Christopher starts Kindergarten today! We decided to go for it and try full time homeschooling after he had been at preschool on Notre Dame’s campus two afternoons per week for the last two years. I have been reading about homeschooling and philosophy of education nearly since he was born and, while I had always been trepidatious about taking on full-time homeschooling, I felt that as he got older, we saw his temperament develop, his enduring intense interest in everything we read to him, and the general rhythm of our family becoming more home-oriented, it was completely reasonable to homeschool. Ultimately, we are homeschooling because I think we can give our kids a rich education.

I am a devotee of Charlotte Mason, an early twentieth century British educator, whose first principle of education is that “children are born persons”. Children, like adults, have a mind that feeds on living ideas. Often we think children need children’s things – and to an extent that is true. But children appreciate truth, goodness, and beauty instinctively and to deprive them of fine art or good books or direct experience of nature is to starve the mind of its rightful food. Mason wrote that education is an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life, and this resonated with how I intuitively thought about education.

Mason’s methods depend largely on what she calls living books and narration. Living books are written beautifully and communicate “living ideas” that can be apprehended and assimilated by the child. This doesn’t mean cheap moralism, but instead communicates something real about the world. Narration consists of the child telling back what they have heard or read and is the mechanism by which he assimilates the ideas communicated. Mason also emphasized lots of outdoor time and nature study as another way for kids to encounter the Real. This all sounds very lofty. Getting down to brass tacks, this means we read a lot and go outside a lot, two things we are really into anyway.

Some Mason purists argue that there should be no formal education before age six. Christopher is five, but it is also important to me to remember that homeschooling is a year-by-year discernment and is also a privilege. There could be a time when I am not able to stay home full time or that Christopher would be better served by attending a conventional school. Most of his peers are getting some formal education now and while I think the over-institutionalization of Kindergarten is a detriment to healthy child development, I don’t want him to be totally behind should he need to go to school for first grade.

So all that said, here are our plans for this year! I thought I’d put it on the blog because I like reading these kinds of posts from other moms and also for my own memory and reference to see what worked and what didn’t for the future. Much of it is drawn from the Mater Amabilis Kindergarten syllabus, but I have made my own additions/substitutions.

Reading

Christopher decided he wanted to start reading on his fifth birthday. We whizzed through Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons until we went to Germany and the lessons got longer. Christopher was initially completing them easily and even looking forward to it, but he started really resisting as the lessons got longer (and I probably pushed too hard for my poor five-year-old to keep up his reading lessons in a foreign country), so we have taken a break since July. I have promised to set a timer and to break the lessons into parts in order to keep them shorter, but he was still pretty grumpy about it this morning. We are currently on Lesson 50.

Math

We will be starting with the Reception year of MEP, a curriculum developed in Hungary for the British public schools. It emphasizes nailing the mental concepts of numbers as a foundation for all of Math instead of simply parroting formulas. I don’t expect Reception to take all year, so we’ll just move on to Year 1 when we finish.

Handwriting

This is probably the subject I least know what to expect, especially since boys – Christopher included – generally are not as interested in fine motor work (except Legos). He already knows his manuscript letters for the most part, but rarely chooses to write. I have Cursive First for us to work through this year and I think it does a good job combining phonograms with sensory work, etc. He loved the salt box this morning (and so did Therese).

History/Geography

We’ll be following the Mater Amabilis plans for History and Geography, both of which seem really fun. The kids have been eyeing all the picture books on the shelf since I ordered them in the Spring. Charlotte Mason emphasizes starting with hero tales from the child’s own country, so Mater Amabilis scheduled some American history tales and Geography is basically a world cultures study organized by continent with attendant picture books.

Religion

We’ll also be following Mater Amabilis’ religion plans and I am adding the Nashville Dominicans’ Virtues in Practice study to the rotation.

Story time

In addition to the piles of books we bring home from the library, we’ll be (re-)reading Beatrix Potter and then Children of Noisy Village by Astrid Lindgrin for our lunchtime books. We’ll also read selections from Joseph Jacobs’ English Fairy Tales. The kids have already enjoyed “The Three Sillies”.

