On Making Stuff Up

by Hillary Harvey, June 24, 2009

"I have a present for you, mama." Zoë approaches me with a brown cardboard box that she'd asked me the other day to tie up with a red shoelace.

"Oh, thank you! Should we do it later, though, when I'm not going to the doctor?" I say.

"It's to make you feel better," she says.

"Oh!" I carefully unwrap the box, pull out the letter and read it aloud. "Dear Momy you ur mi fafrit momy i luv you luv Zoë." I look inside the box, which is filled with maybe ten strings of beaded necklaces, each one made by Zoë.

The reason I'm not "feeling better" currently is that I'm fasting for a blood test. Which means no coffee. Which means I'm feeling very sorry for myself. My brain can't wake up and begin the day. Zoë gets this. She is trying to speak softly and even sang sweetly while getting dressed. She treads carefully not just because she wants to be considerate (ie. not get into trouble), but because she also appreciates why I'm doing the blood tests. It is for the baby. I am now 8 months pregnant with Zoë’s anxiously awaited and already adored little sister.

Ok, at this point you might have some questions. Why, you may ask, would she never mention this monumental accomplishment and Very Good News before the seventh month?! Why wouldn't she talk about how this might fit into homeschooling? Well, my friends, I can see how you might expect a pregnant woman to sing from the roof tops, and how my lack of climbing and singing might be construed as, well, a lack of excitement, perhaps? Maybe the second one is getting the shaft here? Maybe I'm just plain bizarre?

Truth is, there are several reasons why I've been keeping this on the down low (on the Blogosphere, anyway), and why I waited six months before announcing to FB and faraway friends, but the biggest one is that I just LOVE secrets! Especially big, personal secrets that buck convention when left untold. I did the same thing when pregnant with Zoë.

This time, it was a little more complicated. As a homeschooling mom, I did not have the luxury of morning sickness. (True, as a working, secretly pregnant woman, I didn't the first time either.  But with Zoë I was just nauseous for three weeks and would nibble quietly on crackers at my desk. With this one, I was on-the-couch SICK for SIX weeks, and Zoë began to fear that I was dying!) So when we told her that I was pregnant (around 11 weeks in), she was very, very happy, and I was very, very relieved. I could suddenly say, "I need to lie down because I'm not feeling so well." And she would say, "Because of the baby?" And I could say, "Well, yes, because I'm pregnant. Pregnant women need to lie down a lot."

There were a lot of questions.  So the next step was to get to the library. We took out books on pregnancy and fetal development. I found these drawings and videos for Zoë to look at online. And I read to her from her science dictionaries. Zoë was enthralled with how her little sibling was growing and developing. She'd bring me glasses of water at random "for the baby". And I suddenly began to see how one might develop a homeschool unit lesson.


II.
One day, Zoe and I were running an errand to pay a bill in connection with buying the house. We went to where the bill was due, and met with the man we were to give the check to. He was sort of our "case worker" so Zoë was familiar with him. She said, "And guess what? My mommy has a baby in her tummy!" Just like she had at the post office... and the bank... and the pet food store. My secret was totally out once I told Zoë, but somehow mostly to just people we met randomly on the street. He was completely surprised (I was wearing a winter coat and not really showing enough for people to think anything more than I might like ice cream a bit) and asked her if she was very excited. She said, "And I know how she got the baby in her tummy." To which he replied, "Ok, then I need to sit down." When he had, Zoë took a deep breath and continued, "One night I saw a star in the sky, and I wished that my mommy would get a baby in her belly, and she DID!" She watched as we all visibly sighed with relief. "That's cute," he said.

After I'd retold that story a couple of times, giggling, Zoë began to catch on. One day we were driving and she said, "I wonder how you REALLY got the baby in your belly." Now, I wouldn't necessarily call myself a prude or conservative by any stretch. And I'd always assumed that when the subject came up, I wouldn't gloss over the mystery of sex with anything silly like a stork story and certainly nothing so holier-than-thou as a demand that it only happens between married men and women. But then there were those big eyes and the little face that I remember being quite small when I first met it and, let's just say, I couldn't do it. I stuck to the science books: "Seeds from a daddy's body fertilize the egg in a mommy's body." And you know? It totally satisfied her.

Until, it didn't anymore. So that's when I called in my friend, Sarahmarie. Turned out, she was doing a unit lesson around sex education for her boys, and she had a book list! I took out her book suggestions from the library, and I read them to Zoë. This one was perfect for Z, being a zoologist and all. And this one made Owen and Zoë laugh so hard, he couldn't read the words. And this one, especially, made everything (including talking about stranger danger) SO MUCH EASIER! And it was fun. Including when Zoë said with shock and disbelief at the mention of how body parts fit together, "Is that true?!" And I laughed.


