School Subjects
It’s Just Math
Math tears. Do you have them at your house? I am very familiar with those big, frustrated, droplets that bring a good school day to a screeching halt. It’s just math! Please stop crying!!
But what brings our kids to this point? Is it the math lesson, or is it a feeling of being defeated? Do we accidentally expect too much of our kids? Or do we roll our eyes and tell our friends about how much we all hate math—setting up an expectation that math is to be despised and feared?
My guess, most of us do all of the above. I have.
A couple of years ago, our family was not in a good place with math. There were tears almost daily. One child was good at math, but didn’t know it. She didn’t have any confidence and thought she was doing terribly. Her only gauge for her success was how she felt about it, and since it was hard and she didn’t enjoy it, she internalized that she wasn’t doing well.
My other daughter just hated it. She struggled simply because she didn’t want to turn on her brain. She is good at math, but not interested in it. There was nothing fun about it. Just drama.
As I evaluated our math situation, I realized that I needed to adjust our focus. I spent a lot of time coming up with a plan to boost the confidence of one, and increase the enjoyment level of the other. In truth, I’d created the problem. I’d pushed too hard, assigned too much, and expected them to work too independently. It was up to me to mend what was broken.
That’s when I started discovering math read alouds. We love reading together. I can read fun books about math??!! Games. Games can be math! This year, I’ve decided that the last school day of each month is game day—with no regular math assignments! And, I took a hard look at our curriculum and our pace and changed it up. We needed to back off and slow down. I need to respond to math calmly and without drama. I often tell them that “it’s just math.” Let’s figure it out together. (And math should never be attempted with low blood sugar!)
Math takes work, and we all tend to resist something that’s hard. But hard does not equal bad. What a life lesson we can teach our kids if we can show them clearly that they can do hard things! All while learning…math! Perseverance, determination, problem solving, …and math! These are lessons we should be valuing just as much as multiplication tables. Don’t miss the opportunity to guide your kids through these lessons. To do that, we must demonstrate these traits ourselves. If we moan and groan about math, tell everybody how bad we are at it, and complain about teaching it, we don’t demonstrate the attitude we want our kids to have. If we allow math to become something we argue over with our kids, then we’re allowing it to break our relationship with them, rather than be a tool to build character. Don’t let that happen—it’s just math!
This isn’t something we can change overnight. Everybody has bad days. I have seen my kids’ attitudes change so much for the better. I told somebody that yesterday, and today—bam! Math tears. My third child hasn’t even done his math yet today (as I write this at 5:45 in the evening). Math is still hard—but I’m determined that it won’t defeat our family. I won’t let it make our homeschool miserable or damage my kids’ self-esteem. It’s not worth it--it’s just math.
Rebecca LaSavio
rebecca.lasavio@sequoiagrove.org
The Power of Reading Aloud
"I know this: we’re made of stories, legends and myths just as we are made of water, atoms and flesh. Once you know it, you can’t un-know it; you can’t pretend that everything that happened before you were born doesn’t have something to do with who you are today.”
Surviving Savannah, Patti Callahan
Do you read to your kids? One of the greatest and simplest educational tools available to us is simply reading aloud to our children. This is a powerful tool that has been practiced for a very long time, but more recently studied by scientists and educators. This simple practice can bring so many benefits to your homeschool and your family. If you haven’t given it much thought, I’d like to encourage you to consider the benefits that simply reading aloud to your children can bring. If the excuses have started rolling through your mind (I don’t have time! I’m not a good reader! They won’t sit still and listen!) then please continue reading.
I’m biased. I’ll tell you that up front. We use a literature-based curriculum and we read together all the time. I love stories. I remember stories so much better than bare facts. When my head and my heart enter together into a place and time in history, I engage multiple senses and I remember so much more. I want my children to experience this. While there are many aspects of our homeschool that I’d like to improve, I am pleased that my children love to read with me and on their own. They told their grandmother that it is their favorite part of school. They have large vocabularies and can generally find a way to explain their emotions in various situations. I attribute most of this to the simple act of reading aloud together. It brings so many benefits.
