I have to do something about our books.  There are too many of them.  Many of them are not very good, and the ones that are good are swamped.  Some of them are only useful at specific times, like travel guides for places we go to regularly.  There are lots of books that are good, which I would like to have but don’t (and don’t have space for them!)

After months of thinking the hot weather would never come, it is here!  The house is like an oven by day, and swarming with uninvited critters by night.  Last week I heard another snake between the inner and outer walls in our bedroom.  I didn’t tell the others as there’s nothing we can do about it, and it would only upset them.  There is currently a dragonfly in the bathroom.  This is probably my fault, because I have reached the stage where I no longer care how many mosquitoes bite me as long as I can sleep with the windows open.  Antonia has given up sleeping for more than about 5 hours a night, perhaps because of the heat.  Inevitably, she is tired and spaced out by day.  I have sunburn on my shoulders, which isn’t good.  I have a mysterious expanding rash on my toe, which is possibly worse, since I recall removing a tick from that area, a couple of weeks ago.  I’m going to the doctor to get it checked out tomorrow.

Did I mention that it’s been unusually humid.  Hence the dragonfly and profusion of ticks.  But now there isn’t so much as a thunderstorm on the horizon.  If things get much hotter, I may have to resort to eating ice cream!  I seem to be the only person on the planet who would much rather not do so.  In the meantime, our usual healthy, organic diet seems to have evaporated in favour of a few raves from my childhood, when we enjoyed this kind of climate for about 5 months of the year.  This evening, I had merguez (spicy beef sausages, not in the least organic, I’m afraid) in baguette (industrial, hyper-refined white bread), with extra hot sauce (OK, it was from Texas).  Tomorrow, it’s moules marinieres (mussels in white wine broth), with errr…. chips… We have to do it, it’s traditional.  On the other hand, we seem to be buying fruit several times a week at the moment, which suggests we are eating about 3 times our usual ration.

This is the time of the year when the sensible option is to hide inside all afternoon with all the shutters closed.

What went wrong with school?  It would be easier to say what went right…. not much!  But let’s start with goal number 1, which was that Antonia should learn French.  Maybe we started too late for her, as she was a very precocious English-speaker.  Being in French-speaking environments bothered her from the age of 18 months, and she said so.  Not many 18 month olds do that, I guess.

At the end of her second year in school, I was very concerned, because she still could not put together even fragmented sentences.  She did not know the names of items she used everyday.  She appeared not to understand simple, common sentences.  She would not answer questions from adults under any circumstances.   She would not play with French-speaking children, and at the age of four her social development was suffering.  Meanwhile her English was pretty much that of an adult and she was friendly and outgoing to all and sundry.  Some brief, intensive sessions with a speech therapist helped to build up her confidence in French, but as soon as the sessions came to an end, she regressed.

Goal 2 was that she should have a nice time.  She didn’t.  Not ever, really.  But things got worse rather than better.  At the age of 2, she would throw screaming fits at the nursery if she was dissatisfied, but she was actually rather pleased with herself when she got home.  At the age of 3, she would say that she supposed she had to go to school because Mummy and Daddy had to work and were too busy to look after her.  She cried every time she forgot that we would prefer her not to.  When she was 4, all hell broke loose.  She cried morning and night over school, and was generally depressed all the time.  I spent my evenings cuddling her, and my days trying to think of ways to make things nice for her. My weekends and holidays revolved around getting her in a fit state to go back again.  I think our only choices were to remove her from school or take her to a child psychologist.  The latter option seems to be extremely common around here, but we chose the former.

Now, it makes sense to wonder what happened at school that was soooo terrible.  What did she do there?  It would appear that she sat in corners making scribbles, which was strange, because at home she was making quite complicated figurative drawings.  She broke glasses or plates at every mealtime, though at home she rarely broke anything.  She declined to learn anything in school, including French words for concepts she already knew like colours and numbers.   But she was very demanding of intellectual stimulation at home.  She learned to read English at home but apparently “did not know her letters” at school.  By then, I was starting to realise that she was good at abstractions, but had to be virtually bribed to handle physical objects.  Montessori didn’t seem like a very good match for her, or maybe her hatred of the school contributed to making her that way.

