A 12 Year-Old's View of Middle School

My DD12, Hanover, who has been back in the public school system for two years after homeschooling for three, made the announcement, a bit out of the blue, that she was going to homeschool next year. After talking with her a little bit, here are her main concerns:

1. School is boring and they spend waaaay too much time learning the same thing (she's pretty bright, so catches on quickly).
2. She wants to be finished her work early and have more time to spend on her own projects (like writing short stories).
3. She is sick of the moody and pervy (her word--but not in a gross way, more like mischevious) boys
4. She doesn't feel like she can really talk with her favorite friends at school because they can be boring, are too much of followers, don't often get her sense of humor, and can be slow to catch on.
5. The school rules are very much about obedience and don't make sense to her. Examples: even though her math teach has the current textbook page projected on the smart board for everyone to see, she still insists that each student turn to the same page in the book on their desk. The aids are very gruff and commanding in their rule enforcement and she doesn't understand the need for some of the rules or why they enforce rules arbitrarily. 

If You are Near Boston and Love Math: Math is Fun Event by Dads Do Good

From the Math is Fun event listing:

Math Is Fun

at its launch event!

(MIT, Microsoft NERD Center, 1 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA 02142)

It would be a crazy person to choose Mathematics as their first theme but we are convinced Maths can be fun and maybe a little crazy too. We want to share tips and tricks with you on how to make it fun.

Here's what you can expect at the event

Listen to a panel with experts sharing ideas on how they keep Math fun.

See how technology has changed how we deal with Math

Gaming makes Math fun too and you get to try apps and Wii games right there.

Enjoy food as you mingle with fellow parents and experts alike.

Children are welcome and will be engaged throughout

Targeted for elementary and middle school kids

We are excited to partner with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, a global learning company. A wonderful opportunity to be a part of something important.

At this wonderful hands-on event you can learn from math teachers and educators. Dads and kids can experience playful learning through math apps and wii games in a workshop format.

Dads and children (and moms) are welcome! Please register to attend. The event is free.

You can register at this link
http://mathisfunboston-estw.eventbrite.com/

Embracing the Changes

The snow on Saturday was pretty easy for me, a work-at-home mom who didn't have to go out until the late afternoon. Our new plow guy rules. Not only did he plow and sand, his son shoveled the snow from behind our cars and even moved our trash cans out of the giant snow pile. Very impressive!

My four year old can put on his own gloves (mostly) and even put on his own snow pants (mostly).

Accomplishments he notices but that I celebrate silently. He is getting bigger and bigger.

When my first child was little, I adored every new skill she demonstrated and mourned at the same time. I felt like I was always going to miss the gurgling smiles or baby talk words. Every advance was tinged with the loss of the adorable baby-ness that I so loved. Then it was the loss of the adorable toddler-ness, and on and on.

I remember speaking with a friend whose child was already a teenager. I was telling her how much I will miss all of the cuteness. "I just love how wonderful this age is," I said.

She replied, "All of it is wonderful. Every age brings something amazing."

And it is right. Now that my oldest daughter is 12, I can say that seeing her come into her own skin as a young lady is just as gratifying as cuddling her when she was just learning to speak. And as my son learns to be self-sufficient, I celebrate his independence and look forward to fully enjoying, with no sadness, each of his phases of development.

Out of the Mouths of Babes

While preparing the grocery list:

Me: Kids, what kind of fruit do you want for snacks?

Hanover: Apples!

Flurpee: Oranges!

Moose (4 years old): Chicken Nuggets!

Lady Bird Johnson Quote about Children

Bouyancy and Forces Science Demonstration: Floating Corn Kernels with Kitchen Basics (Optional Experiment Included in the End)

You know I am a sucker for introducing kids to science. I have added different levels of discussion for this demonstration based on age. Using easily found items (I may be the only one who still makes popcorn in the microwave with a brown paper lunch bag, so maybe not all of them are right in your cupboard), show a number of different science concepts.

Materials (when you look at the videos, you can see that I had no idea how much I was using of anything):

• A clear, tall container—I used a 1 quart Mason jar
• 3 cups of water
• ¼ to 1/3 cup of baking soda
• 1/8 to ¼ cup of unpopped popcorn kernels
• ½ to 1 cup of white vinegar

Instructions:

1. Mix baking soda and vinegar in the clear container
2. Add corn kernels
3. Pour in vinegar (Over or near a sink! It may foam over the top.)—it may need a little stir

If you do not have a 1 quart container, try halving the amount of water, baking soda, and vinegar.

Middle schoolers through toddlers can learn something from this demonstration. My guy was thrilled to see something change. I showed him the bubbles on the kernels and, that when the kernels reached the surface, those bubbles disappeared and the kernel sank.