III.
I love the public library. I love the fact that Zoë loves the public library, that when she wants to read a book or see a movie, she asks me to order it from the library. We go to Barnes & Noble sometimes.  I think it’s possible that Zoe doesn't know it's a store and thinks it's just an indoor playground with a stage and a train set. Most everything we want to find, we get from the library.

Recently at the playground, Sarahmarie was talking about the local Children's Parade and jokingly suggested we have a homeschooler float. Of course, I thought Zoë would LOVE that. She's always wandering into the center of parades, wanting to be included in the action, or the first to volunteer herself for audience participation performances. I could just picture her riding in the back of a pick-up truck and waving like a queen. So I started to find out about what that would take and who might want to be involved.

As it turns out, it's just really easy. We just sign up our group and gather people. The theme of the parade is the Quadricentennial celebration of Henry Hudson's famed voyage along the Hudson River. And recently, there was a celebration (you may have heard) where a replica of the Half Moon sailed up the Hudson from New York City and docked with the Clearwater and the John Jay Harvey fireboat.  So, beforehand, I went onto the library's website to see what I could find about the Quadricentennial, the river and Henry Hudson, and I ended up putting together a little curriculum on it.

I started out with this book, unsure if Zoë would get into the whole thing. But it turned out to have a map which traced the four routes of Hudson's four voyages in different colors that we could trace with our fingers, and she was so into it! The day of the maritime festival, I showed Z this video about Pete Seeger and the Clearwater, which she thought was slightly boring, but still asked me to rewind for a particular song she liked.  I gathered a little group of people together at our house before the maritime festival, and we did some planning for our participation in the parade in July.  By the time we got down by the water and saw the ships, Zoë’s knowledge of what she was seeing had been so enriched, that her excitement just grew and grew.  I've since  found a bunch of other books and movies for us to explore.


IV.
Today is our last day of math in the Kindergarten curriculum we've been using all year. We're actually ahead. (Apparently, I can't do math very well and didn't calculate precisely how many pages we needed to do each day to take us through the year. We're finishing about a month and a half early. But that's fine, in my book. Better to be done early. Especially with two weeks of camp scheduled for July and a new baby about to be born!) In preparation for our final lessons, we've slowed down a bit and added in a few alternative activities in between. One day, it was baking...

A friend of mine and Owen's from college is in Afghanistan, working as an Army Medic. Aside from a book of poetry, some toiletries and over the counter medicines (I realize he's not in camp and probably has plenty of this being that he's in an Army clinic, but I’ve never had a friend in the Army before! Jeez!), Zoë and I wanted to bake him some cookies. So we set to it.

Having heard multiple times from unschooling friends about how baking is really a math lesson, I tried my darndest to make it an educational experience beyond just helping Zoe self-discipline to not eat all the batter in the bowl until she became sick. I got out a piece of paper and focused on two elements of the baking: showing Zoë that 1/2 + 1/2 = 1 whole; and sets of 3/counting by 3s. After doing the measuring part, Zoë was challenged to make rows of 3 on the cookie sheet, to count by 3s as she made each row, and to tell me how many we could get on a whole sheet (12). Then she was challenged to repeat it with the second sheet. As we waited for these to bake, we went to the fraction puzzle that Grandma had given her for Christmas and looked at how two halves make a whole. With the timer's ding, we headed back to the cookies to arrange the first two batches into rows of 3 on the cooling racks, and to count by 3s how many we could fit on each (18). Then we made a third batch of 12 and counted by 3s how many cookies we had made altogether (36). So, ok, math lesson. Two concepts. Made it up as we went along. Sort of unschooly.  Very neat.


V.
It turns out I may not be the best at explaining things, or keeping my impatience from periodically making her cry, but I do have a lot of devoted interest at hand that is 100% committed to how that little mind works and how I can best expose her to the world.  In terms of homeschooling, we're really learning this whole balance thing. We have certain curricula and workbooks that we like, that make teaching Z (especially for a non-teacher) really do-able and clear. And then we have plenty of time to explore some of our own missions and ideas, both things I come up with (mostly field trips and library explorations) and a lot of Zoë-led activities and projects (mostly involving making books and drawings or throwing parties). Then we have our classes and social outings. It's been really fun figuring out what works best for us, and I'm feeling pretty confident that it'll all go smoothly into first grade, when we start reporting.