Leaving Italy

No, we are not leaving Italy for good, but we will go up north for a while for our Christmas break. First to Berlin where we are going to house-sit and cat-sit at our friends' lovely place. Berlin is a fun place, full of history good and bad, museums, exhibitions and an interesting street life. Sophie and Jake are looking forward to it. They know Berlin quite well, but it will be their first time there in winter. After a couple of weeks we will see our extended families in Heidelberg which is something we are all looking forward to. And then, back to Italy in January - I will be back blogging then. Ciao e a presto!

Andy Warhol

Jake is doing some creative work in the style of Andy Warhol, designing soup tins, shoes and a BMW M1 - all on paper though, which he thinks is not doing justice to Andy's (and Jake's) genius. He would actually likus to paint the car but his parents are less adventurous than he is.

Signposts

 

We have been talking a lot about road signs lately. Why many of them feature red and white, why many tell you what not to do rather what to do. Sophie who is just learning to read realized she usually doesn't need to 'read' at all when she sees a road sign. We took a walk in the city, Jake taking photographs, Sophie walking around wide-eyed realizing how much she can 'read' already. 'Look, Mummy, there is a payphone! And there is a hotel close by... We are not supposed to take photographs here', et cetera. We even discovered ancient signs, carved in marble about hundreds of years ago when Venice ruled Verona and spread its icon, the winged lion of Saint Mark, all over the place.

Back to Italy

I have been away for a week, visiting some good old friends of mine in Canada. As rewarding as educating the children at home can be, I so much needed a break to take in fresh air and spend some time in an environment that is free of demands
While I was away, Sophie's and Jake's dad took over. His approach is very different from mine, and that is a good thing. I guess his way of doing things is a lot more structured than mine and the children seemed to like that. I browsed through the algebra Jake had written down while I had been away and realized they had worked a lot. It is great to have other people sharing the effort to school your own because they bring in fresh air, doing things differently, presenting the children with alternative ways to think, create and communicate. And even though no one said so, it must have been great for the kids too to have a break from me... I am happy to be back!

The classroom by the river

Italy's great weather sometimes seems to be a myth without foundation. In Verona it has been raining for three consecutive days. The Adige river is getting bigger and bigger by the minute. The fact that we live close by the river has prompted the kids to go and check, most importantly to report on how the trees are doing. The trees live on the banks of the river, but are now flooded so that you can only see their tops. You can tell that the waters of the Adige have come all the way down from the Alps and that it must have rained a lot there too.
One day in early fall we went up all the way to the Alto Adige into the Val Venosta where the Adige is little more than a stream. Oh, how much I like being able to take these strolls to the river front, to stand there with the kids in pouring rain, discussing rivers and streams, wondering if the water will uproot the trees, why it actually rains at all, and why eventually the Adige's waters will end up in the sea - oh, and why sea water is salty, of course. It's nasty weather and those few people who happen to pass by do so in a hurry. And tomorrow, finally, there's going to be some sun, so the weather forecast tells me.

A world map of stamps

Jake collects lots of things. Marbles. Stones. Sea shells. Seeds. And stamps. Around lunchtime every day he runs down the stairs, all the way from the third to the ground floor, to check the letter box for letters or postcards with stamps on them. Sadly, very little of our mail has a good old-fashioned stamp attached to it. With the help of his two stamp-collecting grandfathers and a number of friends who kindly keep any stamps they come across, he has managed to generate a collection of several hundred stamps. They come from all over the world, some of them from countries Jake has not even heard of.
This week, Jake took out his stamp album to see which countries the stamps come from and where these countries are. We laid out a huge world map on a piece of thick cardboard. Using pins, Jake marked the countries from which he holds stamps. Tanzania, Iceland, Paraguay, Romania, Japan, Madagascar... Allocating twenty countries to their respective continents and finding them on the map took almost the entire morning. Sophie and Jake were proud of the result. They went downstairs to check the letter box three times that day - just in case someone has happened to send us a postcard from Mauritius...

Venetian diary writing

Jake has been writing a diary for almost eleven months, not having missed a single day! It was his idea because he likes remembering things. Dishes he ate, people he met, places he saw, gifts he received, paintings he made. The diary entries vary in length. Mostly he writes three to six sentences but sometimes he fills the entire page and needs to glue in another sheet of paper. In summertime he had a lot to write about because he recorded every Worldcup game he watched and every fruit and vegetable he harvested from the garden. His handwriting and spelling have changed a lot due to his diary-writing. He tries out different spellings and eventually looks up the correct spelling in the dictionary. He has also been experimenting with different styles of handwriting.
Last Friday Jake went to Venice for the day to show the city to a friend who was staying with us for a few days. If you have ever been to Venice you can imagine how busy he was while being there... and that he needed several pages to record what they'd seen...

