Project Simplify: My Daughter's Room

I have been nagging my 11 year old daughter for a few weeks now, off and on, to clean her room.



I'm really not sure the best way to handle this. She's a pack rat and she doesn't put things away. The goal, you see, is not a clean room, though that is a worthy goal. The goal is to teach my daughter to clean her room. I didn't learn until my thirties and then there was a whole house to clean and a husband and two babies underfoot.

Sometimes I wonder, should I just do it to set the example?



Should I just let her do it herself so that she learns how to make her own decisions?

Or, should we do it together--Me, sweeping the floor and chivvying her along, she, sorting through piles and telling me the story behind every. little. thing? We have done this in the past--and it's time consuming. I really didn't ant to spend most of my day Saturday in a tussle with her.

We needed a different approach.

Friday morning, when I went upstairs to reconnoiter her room, I was instantly overwhelmed.



I didn't quite know where to start. Me! The Organized One! Me! the chivvier! Me, the Mom.



So, I decided simply to begin. Grab a trash bag and turn left.



Pick up the trash.

Pick up the obviously dirty laundry.

I decided I would clean off all surfaces except her desk. It's a disaster of too many delayed personal decisions which I could not make, even if I wanted too.

I piled everything in categories on the bed: clothes to decide whether to put away or put in the hamper, papers to sort whether to keep or let go, and her stuffies.



Forty five minutes later, her room looked like this:







She walked in Friday night and exclaimed, "I have a floor!"

Saturday morning, it was her turn. She was diligent. I'm not entirely sure what she was so busy at, but she started around 10 am and stopped at three with only a couple of half hour breaks.

Beside the bed:


By the dresser (the laundry basket in the hallway contains her donate pile)



The desk:



And, finally, the bed:



Does the room look the way I would want it? No.

Did she declutter a lot? No, but some: A few articles of outgrown clothing, a few toys.

Did she take responsibility for her stuff? Yes, for example, she went through a huge collection of Girl Guide crests and decided which ones she wanted to keep and which she will trade at the next Jamboree, she sorted through her headbands, and she told me not to buy her anymore stuffed animals! (Yay)

So, I let her invite a friend over for the rest of the afternoon.

Verdict: I think this new approach worked well. I'll try it again, hopefully not too soon!

The Power of Fifteen Minutes

Once again, I am involved in a Simplify 101 course. This one is called, Organizing 101. The instructor, Aby Garvey, has challenged us to find something to de-clutter or organize every day for at least 15 minutes during the six weeks of the course. Yesterday, I finished my first project, which I did with my 12 year old son.

Before: (Sunday)



After: (Wednesday)



Note the dishpans on the bottom! Perfectly good storage containers (and at the right price point for us, too!). Note, too, how although I have different storage containers: they are grouped like with like. The whole thing is much more pleasing to the eye that way. It's one of Aby's great little tips.

Today, I went into his room and said, "Dude, your choice. We can spend 15 minutes on your desk top, or your dresser top," and then I wandered away to find the camera. When I got back, his desk top was neat and orderly.



I'm thrilled.

We have to clean off the bulletin board and the wall yet, obviously.

For the next few days, I will be working on the upstairs linen closet. More on that tomorrow.

I Wish All Weeks Had Ten Days.

We have been at school all week. Up at 8, 8:30 and into the books by 9:00. The kids did ask me if they could please have breakfast before we started. Geesh. I reluctantly agreed. So, now we have Hot Chocolate and an egg and some fruit before we open a book: and I've found that things really run much more smoothly--even with significant sleep deprivation which worsened as the week progressed.

The playground program is still running and that has helped us finish in decent time every day. The city hires a bunch of University students to provide supervision at local parks in the summer. Grace and Megan have managed an excellent program and my daughter has met so many of the neighbourhood children that it has truly been wonderful! My social butterfly is thus also highly motivated to get her work done quickly so she can get to the park.

Today we made a balloon model of the Solar System. It's designed to show relative size--NOT distance. We had an extraordinarily hard time blowing up balloons only 2 1/4" or so. You'll notice that our Solar System is missing Venus and Mars. Somehow, even though they were teeny tiny, they popped. (Earth, is, unfortunately, pink.)



So, we have been doing school by day...and by night I have been planning. Lots of planning. Tons of planning. So much planning, I don't really even want to talk about it.