Art & Music

We are following the Ambleside Online picture study and composer study rotation. Our first term we will be studying Pieter Brughel the Elder and Mozart. Mason-style art and picture study is mostly art appreciation, especially for young children. We will look and listen and share what we notice.

I am feeling ambitious and want to do one lesson a week from Drawing with Children using Donna Young’s lesson guides. It seems doable, but Christopher is also not really into drawing – his preschool teachers said it was like pulling teeth to get him to sit for crafts – but I’m hoping this might empower him to draw more. I have low expectations. I do think drawing is part of a good liberal arts education and it would set the stage for starting a real nature journal next year, but he’s also only five.

We are also going to go through Robert Levine’s Story of the Orchestra casually, probably during lunchtime on a day without a read-aloud. I saw Celeste Cruz went through it with her Kindergartners, so I got it at the library.

German

We will keep learning German songs from “Auf der Mauer, Auf der Lauer” and Meine schönsten Kinderlieder. This continues to give the kids familiarity with the sounds of the language and sets the stage for more formal lessons next year.

Nature Study

We will be following Mater Amabilis’ nature study recommendations as well as using Exploring Nature with Children to loosely guide our weekly nature walks. We all love this part of our life together and it naturally teaches observation skills necessary for future in depth science.

Morning Time

Our Morning Time is the first thing we do. The kids sit at the breakfast bar and eat (or refuse to eat) their eggs and we listen to our Bible memory verse/passage and a hymn, read the daily poem from Sing a Song of Seasons and a nursery rhyme from The Real Mother Goose, and listen to our German song. We will be adding Level One of IEW’s Linguistic Development through Poetry Memorization and AmblesideOnline’s folksong rotation.

Extracurriculars

Both Christopher and Therese will be in Level I of Catechesis of the Good Shepherd this year. I’ll be assisting in Level II, which I think will be a nice change since I’m the teacher everywhere else. Christopher starts Cub Scouts this year (a Lion!) and we’re all psyched.

Montessori Mouse

I put together a few Montessori-inspired works to occupy Therese and to give her something special to do while Christopher and I do lessons. The pouring work was a hit this morning.

Teddy will be focusing on his Latin declensions.

Since education is an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life, we hope to orient the whole culture of our home to learning. One of the benefits of homeschooling for Kindergarten is that all this should only take at most an hour and a half (and it did this morning!), so Christopher has plenty of time for his own interests, of which there are many (currently whales and volcanoes).

Chris and I have learned from any travel involving jetlag to anticipate “third day syndrome”. On day 1, you are literally on the plane or just arriving. Day 2 is still exciting and adrenaline-fueled and you don’t quite feel the effect of weird sleeping or you were so tired that you just pass out when you decide to sleep, so jetlag doesn’t really catch up with you. Day three though…day three. It’s the “were we idiots for doing this?” day. It’s the “I’ve ruined my children” day. It’s the “I’ll never sleep again and I want to go home” day. Day three of our last Eurotrip enlightened us to this phenomenon, so we thought we were ready this time.

Uh, we weren’t.

Christopher had told us a week or two ago that he had gotten a cut on his foot at my father-in-law’s house in Connecticut about 10 days prior. It looked ok even though cuts on the bottom of feet worry me generally and after cleaning it with hydrogen peroxide, I assigned some low-level anxiety to it and eventually stopped worrying about it since nothing seemed to be getting worse. He got some mosquito bites on a nature walk, which usually turn into huge welts, so I didn’t really worry about his leg looking a little wonky, since his arm also had huge welts on it. His leg was starting to look a little gross, but again, I chalked it up to scratching mosquito bites and moved on.

On day three, however, I noticed that it seemed to be spreading and spent all day in an exhausted, anxiety-fueled Google frenzy. Half the day I was convinced he had scabies like a Victorian British orphan and then I convinced myself he was dying of sepsis and had to go to the hospital immediately. Day three was also Chris’ first day of class and my mom still did not have her bag. It was a mess.