She also got upset on a daily basis because she got knocked around by other kids, some of whom had behavioural issues, and some of whom had behavioural issues combined with mental handicaps.  She still has a scar on her face to prove that it got pretty rough in there at times.  Her worst memory at this point is of the noise levels.  She spent two years out of the three (the first and last), trying to hang out with the two English-speaking kids in the school who were rather older than her, and getting upset when they wanted to play with someone else. She spent the middle-year in a class with much younger children, many of whom were pre-verbal, because that appeared to the teachers to be the best class for someone who scribbled and didn’t talk yet.  She was very clingy to the adults.  She learned to hide in corners in the playground instead of playing, so that her physical development began to suffer too.  Since she wouldn’t talk, she used clothes as a form of communication.  That’s when she became very, very, interested in her appearance.  She would enter the classroom with her dress held out to show the teacher, as a substitute for saying “Bonjour”.

What did we do during this time?  We spent our time trying to communicate our concerns to the school, wondering most of the time whether we were crazy of they were!  I think they felt the same way about us.  Pretty often, we wondered whether it could even be our child they were talking about.  But then, when I observed her in the school environment, I saw that she had a completely different personality from at home.   I didn’t consider any of the traits I saw her developing there to be in her best interest.  I am so, so glad we got her out.

And why didn’t we do it sooner?  Well, I would have tried something else at the end of the first year.  But the fact is that my husband and I had to come to an agreement and that was not easy.  It only happened because I applied rather more pressure than I am comfortable with.  He had loved the Montessori school he went to and wanted to give his child the same opportunity.  It wasn’t easy for him to realise that it wasn’t suiting her the way it suited him.   Also, I remember very well when I first met him that he and I commiserated over the horrible times we had at school, socially and academically.  But somehow, between then and him becoming a parent, those memories evaporated into a rosy haze of happy children playing together in their own little community! And he was the one who cared deeply about us being an English-speaking household.  That was obviously going to be thrown into question if we homeschooled.  We looked into every possible school, before we were both convinced that it would be more of the same, or worse!

It didn’t help that I was the one on the receiving end of our daughter’s unhappiness and he wasn’t.  In fact their relations were rather distant at this time.  The clash between school schedule and his work schedule meant that he spent very little time with her.  When he did, he took her over to play at friends’ houses and chatted with other adults.  She was glued to me literally at every opportunity, and was pretty direct in expressing her preference.  I know it was upsetting for him.  He was the number one beneficiary of her switch to homeschooling.  Within weeks, she started admitting to liking him, and now she loves us both equally.  But still, somehow, homeschooling ‘feels wrong’ to him.  We get to keep on doing it for as long as he is outvoted, 2 to 1!

We don’t really have a start or end to our homeschooling year, but sometimes you just have to see where you’ve got to, and I’m in that mood now.  Maybe it’s because I have to send off our homeschooling declaration for 2008-9 in just a couple of weeks.  Maybe it’s because the social services are coming round a few days before that, and their visit will wrap up the requirements for our first year of formal homeschooling. So here goes:

Maths: the 2nd grade maths book we are using is virtually finished, and we are on a roll which I hope will continue into the 3rd grade book.  We spend half an hour on the maths book, 4 times a week.  The work is very varied, so sometimes we finish one problem in a session, sometimes we do a page and a half.  Sometimes, Antonia works by herself and I get the housework done, sometimes she needs my help.  More often, what she really needs is moral support, so I am trying to encourage her gently to be more autonomous.  We also do ten minutes of maths drill every day.  At the moment it’s always multiplication tables, earlier in the year, it was telling the time.

Reading: We read all the time, all sorts of things, by ourselves, together aloud, whatever.  Antonia is more drawn to stories and poetry than non-fiction.  Tracking a child’s reading for record-keeping after they get fluent can be complicated.  I’m recording our after lunch reading books, one is read by her, and one is read by me, and I’m leaving out all the rest.