Oh and did I mention, it is Birthday Week? It isn't enough for a child to have a family party on the day of his or her actual birthday, you know. Not anymore. No, you have to offer something on the weekend as well. For children. From 1 to 4 pm tomorrow, we'll feed seven little eight and nine year old girls lots of sugar and then do our best to corral that energy into lots of games and activities. And that's why these balloons are up.



Of course, for me, whose living room furniture has been topsy turvey and in the middle of the room for the last month until this morning, this last week also saw the ceiling painted...and the coving touched up with the same paint as before. (Someone suggested doing something like this in the comments, and I thought, hey, I already have that and it looks half decent, so why not?) The profound and exciting change happened, though, with the first swath of the lighter ceiling paint. That's what lifted the room and completed its metamorphosis from dark and cave-like to airy and open. I am so happy with my vanilla walls and cloud white ceiling that I want to take some time selecting the artwork for the walls and other doodads.

And yes, I cooked. Every night but tonight. Tonight I caved and let the local pizzeria provide dinner.

They do it well.

Words from the Wise

Susan Wise Bauer, that is:
(She's considered something of a classical education guru in homeschooling circles.)

One thing classical homeschoolers really need to guard against is a devastating level of elitism: "We are doing the best homeschooling because our young children are doing such advanced work." This kind of elitism is non-Christian, it is unloving, and it is unproductive. I was recently asked, "What do you think of third-graders doing Saxon 5/4?" I said, "I can't think of a single thing you would gain by that. Some of them will be able to do it, but a lot of them aren't developmentally ready for it. You are going to finish advanced mathematics by the end of high school if you keep them on the normal schedule. What's the rush?" What do you gain by asking a seventh-grader to read the Iliad if that seventh-grader hasn't developed the maturity to understand and appreciate what he's reading? Nothing at all. You gain nothing in the way of emotional and mental development by pushing difficult tasks down to earlier grades.

I am not talking about the lowering of academic standards. I don't want them lowered; I am just talking about extending the time needed for children to meet those standards. Children move from grammar to logic stage thinking, and from logic to rhetoric stage thinking, at different times in different subjects. We should focus on this, rather than focusing on age or grade level. And I hope that classical schools will also begin to think seriously about what is being gained in the classroom if immature students are being asked to do work that continually frustrates them. Is our goal to educate as many students as possible, or to identify a small, advanced, elite core of classical scholars? I hope it's the first, and not the second. I think there is a very high level of achievement that all children can reach, given the appropriate amount of time. Keep the standards high, but give each child the appropriate amount of time for those achievements.

from The Old Schoolhouse.

Like every teaching parent, I need reassurance.

We are so far behind in our curriculum that there's no way ds is making it to University by 18! Yes, he's only ten, but my heavens, I calculated today that if we continue school without any breaks, we'll be done this year's curriculum by September 13, 2008.
September 13th?!
No breaks?

We took a long long break in the fall--the entire fall, in fact. We did about three weeks of school in August, and feeling smug and quite ahead of the game (public school doesn't start here until after Labour Day) we took a bit of time off--that turned into a week, that turned into two weeks. Then a month went by, and then another, and then, why, it's almost Christmas, so why not wait until after Christmas? One January 7th, I could wait no longer...the public kids went back to school and so did we.

It's been a tough month.

First, we decided to visit relatives in Montreal and the Ottawa Valley this spring, so I decided it was time to get moving on the Canadian History course I'd partially planned. I've been doing a lot of on-line research in the evenings, pulling together resources here. It's been fascinating, but time consuming.

Second, I've been introducing our curriculum back in slowly. My objective is to do math, latin, grammar and spelling every day. The kids love to do their History (using Bauer's Story of The World, Vol. 2) so they keep me on task to get it done! We added in Art--just to give our poor brains a rest.

I started Bible this week and it was a disaster.
And we did start that Canadian History course.

There's science to add (I have found two great lesson plans for a study on the Human Body) and writing and Bible Study for the younger, and dictation.

I am overwhelmed.

Because we are so far behind, all the planning I did last year seems irrelevant. The schedule, even before we fell behind was overwhelming. I had seven and a half hour days planned for the ten year old, and only an hour less for the seven year old.

It just doesn't feel possible to do everything I'd planned to do and get through a day--let alone a month--or, even, the rest of the year.

