Mommy School

Mommy School started on Monday, and I have never seen our kids more happy, cooperative and excited about every day as they have been this week. I do my best to create short (10 mins), interesting lesson plans and to incorporate a lot of body movement, for a couple of hours each morning. After the lessons, we go outside, no matter what the weather, and get wet and dirty and tired. We come inside for lunch, bath and naps. That is Mommy School. It is taught in English, Italian and sign language. This week, we read books, learned another handful of Italian words, reinforced the alphabet in our three languages, sang many Christmas songs and thanks to Alex's suggestion we clapped out the syllables, studied our globe, learned the difference between a dolphin (mammal that breathes through a whole) and a shark (fish that breathes through gills), an herbavore and carnivore. We potty trained on a schedule. We put our napkins in our lap and pretended we were at a restaurant when eating. We had music class, art class and on Thursday we went to Grandma's farm for science and art. Thursday is Grandma School.

Basically, I am teaching the kids what I had hoped they would get out of school this fall, with the addition of a healthy dose of love. Although I have lessons planned, I move according to their rhythm, and when it appears it is time to get up and dance, we do. We study words of the week, and this week, our word was happy (Izzy's) ecstatic (Alex's) and felice (happy in Italian for Mommy). We ended the week with the word cooperation, to prep for the weekend when cooperation is required for our activities. Homeschooling takes a lot of work and patience. It also takes us much of my day. I work on the Foundation in the afternoon and evenings. I am completely exhausted by the end of the day, but seeing my children so happy, using lessons they learned during the week in their everyday conversations, and being so excited for more, I feel for the first time since I had children, like a good parent. Parenting can be so unrewarding sometimes, especially if your measure of success for most of your life involved your career and adult relationships. But, watching the kids go from incredibly unhappy just a few weeks ago, to the happiest I have ever seen them, makes me feel I have made a difference in the world, because I have made their world a place they want to be in every day. Positively influence the world on a micro level, that is what we do as parents.

People may think the kids' lessons too advanced for this age group, but I say, if they get it and the info is useful to their lives today, then teach them. I take things down a notch for Izzy, so that each lesson reinforces numbers and colors and other knowledge she should be learning at 2. Why is it important to understand what a mammal is when you are 3? Well, mammals live in the water but breath through a hole, like our nose, and must hold their breath under water, like us, and now when I take Alex to the pool, he wants to swim like a dolphin and I hope this helps him stop choking when he puts his head in the water. Why is it important to know where the continents are, that koala's live in Australia and Ni Hao Ki-Lan (a cartoon) is from China and that Italy is the small country shaped like a boot? Being able to locate these places on a map helps to give the kids a sense of place, an understanding that there are places different from home where people speak and live differently than we do. They love maps, a foundation for navigating mental and physical space. Why learn different languages? Because it develops the brain, and should build their ability to learn languages in the future. Both kids have learned the languages they speak as easily as they have learned English and I believe that all schools should start their language programs at this age. Both kids want a challenge, and the school we had them in this fall wasn't cutting it. Hopefully Mommy School will do it, for now. At least Mommy is satisfied that the kids are taught with love, and challenged intellectually.