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!

Screen print of our Book of Centuries

We tried to do a Book of Centuries a couple of times before, but it was so hard rounding up the glue and scissors and pictures each time that we gave up. Now, we’ve ended up with one after all.  It just grew while we were trying to do something else.  I thought I’d share the idea in case it suits anyone else.

It all started off because Antonia has a hard time remembering names, and needs to hear them many times before they stick.  I began collecting pictures of the people we had studied in history from all over the Internet. I put these in a single folder on my computer, and set the folder to display as a slideshow.  Once a week we looked through the folder and talked a bit about each person until she remembered their name.

 Enheduanna page, with a passage from one of her hymns.

I soon realised that this was a good place to keep all the artists, composers and authors that she came across too.  Then, we started to use it as a basis for narrations.  Now, the slideshow has grown to include quotes, snippets of scores, famous paintings of events and many other things. I’ve included dates and names in the filename so they don’t complicate the pages.  Also Antonia doesn’t notice them, and the idea is still for her to develop her own memory.

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Here are some more detailed instructions for how I made the Book of Centuries Slideshow.  The most important and least obvious one is last!

Making the ‘pages’:  I wanted to have all the ‘pages’ in the book the same size so I made a blank template in Photoshop.  I’m sure just about any image editing software will work just as well.  I add images from the Internet, resize them if I need to, and add text.  Then I save the whole thing as a jpg.

Beethoven page with a tiny extract of the score of the 5th Symphony

Displaying in Windows: in the Start menu, click on My Documents or My Pictures or wherever you decide to keep the pictures.  Browse to the right folder.  In the menus choose View, then as Filmstrip.  On my newer desktop, with Vista, things are a bit different.  There is a button that says Slideshow, and that does a very nice job.

Hans Christian Andersen page with illustrations of his tales

Keeping chronological order: I soon realised that Windows liked to sort my pages in a way that had nothing to do with chronology.  I fiddled with the file names and eventually hit on the following scheme.  Perhaps other people can think of a better one!  My file name starts with a letter or number that indicates the century, or a longer period for earlier times.  Z is for the 21st Century, A is the 5th Century BCE.  The number 8 is the whole 2nd millenium BCE.  When I want to sub-sort, I add another letter AA, AB, AC and so on.  I’ve accepted that I’m going to have to modify the names of the files within each group from time to time to keep them in order. Who knows, if our book grows really big, I may break it into a separate folder for each century.

Yesterday we drove up to Geneva and back, mainly to see some relatives who were passing through. Since we were travelling to Switzerland, which is not part of the European Union, we theoretically needed our passports. In practice the border crossings in the little villages where we went through were completely unmanned. The main border crossing is manned and very busy, but if you go through there you get on the motorway. The Swiss pay a largish annual fee to use their motorways and charge the same to visiting foreigners. We were reluctant to pay this just to travel 12 kilometres into Geneva centre for the only time this year. So we had to take a roundabout route on the backroads.

We spent most of our day chatting over lunch, but we also visited the church in the old town, and climbed the towers. We had a lovely panorama of the lake with its giant fountain.

We also got to see a model of the church and the bells. This one is called Clemence.

Geneva was important in the Reformation, or perhaps conversely, the Reformation was important to Geneva. The main organiser in the city was Calvin, who was French. Strangely, we mostly remember the Reformation in Geneva because Jean-Jacques Rousseau fled from its rigid theocracy (I am quoting the cliché here). Nowadays, we think of Calvin as Swiss and Rousseau as French, though I doubt either would have seen it that way. Our relative was interested in the Reformation, which I had also studied. I was having a hard time remembering any details, but fortunately there were some explanatory posters around.

We found an idyllic spot from which to watch the Bastille Day fireworks which started as soon as it got dark.  This year’s display was pretty and artistic in a low key way.

In the morning, we studied the French Revolution from the fourth Story of the World book, another example of how we skip around.

Le temps des cerises is a French expression meaning the time when you’re young, with the implication that you should make the most of it.  I got back from the UK to find the fridge filled with sacks, bowls and jugs of cherries requiring immediate attention.  It’s enough to turn my few remaining dark hairs white, I must say.  This time it was Mike who picked them using a borrowed cherry picker.  I have fond memories of Antonia climbing on the car roof under the tree while he was away last year.  Mike’s method is more effective, hence the bumper harvest.

I made 6 jars of jam, but the problem is that the cherries are already very sweet, so the jam is even more so.  I imagine it will get used more in cakes and pies than for spreading.  I am planning a cherry chocolate cake!  I’ve decided the way to go for the future is drying them.  Luckily we have a drier so it only takes about 9 hours per batch.  I dread to think what that costs in electricity.  The results are delicious though.  We will freeze them till needed for extra safety – they don’t take up much space.  I am also trying to make glace cherries which I use regularly around Christmas.  It is a long process and I don’t know how well it will work yet.