Benefits
Many of the benefits of reading aloud to children are intellectual—it increases their fluency. They understand language better and develop a broader vocabulary. ”Reading aloud helps students learn how to use language to make sense of the world; it improves their information processing skills, vocabulary, and comprehension,” says Iowa University. When we read to our children they are exposed to a higher level of language than they are capable of yet reading themselves. And as they are exposed to the wonder of books, they become more motivated to read books on their own.
Much of the exposure that children get to other cultures, ideas, and viewpoints in good books crosses from merely intellectual benefit into social and emotional intelligence. After reading Rickshaw Girl by Mitali Perkins, or Other Words for Home by Jasmine Warga I see girls in non-Western dress from a different perspective and recognize more similarities than differences. Children can also begin to see that the stories of lives from the past can have surprising parallels to our present.
In March of 2020, we were reading A Letter to Mrs. Roosevelt by C. Coco De Young. This book is set during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The main character is a young girl who is watching her world slowly crumble around her. Neighbors are losing their jobs and homes and moving away. She understands that something started “knocking down the dominos” of their lives a few years before, though it was hard to pinpoint how it all started. As we sat on our couch in California in 2020, we understood that dominos were being knocked down in our world too, and we didn’t know how far they would go and what effect they would have. Today, they are still falling. Who could have predicted that shortages of toilet paper and computer chips, divisions among communities over masks and vaccines, and economic fallout could have affected us so deeply? But my kids and I have a language to describe what’s happening around us because we read that book together as it all started.
The emotional benefit of reading to our children is surprisingly deep. An article from PBS describes it this way: “When parents read with their children more . . . they learn to use words to describe feelings that are otherwise difficult and this enables them to better control their behavior when they have challenging feelings like anger or sadness.” My kids have known the grief of losing pets—even favorite horses that have had to be put down. When Ralph in Little Britches suffered through that, they knew his sadness and that they weren’t alone in theirs.
Our kids learn empathy as they put themselves in the place of a character in a story that might be very different from their own situation. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry opened the door to a lot of conversation about truths that are hard to come to terms with. Meanwhile, it had never crossed our minds to consider what life in the times of the Khans was like for a 12-year-old girl in Mongolia until we read I Rode a Horse of Milk White Jade. We considered what it would be like to have your family try to marry you off so young. Was she strong enough to survive the adventure she found herself on? Why did she have to pretend to be a boy to survive? Stories about other people’s challenges and triumphs give us language to discuss our own. And I want so badly for my kids to be comfortable talking about their struggles and successes with me.
The time spent together is invaluable. The truth is, I always have a long to-do list. I’m not great at stopping and giving my kids my full attention. But when we sit down together to read, everything else fades. We are transported together to a new place, time, adventure. We get to know new friends together in the characters of the book. Would we like them in real life? What do we hope happens?
The Excuses
Your child is not too old, or too young. You can read to babies, and you can read to adults, so your teenager can certainly join you. They may not realize yet that they’ll like it, but they’ll come around. If this isn’t a habit in your home, start slowly. Ask them for just10 minutes a day after breakfast, for example. When they ask for “just 1 more chapter”, let them savor the anticipation and wait for tomorrow! After a while, you can build up the time that you are reading. If your kids are fidgety, let them color or build legos, just ask that they do it silently.
You might be surprised to see your big kids looking over your shoulder at picture books you read to your smaller kids, as well. And not all picture books are aimed at small children. A beautiful picture book can say so much even without words. Don’t ignore the picture book section of the library or bookstore. Many are clever, beautiful and profound.
If you worry that you aren’t a good reader, just remind yourself that practice makes perfect. Give it time. Maybe even trade off reading with your kids. Most likely your kids won’t mind, or they’ll hopefully come to value the time with you so much that they’ll overlook the occasional stumble over words. As they build stamina to listen, you will build stamina to read. You can certainly listen to audio books together sometimes, but I would encourage you to save these for the car or a particularly difficult book. I know that if I don’t have to sit and read, I’ll listen while I clean the kitchen or fold laundry and I won’t be giving my full attention to my kids.
