Time well spent - purges and educating a young man

This week on furlough has been a perfect opportunity for the New Year Purge. I am not done yet, though I have finished the downstairs (except for the office, which is Rod's domain) and found four boxes of stuff to donate.

St Vincent de Paul was happy to take our kitchen stuff, leaving the excess from the magickal cabinet and the homeschooling cabinet to find homes for.

Next job -- the upstairs. That doesn't get as much attention as the downstairs, so I may generate a lot more boxes up there. Especially in my poor craft room which has slowly become the "home of the unclaimed. (I think every home probably has one. Its the place where you put whatever you don't want to deal with right now until that mythical "later". )

We have also made progress on the time line. It has been sitting, folded up, on top of the china cabinet for months as we tried to figure out how to best hang it. We want it to be secure -- but also easy to pull down in sections so that we can easily add new items to it.

We settled on attaching it to foam board and then punching holes in the board to hook over nails. So far so good. (Except that we ran out of foam board and had to run out and get more.)

Jack and I have already started making our tokens to add and I was surprised at how perfectly they work. Of course, I also realized that we have been bopping all over history in our explorations...we have some paleolithic characters to add from our reading -- but we have also explored Ben Franklin, Louise Braille, Pythagoras, and Beethoven. (Poor Beethoven is folded in half at the moment. )

I liked the idea of the time line -- but now that we're actually using it a bit, I like the idea even better, because it's making the timing of events much easier to put into perspective. As we study different places, I suspect that it will be even more helpful to see that "while Europe was doing this, China was doing that".

Jack continues to be Jack. He discovered Mah Jong yesterday and has a new love. (I doubt it can unseat chess, but he's absolutely enthralled for the moment. Then, at bedtime, he decided to read a chapter book to me before I read his chapter book to him. He chose The Adventures Of Ulysses. I didn't really expect him to get far, but he read two chapters aloud. He stumbled on some unfamiliar words, and I have discovered that he he uses his phonics, finally -- but not on complex, multi syllable words. On those, he mumbles. *laugh* I asked him not to mumble but to stop and show me the word so I can tell him how to say it, since it's hard for me to understand the story when he mumbles. He stopped reading then, so I'm not sure if that's going to backfire or not...

He's become such a complex person, has my Jacky. I have been trying to introduce art to his list of explorations and he has been resisting me. It perplexed me. He loves matching the art cards...he enjoys colouring with me, but mostly he resisted new adventures. That is so unlike Jack.

My "technique" of trying to introduce art has changed from inviting him to play -- to which the answer is usually "no thank you" -- to just sitting down in the parlour with the materials. Then he sometimes joins me.

One day, I had started to play with block crayons at the table. Jack Joined me, but after a few minutes, he started to look angry and said accusingly, "You're too good for me".

Woah.

I was mystified...I was noodling away on my own paper as he worked on his, and from my perspective this came out of the blue. Lucky for me, Rod was nearby and observed the exchange. He told me that he thought Jack wanted me to show him how I was getting the effects I was getting. (I had been carefully avoiding pressing him to try for any specific outcomes since I had managed to turn my older kids off the whole idea by being to focused.) I said I didn't know that, because Jack hadn't asked, but when I asked him, jack said that "yes", he did want me to show him. So I did. As I was showing him, I remembered a couple of other times when he had announced "I can't do that" and had walked away from a project. I wonder whether he had been waiting for me to show him how then too ...

Miss Debra, our artist friend, was over for dinner last night. She graciously talked to me a bit about teaching art to young children -- and then she initiated a game with Jack that seemed to turn his whole perspective around. He pulled out his Magna Doodle and was showing Miss Debra how he likes to make dots and then connect them. (A pen control and writing exercise he and Dad do.)

Debra joined in -- he made a shape and then she turned the shape into something. This went on for an hour, with her gradually shifting the creating to Jack. By the end, Jack was creating recognizable characters...something he had never done before.

She also brought some of her in progress art to show us...and it was very cool to see what she is doing with one theme. She also talked about a few things that hadn't come out quite like she had hoped and how she planned to try this or that to turn them into something else.


I learned *so* much last night! I know nothing about art technique other than what I have taught myself in the craft room in the last couple of years. I certainly know nothing about teaching art. But Debra turned Jack around from "I can't" to "look what I can do!" in an hour. I was amazed. Especially because I remember the "I can't". That was me until not too long ago. I love preRaphaelite painting and I was always so unhappy with my own results because not only couldn't I manage anything that beautiful -- I could never manage anything even cartoonishly recognizable. Jack and I learned last night that maybe we had both been approaching it backwards. Maybe the idea is to start -- and see what it looks like, and then work with that.

Now I just have to find a way not to kill the new spark I saw in Jack last night!

Yikes! We have our pagan homeschoolers nature walk in less than an hour -- I'd better go wake the family!