How we take a break, and how we get started again

And my favourite passages from Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead

As regular readers will know, we took some time away from our usual homeschool routine over Easter. I didn’t call it a holiday and I didn’t specify how long it would last. There’s nothing wrong with holidays, but I don’t want to reinforce the feeling that work is boring but necessary, and that holidays are the fun reward. Sometimes I feel that as a society we live for our weekends and holidays, but I want my children to know that all of life is precious and worthwhile, and that the work can actually be what makes it so.

I may be getting ahead of myself; they’re only 6 and 8 years old.

Anyway, we had a change of pace, and it was glorious. The children have been busy and engaged, not bored or listless, and there’s been plenty of learning going on. Our break ended up lasting a little over a month. Here are a few of the things they got up to:

• Painting their faces and playing games as their characters

• Lots of reading and rereading

• Lego

• Drawing and colouring

• Playing games/doing experiments from science magazines

• We had a Poetry Teatime, which we haven’t done for ages, and the children amazed me by enjoying poems by Tennyson and Pope, as well as a psalm, and some Elizabeth Bishop, in addition to the more obviously child-friendly poems. (100 Great Poems has a good selection of ‘grown up’ poems that children can enjoy too.)

• My daughter made Easter cards for lots of people, in the process doing more handwriting and spelling practice than she ever does during ‘school’.

• They explored building animals out of maths cubes

• They organised their own photoshoot to enter a magazine competition

• I finally, after 2 years of pondering the purchase, bought a set of children’s badminton racquets, and the children have spent hours in the garden honing their skills. They had so much fun that we had to get two adult racquets as well, and now my husband and I can join in too. Does anyone else dither interminably over these really very small financial decisions? Hat tip to Charlotte Mason, who recommends ‘shuttlecock’ in Home Education:

Shuttlecock is a fine game, affording scope for ambition and emulation. Her biographer thinks it worth telling that Miss Austen could keep up in ‘cup and ball’ over a hundred times, to the admiration of nephews and nieces; in like manner, any feat in keeping up the shuttlecock might be noted down as a family event, so that the children may be fired with ambition to excel in a game which affords most graceful and vigorous play to almost every muscle of the upper part of the body, and has this great recommendation, that it can be as well played within doors as without. Quite the best play is to keep up the shuttlecock with a battledore in each hand, so that the muscles on either side are brought equally into play.

• We went to a family fun day in a London park, which involved pond dipping, making clay seed bombs, investigating earth worms, finger painting blossom pictures, and listening to a wonderful story teller.

• The children enjoyed watching the birds on our bird feeder, especially the increasingly bold robin and a very acrobatic parakeet.

• They got out/built Roman forts and played with them for hours.

• My daughter asked to do some Khan Academy maths, which we haven’t done for months, and finally finished the money and time module—which has been a challenge, because the money part is all about US dollars. We also bought some workbooks, just because I saw some in a shop we happened to be in, and thought the children might like to choose one or two for themselves which they might then feel motivated to use. My daughter has been enjoying the DK Master Maths at Home Geometry and Shape book, and I enjoy it because we haven’t focused on geometry much and this book is proving a very easy way to do so.

• My son and I read lots of An Atlas of Lost Kingdoms (Highly recommended. The only thing I don’t like is that it mixes fact and fiction. It covers Carthage, for example, but also Atlantis, and to a child it’s hard to distinguish the real places from the legendary—and some, of course, are a combination of both. But aside from that it’s great and a good way to discover new places and stories from around the world.)

• We’ve done several outings—Kensington Palace, Westminster Abbey, the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at the Natural History Museum.

You may wonder why I felt the need to get ‘back to school’—clearly plenty of learning took place during the break. The thing is, I have seen the children make wonderful progress—and grow correspondingly in self-confidence—when they have regular, daily practice at things like spelling and multiplication. But our break was so delightful that the idea of returning to our usual morning routine of maths, grammar, languages etc was deeply unappealing.

