Grandbaby #10

On August 23rd,  2013, our 10th grandbaby was born!!  Penelope Grace Benedict.  A beautiful, tiny little girl. She's such a good baby for her mama and daddy.  We love her so much, and of course, this grandma wants to hold her as much as possible!   :+)

                    

One AWESOME Blessing

     Do you have something that you feel has been, or is, an AWESOME blessing to you?!  Or in OUR case 9, soon-to-be 10,
blessings!!!  Who are these blessings?  Our grandkids!!  I am so blessed to have them in our lives!  People used to tell me that the proof of how successful you have raised your children, is by looking at your grandchildren.  I used to think, how did that make sense?  But now I see it.  I see how our little grandchildren, all under the age of 7, are copying their mamas or daddys by doing their chores, helping around the house, helping with their siblings...many of the things that we taught their parents, I see duplicated in our children's children.  And many of the phrases we used with our 9 children, they are now using with our grandchildren.  Phrases like, "Because I said so!" or "Patience is a virtue!"  So many people have said that "Just when you think you cannot love anyone, any more than you can love your own children, suddenly you have grandchildren, and your heart melts again, and your mama bear protective mode goes in to high gear!"  They were so right!  Now this is a true blessing from God!! 
                               One of the BEST yet!!!

A Quest for Silence or Simply Just Shut My Mouth?!

 Silence is defined as, the “absence of sound or noise.”

 Antonyms = quiet, peace, calm, hush, lull, stillness, quiescence, noiselessness

I am a person who loves details.  It’s what helped me all through school while growing up.  It enabled me to be on the newspaper staff, as well as the yearbook staff. I excelled in my English Comp classes, and poetry writing.  I love English (writing and talking)!  Details have helped me do book reviews for different organizations and authors.  It enables me to write articles for different newsletters. And in return, it also is what helped our three older daughters excel in their writing while growing up as homeschooled children. 

However, the question remains…Why can’t I “just keep quiet? Skip the details? “Shut up?!”  Why do I bog down my husband with detailed talking?  He truly hates listening to me talk. He only wants a shortened version, if that, of whatever I am talking about.  Perhaps my voice actually grinds on his nerves?  After 26½ years, you’d think I would remember this and have learned by now. I have nothing to say that interests him.  My life revolves around our children, grandchildren, home schooling, and church.  Once you’ve heard it all, you’ve heard it all.  He does different things daily at work.  Each and every day bring new challenges and opportunities.  He is an important asset to the company.  He sees other people all day.  He eats out with different people all during the week.  He has numerous phone calls with other adults during the day.  He is an incredibly smart man.  What am I, but a wife and mother?  YES, I am greatly blessed by this!!  But, I feel that to my husband, I am nothing more than a person “doing my job.”  “What I am doing, is what I am supposed to do (as a wife and mother).”  To him, it is a tedious job.  So, he tires of hearing about it.  Insistently, I go on, doing what I do, wondering why I can’t get this one specific thing right…”quietness.”  Why do I persist at trying to tell him about things?  I don’t know?  Sometimes, I believe, it is in hopes of peaking some interest from him in something, anything that I do, or say. 

So maybe I should look at what “Silence” is from a Biblical point of view…  "Silence" in spirituality is often a metaphor for inner stillness. A silent mind, freed from the surplus of thoughts and thought patterns, that are both a goal and an important step in spiritual development. Such "inner silence" is not about the absence of sound; instead, it is understood to bring one in contact with the divine, the ultimate reality, or one's own true self, one's divine nature. Many religious traditions imply the importance of being quiet and still in mind and spirit for transformative and integral spiritual growth to occur.

Maybe I should put my goal toward this kind of quietness?  To grow spiritually if not in other ways.

Ironically enough, these two phrases have become popular throughout the centuries;

          "Silence is a woman's best garment."

“Speech is silver; silence is golden”

   Perhaps I either need to work even harder to learn from these phrases, or if nothing else, it is time for society (and maybe my husband), to see women over-all as someone with worthy words to share, details to adhere to.  

One Mom's Journey Through Homeschooling

     I remember watching my children struggle. They were much younger then; we were living in New Jersey, and my fourth and youngest child was not yet born. My two eldest children were in elementary school at the time.

     My older son was being persistently scolded for his inability to sit still; I was once called in by his teacher and told that he was sometimes so active that he would knock others over. Meanwhile, my daughter, who was in kindergarten, was getting into trouble for gathering children in her class and reading to them.

     Clearly, something was not working.

