Hi - I'm Back!

Hi everyone!

It's been a bit quiet on Grace To Abide for the last few months. Just to recap:

• in June we had to leave Russia, where we'd been living for the past 11 years, and move back to our 'home' country of the UK

• the summer was spent travelling around temporary accommodation and living out of suitcases

• at the end of July I found out that I was pregnant again, and experienced the worst 'morning' sickness I've had with any of my pregnancies, which basically wiped me out for several weeks.

So here we are in more stable, rented accommodation in my husband's home town. I'm still feeling nauseous at 21 weeks, but it's definitely getting better. My eldest two children are in a local primary school this year, so I'll have lots to say about how this homeschooling-at-heart-mama is dealing with that, as well as the ups and downs of being first-time buyers on the property market, and of course the culture shock that we're still dealing with.

I hope to see you here at Grace to Abide more regularly from now on :-)

Abide in Him!




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Preparing My Homeschooler for Mainstream School.

Last week Sophie (8) and Charis (6) had a tour around their respective new schools, which they’ll be starting in September. I think I was more nervous and apprehensive than they were! I’m a homeschooler at heart, but for various reasons it seemed the right thing to do to put the girls into mainstream school during this year of transition. However, I can’t get rid of this anxious concern of "Will they measure up OK? Have I done a good job or will they be way behind their peers? Have I been a good advert for the homeschooling cause?"

I’m sure I’ll be writing a lot on this general topic over the coming few months,

but in this post I’d like to focus in on the concern I have about their writing skills, and by that I mean their ability to formulate their thoughts into written words and write in sentences, not the way they form their letters.

You see, up to now we’ve been very happily following a homeschooling curriculum, called Ambleside Online, which is based on Charlotte Mason’s methods of education. When I think about my girls going into mainstream school, I can foresee two potential areas of where the school might have a different approach to the one my girls have been used to: 1) writing ‘creatively’ and 2) spelling.

Creative Writing

In the Ambleside Online curriculum, children start with oral narration (telling back verbally what they’ve heard or seen), and it’s not until they’re about ten years old that they begin written narration. The expectation is that this should lead quickly to ‘creative writing’. However, Charlotte Mason didn’t require the children to come up with too much ‘original’ work at an early age. It was mostly dictations or narrations from what had been read or observed. Before the age of ten children practise their writing by doing daily copywork exercises.

“They should narrate in the first place and they will compose, later, readily enough, but they should not be taught 'composition.'” Vol 1 of Home Education, pg 247

Worried that Sophie, in particular, would flounder when asked to write something original in her exercise book during a lesson at school, I decided to encourage her to keep a little diary of her exploits over the summer. We’ve already missed a few days, but I’m hoping that by practising this a few times a week she’ll gain a little more confidence in writing down her thoughts rather than just copying a text in front of her. Diary-keeping, of course, is a form of written narration since she is recounting what she did and saw.

Spelling

I don’t yet know what the school policy is in regard to spelling, but I suspect that a teacher in charge of 30 pupils won’t have time to correct each spelling mistake the moment it occurs. Charlotte Mason didn’t like the child to get used to seeing a word misspelled, and the teacher/parent was supposed to erase the word as soon as possible before bad spelling habits were lodged in the child’s mind:

“The teacher's business to prevent false spelling, and, if an error has been made, to hide it away, as it were, so that the impression may not become fixed...”

Charlotte didn’t advocate writing out a word 10 times from a spelling list. Instead, she wanted the child to focus on the written word in front of them until they thought they could ‘see’ it in their mind’s eye. Then cover up the word and get them to spell it out orally, then perhaps write it out once.

“Once the eye sees a misspelt word, that image remains; and if there is also the image of the word rightly spelt, we are perplexed as to which is which...”