In the meantime, I have pitted about a thousand cherries!

I decided today not to renew our library subscription.  If it had been free, I might have just kept it anyway, but as we live out of town, it costs us enough that it needs justifying.  I have a few reasons why I decided not to do it:

• Now Antonia has an extra swimming activity, it’s proved virtually impossible to coincide our schedule with library opening hours, bearing in mind that it’s a half day activity in itself.
• When we have made it, it’s proved even harder to return the books on time.
• As the books Antonia reads or has read to her are getting longer, it’s proving less cost effective to get them from the library.  Today, for example, I bought a novel that will probably take us several weeks to read together.  It probably cost less than the gas to get to the library, and it’s lendable or recyclable.
• In any case, I’m finding that it’s the books Antonia lives with that really contribute something to her learning and growth.  Books that stay in the house for a few weeks are quickly read and quickly forgotten.

This week I went to Argentina, virtually, of course! Fortuitously, Antonia’s magazine does about the same virtual travel thing as I am doing, and its country for the month was also Argentina. They decided that Argentina’s distinctive features are: Buenos Aires, the tango, penguins, whales, glaciers, Ushuaia, football, gauchos in the pampas and barbecued meat and mate.

After doing a little bit of research and scraping my memory I decided to read two travel books that touch on Argentina if only in part: Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, and Che Guevara’s The Motorcycle Diaries.

Neither of these books deals exclusively with Argentina, in fact Guevara’s book only takes place in Argentina in the opening sections. For the rest, he does offer one Argentinian perspective on Latin America. It became clear that Argentina was rather admired throughout the region in the 1950’s, or so it seemed to Guevara and his friend.

Quite a large chunk of The Voyage of the Beagle takes place in Argentina, from Buenos Aires to the Pampas, down to Patagonia and Terra del Fuego. As I expected, Darwin talks a lot about natural history, though strangely, he hardly seems to mention whales or penguins. The Voyage precedes his theory of evolution through natural selection, but it’s interesting to see him trying to figure out cause and effect in what he encounters.

He’s a bit more of a dunce when it comes to people, with the Victorian English gentleman’s horrible attitude to everyone except other Victorian English gentlemen. Clearly, he intended to be objective and thought himself benevolent, but this might not appear sufficient excuse to modern readers. I’ve just reminded myself that he was barely an actor in the various circumstances described, so perhaps he should not be vilified more than those who were. He still gives an interesting slice of South American social and political life – strife between Spaniards and Indians, slavery, runaway seamen, Indian children removed from their families and taken to England then returned, gauchos in the pampas, revolution in Buenos Aires (one of them!) Throughout his time in Argentina he lived on a diet of freshly killed, barbecued meat and mate.

Turning to The Motorcycle Diaries, it was surprising in a way how little had changed. The same social issues were particularly recognisable in Chile. But this is about Argentina. Guevara and his friend still lived on barbecued meat and mate, they still dossed down in a mixture of estancias, inns and government posts, but they had substituted the motorbike for the horses of Darwin’s day. It doesn’t seem as if this was really the best idea, and the motorbike barely made it out of Argentina.

These two young men were utterly clueless about natural history and most other things, but they had their own speciality – medicine. Neither Guevara nor Darwin had reached the positions that made them famous when they wrote these travel books, but in both, you can see their positions emerging out of their specialised knowledge. In Guevara’s case this seems to come from a realisation of the link between social and political circumstances and people’s state of health. When he is discussing this, he suddenly emerges from puerility into detailed and systematic explanation.

Conrad Martens accompanied the Beagle as draughtsman, and some of his sketchbooks can be viewed here.

Next week, I’m going to the UK for real, so I guess I won’t need to do any virtual traveling and I’ll probably have limited Internet access anyway.

Today was our annual trip to the fairground park, carefully timed to coincide with nice weather and a school day.  We thought we would never manage to get the two together!  So our day started kind of like this:  Mike complaining about how boring all the rides were and insisting that he’d be taking Antonia on this Boomerang thing before she’s very much older, never mind the fact that you have to be 15 cms taller than she is now.  So here he is, waiting to be turned upside-down at Mach speed on the Boomerang and he would like us to think he is waving!

Shortly after lunch, it became apparent that the rides were so ‘boring’ that he would stick with the position of official photographer instead.

Nothing would induce him to abandon his new vocation and get back on a ride.

As for me, I don’t think I’ve had so much fun since last year.  Of course, we didn’t have to queue once, and if we wanted to take a ride several times, we just stayed on it.  There was only about one other kid in the entire park of Antonia’ age, though there were a couple of coach loads of middle school kids on their end of year treat.  The place was so quiet that the attendants were willing to watch Antonia while we went on ‘big kid’ rides.  We managed a couple, before Mike discovered his new purpose in photography.  Antonia was thrilled with the whole day, and, at the end, exhausted. Between us, we took over a hundred rides.  It was great!