Colourful Threads

UPDATE: Apparently Rosetta Stone was not making enough money with all of us using versions at the library, so they have terminated all library contracts. The only way to use this amazing program is to pay a lot of money for it. We ended up saving for a year or so and purchasing this program.

We want to raise our children to be culturally-minded. For us, this includes learning a second or third language.

To that end, I researched all the home schooling language curriculum options, and decided that Rosetta Stone was the best program available for the acquisition of a spoken language. (We are not yet using anything for grammar work.)

Rosetta Stone offer languages from everywhere! You could learn Swahili, or Mandarin. How about Latin, or Russian? Hebrew, anyone?

The only problem is that Rosetta Stone is ludicrously expensive! Being diligent home schoolers, however, we started a fund to purchase the program.

Move along two years. We are almost ready to buy this program.

Then I heard through the internet grapevine that Rosetta Stone is available free through some Public Libraries. Specifically the Chattanooga Hamilton County Bicentennial Library offers Rosetta Stone free to all its patrons. The best part is that the CHCBL offers an online membership to anyone in the world for $30US. This online membership allows access to Rosetta Stone.

For $30 a year, my children can learn a myriad of languages from an excellent program that is exactly the same as the purchased program, but for a fraction of the cost. So we went ahead and purchased a membership. It worked wonderfully.

Then late last year, our own local public library began offering the online Rosetta Stone courses. If you live where we live, you can go to the front of the library website and click on the little picture of Rosetta Stone. Set up your account and start learning!

If you don’t live where we live, check the databases available at your own local library.

If that proves fruitless, mail in your membership to the CHCBL!

C’est bon!

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Things have been far too serious around here, this week. Last night was a beautiful breath of fresh air as we enacted our own urban version of Robert McCloskey’s Make Way for Ducklings.

Our neighbour interrupted our dinner to let us know that a Mallard Duck and her eight ducklings was caught between our houses.

We knew that the little family had a slim chance of survival if we just left them. So being the passionate nature lovers we are, we decided to capture them all and release them down at the river, about twelve blocks away.

The ducklings were easy to round up, although one little one escaped into the neighbour’s yard and hid successfully in some deep foliage. He soon joined his mates in the Rubbermaid Roughneck. Mother Duck, however, proved much harder to secure.

We finally admitted defeat and wondered if she would follow us, if we simply walked away with her ducklings. Sure enough, as the little box of peeping ducklings moved down the street, Mother Duck ran along behind.

We decided we would try walking down to the river. We would walk forward about 50 paces and then stop and wait for Mom to hear her children peeping in terror and run along to catch up with us. She would occasionally fly a short bit, but mostly she ran along behind us, answering her children’s pleas with the frequent quack.

Just as we reached the river, Mother Duck took to the air and disappeared over the trees. We walked down to the shore and both MrPages and I wondered if we had made a mistake. Mother Duck was nowhere in sight.

I was just beginning to rehearse my speech to the Wildlife Rehabilitation Organization, apologizing for interfering with this family of ducks, and acknowledging that “good intentions” almost always result in tragedy when it comes to wild animals, when a loud quack brought Mother Duck right down to the edge of the shore.

MrPages dumped out the bucket and the Little Ducklings raced down the bank, into the water, and right out to mom. It was beautiful!

We had the most wonderful evening we have had in a long time.

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A vacation is having nothing to do and all day to do it in. ~Robert Orben

MrPages and I are going away on a marriage retreat this week to a little cabin in the boonies, so we will be away from the blog for several days. We’ve scheduled a few posts to come up, but comments will not be moderated until we get back.

We’ve been having a tough time of it here, communication-wise. Have you ever struggled with a problem for a long time and one day decided enough is enough?

That’s sort of what happened to us. Poor communication skills are doing terrible things to our family life, and so we are taking a time out – time to reflect, time to pray, time to plan, but mostly time to remember what it’s like to enjoy being with one another.