Up to now, in our homeschool, when the girls have needed to write, for example, a thank you letter back to their grandparents, I’ve always dictated or written out clearly what they were going to write and then got them to copy (like doing copywork). I didn’t make my child ‘guess’. The only times I’ve turned a blind eye to misspelled letters is when the girls have written something on their own initiative outside of ‘school’ and presented it to me, for example a card or a comment on a picture. In those situations I’ve felt it more important not to quash their enthusiasm. If they’ve written something longer, for example Charis loves to write emails to people, then I might point out one or two main spelling issues just to make the letter a bit more understandable to the person who would be reading it, but I let the rest go. But generally, their habit is always to check with me first a word they’re not sure about rather than just guessing and trying to write it phonetically, which we all know doesn't work too well in English!

I don’t know if this habit will hold them back in mainstream school, and whether or not it will be a problem. I suspect they will write more slowly and be more unsure about their writing than their peers. I wonder too how the different approach to spelling will work. I hope to continue using the art of 'visualisation' when we receive those spelling lists from their class teacher.



Supporting From Home

Of course, there are many other things I can continue to do with my girls, despite no longer homeschooling ‘full-time’, and one of those is to keep on reading quality books to them that challenge and inspire them. I’ll leave you with an appropriate comment on this from Charlotte Mason herself which I really love:

"Writing, of course, comes from reading, and nobody can write well who does not read much."

Qu: Has your homeschooled child spent some time in a mainstream school? I'd love to hear your thoughts about the particular challenges you faced and how you overcame them.

Abide in Him!



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(Apologies that I was not able to find the exact references for several of the above quotes.)

Photo credit: freedigitalphotos.net / stockimages 


Grace to Abide will be taking a few weeks off over the summer, but we'll be back soon!

10 Things I'll Miss About Russia - Part 2

This is the second part of my series about things I'll miss about Russia now that we're no longer able live there. If you missed Part 1 you can find it here. In Part 1 I started listing my choices in reverse order, 10 to 6. So now, let's kick off with number 5.....

5)      The Child-Focussed Nature of the Local Culture

I remember returning to England once when Sophie was still very small, and wondering ‘Why aren’t people cooing over my baby and wanting to hold her? Can’t they see how beautiful she is?’ I’d got used to living in a culture where it’s totally fine for strangers to want to interact with your children; for waitresses at cafes to whisk them off into the kitchen so that you can eat your meal in peace, and for sometimes quite random people at church offering to hold your baby so that you can concentrate on the service. It seemed to me that all babushkas had a supply of sweets stashed away in their pockets, ready to be whipped out whenever a small child appeared within 5m of them (although realising your toddler has chocolate smeared all over his face just when the church service is about to start was not always totally appreciated by the parents involved!), and all strangers, men and women, regardless of age, saw it as their duty to inform any poor, distracted mother when her child was showing any bare skin, especially around the ears, during the winter months. Whereas in England people in supermarkets can sometimes look annoyed that you’ve brought your toddlers there to disrupt their peaceful shopping experience, in Russia they would smile at them, offer them sweets and praise them for being such good helpers. I’ll miss being in a place where children are genuinely loved and valued by the whole community. Not that they're not loved and valued in England, but it was more tangible and obvious in Russia. Now we'll have to teach our children that it's no longer acceptable to accept sweets from strangers - if we'd taught them that in Russia, we would have offended a lot of people!

4)      Experiencing Different Cultures

Living in a culture that’s not your own is difficult, but incredibly enriching. I feel so blessed to have had this opportunity to live in a place where very few foreigners have ever lived, to learn about traditions that are so different to my own, and to have my eyes opened further to the beautiful diversity of culture, people and language that exists in God’s world. Some cultural habits will be hard to shake off, like wanting to take your shoes off when you enter a house, or wanting to 'bob' up out of your seat when somebody sneezes. Other cultural habits we hope we won't shake off, such as the respect shown to elders and the generosity and hospitality shown to guests. It now seems natural to us to want to take a gift whenever we are invited somewhere, and to want to give away toys to the children who come to visit us.

3)      The Weather

OK, so I’m British, and ‘the Weather’ has to be somewhere up there in my top three! Last year we were back in England for six months, just in time to hit the wettest spring/summer on record (going back 100 years!) It seems like the national dress has now become waterproof jackets and wellies. When we returned to Russia in August (I need to point out that we lived down in the south of the country) we experienced more sunshine in one month than we’d had in the whole six months in England! We’re going to really miss the heat, the sunshine and the clear, blue skies! We’re going to miss not having to think about taking a sweater and an umbrella with you everywhere you go. We’re going to miss all those summer evenings of eating outside in our garden, and our kids being able to splash in the paddling pool all summer long.