Contributing to this is the third thing: our daily wake/sleep cycles are completely out of whack. The kids and I are up until 2 or 3 in the morning--and thus not up and at it until noon. I feel preassured all day long to keep moving. I hate giving the kids breaks because it is nearly impossible to bring them back from them. So, I keep pushing, let's do one more thing before we....But, it's Newton's law in action: the more I push, the more they resist. I haven't found a rhythm to our day, such as it is.

Lastly, I've been spending a lot of time over at the Well-Trained Mind message boards. I've been checking out other homeschooler's blogs. And I'm depressed. The women (and men) on those boards would be the very last people in the world to heap scorn and shame upon my head, yet I'm intimidated by their energy and committment (pre-reading? A Mom is actually pre-reading her history book selections?) and in the inevitable comparison between her kids and mine, mine seem to be way, way behind.

I must take a few days and get a handle on what's happening and what I want to have happen. My original plan was a 40 week school year with a week off every six weeks. That leaves us with six weeks for a "vacation" --now to be divied up between the three week trip to be taken out East in the spring and maybe three more weeks in the summer.

I have yet to figure out how far back that pushes our curriculum to next fall--but as Bauer writes: is there really a rush? Still, I can't help cringing. You just can't take half a year off and expect not to be half a year behind. In the words of the Wise, this needs to be my focus as I reevaluate:

Children move from grammar to logic stage thinking, and from logic to rhetoric stage thinking, at different times in different subjects. We should focus on this, rather than focusing on age or grade level.

or where we are in the curriculum.

Struggling

We are struggling with our circadian rhythm. No one, except the husband is sleeping anything like normal hours. For example, it is 2am here--and both kids and I are wide awake. And of course they refuse to do any school from about 5pm onwards. We just can't get anything done getting up at noon!

I found this poem by Emily Dickinson for us to memorize. It hit several chords. I thought I'd share:


Morning


Will there really be a morning?
Is there such a thing as day?
Could I see it from the mountains
If I were as tall as they?
Has it feet like water lilies?
Has it feathers like a bird?
Is it brought from famous countries
Of which I've never heard?
Oh, some scholar! Oh, some sailor!
Oh, some wise man from the skies!
Please to tell a little pilgrim
Where the place called morning lies!

Here's more of her poetry.

Day 7.7 Curing with Kids

Today, I learned my daughter is following well in the footsteps of her mother and Grandmother. Only seven, she's already a pack-rat. Every object is a treasure, to hold an object is to tell a story. After having sent her to clean her own room for two days straight, it was still a disaster.

This room is also enormous. It used to hold both kids--their beds, two armchairs and two dressers. Now, it is the Duchy of Junk. She was told: no attending the neighbourhood halloween party today until the room was clean. We had two hours.

Those blue things on the wall are Cinderella's cut from one length of border paper. We didn't have enough to do the room, but she wanted them desperately. I think I need to freehand a ribbon or something to connect them.



(my apologies for the poor quality of these photos.)
Dad suggested we bring up the Trofast unit from the basement to house all the stuff in various boxes and baskets on the floor. I washed out all the containers while she was at Church. We put them on the bed and started filling them when she got home. Dad made lunch.

My job was the same as it is when I'm helping my Mom. I hand her stuff and say, "Stay or go?" As with my Mom, my job is to cut any story evoked by any object short. In my daughter's case, we set up a laundry basket which I kept filling and she kept emptying, sorting it into her bins. We didn't let go of much unfortunately.

However, two hours later, we had this:

To the left is the Trofast unit. It used to sit in my living room and hold ALL the toddler toys (and I thought we had too many toys then!) It needs to be sanded and painted. The girl wants "baby blue." And she doesn't want that great chair.
The table will be moved into the Dining room, for now.
That dresser, I painted many moons ago. I want to repaint it, but the girl won't let me--though she will let me put flowered knobs on it. Hmmm. We may be able to negotiate something.

We didn't touch the shelves. Well, I didn't except to remove about a half dozen magazines and a few books I had stashed in there (oops). The girl may have rearranged a few things. Can you see a difference? I can't see difference.

We got that headboard via freecycle. I wanted to paint it white. She loved it as is. So, it stayed sponged purple with stenciled burgandy angels. She says they watch over her when she sleeps.

I didn't primp to take these shots. I wanted to get a record of her room while it was clean--and that meant taking them before she got home from the party!

Next spring we may tackle the boy's room.