This is no easy task. I have been having night terrors and anxiety attacks for a few weeks. We have never left children. Never. Ever.

Sweet friends, who we trust implicitly will be caring for the LittlePages and yet I can’t help struggling with the what-if’s. So I have spent the last week pushing aside those fears, trying to find peace, and packing and cooking like a mad woman.

So we will go to be together. We will leave our most precious possessions and we will all be back together in a week.

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“If you bungle raising your children, I don’t think whatever else you do well matters very much.” Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

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Lyndon made a wise point in a comment on my last post that I think is worthy of addressing.

When I got on my soapbox about our children doing as we do, it was a response to the question, “How do I get my child to read? He hates reading!” from a fellow home schooler who doesn’t read herself. I found that rather frustrating, and that is why I wrote the post.

Lyndon’s comment got me thinking about my parenting (not that I need much encouragement there) but I realized a couple of things.

First of all, I do not believe that all of the faults in my children’s life are my fault. They’re not. My children are unique individuals, different from me, although they are like me. I do believe that many faults are generational, in that we pass on poor life-skills so that our children in turn commit the same mistakes that we do.

However, my children are perfectly capable of making their own new and unique mistakes. My children are human. My children are also young, and so many of the negative traits they exhibit are ‘parroting’ what they have seen (in classical home school circles – under age ten is the “grammar stage”, or what Susan Wise Bauer calls the “parroting stage”.)

I realize that as they grow and continue to discover and define themselves, they will begin to show traits, both positive and negative, that I myself do not have.

I hope I will have the grace to learn from them in those positive areas they excel at, and I hope that I will have built some sort of solid relationship that includes accountability so that I can call them on those negative things. I want to be able to approach my children in the same way I would approach the others in my life if I saw them struggling with negative behaviors.

I’m not sure how to do this right now. I would love to hear from wiser parents who have walked this road, because honestly, in my home right now it’s mostly “parroting sins.”

I know the time will come when things will change and I will face far greater challenges. I expect that I will have to work it out as I go along, and I expect that I will probably make many of my own mistakes in doing so.

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(Please excuse me while I get up on my soap box for a minute or two…)

At my workshop on Ten Things to Do Before Age 10, many people ask me how I get my children to do (insert various school like assignments here, like writing, reading, math, public speaking, etc.).

My first response is to ask them:

Why do you wish for your children to learn that particular skill? Is it necessary for them to learn? Is it something they want to learn?

If there is a justified reason why the skill should be taught and mastered, then I need to ask some really hard questions:

Is this a skill that you yourself use and if so, do your children see you using it?

As parents we all joke about the old adage, “Do as I say, not as I do,” but the frightening reality is that children will do as their peers and elders do..

My oldest daughter loves to write and, quite honestly, she is very talented. So I, in my flawed wisdom, purchased a writing program to encourage her along. All her writing ceased, except that which was assigned. As an experiment, I quietly put the writing program aside and just let her be. Low and behold, she began churning out the stories and poems again.

She asked if she could on the blog. (ETA: She now has her own blog!) I didn’t have a reason why not, so up they went. Now she is learning about punctuation and grammar, so that her pieces will be well received by our readers.

A couple of weeks ago, LittlePage2 presented me with a poem.

“Can I write for the blog too?” she asked rather hesitantly.

My children write, because MrPages and I do. They are not afraid to stand in front of a crowd and speak, because MrPages and I do. They will engage neighbours, clerks, and professionals in questions about their work, because MrPages does. (This is not one of my strengths.)

My children also do not know how to stick with a task and finish it right through to completion, because MrPages and I struggle with this. My children do not pick up after themselves, because MrPages and I don’t do this either.

If I feel these are important things to accomplish, than I need to get off my butt and master these skills to the best of my ability so that my children will see that they are valuable, and worthwhile.

If a skill worth having, than my children should see me using it.

Granted this puts a lot a responsibility on parents. But then again, isn’t that what parenting is about?

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