Chris got home and went to ask our AirBnB host about seeing a doctor. He told us that he worked at the hospital and was some assistant of some kind, so he took a look and after we assured him it wasn’t measles, he said he would drive Chris and Christopher to the hospital. We had already put Christopher in his PJs and tucked him in, so Chris roused him and they drove to Emmendingen Kreiskrankenhaus (why is the German word for hospital so funny??). He saw a great doctor who spoke good English who told us he thought it was a staph or strep infection and to come back to his practice in the morning to get a prescription for antibiotics.

Waiting for the bus to the doctor

This made me feel a lot better, though I still swung wildly between feeling ok and being convinced it it’s actually MRSA and we would have to amputate his leg. I slept a bit and then took the bus with Christopher to the Gemeinschaftspraxis in Emmendingen to see this doctor’s partner. (Sidenote: Chris and Christopher like to build “mine shafts” out of Duplos that Chris jokingly calls “Gemeinschafts” or the “Gemeinschaft Community Prison” since it means “community”, so Christopher thought it was funny that was the name of the doctor’s office.)

The secretaries spoke serviceable-enough English and the doctor from the hospital had told them to expect us, though we were all a little deer-in-the-headlights about the whole scenario. The office had a cute little play area for kids in the waiting room, which Christopher loved. I also noticed that the doctor we were seeing this morning had Homöopathie next to her name in addition to the word for general practitioner and that there was a whole wall of natural remedies. It briefly concerned me, especially because we were dealing with something that clearly needed antibiotics, which are often demonized in the alternative medicine community in America, but it quickly became apparent that perhaps they do not have the cultural divisiveness between conventional and alternative medicine here or it may have simply been a quirk of the particular practice.

Anyway, the visit went fine. She spoke OK English (Christopher clearly had a hard time understanding her) and we had a few misunderstandings, but she prescribed an antibiotic and gave me a slip of paper to take to the Apotheke (Pharmacy) in town. Since our insurance only covers doctors licensed in Indiana (I didn’t ask if these doctors were, perchance, licensed in our beloved American flyover state), we were cash patients (or Privatpatient). I had to run to the ATM to get cash, but it was fairly affordable – about 90 euros for the visit and diagnosis (Impetigo: a common highly contagious strep or staph infection of the skin).

The Apotheke is like a drug store/pharmacy. You can’t even grab Ibuprofen from the shelves, but have to ask for the attendant to get it for you in line. I wonder if this helps cut down on overmedicating or has anything to do with more acceptance of herbal remedies, but writing any more about it would be pure speculation on my part. They were very helpful and again spoke good enough English to get me set up with the antibiotics. Christopher and I made our way to the bus stop at the platz and browsed the market while we waited. I got some apple tarts to bring home and the bus was uneventful except for my stroller falling over and making a nuisance of itself. But again, I’ve found everyone very friendly and an older lady was clearly teasing me about it in German with a twinkle in her eye, even if I could only pick out two words from the whole thing.

I got briefly lost on the walk home from the bus to our AirBnB (no Google Maps since our phones don’t get data internationally…yeet) and arrived to find my mom cleaning up from Therese barfing up her breakfast. It was low key mayhem the rest of the day. Christopher was out of sorts from being so tired – the visit to the doctor was stressful for me, it must have been for him. Therese barfed one more time from what turned out to probably just be exhaustion since she hadn’t fallen asleep until 1:30am the night before. (“What are you doing with Brother???” she yelled when Chris took him to the hospital, breaking my heart.) I realized I had forgotten to ask the doctor some things and started spiraling again in to a Scylla and Carybdis of exhaustion and anxiety.

Chris decided he was going to take advantage of his own German health insurance provided by his state scholarship to go back to the Gemeinschaftspraxis and see the doctor he had seen last night about his own spot of Impetigo that had shown up that day, along with some on Therese. His visit put me at ease, though, and Christopher was clearly acting like his own (exhausted) self and it didn’t seem to be getting worse.