     When you watch your children grow up, you start to recognize their personalities, their individual quirks. My older son, fidgety as he was, was never more content than when he was pulling apart an old, broken television and putting it back together.

      My youngest son, on the other hand, liked to observe things and was obsessed with anything visual. He even refused to wear more than one color at a time — he seem perpetually perplexed by the idea that he could wear shirts that weren’t blue with blue jeans.

      It wasn’t long before I started to understand why my children were struggling in school. Their personalities overwhelmed their learning, and public schooling didn’t have the time, means, or opportunity to account for those individual personalities.

     The sheer number of students in each classroom stamps out the possibility of any recognition of distinctive learning styles. Private schools would be more likely to accommodate my kids as individuals, but, truth be told, we could not afford that for our three children, and the fourth was on the way. Neither the private nor public schooling systems was providing us with what we needed.

I grew up surrounded by educators. Both of my parents were teachers and one of my grandparents was a public school superintendent. That made my next choice seem all the more radical to me: I chose to homeschool my children. 

     When I made the decision to homeschool, my oldest son was eleven years old and my youngest daughter was a newborn. Back then, there weren’t the resources there are now — internet or computers even — so I went in to the experience rather blindly. I originally went for the traditional schooling idea, buying the usual textbooks and workbooks; I reasoned that that was what my children were already most used to. Eventually, however, it seemed like my children were in need of something radically different.
     My youngest daughter was in a phase where she loved watercolors. I say ‘phase’ loosely, as that’s really how she’s been her whole life. Once, she even painted the entire back of a chair we had recently reupholstered! It brought me back to thinking about how my children’s related to the world in completely individual ways. For my daughter, it was through watercolors and art. For my older son, it was through breaking things apart and putting them back together.

It wasn’t long, then, before I figured out that these were their learning styles: my oldest son and youngest daughter were kinesthetic learners, and my middle daughter and son were visual learners.

From then on, I knew the best way to help them learn would be to play to their strengths. I was lucky enough to have only two different types of learners in my family, so I only needed two different ways of approaching subjects.

     Visual learners, like my middle children, work perfectly well in a traditional school setting: they are good at reading and writing, and even enjoy them. The difficulty with them is trying to get them to apply what they learn from what they’ve read, asking them, “okay, now what do you do with that information?”

     My kinesthetic children, on the other hand, did not at all flourish in a typical school setting. Besides their inability to keep still, they, my son in particular, have a harder time with reading. On top of that, they can easily start to feel inadequate when they aren’t understanding something that their visual peers are easily grasping. My son was always an optimistic child, so he never let it get him down, but my daughter always got frustrated when she saw her siblings understanding something she simply couldn’t decipher.

     Their education needed to be tailored to them: their needs, their personalities, their strengths, what they liked and disliked. I let my son continue to take broken TVs and remote controls apart and put them back together, but instead of letting that be it, I would have him write about exactly what he did. After that, he would read aloud what he had written, and eventually, his struggles with reading passed.

     Awareness of the way my children learned, and helping them to understand they learned, helped my children become captivated by education. They would no longer feel inadequate when they didn’t understand something, they would no longer feel frustrated. Instead, they learned to play off their own strengths, and the strengths of their siblings. They understood how they worked and how to work together, and that understanding has shaped their lives, even to this day.

My oldest son is now 30. He never let go of his desire to move and play with things; in fact, he now owns an extreme sports clothing company. My oldest daughter, one of my visual children, is now a manager at H&M and designs and sells things on Etsy. My youngest son, also one of my visual learners, is a published author, and is about to start an MFA program at Chapman University. My youngest daughter is now 19, and is currently studying at UC Santa Barbara.

What was the best takeaway from learning how my children learn? It was their reignited passion for learning. Even to this day, they continue their education in any way they can, looking for learning opportunities in everything they do. The experience and new understanding even helped me rekindle my love of learning. I started studying at a culinary institute, and have not stopped my quest for education since.

     Understanding how a child learns, and catering to that, making education interesting and involving for them, can make all the difference in a child’s life. It can reshape them to love education. Take your child’s education and personalize it; it can change their life forever.

    
About the Author: The author resides in California but is a Texan by birth and has lived in seven of the fifty states and homeschooled in three of those states. She received a degree in finance from the University of Texas at Austin and later followed one of her passions by attending culinary school in her thirties. This fueled her desire to learn to speak French and Italian and these endeavors are still works in progress. You can find Gaye at: gayemarkham.com

Aaron K. Harris

Tutorspree: Co-Founder and CEO

 

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