love is in the air

My son has a new love.

It's shiny and colourful,

big and bold;

it's filled with information, pictures,
and
little tid-bits of Stuff that interest and excite him.

It's a…

Maths Textbook.

Yes. It's true! One of Those, being used in a house of life learners/ unschoolers/ natural learners!

Why?

Because it's exactly what my son wanted.



He finished the first two books of Life of Fred and was ready for a Fred break.

He read as much as he wanted of The Number Devil, for now.

He read all the Sir Cumference stories, plus A Place for Zero, What's your Angle Pythagorus, the Multiplying Menace books, Pythagorus and the Ratios, and Rabbits Rabbits Everywhere.

He played games on Mathsisfun and Coolmath. He had tried online learning through Mathletics, Studyladder and Mathsonline (none of which he was into at all. He is, we have discovered, not an online learner).

He played Monopoly, Uno, and Mythmatical Battles (which is a card game he loves).

And

he wanted more.


So I said, "Would you like a book, a maths textbook? Something you can read, and work through at your own pace?"

(This being exactly what he didn't want, for ages and ages. But he loved maths and wanted to learn it. Hence all the living maths books and games!)

"Oh!" said my son, "Yes PLEASE!"

Okay, then. One maths textbook coming right up :)

I pored over the internet, read about different types of books, tried to see what books had the type of exercises my son liked. (No excessive repetition, no endless drills, lots of open-ended questions, lots of information, high level thinking, and colour). I thought I had one picked, then thought, How can I buy one online without getting my mitts on it, touching those pages, seeing exactly how it works, and most importantly: showing my boy and having him say, Yes or No?

Which is when serendipity stepped in.

A trip to Sydney was already planned for last Saturday, and was almost entirely open ended. My son suggested we go to Kinokuniya, the book store. He'd gone there with his aunt for a special birthday treat a month ago. It was now, officially, "The Best Book Store Ever!" according to him.

Well, I think he could be right! It was MASSIVE. And filled to the brim with books, and couches and cushions and people browsing, and that delicious energy you get from being around words and people who love them. It was scrumptious.

And it was perfect for a mama looking for a maths book for her boy.

I went to the Maths section. SO many books! A smorgasbord, really. I found two Year 7 books that seemed close to what my son liked. I called him over. We sat together, and opened those crisp pages, breathed in the New Book smell. Ah. Sigh. He loved the one with the information boxes telling him unusual facts about numbers and mathematicians and discoveries. He loved the colour. The small, manageable sections. The text. The look and feel and heft of it (that puppy was big!).

It was like picking out a bike—that one so bright and bold and fast looking?

"That's the one!" he said, grinning. "Let's get it!"

Then off he skipped, leaped, flew, to the Graphic Novels section of the store, where we all spent a sweet hour breathing in the wonderful stories there.

First thing on Monday morning, he sat and opened this shiny new world of maths. He asked me where he should write his answers. "A notebook?" I suggested. Together we found a spare exercise book, shiny and new, too.

He decided to begin at the beginning (which, he thought, was a Very Good Place to Start). He sat and worked, I don't know for how long; he worked until he felt done.

"Is that enough?" he asked.

I said, "Does it feel like enough? It's up to you, you know."

Together we figured out that if he does a small section and the corresponding exercises each day (Monday to Friday), he'll easily finish up in a year, if that's what he wants. He can do more, or less, as he chooses. There will be parts he'll know already (thanks to Life of Fred) and he won't have to do them. Some parts might be harder. He might go slower then; he might want to look other things up to help him. And he may not finish the book. That is okay with me, if it's okay with him.


Two days ago, he said, "I'm done for now, but can't wait for tomorrow!" Yesterday he did two sections, because he just didn't want to stop.

This book, and this kind of maths learning

is what my son loves.

He loves having a sense of routine, and he loves learning from books. He loves having a clean, fresh notebook to write in (and it looks unbelievably neat in there! Every answer written so carefully, lovingly. You can tell the work is precious to him). He loves knowing that the textbook is there, waiting for him every morning, to learn more from.