I felt a certain trepidation about going back to the usual rhythm. I always worry that when I tell the children that the break is over they’ll respond with whining and tears. But actually this is in my head. The children enjoy the morning’s work. It tires them out, yes, and sometimes it’s hard and frustrating and one or more of us isn’t in the mood. But mostly they like it and do it uncomplainingly. They also, even at 6 and 8, understand that education matters, that they don’t want to grow up with little knowledge about the world around them.

But it’s still an adjustment, so this time I decided to take it very gently. When I was a teenager I ran a 5k with my mum, and we trained together in the weeks beforehand. In my memory, the first day of the training schedule was a ‘rest day’, and I thought that was wonderful. Day 1 completed, and I didn’t even need to put on my running shoes! We took a similar approach to getting back to work: To begin with, I just told the children that we needed to get back to some work next week. There was plenty of time to acclimatise. The work we did to begin with was just reading books together on the sofa. After a few days of that, I told them I’d like them to add a page to their history folders based on something I’d read to them recently—their choice. They enjoyed it so much they each did several pages, for several days. My daughter had been doing some of her new maths workbook on the break, and got into a habit of doing a few pages each day. So today, when I said we were starting with spellings, and then worked through maths, Greek, grammar, and more sofa reading, it didn’t feel like coming back to Earth with a bump. I also made sure that most of what we did today was revision, rather than new learning, so they could feel good about it rather than exhausted by the challenge.

As I write this it’s our first day back, so things may not continue as smoothly as they’ve started. But, as Aristotle and Mary Poppins say: Well begun is half done.

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My favourite passages from Gilead

It’s fair to say that much of Gilead went over my head. Religion and philosophy are at the fore, and religion and philosophy are two of my weakest areas. Nonetheless I found it strangely compelling, and it kept me up late and got me up early to finish it. By the end I felt grateful that it had been written and added to humanity’s library, even though I know I don’t completely ‘get’ it.

The book is one long letter from an old man to his young son, to be read some day when the child is grown. Here are three bits that I really loved, and that might particularly appeal to those of you with children of your own:

You are standing up on the seat of your swing and sailing higher than you really ought to, with that bold, planted stance of a sailor on a billowy sea. The ropes are long and you are light and the ropes bow like cobwebs, laggardly, indolent. Your shirt is red - it is your favorite shirt - and you fly into the sunlight and pause there brilliantly for a second and then fall back into the shadows again. You appear to be altogether happy. I remember those first experiments with fundamental things, gravity and light, and what an absolute pleasure they were. And there is your mother. ‘Don’t go so high,’ she says. You’ll mind. You’re a good fellow.

Whenever I think of Edward, I think of playing catch in a hot street and that wonderful weariness of the arms. I think of leaping after a high throw and that wonderful collaboration of the whole body with itself and that wonderful certainty and amazement when you know the glove is just where it should be. Oh, I will miss the world!

I can tell you this, that if I’d married some rosy dame and she had given me ten children and they had each given me ten grandchildren, I’d leave them all, on Christmas Eve, on the coldest night of the world, and walk a thousand miles just for the sight of your face, your mother’s face. And if I never found you, my comfort would be in that hope, my lonely and singular hope, which could not exist in the whole of Creation except in my heart and in the heart of the Lord. That is just a way of saying I could never thank God sufficiently for the splendor He has hidden from the world - your mother excepted, of course - and revealed to me in your sweetly ordinary face.

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A Mothers’ Day post you might have missed

Dixie Dillon Lane

did a wonderful post recently where six Substack writers chose their favourite fictional mother and wrote briefly about how she inspires them. The range of books chosen was great, and I got goosebumps at several points reading through everyone’s choices. If you want to see who I picked, read the post here:

Teach Me of Motherhood: Six Inspiring Mothers in Literature

Dixie also wrote a guest post for me a few months ago about how her family coped on a homeschooling day when everyone was sick.

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