Older children, elementary-aged, might look at how many bubbles it takes to make the kernels rise. Bubbles float and, when there are enough bubbles on a kernel, that force is more than the force of gravity pulling the kernel to the bottom. They will see quickly that the amount of bubbles on the surface will determine whether the kernel will rise or fall. Try to figure out how many bubble are needed before it rises.

With middle schoolers, start with the same concepts above. They may already know that the bubbles are pushed up by an upward force called bouyancy. The bubbles are bouyant because they are not as dense as water. Each bubble adds its upward bouyant force to the other bubbles on the kernel (a cool property called force superposition).  The kernels rise when the bouyant force is larger than gravity.

More in-depth: Ask your child where the bubbles are coming from. Turn this activity into a science experiment by putting kernels in plain water, water with baking soda, and water with vinegar. Are lots of bubbles forming on the kernels in any of those? What about seltzer water? A chemical reaction occurs when baking soda and vinegar are put together. They create carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide gas dissolves in water. Seltzer water also has carbon dioxide dissolved in it.


For those who just can't get enough, ask why the bubbles appear on the kernel (and wall of the container) at all. (Bubbles like to form on tiny, sharper places, nucleation sites.) They can try to estimate how many bubbles it takes to get the kernel to move up.  

Kim McNeill is the editor and publisher of Macaroni Kid for Southbury, Oxford, Woodbury, and Middlbury CT, blogger at Hearst CT Media Group, Kim's Play Place, the Waterbury CT Family Entertainment Examiner and freelance writer for CBS Local in Connecticut.

Things I Never Thought I'd Say Before Becoming a Parent

Things I Never Thought I'd Say Before Becoming a Parent: You are the master of your body. You control the poop. Be the boss of your poop. You tell that poop it has to go into the potty.

Relaxing Weekend without Kids? Yeah.

You would think there would be no down side to having my father voluntarily take all three of my kids for a long weekend.

I don't know what he was thinking. Although I am with my 12 year old, 10 year old and four year old all of the time, I am sure it must be intense for someone not used to it.

Yet he did take them and they had a great weekend. They spent a good deal of time playing outside because of the unseasonal warmth. The four year old, who is notoriously difficult to get to sleep, went to bed well all weekend--as long as he was sleeping with both of his sisters.

Now all of the kids are back home and we are resuming our usual routines with a little extra oomph because of my New Year's resolution to keep the house cleaner.

And that resolution has already hit a huge snag. I was prepared for my 12 year old to be truculent and derail our efforts.

Nope.

The lovely, relaxing weekend I enjoyed while the kids were at my father's house has left me with a potty training regression.

Instead of just reminding the kids to pick up after themselves and establishing new chore charts, I'm cleaning furniture and giving baths four times a day. It is difficult to embark on new routines when I have to clean up emergencies frequently.

So I am back to setting timers every two hours to remind my guy to head to the potty. I just hope it is only a short adjustment!

How I Torture My Daughter: The Extracurricular Tally

Here is what we are doing and have done with my 12 year old daughter on top of her normal school work:

Splash, two days, multiple workshops

Splash one day, multiple workshops

Online Class Honors Pre-Algebra, ongoing

Online Class Writing, ongoing

Girls Science Initiative, four days a year

Minds in Motion one day seminar

Writing classes at a local library, poetry and creative, ongoing

I am torn between feeling sorry for her and feeling pretty good that we were able to find all of those opportunities for her.

Why I Don't Care that an Adult Failed a Standardized Test

Update: Here is an example standardized math test the adult failed. I am more math fluent than most, having taken engineering-level math classes all through college. I cannot imagine that a successful businessman has no need to use basic graph-reading, estimation, or even understand basic equations. Here is the answer key if you want to see how well you do.


Is this test harder than you thought? Easier? It is much easier than I thought it would be based on the man's exclamations and I find it hard to believe he could only get 10 questions right--and those being guesses.

There has been a lot of buzz around the Washington Post's blog on an adult who took a standardized test and failed it. For everyone who hates the idea of "teaching to the test", who homeschools by radical unschooling, or hates having teachers and budgets held to the results of standardized tests, the post is flaunted as proof that testing is unhelpful.

The adult who took the test is a member of the school board in the district. He is well-educated with grown children and an apparently healthy bottom-line. If he cannot do well on the test, then why are we expecting our students to know 70% of a test he did not?

His argument: I don't know this stuff now and I am successful, so why should high schoolers need to know it. Very simple answer: Not every kid is going to do what he is doing.

I see the same bias in homeschoolers who do not understand why kids need a strong foundation in math in their younger years. Even a certified secondary school math teacher in a seminar I attended implored stay-at-home mothers to envision how they use math and to use that knowledge as a basis for how they teach math to their children.

As long as you are OK that your child could never become an engineer, scientist, actuary, and a host of other math-dominated careers, even if they desperately wanted to be one, then, by all means, teach the kids only the math you now need as an adult.

