Back on the Homeschooling Wagon

I love this photo of a mother bird sheltering her chicks under her wing. She has a rather fierce, defiant look about her, don't you think? Like she's saying "Don't you dare snatch these little ones away from me, I'm taking care of them!" I guess I feel a little like this as September 1st approaches, and with it our return to Home Education after a year's leave of absence.

Not that we had a bad experience of mainstream school. On the contrary, it was with a great deal of heart-wrestling that I mailed that fateful letter declining our school places for the next academic year. "Am I doing the right thing? Am I crazy - I've got a newborn baby who's still not sleeping through the night! Am I dragging my kids away from all their friends only to isolate them and make it ten times harder for them to make any new ones? What about all the positive aspects of mainstream school that they're going to be missing out on, like sports days, choirs, school trips and plays? And what on earth am I going to do about their exams when they're 16, if we get that far? Am I ruining their chances to get into a good university if that's what they want to do?

......and so on and so on.......

Perhaps some of you have been there too. It was interesting; it was so much more difficult to pull them out of school than if we'd never put them into school in the first place. I think if we were still in Russia and still happily homeschooling, because that was really the only viable option and we loved it, I'd have great peace in my heart instead of this terror and panic that I have now, along with this huge (self-imposed) pressure to prove to doubting family and friends that I can do this.

I guess I've caught a glimpse of what life could be like. With just one little baby at home I'd be free to go on playdates...and sit in coffee shops...and read books...and workout.. and finish those two books that I started ages ago. And my house would be so clean and tidy!

But somewhere deep down I know that that is not God's calling for my life at this moment in time. We're a homeschooling family at heart - it's what we're supposed to do, for this particular season at least. And somewhere deep down it just feels right. Hard, yes, but right.

And to be honest, if I look deep down I also find a sense of freedom and relief. No more shouting at the kids to get them out of the house on time in the mornings. No more packed lunches, reply slips, crazy 'dress up days' where I'm given one week's notice to find them a World War 2 Evacuee's outfit or to whip up an ancient Egyptian's costume on my sewing machine.

Most importantly of all, no more wondering what my kids are doing, what they're thinking, what they're being told about life, the world and their place in it. No more worrying that I'm losing their hearts and losing my connection with them because they're spending more time away from me than they are with me.

So yes, I'm firmly gripping my little chicks under my wings (all four of them) and heading out into this new school year with trepidation and fear but also with determination and excitement. What will be the key to our success? Having my eyes firmly fixed on Jesus, placing all my hope in Him and trusting that He will provide me with the resources I need to do this job He's called me to and to do it well.

Abide in Him!

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Life Amongst the Mess and Chaos

Things have been a bit quiet on Grace to Abide this year. After a brief burst of enthusiasm around Christmas, life just continued to be too demanding and messy for me to get my creative juices flowing again and find the time to keep up with my blog.

What's been going on for us this year? Well, at the start of April this happened:

Then just two days later, this happened:

Yes, after months of chasing after mortgages (which never materialised), getting finances together and viewing over 20 properties with a bored pre-schooler in tow, we finally found our future home. It's a perfect fit for our family, and such a clear answer to prayer in many ways - ticking so many boxes. We feel very blessed and I can't wait to move in and finally unpack those bags which....yes really...have been sitting there for over a whole year. Not to mention the bags that have been stored in other people's attics for over ten years!


Of course, just to make things even more stressful, we decided to have a new baby at the exact same time.....crazy I know! After a couple of sad miscarriages in recent years, we were so happy to welcome baby Joy into our family - our fourth and, I've decided after experiencing a truly horrible pregnancy in which I was sick for the entire 9 months, definitely (hopefully) our last! We are so grateful to God for this beautiful, healthy baby girl, and are loving being a family of six.

And so now, I'm living in the crazy interim period of choosing paint colours, carpets, furniture and appliances for our new house whilst at the same time caring for a newborn and trying to keep my other three kids fed, dressed and arriving at school with all the necessary equipment on next-to-no sleep. We're still in our temporary, rented accommodation while Hubbie is overseeing the necessary remodelling which needs to be done on the new house, but we hope to be able to move in about three weeks' time (fingers crossed, touch wood, and all other manner of superstitious mumbo-jumbo).

So as I look back over this last, rather difficult year, I can see God teaching me lessons of patience and contentment in less-than-ideal circumstances. Perhaps the biggest lesson for this control-loving, home proud perfectionist has been to learn to live surrounded by boxes, piles of 'stuff', and the general clutter that comes from living in a house that is not your own but which already has loads of clutter from previous occupants. I hope I've become more 'chilled' and laid-back as a result, but that doesn't stop me dreaming of perfectly aligned mason jars on my kitchen shelves and IKEA storage units.


