Marina was getting stomach aches. They were annoying. Mostly they annoyed me because they were happening right before bed each night and in the morning when she had to go to school. I took her to the doctor after months of listening to her complain. The doctor thought it could be stomach acid but probably not. There was nothing that could be done. The poor girl (and her father and mother) had to suffer through it.
Remarkably, since we have been homeschooling her stomach problems have ceased.
Why am I starting this blog with this health update? Well, I was thinking I could explain our decision to homeschool by expouning on my belief in school choice. I could go on for hours about my philosophy of education. I could accredit it to our pending vacation. All of those things are true. The bottom line though, is that Marina was not doing well at McNeil. Something that she could not define and that her teachers could not identify was bothering her and causing her stress. Since she has been home the only time her stomach has been bothering her is when her dad is gone to work and she is looking for reasons to crawl into bed with me.
What does Greear Family homeschooling look like on the ground? What are the days like? Marina has an office where she has the privacy she feels she needs to complete the tasks that she and I have agreed to for the day. These tasks include math, science, reading and writing. We had a social studies lesson the other day at the Middleton Homestead when we showed up just in time for Marina to watch the ferrier shoe their horses. On another day, we went to the Kilcher Homestead where Charlotte was preparing to use a ringer washer (yes, the kind my grandmother had) and Charlotte taught her about the phrase, "Don't get your tit caught in a ringer." Important stuff.She had a unit on bee studies and spent over an hour sitting out in the sun with her father watching as the worker bees violently kicked out drones and brought in many varieties of pollen in all different colors. They then extracted and spun honey.
She is taking Manerine lessons with her friend Abby from Min Hui every week. Learning this type of Chinese is not easy, but she is good at it and is loving it. We vacation sat a bunny for a week. All that caring for the bunny that Marina did convinced her full heartedly that she does not need to have a bunny, hamster, Guinna pig, or mouse living with her in her room ever. Might have been the best lesson of the week.
We have made pickles and jam. Worked over the details of the Swiss Family Robinson and laughed about how that family "killed everything!" We are moving on to the voyage of the KonTiki but the size of the volume is daunting to her.
There have been days where the math and language work has had to be pulled from her irritated 'bumble bee trapped in a jar' self. Her grumbling over having to rigorously follow the math and language arts plan has discouraged me more than once. Then I went out to Razdolna to do my teaching practicum and I watched the kids: their attention and drive fluctuates in and out. They are not all interested in what their teacher is saying every minute of their day. It's normal. In all honestly, Marina may complain to start the task, but she is giving more attention to what she needs to be doing in that moment than she would have in a classroom full of distraction.
Not to mention preparing her for a zombie apocolypse :).
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