2)      The Ex-pat Community

Living in an often difficult cross-cultural environment understandably brought all of the like-minded Westerners together in a special way over the years. It was such a privilege to be a part of this amazing group of people, all doing amazing things, and we benefited so much from their practical help, emotional support and spiritual encouragement over the years. We know it’ll be hard to find such a group of people back in our ‘home’ country.

1)      Local Friends

We found the people in our part of Russia to be incredibly warm, friendly and hospitable. In fact, many of them are generous beyond what they can really afford, and I’ve learned so much from them about hospitality over the years. With some particular local friends we have fond memories going back ten years, and it was very difficult to have to say goodbye and possibly never see them again. We’ll particularly miss our local church, where we were so blessed by the fellowship and the worship. However, my heart bleeds most for my children. For me, I know that if I have the opportunity to visit my friends in two or three years time then they won't have changed that much, but for the children it feels like their whole childhood experience up to now has come to an end and will never be regained. They were so blessed to have wonderful friends living right next door, with whom they played almost every day, and they had lovely, local friends in their Sunday school group at church too. I know they'll make new friends here in England, but I still can't stop the tears coming to my eyes when I look at photos of the friends they left behind in Russia.

Qu: Have you moved a long distance away and had to leave close friends behind? How did you help your children work through their loss and start building new relationships? I'd love to hear your thoughts.


Abide in Him!

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10 Things I'll Miss About Russia - Part 1

We've been back in the UK nearly two weeks now, and are slowly recovering from the two day journey with 15 large bags, 9 items of hand luggage and 3 small-ish children. We're gradually, albeit a bit reluctantly, adjusting back to life here in England. It's lovely to be reunited with family, to have more conveniences on hand, and to already be making use of the wonderful health care system, but at the same time we feel very much in limbo and are afraid of getting sucked into materialism and just the 'mundane-ness' of life as we experience it here.

So, before I go too far along the transition process, I wanted to remember and record all the good things about our life in Russia. Things that we really appreciated and will really miss. I'll write this over two posts and in reverse order:

10) Village Life

Back in Russia we lived in a village that was situated close to a main town. It was the best of both worlds,
really. We loved the peaceful, slow way of life in the village. I loved the fact that the kids and I could see so many animals on our walks 'around the block'. There were chickens, geese and turkeys just out and about on the streets or behind wire fences where we could see them and observe them. Every evening the cows would amble home from the pasture, and we watched in amazement as each cow knew exactly where she lived and would peel off from the rest of the herd, stand at her own gate and moo until the owner let her in for the night. There were of course lots of dogs and cats (pets and strays) around, and occasionally we would see a horse and her foal munching grass by the side of the road.

9) Beautiful Scenery

We were lucky enough to live in a place where we could see a range of snow-capped mountains in the distance. On a clear day the view was stunning. I named our homeschool 'Mountain River Homeschool' and our special verse was Psalm 121 v 1,2:

"I life up my eyes to the mountains. Where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth." 

When we were in need of a break, then a few hours drive and we could be up in those mountains, enjoying a family picnic or walking beside mountain streams.




8) New Food

One of the most interesting aspects of travelling is trying out the local, ethnic cuisine. We'll miss the local pies, the wonderful variety of salads and the varied assortment of cakes. We'll also miss some local foods that came to be a natural part of our diet and that are hard to replicate here, such as the wonderful seasonal fruit and veg (I doubt we'll see watermelons that size again for a long time), dairy products such as smetana, grains and legumes such as buckwheat (it doesn't seem to be quite the same in my local supermarket in England) and a certain pear-flavoured fizzy drink called 'grusha'. Over the years I adapted my recipes to fit the local ingredients and there were fewer and fewer things that I hankered after from the UK (with the exception of peanut butter, marmite and custard powder!) I'll miss the local farmers' markets.