When he does this work,
at his very own table,
where he also writes his stories, designs his buildings, reads his information books, and draws his cartoons,

he is in his Element.

I think he actually radiates joy.

In fact, I'm pretty sure that if we sat beside him as he worked
(but not too close! He likes his space!),

we would walk away golden.

.

stretching time

credit

Our days are flashing by.

Days are whistling by our ears;

time's like a blizzard, whipping past sideways,

while we stand

in the middle,

grinning.


Our days look different every time

There are not-schooly moments and schooly moments

ever-changing moments and moments of Still

Days that, as they fly by,

stretch out, and fill up

to the brim.


Days like Today.


Where my girl had to tell me, first thing after she'd woken up,
about her incredible dream where she was a lion cub.
And her chair got stolen so she had to go in a van (with a chimpanzee called Michael sitting on top), to the robbers' underwater cave,
where the robbers had magic watermelons, oh no!
but luckily she was saved by a friendly mouse…

And when my girl was done describing her dream (and the other one where she was on a pirate ship), we had to go downstairs to type it up, and my girl had to start illustrating it with Paintbrush

…while my boy read Tintin on the couch and the cats chased each other through the house.

But then my girl did some maths too
kind of to keep my boy company… 'cos a little after breakfast, he started slogging through a really tricky chapter in Life of Fred.

At some point I went to help him
and thought, Oh, man. This is HARD! Impossible in fact!
We almost gave up, but then… we started talking the New Concept through together,
began to wrap our heads around it
until we had it! We figured it out.
And we high-fived.

Meanwhile my girl had been ambushed by her 4 times tables on MathsBuddy . They'd sat on her until she called a time-out. Together we worked through the last few questions and when we looked at the results, she'd got 2 questions wrong.
She said, "I don't like getting questions wrong."
"Yeah," I said. "Me neither." We smiled at each other then.

And she said, "I want to get a Platinum certificate on one of these levels one day,"
which is the first time she's mentioned wanting a certificate. I actually forgot they offered them.
A Platinum certificate means she has to get every single question right on one of the levels. I think: if that's something she wants, and she reaches for it, then I'm sure she'll get it.

After all, that how it's supposed to work, isn't it? You want to learn, you learn. You want to achieve, you achieve.

So much better than being told what to reach for. Reaching only because you think you should.

So then we decided to do Astro—um—Wednesday because we'd been way way too busy two days ago to do Astro-Monday!
In fact, we really should call it Astro-Whenever-We-Feel-Like-It, because that's more our style…:)

credit

We sat together and talked about Planets
and what they were
and we looked in books together and the kids summarised information and wrote it in their own words…
and we found out that the word Planet came from the old Greek word for Wanderer,
which led us to look up Greek to English translations,
and my boy pulling out his book on Mythology with its ancient Greek alphabet…

And then I found an awesome experiment where you put a saucer over a candle to see the carbon deposits from the flame and the kids were
spun out! I read out that when a star explodes it leaves carbon clouds that drift through the universe—wild. We drew with our fingertips in our very own carbon clouds, our homemade solar dust.

Then we found another cool activity where you go outside and hold binoculars up at the sun—you direct the light onto white paper
and voila! You see the sun and a whole bunch of sunspots!
Which was stunning, but we only saw it for a second because
the sun went behind a cloud
and stayed there.
It probably felt a bit self-conscious. I mean we were kind of staring.

So then we ate our lunch surrounded by books on space.
The table was so crowded with books, and drawings, and notes, and coloured pencils and paper,
that I ate my lunch with my plate on my lap.

Then it was time to walk the dog
because even though it has been raining for two days
it wasn't raining now.

So we got about 15 minutes in, we were just across the big park,
when the rain CAME DOWN.
It was a total downpour, like walking through a carwash.

We hid under someone's avocado tree,
my girl, the dog, and I,
…while my boy danced in the rain.

After a while, we kept on walking.

Loving the thrill of it, getting soaked, splashing through puddles…

and we walked past our local school

where the kids were standing by the windows looking out.

They pointed at us,

and I grinned back.

credit

When we got home, we dried ourselves off, changed clothes. We washed our feet in the bath. Standing in the bath with my girl as we ran warm water over our toes? Bliss.