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The Discipline of Waiting

Advent. It means 'coming'. Something, or rather someone, amazing is coming and we are waiting expectantly.. ..excitedly.. ...impatiently.. ...thoughtfully.. ...reflectively.


We usually think of waiting in terms of waiting for something to happen or to start. My kids are getting very excited about Christmas and have been counting down the days. They are waiting for a magical day to arrive. 





 

To be honest, my waiting experience is more to do with waiting for a home. Waiting to be settled somewhere at last after 10 months of living surrounded by boxes. Waiting to be able to put my own motherly, feminine touch on a place that we can finally call 'ours'. Last week we had to move again.....for the 26th time since we've been married. And I'm tired. We have another move scheduled for the end of January. And so we keep on waiting..... waiting for some bank to agree to lend us the money we need....waiting for that perfect, affordable house to appear on the market.






But waiting can also be about waiting for something to stop, to be over. Something unpleasant, difficult, stressful, painful. I know it's very minor compared to what many others are going through, but I'm still waiting to stop feeling sick! I'm 25 weeks through this current pregnancy, and the sickness has never gone on for so long. I know the end is in sight, I know it will stop eventually, but, again, I'm tired. Tired of waiting to feel 'normal' again.



Waiting. It's part of the Christian walk. The Bible tells us:

Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord. (Psalm 27v14)

Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him. (Psalm 37v7)

In the morning, Lord, you hear my voice; in the morning I lay my requests before you and wait expectantly. (Psalm 5v3)

Yet the Lord longs to be gracious to you; therefore he will rise up to show you compassion. For the Lord is a God of justice. Blessed are all who wait for him! (Isaiah 30v18)

Interestingly, when I looked up the instances of the word 'wait' in the New Testament, they were almost all about waiting for Jesus to return, waiting for heaven and for eternal life. Perhaps it's a symptom of our modern, consumer culture that we find ourselves waiting for 'things' rather than for a person. Like the child who is waiting for her Christmas presents rather than the celebration of God's greatest gift - His Son.

God is not slow to act. His timing is perfect. Our job is to trust Him and to be patient. In the Bible, Sarah ran out of patience and gave Hagar to Abraham so as to preempt God's promise of a son. Saul ran out of patience waiting for Samuel at Gilgal and went ahead and sacrificed anyway. In both cases the results were disastrous.

No, the lesson of Advent is that we are to wait....patiently, expectantly, trustfully. And we are to make sure that, even though we can enjoy and thank God for the material comforts around us, our eyes are still fixed on Jesus as we celebrate His first coming and look forward to His second coming.







Merry Christmas to you all!






Abide in Him!

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Photo credits: www.freedigitalphotos.net /Gualberto107, Ian Kahn, Stuart Miles

A Homeschooling Mother's Experience of Mainstream School

When we returned to the UK in June of this year after 11 years in Russia, we faced a number of cultural adjustments. For example, on my first few visits to the supermarket I was completely overwhelmed by all the choice available. When driving, an oncoming vehicle flashing their lights meant 'come on through, I'll wait for you' as opposed to 'watch out, I'm coming through at some speed'. And it took us a while to get used to dogs who lived in people's homes and not in a kennel out in the front yard.

However, one of the greatest cultural adjustments was sending our two eldest daughters off to the local primary school after having homeschooled them up to this point. Here are some of the things we had to get used to:

• Mornings now involve a lot more shouting and cajouling as we try to get the girls dressed in their uniforms complete with packed lunches, book bags and gym kit, and out of the door in time for the 8.45am school bell.

• I've gone from knowing in great detail exactly what my girls are learning and how they're doing academically, to having to bombard them with loads of questions just to establish whether or not they did in fact have a maths lesson that day (let alone what they actually learnt in it).

• The amount of paperwork work that comes home, in the form of letters to parents, could stock a small-sized rainforest.

• The Parents Association are absolute pros when it comes to eeking out extra money from you, whether it's that school disco that everyone is going to, or the school photo that you just have to buy. At one point I found myself making chocolate cupcakes for a bake sale (my child surely couldn't be the only one without a contribution the next morning) which I then felt I had to buy back at 50p a plate the next day to show my support!

• Everything now needs a name label on it. For a recent school trip I was up late the night before labelling sheets, socks, a soap box and even the toothpaste! My parents knew what they were doing when they gave my brother and me the same initial!

These are just a few of the funnier adjustments we've had to make. I'll talk another time about some of the more serious negatives I've encountered as well as some of the positives we've experienced.

Qu: If you've been in a similar situation, what are some of the more humorous observations you've made?

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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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