You may have tangible wealth untold:
Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold.
Richer than I you can never be—
I had a mother who read to me.
-Strickland Gillilan,
“The Reading Mother,”
Best-Loved Poems of the American People
All the Subjects
If you are still worrying about not having your curriculum orders in on time as school is starting, please consider the benefits of reading aloud together. You can cover just about every subject with read-alouds. I am going to give you a list to get you started, but there are so many more. It’s very difficult to choose which books to even include. Please keep your audience in mind as you look through these books. It’s ok to aim at your older kids and let the little ones tag along but adding in something like Winnie-the-Pooh or Charlotte’s Web—books everyone can understand and enjoy—can help your littlest people feel included.
The list below is very incomplete. There are so many more books I’d like to include here. So many more books are out there. So many more genres. And many of the books listed in one category overlap into another. Carry On, Mr. Bowditch is about the development of navigational tools. But it’s also about US history. I mentioned Other Words for Home at the beginning of this article as an example of understanding other cultures, but it’s also poetry. All of the books help with an understanding of grammar and vocabulary. That’s what is so exciting about reading to educate yourself and your children—you are feeding the whole intellect, the whole person.
I did not include biographies, because the possibilities are endless. I also did not include a list of the good, classic literature that is so good for High School and beyond because there are endless lists online that can be found very quickly.
US History
Walk the World’s Rim, by Betty Baker
The Lewis & Clark Expedition, by Richard L. Neuberger
Across Five Aprils by Irene Hunt
Johnny Tremain, by Esther Forbes
The Year of Miss Agnes by Killpatrick Hill
Ancient History
Detectives in Togas by Henry Winterfeld
The Trojan War by Olivia Colidge
Asian History
Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze by Elizabeth Foreman Lewis
Kite Fighters by Linda Sue Park
The Master Puppeteer by Katherine Paterson
California History
Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell
By the Great Horn Spoon by Sid Fleischman
Vietnam War
The Land I Lost: The Adventures of a Boy in Vietnam by Quang Nhuong Huynh
(Disclaimer: This book has some authentic but disturbing stories about animals.)
Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt
Science
Carry On, Mr. Bowditch by Jean Lee Latham
Pasteur’s Fight Against Microbes by Beverley Birch & Christian Birmingham
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
Math
Sir Cumference and the First Round Table by Cindy Neuschwander
Bedtime Math by Laura Overdeck
Life of Fred by Dr. Stanley F. Schmidt
A Grain of Rice by Helena Clare Pittman
Sled Dog School by Terry Lynn Johnson
The Lemonade War by Jaqueline Davies
Music
Because by Mo Willems
Getting to Know the World’s Greatest Composers series
Meet the Austins by Madeleine L’Engle
Art
Come Look with Me series
A Child’s Introduction to Art, by Heather Alexander
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg
Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliett
Poetry
The National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry
A Child’s Introduction to Poetry by Michael Driscoll
Cornstalks: A Bushel of Poems by James Stevenson
Favorite Poems Old and New compiled by Helen Ferris
Just Fun (but with plenty of literary value)
Adventures with Waffles by Maria Parr
Anna Hibiscus by Atinuke
The Great Turkey Walk by Kathleen Karr
The Cricket in Times Square by George Seldon
Geography
Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne
The Story of Dr. Doolittle by Hugh Lofting
Red Sails to Capri by Anne Weil
Writing
Gooney Bird Green by Lois Lowry
A couple of valuable resources for you as the parent:
The Read-Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease
Compiling this list for you has made me so excited to start our school year. So many good books to discover! If you don’t usually read to your kids, please try it. Give yourself and your students time to get used to it. It’s truly a gift to give your children--and yourself.
Rebecca LaSavio