Then it was time for Pole to Pole,
a documentary from 20 years ago, with Michael Palin. We love it, just as we loved his first documentary, Around the World in 80 days.
In this episode we went across Turkey and the Mediterranean. Michael had already traveled on ice over the Arctic, listened to Finnish football songs and drunk home-hewn vodka with Russian film-makers. We learned about Soviet history and Lenin. This time, he was checking out Turkish minarets and English tourists, and talking to an ancient tomb-guide in Egypt.

We looked up where he was on the atlas, and where he was going. He's following the meridian of 30º E, so we traced it with our fingers.

We sat with our feet warm, munching apples, side-by-side and cosy on the couch.

Then my boy had band
so outside we went again,
and while my boy played jazz piano,
my girl and I read for a whole hour in the carpark.
Just us
and the silence.

And then dinner came, and more sitting together happened

with another movie called Fox and Child
which was beautiful but we left unfinished
because we decided it was bedtime.

And cuddle time and smoothing hair time and kisses time and last few waking words time. The end of day time.

And, just like that,
the day was over.

A day that was
in fact
just a single day, no more, no less.

Where
Time had flashed past
constantly,
unstoppably.

Perhaps feeling kind of special
and kind of speedy.
A bit like a superhero, a bit like a shooting star.

Perhaps it wanted us to be flustered? All White Rabbity and overwhelmed? Amazed at how fast it could be?

Not us.

We sat on our day like it was a suitcase.

One we'd crammed full
with joy and fun and learning and meals together and talking and walking and dancing and writing and drawing and playing and cuddles.

We said,

Let time flash by
and the days pile up behind us.

Those days are our treasures.

And time?

It is

bendable, extendable.

It sings with Possibility.

M.C. Escher
credit

bye bye maths fear!

The fear has gone.

YES. I'm not kidding. It's gone. 

I've been looking and it's not anywhere.  

And what has been left in its place?

Learning. 

Great grinning gobs of it. 

I don't think I've ever posted anything more beautiful!

After enduring almost a year of math phobia—which was becoming crippling and filled with such sadness—my girl has made her way out. Slowly, carefully. With a "one-step-forward, sometimes a few back, bit-by-little-bit" approach that has literally drained the fear from our days.

What did it take?

Well. Stories, and lots (and lots) of talking, for one!

I remember a big talk we had about a month ago, with my girl on my lap. She just could not see the purpose of subtraction. Near tears, she said, "What's the point?" So we talked about when you might use it, or need it. We imagined how she might need to use it, for example, if one of her dreams—of running a pet shop—came true. 'Cos you need to know, when you've sold 5 bags of kitten food, don't you, how many bags you've got left? That led to a big old talk, about pet shops and bags of kitty litter, about stocktaking and kittens! and my girl began to smile.

I also remember another talk in the car the other day, about perpendicular lines. My girl said she just did not get them. What were they? So I described two dudes, Fred and Bob, two perpendicular lines. I did a whole conversation pretending to be them—with the two of them talking and planning to get together. The cool thing was, Fred and Bob COULD meet (at right angles, of course) because they were perpendicular! Whereas Sally and Mary, two parallel lines could not. They'd NEVER meet. They were destined to travel side by side forever, calling out sadly to each other across the gap.
Ah. There I was at the lights, gesturing wildly in the car, doing voices, both of us laughing. It was glorious.

Then there have been all the games.

Games like

Duck Duck Bruce
Zeus on the Loose
AddEmUp
The Sum What Dice Game (and others!) from Family Math

Mancala

Chess (just learning!)

and
our very own, home-made Kittenworld game :)

There's also been

a whole lot of computer learning on MathsBuddy 

which is uncomplicated and simply good. There's nothing flashy about it, and it doesn't use competition or prizes to get you motivated. It gets to the point, but it's also kind of sweet—we love the guy's voice who teaches the lessons. He sounds like someone who smiles a lot. :)


Then, there's the thing that seems to have clicked everything into place.

And it has been one of the simplest things of all.

Addition Practice.