Secondarily, just because you do not use something in your career or everyday life does not mean that there are not very good reasons to know it.

When I was in engineering school, I often heard the rumblings of other students (since I am at least young enough to have gone to school realizing that computers were going to be doing some seriously heavy lifting by the time I entered the work force), "Why should we bother to learn this? When we graduate, all we will need to do is press a button."

And how will you know what data to enter? How will you select the appropriate parameters for the program you are working on? If your program's finite element analysis grid size is wrong, then you may miss the failure point and you will have no way of knowing how much or little confidence to place in the results. You won't even know enough to calculate a confidence interval.

And if, for some reason, the computer spits a spurious result out at the end of its work, the engineer who was never taught the principles by which the code operates has no way of knowing that his design may not be as robust as he believes. Also true even for calculators.

Another misconception is that because an adult does not appear to need such information now, they have never needed that information.   There are some very strident opinions that I hold today specifically because, at one point, I went through the hard work of applying some information that I knew way-back-when and confirmed. I cannot remember details at this point because I have had no reason to revisit them.

Does that mean that I will defend everything I learned at school? Hell, no. No one today will ever learn to draft blueprints by hand and will never be at a loss for having avoided it. Just like it would have been ridiculous to for me to learn the slide rule.

What is the difference? I know the purpose of those objects and I understand that purpose conceptually. The tools can change and the presentation can change.

I would argue forcibly that mathematics sees too much theoretical math pushed down into elementary grades (my daughter has worked on set theory, prime numbers, and exponents in 3rd and 4th grade without even learning about division) because teachers and curriculum developers think they are teaching harder things by introducing high-level concepts.

Mathematicians are part of this nonsense because they want to see children exposed to their favorite math-theory puzzles or fascinations because that is what turns them on about math. They think that if kids see these ideas earlier that they will be excited about math.

More frequently, the children miss out on developing a real number and operation sense because they were too busy trying to figure out how to divide numbers without actually ever having being taught division and they end up frustrated and puzzled.

As you can see, I am no 'test no matter what' advocate. I am also against using any one person's experience as a barometer for what children should be taught.

Making Education a Priority

If you have done any reading on my blog, the Twitter feed, or the Facebook page (come on over and "like" me! I only need 2 more people to get to 25), and now my Google+ page, then you know I push learning. I don't just "blah, blah, blah" about it here on the blog. I actively pursue meaningful academic enrichment for my children, in school and outside of school.

Ever since I was a kid, my parents talked to me as though college was a forgone conclusion.  They stayed positive about education even though my dad never graduated high school and no one else in their families had ever gone to college.

We are cheerleaders for learning in our house. What does that mean? We review homework. We ask about school (even if all we get is "it was OK" for two weeks straight). We sign the kids up for as many afterschool academic enrichment opportunities as we do sports.

My youngest daughter, 9 year-old (almost 10) Flurpee, is signed up for some extra work at a tutoring center. When it came time to schedule our meetings, the class times available overlapped with soccer. When I told the manager that we would rather have this extra academic work instead of soccer, he said, "More parents should think like that".

Notably, soccer is not a passion of my daughter's. She enjoyed it, but she could also do without it. I would not have her trade something she loved for the extra academics. That would be dismissive of her personal values. It would also harm our ultimate goal.

How could we encourage a love of learning when she resents the additional classes because they displaced something she truly loved?

That is a fine line to walk as well. I do not feel the same way about watching television or playing video games--though I do not remove those completely either.

Working for Myself--Busy and Happy

It's been a while. That's what happens when you just delve into projects and don't come up to breathe. And that's pretty much how I work. I take on a lot of responsibility and, now that I'm working at home, without the structure imposed externally by an office, I tend to work ALL THE TIME!

I'm often working into the wee hours, working all weekend, and only taking time off for necessities. Apparently making dinner doesn't seem to count as a necessity since I'm often lax in that regard.

My daughter pointed out the obvious. "But Mom, you said you wanted to work from home to be with us more but you're always busy." And I am. I like being home to drive the kids to sports and, of course being around them. But I also love being engaged in my new business.

My business also requires me to do fun things with my kids. No, really! I have a hyper-local website dedicated to kids events and activities in my local area of Connecticut.

Every time I take my kids out to do something, I can take some pictures, write about it so other parents in my area know what to expect, and then I take a tax deduction for the expense. Sometimes I even get to go places for free.

How is the new business going? Really well! I enjoy knowing about almost everything that's going on. The people who run the site are amazingly helpful. As soon as I signed up, they sent a huge amount of "getting started" info that really helped guide me in what to do next.

While I take my involvement "to the limit", lots of stay-at-home-parents and work-outside-of-the-home-parents run their sites with much less time than I have decided to use.