Curries and Cookies

It's that time of year when we start doing curries on an increasingly regular basis. In late September, we might do the occasional curry, perhaps once a week, and by mid-October we cook one as often as four times a week. We love the smells and textures of the spices, the colours and, of course, the taste once it is done.
Sophie and Jake love curries, especially those that involve chicken and rice. This year, Jake has started cooking his own curries, with almost no help from us grown-ups. I needed to remind myself to be patient when he fiddled with the apron, trying to pull the strings together on his back. He bravely wiped away his tears while cutting onions. Before he ground the spices he wanted to know their names and where they come from. 'Are they healthy?', he asked inquiringly as he has recently become aware of the fact that not every type of food is actually good for you.
For a few days Jake experimented with fennel seeds, cardamon, turmeric, cumin and lots of other stuff, slowly making his way through an Indian cookbook. Sometimes he loved the result and licked the pan clean, long after everyone else had finished lunch. Sometimes he would cautiously say, 'I don't like it as much as the one we had yesterday', and prefer to eat plain rice and salad instead. But he was always proud of what he had achieved, because there always happened to be someone at the table who got himself a second helping and truthfully praised the curry to the sky.
Sophie has also been experimenting in the kitchen. We had realized that she finds writing numbers really difficult - but is desperate to do it. She's had no trouble with 0, 3, 4 and 7, but the others she found impossible to do. While her understanding of what the numbers actually mean and how to work with them has progressed rather fast over the past few months, she has become increasingly frustrated about writing them. We assured her that she can take her time with that and that there is absolutely no need for her to write them right now, but she insisted on trying, which almost always resulted in anger and frustration.
Yesterday we felt it was about time to help her relax a little. We suggested that she bake numbers rather than write. We prepared a huge amount of cookie dough and let her have a go. And she was so into it! Now she could try figuring out the numbers she found so difficult as often as she wanted. Whenever the result didn't please her she could roll up the dough and start again, with no 'ugly' numbers on the sheet that reminded her of not having written them correctly. The results were beautiful, trays and trays of beautifully formed numbers that were nice to look at and even nicer to eat.
The real surprise came the this morning though. 'I am going to write down all the numbers I know today!', Sophie announced very matter-of-factly over her breakfast cereals. A little later, she got herself some paper and a pencil and wrote a dozen of beautiful Twoes. All the other 'difficult' numbers followed, one more flawless than the other. She had managed to do something with ease and joy, something which she had found impossible to do just a few days before.
I'll write again soon.

New here

This is my first blog and today is my first post, so I'm a little excited. We have unschooled (or homeschooled) our children for a little more than a year and I decided that I want to write about it. It is such a rich, wonderful experience that I feel I need to share it with whoever is interested. None of the people I meet in my day-to-day life are homeschoolers. While homeschooling is legal in Italy (as i t is in most other European countries), it is extremely rare. The Italians I get to talk to tend to react indignantly to the fact that our children do not go to school. I have gotten used to them finding me extremely strange at best or completely mad at worst. In a way this has made me even more determined to continue what we have begun.
Jake and Sophie, our son and daughter who are aged nine and five, love that we school our own. Jake went to a Montessori school in Germany for one year before we moved to Italy. He did have an okay time there, but within that year his enthusiasm for learning reduced quite noticeably. Somehow school had not made him want to learn and explore more, but less. While we have always been attracted by the idea of homeschooling, his experience in school led us decide that we want at least try it. Now we are about 14 months down the road and there are so many tales we could tell.
What is clear is that unschooling is an amazing experience, both for the children and whoever happens to 'teach' them (which we don't really). I often find it hard to tell friends and family who are not directly involved about it, as it seems to be way off anything they imagine. They sort of imagine us playing teacher and pupils in our living room (which we don't), me standing in front of a blackboard, trying to fill my kids' brains with knowledge. Well, it definitely does not work like that, at least not for us, and still our children have learned a lot so far. Everyone we meet - even the Italians who are so adamant about a child having to go to school - expresses delight about Sophie and Jake, how clever they are, how creative, focused, sociable and adaptable. It is true that they love exploring and being creative, and they love interacting with other people, both young and old, whatever their background. It is a great gift, and the fact that I am able to share it with them every day feels like a huge privilege to me.
I'll be back soon, as there is a lot to tell about what they do and how they learn, about the difficulties and the delights. Have a good day! Ciao from Verona - Maria