Popcorn – Jewish and Homeschooling in an Amazing World

I Am Still Here, Really!

It has been a while since I have been able to sit down and write. Preparing for a low-key Bar Mitzvah sure has taken up a lot of time – between making sure everything is going as needed at the right time to trying to finish some needed things off in time, time has sure contracted and as the days grow shorter and a halachic hour is getting shorter, it seems to have affected the speed of the hands on my clocks as well!

Last night I went through some pictures that were almost 13 years old. As I went through the folders on the computer and my husband and I walked through Memory Lane, he told me it was enough to make him cry. He was sad when thinking about the past, how all the boys are growing up and thinking that in the not so near future they will almost be all grown up. I told him that the boys are just becoming to Be. Our oldest is just becoming to be his own real self, who he really is going to be. Yes, each boy has shown their own personality right from the beginning, but they have been busy learning and growing. Now, our oldest is just starting to be his own person. We still need to continue to guide him over the next several years, but it is going to be a different kind of guidance.

One of the boys put on Shabbos music a little while ago and we were all in the kitchen making various food for Shabbos, I know that one day I will be doing this by myself again and I will not be looking at one boy making dough and I will not be seeing flour flying all over the room in order that the dough not stick to the counter, on the floor, clothing, air, and who knows where. However, today said boy made amazing knishes and even cleaned up after himself.

Not everything as been able to have been done school wise for the last few weeks for my oldest for he has been busy practicing his laining and preparing for his speech. He also has SAT math and vocabulary that he has been working on and yes, it has been a lot, however in less than 2 weeks his load will have lightened up a bit. Boys are finishing up selling all their popcorn and my oldest even did his first sewing project on the sewing machine – they are making a tallis in Boy Scouts. He sure did a great job! Even I learned something new by learning how to sew button holes with my machine.

In the meantime, I am enjoying all the wonderful chefs and the delicious smells in the house today. They are sure turning into wonderful cooks. We are almost done cooking and are going to spend a few hours cleaning, writing Dvar Torahs and showers!

Wishing everyone a restful Shabbos.

Back to Reality

After all the wonderful holidays, we are back in reality. I really felt it on Shabbos even though Yom Tov went directly into Shabbos, when Simchas Torah was gone, so was that special feeling. This week we are back in the real world. It has been quite busy this week, with popcorn selling, popcorn selling and more popcorn selling. I have two boys who are taking Amateur Radio classes; one boy is going for his license, and a second boy is going for an upgrade to be able to use more radio bands.

Even though we have not had that many real school days so far because of the Yomim Tovim, I finally figured out why we always seemed to be missing 15 minutes in the morning, right at the beginning of the day. I am not sure what I was thinking, for I really did give only 15 minutes to something that should take 30. I was able to rearrange the schedules to include that extra 15 minutes, as well as fix some of the other issues that arose as well. That’s the nice thing about being the boss of the schedule. J This week went a lot smoother than previous attempts.

I was thinking about my right-brained son last night. I am sure there are readers that are wondering how things are going, and what I am doing differently in teaching him. The truth is, I have been so pre-occupied with the wonderful Yomim Tovim that I have done nothing. Though I have felt so much more at ease just knowing he is right-brained. I know that there are resources out there that can help me teach him the way he learns best and that knowledge in itself has been quite comforting. What I have done this week is give him a… calculator. (Yikes!) The questions they were asking were using rather large numbers and to do them in my head would take some time, let alone this boy. The questions were about finding the lowest common multiple of two numbers. For those who do not know what that means, it entails doing the multiplication tables for two different numbers until you find a common multiple. The lcm(8,16) is an easy one – 16, but the lcm(25,35) is not as inherent. He understood what was expected of him and instead of having him just guess the correct answer for he felt it was impossible for him to do, I gave him the calculator and off he went. It took a subject that he was not excited about and changed it to one that he actually seemed to enjoy. This was hard for me to do for there is a stigma that giving a calculator is liken to cheating. But, I am not asking him what 6×6 is, I am asking him to go a step further. If one does not know what it means to find the lcm(25,35), using a calculator will not help. The next time math came up in the schedule, he went to grab the calculator, paper and pen and just went about his business. Needless to say, he got many more questions right in such a short time.

We were forced to try another change in different area. I had been having all three boys listening to their Rambam videos together, but unless I am in the room it does not work out very well. I went out Motzei Shabbos to listen to a speaker and my husband and 3 boys were home, all learning with DH learning something different than the boys. I took one boy and gave him a computer and headphones and sat him beside his father in one room, and the other two boys were on another computer in another room. The boy who learned by himself liked it so much that he asked for it again. It worked out really well.