Just in case you were wondering where I've been, that's it!

If you are interested and want to learn more, just drop me an e-mail at kimberly_anne_mcneill at yahoo dot com . And yes, I like it enough that I'm hawking it.

You Win Some, You Lose Some, You Win Some--The Boost of Accomplishing a Goal while Working for Yourself

Now I'm working for myself. Not my own business, really. I'm an independent contractor. I get to work for myself as I work for someone else. It's new for me.

My previous job was as an engineer (although my most recent was homeschooler). It wasn't a job that had you out much. Sure, I'd meet customers sometimes, but I never had to introduce the company or ask anyone for money.

Over the last few months I've had my share of problems trying to work from home (the kids are a little better about interrupting me on the phone). But I've also had a really good result. And that feeling of success not only wipes out the last bad phone call, it wipes out the the last week's worth of bad calls.

It's an amazing exhilaration. Those times where something falls through are no longer as daunting. When I'm discouraged it can feel like it's going to take forever to get where I need to be. When I got something I had to work for, it's as though the finish line is right in front of me and I only need to take the final step.

Enjoy crafts, recipes, and local Connecticut events for kids and teens at Macaroni Kid for Southbury, Oxford, Middlebury, Woodbury, Roxbury, and Bridgewater.

Slime for a Crowd--How I Became a "Cool Mom"

Mad Science gets a lot of props for fun science. While I would never substitute those activities for science instruction, they get kids excited. Once I bought a book with simple science experiments. Was I ever surprised to find the same types of activities that kids love. With a trip to the grocery store, I was set.

At some point in the beginning of the year, the class parent for my 3rd grader had asked for volunteers. As usual I signed up and then smacked my forehead once I realized I would actually have to do something with all the kids in the class. These science activities fit the bill nicely–if I could get them to work for 24 kids.

A little recipe testing was in order. Anyone who has had a dinner party knows you’re supposed to test all the recipes before serving them to guests. Science recipes benefit by the same procedure when you’ll be in front of an audience of 9 year-olds. I had to take the numbers of kids and the amount of time allowed into account. I used the slime recipe from chemistry.about.com. I mixed the glue at home in small batches and put 1/2 a cup of the mixture in 24 quart-sized, zipper bags.

I packed up all of the baggies (making sure the top stayed up–I didn’t want to take any chances), some food color, and a Mason jar of the Borax mixture. Once I got to the school, I passed out the ziplock bags of the glue mixture and let the kids color it. After the color, I had the kids line up and I put three tablespoons of the Borax solution into each baggy. The kids just squeezed the bags to mix it up. When they could reach in and feel the slime, it was declared the “best Fun Friday ever!”

A little hint that I learned: the more water added to the glue the more “slimy” the slime.

More craft or activity ideas for kids and teens and also local things to do in Connecticut.

A New Journey--What is Up with my Kid's Poor School Performance

Hanover started public school in November of 2009 after three years of home schooling. Her first year was a little rocky with adjusting to new expectations, rules, and learning new skills. This following year, in sixth grade, started off really well. She could still her new best friend, she made another, very close friend, and her grades were good. Everything seemed to be coming together.

Her second report card started to show a slip. Her grades had fallen and there were some comments about her performance. The third marking period showed a steady decline in all of the academic subjects. After meeting with her main teachers, we implemented some new strategies at home to deal some of the issues.

One concern we needed to address was homework. Hanover was not turning in the required work. If we let her come home from school and blow off steam and play until dinner, by the time dinner was over, she forgot what her homework was or forgot any verbal instructions. First change: homework, if there is any, is done before anything else. That way all of her work is still in the forefront of her thoughts, she's still in "school-mode", and she can truly relax knowing she doesn't have anything work waiting for her before bed.

Along with that, I also became the homework police. I checked the websites where the teachers posted the assignments and made sure she knew about each one. I also drove her back to school a few times if she forgot a book.

Another change put into place dealt with organization. Instead of one binder that hardly held all of her work, we purchased a separate binder with dividers for each subject and a portable three-hole punch. She can punch any paperwork and add to the right binder. That helps cut down on some of the lost papers.

And that helped with some of the concrete problems. I wanted to understand the daydreaming that the teachers were reporting. They all said her test scores were good but her grades suffered because she didn't complete homework and she drifted off in class. So I investigated further with an academic counselor.

Yes--I know she was probably underachieving in school because she didn't need as much time, but it took a second set of eyes for me to figure out that she was fiercely independent. It's not that she didn't want to do well in school, it was that she is very intrinsically motivated and whatever was going on in school didn't float her boat. Which was almost no answer to what we needed but did help us move in a more interesting direction.

When I'm not policing schoolwork, I publish a website that has crafts, recipes, and events for families in an area of Connecticut.