English:  the reading, writing and spoken language have all come together, so that Antonia reads and speaks well, and above all spells and punctuates the sentences that she chooses to write pretty well.  We worked officially on spelling for a while, but now I see that the visual memory from reading is starting to kick in and she can spell many words I would not expect her to get right.  She is writing about four sentences in English every day, usually a story, which is now turning into a saga, and sometimes a letter.  She’s reading for fun, and beginning to read parts of her history book herself.

French: we are not quite at the same level as in English yet, alas.  She reads at nearly the same level as in English, but even orally, she has a poor grasp or grammar and doubtful comprehension.  She tends to read the way she speaks, where grammar is concerned.  If she were left to her own devices, that would only reinforce the mistakes, so I am going to encourage her to read French aloud. Writing in French will be our big project for next year and at the moment things look fairly grim.  She cannot even formulate a correct sentence to write, let alone set about spelling it correctly. I am hoping it will all come together over the next year.  I will be so glad when it happens, because it is taking a lot of our time.  We are doing written exercises four times a week, spelling four times a week, and reading a passage for comprehension twice a week. I can think of a lot of things I would rather do, and I’m sure she would agree.  On a positive note, I should say that she has very nice cursive handwriting.

History: This is our big success at the moment.  I waited patiently for ages for history consciousness to kick in and here we are.  We are working through Story of the World twice a week, and keeping a Book of Centuries that works for us.  We look through the Book of Centuries once a week to make sure we remember the main people and events.  We do associated activities as and when we please, so we have all kinds of helmets, spears and cuneiform tablets all over the house.  The child also found a broken mug in a yard, collected all the pieces and proudly tells everyone who comes to the house that she is an archaeologist!

Geography: Well, we are still travelling quite a lot!  Aside from that, geography at the moment consists of learning the names of continents, oceans, countries, rivers and regions.  Especially those we have travelled to or studied in history.  Officially, we do this for 15 minutes a week, but in practice, she wants to do it more often.

In theory, we do one of the activities below once a week!

Science: Strangely, for a very science orientated family, we are going nowhere in particular with science at the moment. Pretty often, we do the shopping instead. I feel that Antonia is ready for something more than we had done up till now, but I haven’t found a resource I like.  I am feeling like I have to make my own, and of course that is a lot of work.  In truth, we have done a lot of science already, and if we didn’t do any officially in the coming year it wouldn’t matter, but we absolutely must have something for the year after.

Music: I like the Suzuki Piano program.  I do not think I could say we are making fast progress with it, partly because up till now, Antonia has been practising its pieces for no more than a few minutes a day.  And partly, probably, because I don’t know the best way to teach.  We have averaged one piece per month we were at home, which puts us at piece five.  Piano has probably been our most unschooled subject.  Now, however, we are having one long music lesson per week, and will add music reading soon since Antonia has been saying she feels handicapped by not being able to read.

We also listen to a lot of music.  I feel like Antonia would like to know more about musical forms, and with the arrival of history consciousness she is interested in composers and their biographies.  At the moment we haven’t made time to do more than listen and stick their pictures in the Book of Centuries.

Art: This is like music, it’s one of the things that tends to get squeezed out, which hasn’t stopped Antonia filling her sketchbook with very individual drawings.  I plan to try detailed study of individual pictures.  At the current rate, I think it will take us about one month to study each picture.

Foreign language:  We chose Chinese.  Antonia is very enthusiastic about it.  At the moment, it is mostly consisting of playing the CD in the car as we drive around.  At some point we will have to sit down with the book, because there are other activities connected to reading and writing Chinese.  I am not worried about speed of progress for now.

Nature study:  This consists of a long outing once a week, which might be combined with a cultural or fun activity, and shorter walks several times as week.  We are in a slightly similar position with nature study as we are with science.  We go out a lot, we enjoy ourselves and see nice things, but it doesn’t feel to me as if we are in a different place from where we were last year.  I very much like Anna Botsford Comstock’s Handbook of Nature Study, but there again, as we live in Europe, many of the species are different so I can’t just use it ‘off-the-shelf’.  Antonia is certainly more into outdoor physical activities at the moment which is valuable in itself, but is more of a sport.

Sports:  The sports are all on summer holiday, it would seem!