On Friday, our library next door was having one of its quarterly book sales. I usually let each boy choose one book a piece and then I go and find potential school books (i.e. the classics) as well as other free reads they might be interested in and ones that I would approve of (historical fiction usually.) I needed Shakespeare books for two of the boys and noticed several complete books of Shakespeare. I decided to choose 3 of the books – one for each boy. For $1a piece, they were a great used book bargain at the library. I inscribed a short message to each boy and handed them a book. They were all very excited. Yup, they are homeschooled boys. Love my job!

My house is a mess; I was selling popcorn all day with my boys. I keep telling myself that it is almost done – this part of it anyways, though the next part is the easy part. We are pre-selling the popcorn and collecting all the money so all we have to do is go and deliver it and not have to worry about the hassle of trying to collect the money afterwards. However, I did get ALL my dishes washed up after Shabbos last night. Need to remember to look for the good.

I am off to LaLa Land, and as I remember that this past Shabbos my oldest wore his new Shabbos hat, and oh, looked so spiffy in it, I am going to be dreaming of Bar Mitzvah invitations that I have to come up with now. All for the good. J

Phew!

I hope everyone had a wonderful Rosh Hashanah. It was beautiful over here; not too hot, not too cold, and we even ate outside for one of the meals. If the holidays have crept up on you making it difficult to finish planning some of your teaching, or if you just are unsure of what or how to teach the Judaics, Rabbi Resnick is having a free classes week in Room613. Feel free to pop on in by going here. His new 2013-14 schedule can be found here.

Having a fast day the day before school starts was a challenge – especially since DH wanted us to go sell popcorn as well. Before yesterday, the boys did manage to sell $1000 in just 3 days by going just door-to-door! That definitely was a record for us. The new training we had for selling popcorn has sure helped so far. I have even set up several days in the next month were we are going to be selling at a table. I am hoping the new training will help us sell more there as well. After all, we are getting over $4000 worth of popcorn this Friday. Anybody hungry? We even accept credit cards this year. (Don’t be shy, there is plenty for everyone!) 🙂

Yesterday I was running around in a panic – I made my schedule for the boys last week. Even with an added boy to the list, I was still able to get it all on 2 pages. The problem was that I was missing one of the pages – and it happened to be the one I needed for the first day of school. It did not help that there seems to be papers that have decided to procreate, making the kitchen look quite hideous. It is amazing how that happens. Baruch Hashem I found it before I felt I should try to make a new schedule. It took several hours to create the first one. As it was, I did have to recreate an evening schedule, however that was not terrible. The boys ended their day with a green smoothie and Ryvita crackers for supper along with green back-to-school cupcakes for dessert. Thought that would be a great way to start the year off. I even went through the schedule with all 4 boys separately before they went to bed so they would know exactly what to expect from the new year.

The morning started off on the right note. Five out of six of us were up, dressed and ate at the same time. Just the little one was in bed, but he did not have to start at the same time as his older brothers. The boys even got to daven with their father instead of davening with me. Breakfast jobs were done on time. I was feeling great. Everything was going as it should. And then I made *the* mistake. Yes, the one that threw the ENTIRE day off.

I DID NOT CONSULT THE SCHEDULE! 😐 Yes, the same one who said that even after a full year of doing the same thing every week she knows how it is so important to still have a physical schedule to help keep everything going like it should, did not even look at the schedule this morning. The morning of the first day of school. I was so cool that I knew what everyone was supposed to do….. until 8:15 in the morning. How did this happen? I am not sure. I must have been a bit over confident that I knew what was going on until around 11 am that I did not even bother to look. That may not seem like the end of the world, and I would have thought that a small mistake would have been just a little ‘oops’, but that little ‘oops’ affected our entire day. What happened was that I thought that since the boys davened earlier with their father than was listed on the schedule, we had extra time to catch up on some mishnayos that the boys got a bit behind in because of the Yomim Tovim. That would not have been the end of the world if it were not for the fact that we totally skipped out on one of the subjects for each of the boys and I did not realize it until about lunch time.

One boy did not consult the schedule very closely either for he ended up missing a second subject. We did catch up one subject, but it was too much for me to fit in the second one, even at night. Between getting ready for his Bar Mitzvah in a few short months (oh my, where DID the time go?), working on his SAT vocabulary and SAT math (aka algebra) for the SAT he is going to, IY”H, take in January, and the extra subjects he is taking because of his grade (and selling popcorn), we are sure keeping him busy and out of most of the trouble.