7) Reduced Health and Safety Restrictions

OK, this one might sound a bit strange. I mean, what kind of mother would like slacker rules on health and safety? But there are a few things that we find have been taken to an extreme back home in England. Road works is one. In England, the whole road could get closed off, causing annoying disruptions. In Russia, you just drove around it, and if your car fell in the hole, well, that was your problem. There were no restrictions on photographing your kids in public places. You could let your children go and play on the street with their friends from a really young age because you knew that they would all be under the watchful eye of some babushka standing on the corner. And, although we almost always strapped our kids into car seats, you knew that if necessary it would be totally OK to hold a child on your lap while you were giving friends a lift home.
 
6) A Gadget-Free Childhood

Every time we go back to England we’re amazed at how many toys and gadgets children have. And whilst we provided our children with more toys probably than many local children in Russia were able to have, we’re still very thankful that our kids have grown up in a culture where it’s normal to spend your afternoons riding bikes, setting up a home for your dollies in the garden shed, picking flowers and climbing trees rather than playing computer games or watching cartoons on the iPad. We’ve also appreciated not being pressured by our kids to buy ‘the latest thing’ or a particular brand of clothing that everyone else is wearing, simply because that wasn’t important in Russia, at least not among their peers. Somehow I get the feeling that life will be a bit more expensive here in England, in terms of what we will need to buy for the children!

I'll let you know my top 5 things in the next post, which you can find here. But in the meantime: 

Qu: If you've ever been to Russia, what were some of the things you appreciated about life there? Or if you've lived overseas somewhere else, what are some of the things that you would miss/have missed about life there?

Abide in Him!

Linking up here:

How Building A RAFT Can Help In Times of Transition

We’re now into our last few days of living here in Russia before we return to England. This week we’ve moved from concentrating on selling/packing/getting rid of all our stuff (and when it’s been accumulating for 11 years there’s an awful lot of it!) to saying painful goodbyes.

And it’s not just saying goodbye to people that’s painful, but also to places and activities that have been special to us over the years. Yesterday, for example, I had my last visit to my favourite café in town. Situated in the park, it’s been so peaceful being able to sit outside in the summer-time especially, and I’ve spent many an afternoon there re-charging my batteries and re-focussing my vision for the week ahead. I’m really going to miss it!

Many people have shared with us the RAFT principles of transistion times such as this. It’s a tool offered by the late Dave Pollock, who wrote a seminal book about TCKs (check it out here: Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds, Revised Edition). RAFT stands for:

R – Reconciliation

Try to heal any broken relationships and resolve any tensions before you leave.

A-  Affirmation

Tell people how much you’ve appreciated them and been blessed by them over the years. Thank them for their kindnesses.

F- Farewells

Make sure you make time to say goodbye not just to people but also to places, possessions and pets.

T – Think Destination

Be realistic about what it’s going to be like when you return and how you’re going to cope with all the adjustments.

Following the principle of Affirmation, I felt moved to write a comment in the comments book at my favourite café. I thanked them for many things, including the fact that they have the best toilet in the whole town! This may sound like a trivial thing, but when you’re faced with the alternative of dirty holes in the floor and open-topped baskets overflowing with discarded, used toilet paper and other unmentionables, the clean, white toilet seat, the automatic soap dispenser and the continuous stock of paper towels seem like they’ve been sent from heaven!

So, if you’re going through a time of transition, moving from one place to another, I encourage you to build a
RAFT too!

Qu: Have you had experiences of good transitions using this model? Do you have any advice to add about how to make transition times smoother? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Abide in Him!

Photo credit: freedigitalphotos.net/baitong333 and cbenjasuwan

You Know Your Child Is A TCK When.....

It's now less than a month until we have to say a final farewell to our home of nine years here in Russia and head on back to England. The last few weeks have been filled with sadness and stress, but also we've sensed God's peace and people's prayers throughout it all.