A while ago, I realised my girl's fear boiled down to not comfortably knowing her addition facts to 20.

When you don't know your basic addition facts, it means when you get to harder maths, you don't have the building blocks to do it. You can't do big subtractions, you can't do big additions, you can't do multiplication, and you start to doubt yourself.
You start to believe you don't know things. You start to believe you will make mistakes and never know the answer. And the fear finds that simple, ordinary hole, and creeps in.

So what did we do? We started at the very beginning. Which was a very good place to start!

And we went to an unbelievably simple tool on mathsisfun.com called

Math Trainer: Addition.

How does it work?
Well, it's just a little bit of practice. It's something my girl and I talked about doing and decided would help, so it doesn't feel coercive. Just ten minutes, most mornings, never any longer. It's a tiny part of our day. Just like brushing your teeth, or practicing a scale or two on the piano. Ten minutes, sitting together at the computer, then it's done.

Then you go on, if you want, to whatever other maths thing you feel like doing for the day (like Games! More games! Mathsbuddy!).

When you go on it, you get to choose how long to "train." They suggest 5 minutes 3 times a day. We just do the ten minutes once, in the mornings. We don't do it every single morning—sometimes other things feel more important (like story writing! Sewing! Pottery class!).

You get to pick how hard the questions will be.

You can take your time. If you write the incorrect answer, you get that question again, just a few more times than the rest, to make sure the learning comes.

The idea is to eventually make your answers automatic, so in the end you don't have to count on your fingers or use a chart. Right now, my girl is using our beloved Penguin Theory for adding nines to things, but you can tell she doesn't have to think for long.

Things are popping straight into her brain, and the other day she did the Trainer by herself, for the first time.

She whizzed through! When we began practicing a month ago, my girl managed about 50 answers in ten minutes. On Friday, she answered 135 questions. All correct.

How big was her smile then? Out of this world.


My girl knowing her addition means

we've now gone right through year 3 addition and subtraction on MathsBuddy and are now onto multiplication!

(and shapes, lines, and angles and more!)

It means she isn't afraid of something new when it pops up. We talk every new thing completely through, and she trusts that it will be okay.

It means she wants to play games that have maths in them,
read books about maths,
and use the maths she knows to figure out something she doesn't know.

Like: "Mum, I knew 8 plus four was 12, so 8 plus 5 was just one more—13!"
And, "Mum, I knew 5 times 3 was fifteen, so 6 times 3 would be 18!"

And it means when we're out getting ice-cream at the harbour on a beautiful sunny Sunday,

and she finds out the ice-cream is $3 each, she says,

"Mum, 4 times 3 is 12. So it's twelve dollars."

Right?

RIGHT!

Yeah.

Right all the way through to your bones, my incredible, tenacious, beautiful girl.

I am so, so proud of you.

ps and such:

• the other thing about the Trainer is you can use it for multiplication, division and subtraction too. My boy used it two years ago for his multiplication—this was his big maths block when we took him out of school. And within the month, he was cruising happily along and hasn't looked back. I know, I know; I sound like a knife salesman on t.v. but Yes, the Trainer could do it for you too! See how it cuts through cans? And I'll throw in a paring knife for good measure. Call now! :)

• Finally, I've heard that when you tout a product on your blog you're supposed to say, "No-one paid me to write this, etcetera". So, yeah, that's what I'm saying. I am so unpaid it's crazy! 

a (not so) quiet week

A quiet week on this blog can mean so many things…

Like it could mean

my thoughts crept up on me and ambushed me in the night. They chloroformed me and took me to their secret lair where they held me hostage for about 5 days. They stood over me and said words I didn't like. They poked at my dark spaces and made them come out. Then the dark and my doubts hulked over me and said, "So what could you possibly have to say for yourself?"

And I, having become tiny, said, "nothing."

Until…I took myself back to bed this morning and felt the dark wave rising. Then…slowly, and with one hand over the other, I listed the things that were good, about my life and about myself. I listed them and I gave myself permission to look at each and every one. And then…

I believed them.

At which point the dark stopped gleefully rubbing its hands together, and the negative thoughts looked startled and afraid.