We ate dinner, I put Teddy down, took a shower and passed out on our bed at 6:45 until Teddy woke up for a jetlag party at 9:30 and Therese began her nightly jetlag whine/yell. Again, I didn’t fall asleep until around 1:00, both because of the little Ts being awake and because I was just wired from anxiety, jetlag, and sleeplessness. I had a moment lying in the dark when I just implored all of our family’s patron saints for help. My anxiety was telling me I needed to stay awake all night to keep vigil for Christopher, even though reason would indicate that actually sleeping would help him more. I realized that I couldn’t keep vigil all night, but the saints could. I was praying especially to St. Therese to help me get Therese to sleep. We were both so exhausted and unhappy and I had just been snappy to her. I didn’t have the energy to deal any more and Chris had to sleep to get to class in the morning. As I was praying, I had a sweet experience of the love of the saints that I think I will keep to myself, but it helped me profoundly to know that I was not the only one keeping vigil that night.

I finally fell asleep, only for Teddy to wake up too early. I put him back in his crib and passed out on the couch again. I woke up at 9:00am feeling infinitely more positive about the world. The kids and I ate breakfast and did Morning Time. My mom got back from the grocery store and we were talking about our plans for a train day trip in the region.

Then Christopher threw up his breakfast. Sigh.

It was just an upset stomach from the antibiotics, but we decided my mom would go on the train trip since she had already bought a ticket and even though Christopher was feeling totally fine, we wouldn’t risk vomiting on the train and I took the kids to a playground in the neighborhood.

“Mommy, they used these bandages for lepers in olden times.”

Since Chris gets home around 3:00 from his class and everyone seemed to be almost back to normal, he took them into Freiburg to get them bächlebooten, toy boats for the little canals running through the city, while I stayed back with Teddy, nursed my own cold, and cleaned the apartment.

Things are definitely looking up. Christopher’s skin is healing and we are beginning to get decent nights’ sleeps. Here’s to the next five weeks being less eventful.

Germany is experiencing a heat wave right now called the “Saharan Bubble”. We woke up on Sunday morning anticipating a high of 96 degrees F, which didn’t sound great for a place with no air conditioning. We also had to find a place for Mass and the Catholic Church in our village shares a priest with other parishes and did not have Mass this morning. Chris found a Mass time in Emmendingen, about a 4 km walk away and we decided to go for it, so after some breakfast, we headed out for a stroll/march on the bike trail between the towns.

Surely pontificating about something whale-related

St. Bonifatius Kirche

Christopher was not into walking – it was hard to blame him, it’s hot – so the kids did musical chairs in the stroller, on a parent’s shoulders, and in the Ergo until we arrived, sweating, at Mass to the familiar tune of the Alleluia.

The Mass was all in German, of course. There was even a tune that sounded suspiciously like a song from the American Church’s worst export, Marty Haugen, translated into German. (I will never escape him.) It kinda spoiled all my nascent thoughts about catholicity and particularity because lol Marty Haugen as the universal does not inspire the same wistful reflection. Nevertheless, it was a sweet little church, with a basket of books and paper for drawing for kids, of whom there were a couple besides our crew. We made a stop at the St. Joseph altar after Mass and then walked into town to find some food.

Germany puts Indiana’s blue laws to shame and almost everything is closed on Sundays. (#integralism?) Emmendingen has a sweet little platz and carless streets.

We wandered down one looking for a place to eat and stumbled upon Mahlwerkk, a cafe I had read about before we arrived. The side street also had Bächle, little canals that were used originally to keep water easily accessible in case of fire, but now offer a little place for kids to play and for everyone to cool off. The morning was exactly what I pictured for this trip: enjoying an iced kaffee in a picturesque town while the kids play happily. It was so lovely.

We took the nice air conditioned bus back to our town to spare ourselves the walk and put the T’s down for naps and Christopher deposited for quiet time. My mom arrived in the late afternoon! Yay! But the airline lost her bag. Boo. We’ve been catching up with her and keeping our apartment a cool oasis with the blackout shutters down – my mom said it looks like we’re in an apocalypse with boarded windows – as the real feel has reached 103. Chris has perfected the art of bowl ice. The kids’ rooms have the only two fans in the house. Send A/C.

Mouse of the World is back at it again.