I can't help wondering, of course, what it'll be like to assimilate back into British culture, and especially how my children are going to cope with that. For those of you who live overseas you may be familiar with the term 'TCK' or 'Third Culture Kid'. For those of you who are asking: "What are TCKs?", let me explain:


Our children don't belong to their parents' culture (since they've lived overseas nearly all their life) and they don't belong to local Russian culture either (because they're clearly foreigners who don't speak the language fluently). Instead, they belong to their own 'third culture', which only their siblings and other TCKs can fully understand and appreciate.

I thought, after the heaviness of the last few posts, that it was time to have a more light-hearted one, so here goes some funny (well, at least I think they're amusing!) reflections on the life of a TCK:

You know your child is a TCK when....

.... they've been on 17 flights before they're even born (Sophie)

.....their first steps are taken not in the family home but in an airport (Charis, in Berlin, on our way to Moscow)

...... their first proper sentence contains the words 'skype' and 'Grandma' (Nathaniel)

.....they list as their top three favourite foods 1) smetana 2) khitchini and 3) grusha

.....they can't understand why, when you're visiting your home country, you can't 'pause' the TV to allow them to go to the toilet (because they only ever watch English language TV on DVDs)

..... they return to your home country and are shocked to find that the children around them are speaking English.

...... they automatically kick off their shoes when entering people's houses in England

...... they're amazed to see dogs living inside people's houses and not outside in the yard

...... they know the Russian term for 'Hide and Seek' but can't think what it is in English

...... they have no idea who Justin Bieber is, but they're quite happy, thanks to your husband's influence (!), singing songs by Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey and Celine Dion.

Qu: Are your children TCKs? If so, please add some more funny observations in the comments below!

Abide in Him!


Photo credit: freedigitalphotos.net / digitalart

Has Homeschooling Become An Idol?

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been trying to listen to what God might be teaching me as our time here in Russia draws to a close and I pack up our life here after nine years. If you haven’t already, I think you might need to read the previous two posts to understand what I’m about to say. You can find them here and here.

A thought occurred to me as I was sorting through the craft cupboard. Now, I have to tell you that, despite not being a particularly crafty person myself, I’m very proud of my craft cupboard! For years I’ve been stocking up on goggle eyes and lollipop sticks, sheets of felt, pipe cleaners, and colourful foam shapes. And since I know that those items are impossible to find in our part of Russia, I’ve been using them very sparingly. It seems to me ironic, now, that my kids will never get to use most of the items I’ve been storing up in those lovely, matching, clearly labelled plastic containers. Which is why I suddenly wondered, have I been storing up my treasure in the wrong place? Has my homeschool room become an idol to me? Has my homeschooling dream been pushing out some of the other dreams that God has been wanting me to embrace?

I’m still processing this thought, but now I’m more open to spending this next year listening more closely to what God wants of me. It may well be, and I really hope so, that He will reaffirm my calling to be a homeschooling mother, but I have to be open to the possibility that He won’t. And even if He does, I need to be sure that I’m storing up treasures in the right places. 

Perhaps I’ve been focussing too much on completing schedules and ticking boxes rather than making sure that my children are really learning and enjoying the experience of learning. Perhaps I’ve been more obsessed with ‘looking the part’, with the neatly labelled but generally unused boxes, than with allowing my children the freedom to explore and learn through their own, often messy discoveries. Have I let rigidity and rules take the place of relationships? How often have I filled in something myself in the nature diary or the Book of Centuries because allowing the children to do it would take too long and wouldn’t be ‘as neat’? How often have I been more worried about other people’s expectations of me than working at the pace my child needs to go at?

Now, before you start to object, I know that children often need to do things that they don’t enjoy. Personally, I'm not an ‘unschooler’ – I choose to follow a fairly set curriculum and daily timetable, and I believe children need to learn to persevere at tasks they don’t find easy or necessarily enjoyable sometimes. However, I think these are questions all homeschooling mums need to ask themselves from time to time.

Transition times are hard, but they do offer us the chance to step back a bit and take stock. I pray that we would all have the opportunity to do that from time to time, because motherhood is a lifelong learning process, and if we stop learning we stop growing.

Qu: How about you? Do you feel that sometimes homeschooling can become a bit of an idol in itself? What lessons have you learned through the homeschooling journey?

Abide in Him!