And, when I sat up, opened the curtains of my room, and sat to play with the kitten, the dark and the negative and the sad simply

scuttled off.

A quiet week on this blog could ALSO mean

that we were very very very busy!

It could mean that

a boy played music at the mall again,

this time with his latin jazz buddies and his gorgeous dad

 (this man danced through almost the whole concert. Gorgeous)

A quiet week could mean

we had to go on a wonderful excursion to Jumbulla Aboriginal Discovery Centre

where we watched films,

painted dreaming stones (with symbols you can learn more about here),

saw Indigenous art and learned about hunting tools,

pretended to hunt animals with balls, watched a man tell stories about a spooky Hairy Man, drew patterned hands, and

learned how to pull a bush leaf without cutting our hands (and the leaf could then be used to weave baskets. Very cool).

What a great excursion that was!

(and three days later, this wonderful space closed down, 

because it just wasn't getting enough people in to cover costs… 

A huge shame. It was lovely there.)

A quiet blog week could also mean

my boy was busy finishing Life of Fred: Fractions! 

He worked so hard on those final chapters and Bridges. I sat with him the whole time, learning alongside him, helping him through the hard parts, bringing him Gatorade and mopping his brow… (well, okay, maybe not the last two). We were together as he answered the last Bridge question, as I checked over his answers and declared him DONE! and together as we hooted and hollered and whooped. My boy was so, so pleased with himself. That book got HARD at the end!

Then, he rested. And two days later, my boy decided to start the next Life of Fred book! It's Decimals and Percentages. A new workbook was bought, and both workbooks covered (with a hand-drawn copy of the Life of Fred cover). And a new adventure began…

A quiet week could also mean

we had to go to pottery class 

where beading was the order of the day!

these beads prepared earlier 

by our beautiful pottery teacher

And…

we had to go to writers workshop (not just one but three!) 

where kids chatted and shared stories and talked about books and poetry and where they 

wrote.

And…

we had to play all those games …

Doubles Wild 

Menagerie

(plus Zeus on the Loose, and our Family Math games, all of which I forgot to photograph!)

Plus

art and stories 

had to be created

by a girl (at her truly beloved desk)…

And 

a LegoQuest had to be attempted

by a boy who loves his Lego…

(Coral reef, complete with submarine and lost treasure!)

And finally,

music

had to be heard…

performed by Synergy Percussion,

in a hall in our much loved art gallery (which used to be the town hall I think),

and watched from the secret balcony above…

It was a magical show.

So,

a quiet week on this blog might mean 

I have slipped into sad…just a little (and not enough to stop all the doing)…

then found my way back out,

and it might ALSO mean

that our days have been bursting at the seams

with full

and fun

and learning 

…and joy. 

I'm so glad I got to live and breathe and see these overflowing days, 

because every single one of them was, and is, beautiful. 

Seriously. They always are

when you stop and list the good things, 

one by one by one. 

the penguin theory

So I wonder…What's your fear?

Do you have one? Is there one thing you can't bear?

Is it sharks? You're underwater, deep below. Above you the glistening lid of the sea. And here it comes. Big ol' teeth, flat eyes, rushing towards you. Are you afraid?

What about falling? You're by an open door. A grinning man shouts in your ear. The wind rushes and rushes and rushes in. You're supposed to jump and fall, from this incredible, spine-shrinking height. Your whole life hangs on the pull of a cord. Are you afraid?

Or is it flight? Or open spaces? Or small ones? Or heights. Or the deep, hollow dark. Or mice. Or spiders, the fast-as-a-flash, long-legged and hairy kind?

What are you afraid of?

And I wonder…How does your fear feel?

For me, fear feels like a shiver. My whole body goes cold. It feels impossible to catch a breath. If I let it, it cripples me.

For my girl, fear brings a weeping, wide eyed, squeaking, whole-body panic. 

Ah, what could she be so afraid of?

It's maths.

Some time around the end of last year, 

I realised my girl's fear of maths had grown.

Grown so much bigger than

the thing she was afraid of. 

It had become debilitating.

She wasn't avoiding maths because she wasn't interested

or because it was too hard.

