Lesson learned

I have learned many things from homeschooling, not the least of which is that I need to lighten up and let the kids have a little fun with their work sometimes. Believe it or not, I can be somewhat controlling and inflexible if I'm not careful - shocking, I know!

Take for instance vocabulary words. What pops into your head when you hear vocabulary? Is it "Booorrrriiinnnggg"? Yep, my kids think so too. But yet this is a skill that has to be developed, because I sure don't want them to look stupid by not knowing what "antidiluvian" means by the end of eighth grade. (I had to look that one up by the way.) See, my kids think I know everything, and I like to perpetuate that myth, so when they ask what one of their words means and I don't know, I just tell them to look it up, and then while they are poring through the dictionary, I go in the other room and look it up online. It's only a matter of time before I'm going to be busted.

Do you remember being given a word and having to use it correctly in a sentence? Me either, but I'm sure at some point in my education, I had to do it. And if I didn't know it, I would have either looked it up or left it blank, because everyone knows that you must, must, must take these kinds of assignments very seriously and follow the directions to the tee. No way would I try to bluff my way through hoping the teacher wouldn't notice that I used the word incorrectly (horrors!) because then he/she would know that I didn't know what it meant.

Not so with my son. He takes great pleasure in trying to bluff through writing vocabulary sentences. And I must say that he has had some pretty creative sentences in the last year or so. I would like to share some of them with you so you can see the progression of creativity for yourself...(and for the record, I did make him go back and rewrite these sentences using the word correctly)...

Let us go back in time to last fall, when we switched to a spelling curriculum that required him to write sentences for several of the list words each week. At the beginning, it was just him not knowing the word and throwing it into any old sentence. For example, he had the word deplorable; his sentence was "We must deplorable them!" (Really??? This is just a step up from writing "I don't know what this word means.") Same thing for sentences like, "Hey look! It's Mrs. Beguile!" or "Look, it's Mr. Heathendom!" Yes, these were all sentences he actually wrote and hoped I would give him credit for. He figured out pretty quick that wasn't going to happen.

But he quickly got a little better at it, substituting his word for one that SOUNDED close, but was obviously not the same. For the word infirmity, his sentence was "Many soldiers are in the infirmity." (At least both infirmary and infirmity have most of the same letters in them.) Ditto for the word abject: " 'I abject,' shouted the lawyer." The same thing goes for this one: "Most birds squaw when they are angry."

I was starting to see more improvement as time went on; his sentence for the word aptitude was "I have an aptitude for food." This is a somewhat true statement, so at least he was getting the general concept in there. And with "You are protruding on private property." I suppose that could happen, but...ewwww.

Soon, he caught on that I found some of these humorous and it became a game to see how ridiculous they could get. His sentence for the word irresistible: "To resist or to irresist, that is the question." Maybe we can count this as integration of literature? How about "Electives are needed to choose the next president." I think we better revisit government again. And "Theirs was a new kind of haircut, the mohair." I'm pretty sure this one came after my brother's mohawk haircut. Or how about this one: "The country tapioca is a land filled with gold, silver and bees." (I don't know, I didn't get it either.)

I also saw flashes of what kind of TV shows they watch too much of: for the word foretaste, "The pretaste of hog jowls was good, the foretaste, not so much..." Quick, name that TVLand sitcom! (If you guessed Beverly Hillbillies, you were correct - Granny would be proud!) Next, see if you can guess the website this one is a spin off of: "I like to look at the drudgery report." I don't know that he's ever actually seen the Drudge Report, but it shows that he picks up more by just listening than I realized. And a nod to superheroes: "Look! Up in the sky! It's a plane! It's a bird! No, it's a cherub!" I even saw some plays on words: "Instead of having mere cash, you can have cashmere for the same great price!" and "I put my cash in a cache."

My whole point in sharing all of this (other than to see if anyone else finds these as funny as I do, or if I'm just that wierd) is that I learn more than the kids by homeschooling them. Not the technical, academic stuff (although I have relearned an amazing amount of that too), but what motivates them and what they find funny, what they love and what they sincerely dislike. I get glimpses everyday of the young adults that they are becoming and that is both exciting (they are growing up so fast) and scary (there's so much they still need to learn). If my son was in school, he wouldn't have the opportunity to play around with vocabulary words - he'd probably be failing his vocabulary assignments and probably hate every minute of it. I've learned that I can let him have his fun while still holding him to high standards because he knows that he will have to do them correctly, but he doesn't mind because we were able to share a laugh along the way. I hope that they are all learning to love learning. It's not all fun and games and it's definitely not easy, but it is totally worth it.