the party.

We're learning lots of things at our house this week.....

....algebra. Solving for x and all that. Side-by-side white boards on the couch, student and teacher, working through the problems in the book. Together. We've turned math from something that used to involve shouting and crying and fussing and frustration (from both the teacher and the student, sadly) to something that we collaborate on, our mutual enemy and together we team up and conquer this stuff. It's amazing, really.

....the alphabet. Yes, The Adventurer is still learning the basics. That each little scribble has a name and makes a particular sound (or two or three....). That if you string enough scribbles (letters) together, they make words. His penmanship is fantastic, and he can perfectly print every single letter. We're working on recall, and I'm confident he'll get it. Soon. I hope. And, no, the irony of teaching & learning both algebra & the alphabet is not lost on me.

....context clues. The Artist is reading a free version of Sherlock Holmes mysteries on the Kindle, and the formatting is sometimes off just a bit, so that some words show up as nothing but upside down question marks and fractions and dots. He asked me about it the first time he encountered this oddity, and I helped him decipher what that word was meant to be, and then he mentioned that this funny mix of symbols shows up here & there and what should he do? I explained to him about poor editing jobs and told him he'd just have to guess based on what word he thinks best fits in the empty space. He hasn't asked again, so I guess he's getting it.

....the necessity of giving things a fair shake. This one's me. I was all set to boycott the movie The Hunger Games, as I hadn't read the book and had no desire at all to read or see anything that involves kids sent into an arena to fight to the death. None. It just seemed too horrific. But The Chemist looked me in the eye with that gaze that means, "I'm having trouble recognizing you right now..." and asked me what was my biggest criticism of those who blindly boycotted Harry Potter. Silence. He waited. I said I'd download the book and he grinned. Because my biggest complaint is that people would boycott a book they'd not even done the courtesy of reading.

Read it. Decide for yourself if it is okay for you & yours. But do not just judge it based on what someone else tells you to believe about it; do not just latch onto one aspect of a book, any book, and declare it inappropriate until you've read the whole of it and can decide for yourself.

So I borrowed book one from the library, finished it in one gulp and immediately bought a 3-in-1 version for the Kindle so I could keep going, and just this morning I finished the epilogue. I'm still sorting out whether the horrors in the series are the sort of thing I need to shield my boys from, or throw the light on full force. I've already acknowledged that mostly my boys won't be terribly undone, like their mom, at the scenes of psychological warfare; the scenes that twist a knife in my gut as I ache for Katniss will, I think, ricochet around my boys without inflicting any damage. I'm still deciding for sure, though.

....to let them grow up. This ties in with that last one, as I search my heart and soul and the hearts of my boys, or what they let me see of them, to decide when to offer them The Hunger Games. It comes in small doses, as I convince The Chemist that our oldest son, 14.5 yrs old, is old enough to walk to tennis lessons alone. Even if we both see the same small boy who never wanted to leave our sides, reality stares back at me, at us, in a teenager thrilled to be granted this tiny freedom. It's hard to pretend he's still a little boy when I have to look up into his eyes.

....to cook. Okay, I know how to cook, more or less. But we're doing a group class with some friends of ours, here at my house, once a week. Every week I go onto Jamie Oliver's Home Cooking website and print off a recipe and matching skill sheets. Each week my kitchen fills with 4 kids learning to chop and slice and peel and muddle & bang their way around a kitchen, learning to cook. Then they eat and laugh and goof off and I smile to know we're giving them skills that will last them through life. More of that growing up bit.

Not much on the silly side from me this week, but I'm sure my friend over at GfG won't mind. Someone has to be serious sometimes. Not sure I'll manage to link up every week, but I'll try. Go and read her stories and the rest; they're much funnier than mine.

We've got learning to get back to.