She was avoiding maths 

(and ALL maths games and anything to do with maths)

because it

had become something huge in her mind.

Maths carried 

the kind of fear that would start her 

crying if you even raised the subject,

panicking if she tried it, and

left her overcome in the face of it.

The kind of fear that

—if you fed it and nurtured it and gave it space to grow—

could overtake you and 

sweep you out from under your feet.

The kind of fear that could, without mercy, take you down.

And because I know how this fear feels and

 how it can swallow you whole

if you let it,

I can't bear to watch that happen to my girl.

Not when

with love,

I can help her face what she is so afraid of.

So

this year,

ever so gently, 

with love and kindness and care

(and in no rush whatsoever),

my girl and I are doing maths

together.

Mathsbuddy maths

and

Zeus on the Loose maths

and

Family Math maths.

And, just newly and this last week:

Story maths.

Because a friend of mine gave me such a gift the other day.

She told me she was telling the story of threes to her girls…

fairies carrying jewels in groups of threes 

to a secret place in fairy land.

My friend tells her beautiful girls maths stories. 

This is how they learn and love to learn.

So I tried it. 

I asked my daughter how she might buy a kitten

if a kitten was 10 dollars and she only had 6. 

She said, I'd go home and get more money!

I said, Do you know how much you'd need?

She said, without hesitating, Four dollars.

We talked about having a party. What if we had 8 cupcakes but 11 friends were coming? How many more would we need for everyone to have a delicious cupcake?

Three, of course.

We talked about eating oranges and feeding guests and buying animals.

We talked about numbers like they were our friends.

We even talked about the colour of numbers 

and she said her 5 was always, always red

(my five is always green).

And just yesterday, 

we talked about adding 9s.

We were doing some Mathsbuddy addition, and at some point the question was

9 plus 5. 

Oh! she said. I don't know that! 

Her eyes widened. Her eyebrows and voice went 

right 

up.

Well, I said, Imagine a little animal slides on over from the 5 

to help the 9 become a 10

(and I gestured with my hand,

an animal sliding along and straightening up beside the 9 like a soldier).

Oh! she said. A penguin! A penguin slides over!

Yes! I said. 

A penguin slides over to help the 9 become a 10, 

(and I gestured again with my hand)

and then all you need to do is add the rest of the penguins....

It's 14!

Yes! Yes it is!

That's easy!

Yep, it is! Now,

what about 9 plus 6? A penguin slides on over 

(and I gestured with my hand again)

and makes the 9 a ten. What have we got all up?

15!

Yes!

Oh. 

We were so pleased.

Then we checked out our Penguin Theory with a whole bunch of numbers. It worked every time. 

Wow!

Then I asked, Hey, do you want to draw it, our Theory? 

Sure! she said.

So my girl drew our Penguin Theory. 

And it looked great.

And when she did some more Mathsbuddy addition later, 

9 plus Something

showed up 

and she knew the answer,

just like that.

Her theory stayed in her head AND it made sense.

And 

not for a 

single 

second 

was my beautiful girl afraid.

when I love homeschool

One of the things I love about homeschooling is that I get to find out who my children are. As people, as individuals, and as learners.

I get to hang out with them every day. Discover what they are interested in. What they think. How they think and why. How they invent. What they invent. How they learn. These discoveries make me feel closer to them, more connected. And that connection makes me buzz.

I love homeschool the most when I open myself up completely to who my children are, unconditionally. When I accept and embrace the ways my children learn, even when it goes against my own learning style or the ways I thought education had to happen.

When I do that, our Homeschool Land becomes the best place in the world.

This has been a big challenge for me, with my girl. It has taken me over a year of homeschooling to begin to see and embrace the unique learner that she is, and to recognize that who my daughter is, is inextricably linked to the learner that she is.

my daughter, the artist

I recognised my daughter as an artist years ago, but I only recently began to understand how this part of her is connected to everything she does. She sees the world from the perspective of the artist, constantly. It's beautiful and inspiring. And it is how she learns.

She makes things all the time, every day, all day, well into the night sometimes. She uses her hands to create, draw, build, play, constantly.

