Wind Rose Homeschool Academy Blog

The other day, I felt super frustrated.  My daughter was struggling to transition back to learning after a play break, and I snapped at her verbally.  There’s that moment, right after I snap at one of the children, and I am sort of outside myself just for a second and actually hear myself and think, “Well, that sucked.” Know that feeling?  And, despite that inner voice, I sometimes feel this temptation to lean in and hold onto my pride in “being right” or “being in charge”. I have a choice in that moment to lean in to that pride, or I can stop and make a change. Unfortunately, this time, I leaned in a bit more.  Said, “I don’t know how often I have to..” a few more times and expressed my frustration with “We need to get moving” a few more times, before I finally stopped and took a deep breath.  I can’t tell you how important that dang deep breath is. And then I owned it. “Wait. I’m sorry. I’m not breathing before I talk, am I? And my commitment is to breathe ...

Teaching and parenting are not simple, easy tasks for anyone, including us. There has been a lot of change in our lives and the lives of our children over the last few months.  We are all adjusting to the change from public school to homeschool. We have changed our primary location for our learning time, which led to less time for the adults to collaborate and less opportunity for all our children to feel connected to their adults.  I’m not going to paint a perfect picture of our homeschooling adventure. We have had some seriously rough days so far this year, and I recently found myself questioning, “Is homeschooling really right for us?” and, worse, participating in harmful self-talk: “This isn’t working.  I’m failing.”  I reached out to some great friends and colleagues, who reminded me that we are all going through some major transitions right now, and that we need to make time and space for the big feelings we are undoubtedly going to experience during this ...

About a year ago, I read Jo Boaler’s book Mathematical Mindsets , and my understanding of mathematics education was completely transformed.  It’s one of those mind-blowing, life-changing professional books. Using combined research of neuroscience, educational studies, and growth mindset, Boaler provides the evidence to support the following tenets for mathematics education: Anyone can achieve to high levels. Mistakes grow your brain. When you believe in yourself, your brain operates differently. Parents’ beliefs about math affect their children’s achievement. When teachers believe in their students, the students perform better. Student assessment ought to align to brain science. Visual math improves performance. Speed (often called math fact fluency) is not valuable or important. Mathematics is about more than computation; it’s a multi-dimensional, open, and creative subject that is more about patterns than about computation. This year, we are using a combi...

Aesthetic Experiences & See-Think-Wonder Our Anchor Chart We have been discussing Aesthetic Experiences the last week or so. In her new book Engaging Children , Ellin Keene writes about the aesthetic experience being vital to true, authentic engagement with learning.  She urges us to directly teach and share an awareness of aesthetic experiences.  In our opening mini-lesson, we each shared stories of our own aesthetic experiences. Our second grader talked about seeing a hummingbird for the first time in the yard, the time she cried reading Charlotte's Web , and when I cried at Matthew's death when reading Anne of Green Gables aloud to her. Our fourth grader shared traveling to an Amish community and being moved by their simple architecture and clothing. Our fifth grader talked about the movie Christopher Robin . In reading, we are paying attention to lines we find aesthetically pleasing and tracking them in a Craft Study section in our Literacy Studio notebooks,...

On Day 3 of school, we went on our first field trip to a local park with a lovely little lake.  We started with our typical morning meeting-- but in the grass surrounded by water and the sound of the wind in the trees. We read this poem by Emily Dickinson: To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee One clover, and a bee.  And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few. We then briefly talked about what a revery is (a daydream) and the prairie ecosystem where we live. The children spent the next four hours, exploring, picnicking, pretending --a true revery-- and kayaking on the little lake.  As they played after I had finished taking them out in the kayak, I listened for questions the children had about the nature around them, careful only to listen rather than answer, to allow extended time and space for wonder. One of the children is reading the book Magic by the Lake , and the children reveled in the daydream of the lake granting wishes abou...

Names matter.  Names are important.  They communicate our values and hopes.  They are a choice.  They are how we say, "This is what this thing is and what it means to us and what we hope it means to you." The weight of choosing the right words carries into all of our work with our children.  In his book Choice Words , Peter Johnston shows the power the language teachers use have in the way children learn and think about themselves. He writes, "Teachers play a critical role in arranging the discursive histories from which these children speak.  Talk is the central tool of their trade.  With it, they mediate children's activity and experience, and help them make sense of learning, literacy, life, and themselves."  Naming our group was a responsibility of much consequence; we were naming ourselves and our children, setting our roles in place.  Thus, we weren't going to take the naming of our homsechool group lightly. A wind rose is very simila...

Our first day of school as a homeschool group is just 5 days away, and we planning our first few weeks of mini-lessons, discussions that will set the tone for the first year of our learning together.  We are reading and organizing ways to introduce engagement, passion, curiosity, and growth mindsets. We will begin our collaboration time each day with a morning meeting, as many classes around the country do.  And that first day, there was a time in my past when my main goal for was to make sure all the rules were clear: No interrupting lessons, no getting up without permission, no late work.  I once started off the year with a lot of "No's".  I can only imagine my former students going home after that first day, plopping down on the couch, and feeling completely uninspired. This year, day 1, I have nothing planned.   Inspired by this Spring 2014 article from Teaching Tolerance, I am planning nothing for our morning meeting, other than asking the students two ...