That is not mentioning the one boy that was not feeling up to par today with a headache and had to lay down a few times, missing some classes, a boy who tried being a challenge. I think the mild headache I had all day until supper time was due to the amazingly, crazy first day. On another note, I did have ONE boy who got all his work done, even did his organ practising. Must have been the extra morning sleep. Baruch Hashem, there is always the good, just sometimes it is harder to find. The nice thing is that it is always there; if you look, you WILL find it. 🙂

As I am typing, I sit here feeling almost bored. The good is that as soon as I pick my eyes up from the computer screen I am reminded that I am really not bored. I have dishes to clean, tables to empty, the rest of the papers to put away. And that does not include the laundry that is so patiently waiting for me (and most probably procreating as I type.) No, I do not have to worry, I am not bored. I just wonder how long I can keep my eyes on the computer screen…

Sweet dreams and I really should get a little more friendly with my dishes. Tomorrow is another day, and that means the potential for a great day (and humbly remembering to look at the schedule!)

Popcorn, Yomim Tovim, Yomim Tovim and More Yomim Tovim!

Rosh Hashanah has come, Yom Kippur will be here in less than 24 hours. I have been trying to think of something to write, but nothing popped into mind.

Baruch Hashem we have been busy. Our annual Scout popcorn fundraiser is in full swing now, with $4000 worth of popcorn already bought – and that does not include the chocolate flavors that we could not purchase this round (the chocolate melts too easily we are told.) I am told the popcorn is much better than last year and not to mention it is in tins again. (All popcorn is OU-D, with the plain unpopped kernels OU-Parve – anyone interested? 😉 )

This is the best and worst time of the year. The best time for the boys to work on their socialization skills and go door-to-door and talk to all sorts of people – from young to old, from cranky to nice, from English speakers to non-English speakers. They also get lots of exercise for they do a lot of walking! It is the worst time for Daddy and Mommy have to go and take them all over, not just once, but twice when we have to deliver to the wonderful places that bought. But soon it will be over and we are hoping that the older two will have earned enough to go to one week of Jewish Scout camp in the summer (the number 3 boy has one more year before he can go!)

We sure hit our new year off to a good start with missing the first 1.5 days of Room613! Several boys thought they read there will be no classes the ENTIRE week, not just for Rosh Hashanah. But after talking to my sister and a friend on the second day after Rosh Hashanah, I found out they were wrong. Lesson learned: Read my emails more closely… It was not a total loss, I tried to add more secular work into the 2 days that would have been missed because of Rosh Hashanah.

We did not delve into Yom Kippur last week too much, probably should have, though I had other unrelated things on my mind. Sometimes I find it hard to balance personal learning and introspection with teaching the boys and helping them out with the same things. We did talk about some of the basic prayers and their meanings. I also found some nice Kol Nidre songs on Youtube to help get us in the mood. One thing I told the boys is that they should read the davening in English – especially the Al Chets. Since all the davening we do is for us, not Hashem, how are we supposed to put ourselves in the correct frame of mind if we do not even know what we are saying?

This week we worked on Yonah and the Whale. I found some nice one page versions for preschoolers and a cute song for the little one, as well as a translation of the Vilna Gaon’s work on sefer Yonah. That is set for high school, however, my older boys are getting some of it. They just had chapter 1 on chinuch.org, however, I was able to find the full English version at the Daf Yomi Review website. We are not going to finish what we have, but that is fine, that leaves more to learn another time. My youngest wanted stuff to color today, but the computer we use for printing was being used, so I will hopefully print out a copy of Yonah and the whale for him to color tomorrow while we sing our song or I’m working with the older boys.

Sukkos is right around the corner, and it is always tough to do Sukkos learning with very few days – I feel I should spend several days on Yom Kippur, and not just rush through it to start Sukkos material, but then I feel Sukkos gets jipped! I did buy nice 8.5 x 11 charts from Torah U’Mesorah on Sukkos many years ago. I do not always go over them with the boys, but I think it is time to do them again. When the older boys were younger, I did manage to do several projects such as a styrofoam esrog and foam/feathered lulav, however, lately we have been focusing on getting the sukkah all up and set that we do not do very many crafts for we are also still doing school work. We are fortunate for the front entrance to the house has three walls already and all we need to do is add schach on top. We have most of the schach (about 70 individual bamboo sticks), but it is not quite enough, and we always have to figure out where to find more! I think I will need to come up with one nice decoration they can each do, the previous ones are getting old. Oh, and I think I have one more styrofoam ball the youngest can paint as well as some green foam. I think an older brother might like to spend some quality time with his youngest bro. 🙂

I am going to finish up, drink more liquid, and try to finish getting myself ready for tomorrow night. Wishing everyone a Gemar Chasima Tovah and an easy fast!