She makes paper animals and cloth animals and makes them toys to play with. Yesterday she spent hours finishing up a house for her toy cats, constructing rooms, beds, sinks, showers, a spa for the pet fish.

Last week, she created an intricately-designed cardboard lizard with opening jaws—she thought to have straps inside the mouth so her hand could open and shut it with ease. I would never have thought of that.

When she writes a story, she has to draw pictures on every page. She draws all the time.

She loves books, but especially loves the ones with visual images included—nature books, younger kids' picture books, chapter books.

She adores animals, and inhales information books about them—she pores over the pictures as much as the words. And when she's committed a detail to memory, it pops up just like that in a drawing of a leopard, a deer, an elephant. Tiny details that I would have missed show up in her art. She misses nothing.

my daughter, the maths student

I have known my daughter is an artist for years. But it has taken watching my daughter learn (or try to learn) maths for me to really see how the artist is connected—like skin, or breathing—to the learner.

I assumed my daughter would learn from a maths workbook, just like her brother. Workbooks are simple; you buy one, you work through it, get help for the tricky bits, move on. Because I never liked or felt confident about maths, I thought it was something you just got over with, like medicine, or vegetables you don't like, to get to the more fun stuff like writing stories, drawing, painting, and music.

I think we've always had a difficult relationship with maths in our Homeschool Land. It's our sticky patch, the one area that really doesn't embrace my ideal of "Life Learning."

Because while I have never been a huge fan of traditional maths, I've felt like it had to be done, regardless of what my children would prefer to do. And we've done it in the way I've always done it, because in my head, if the kids asked for help, that's how I'd be able to "teach" it. I think a lot of people who are entering the world of natural learning/life learning/unschooling have felt this way about maths too. It's a tough one (and deserves its own post, I think!).

Sometimes traditional learning works, if your kids can learn that way and fit that mold. But it's really tough if you have a girl whose learning style is so different from the way you learned that in the tricky times, when you can't explain in a way your girl understands, and she gets stuck, you both panic.

That's when I feel terrible.

Sadness, fear and complaints make me aware that I'm asking the kids to do something they don't like, or in a way they don't like. It makes me feel guilty, anxious, angry with myself, and frustrated that the kids don't want to swallow their maths medicine fast, and just get on with it.

So maths time in our house has had a lot of tears, especially for my daughter. That sucks, because in my image of Homeschool Land, at least the image I hold dear, no-one cries when learning. No-one gets frustrated, resentful, or resists. It is supposed to be a sweet place where learning equals joy.

Maths doesn't equal joy for my girl. At least, traditional, scheduled, book-learned, get-it-over-with maths rarely does.

But when her hands and her artist heart are allowed to be the learners, it does. It brings joy and then some.

my daughter, the learner

When she plays Timez Attack and launches numbers at a door to learn her times tables, maths equals joy. When she gets to another level and has to jump over rotating 3-dimensional grids to get to the next question, it equals joy.

When she does her time4learning maths and gets to put a yellow five with a blue 2 and make a green seven, it equals joy.

When I pull out the Cuisenaire rods to learn addition and subtraction and she uses them to create an amazing multi-coloured owl, and says, "Look at my owl!" and then makes Cuisenaire cats, cats, cats. Joy.

When she sits to write number sentences and says, "I love those little plus and equals signs."

When she writes numbers and realises they can be turned into animals, the fives into birds and puppies, the sixes into pigs, and a cat with a zero for a face.

When she is given free rein to draw a page of number animals, and fills the page with them, even a trio of number critters standing on a dais having won some race.

When she then draws an intricate map of where the number pets live, including a key to show bridges, roundabouts, cows.

When she builds, constructs, designs, creates—all of which take so many maths smarts you'd need a page to list them all.

This is when maths equals joy.

When the artist and the learner meet.

When they are allowed to meet.

When the learning being asked of my daughter can be translated into a language that is hers.

When no pressure is placed and freedom is given.

When she can be the learner she is and the person she is and this is celebrated without condition.

When I don't crowd her with expectation and fear (all ingrained, all my own shackles).

When she is.

And that's when I love homeschool.