Home Field Advantage

Introduction: The Adventure Starts

By Skyla King-Christison

INTRODUCTION: 
The Adventure Starts

Successful teaching takes experience and knowledge. One comes with time, and the other comes with study.

IT’S six in the morning. The alarm on my cell phone begins to play a cello suite, a carefully selected alarm tone that wakes me without alerting the kids still sleeping in the next room that someone tall enough to cook breakfast is already awake. I sneak into the living room for some prayer time and morning meditation before ironing Joe’s work clothes and peeling some vegetables for my breakfast juice. I cherish those fleeting morning moments before the high-energy day begins to unfold. There’s no time quite so calm and reassuring as that hour or so before the rest of the world wakes up.

Soon I hear Joe’s alarm, loud enough to wake the dead and signaling the end of the peaceful morning quiet and the beginning of the day. I can hear the kids beginning to stir, milling around their rooms, and the rustling of Joe readying himself for another day at the office. The boys, Hunter and Haven, don’t get up right away, but spend a few minutes in their side-by-side beds reading books to each other, giggling over a story about a lap dog who hates having to wear a bow because the other dogs make fun of him. My eldest, Hannah Jane, is already making her bed and choosing the day’s fashion statement.

Almost every day starts off the same way. As part of their chores, the kids must make their beds and feed their animals: Hannah Jane takes care of the dogs because no one else wants to deal with them. Haven is on cat duty and waits for Hannah Jane in the garage, so that she doesn’t get scared being alone. Hunter feeds his beta fish, Fin McMissile, on the kitchen counter.

Soon they’re all lined up at the breakfast bar, Hunter and Haven with their bowls of oatmeal sprinkled with cinnamon, and Hannah Jane with her wheat toast and butter. I sit with them, perched beside my Jack LaLanne juicer, gulping down my breakfast of juiced greens as we form a plan for the day.

We all talk about what’s on the day’s agenda, whether it’s a field trip day, a co-op day, or whether there are some errands to be run. Then the kids all tell me what super special thing they have planned for the day: Today, Hunter says he wants to ride his bike. Haven wants to play his favorite games on Starfall (more.starfall.com), an online collection of math and language arts activities. Hannah Jane remarks that we really need to spend more time painting and that she wants to lead us all in a painting class in the afternoon. This makes me laugh because this is typical Hannah Jane confidence on display. She’s led classes for her dolls before, and she’s sure she’s awesome at everything she does—so, naturally, we all need to take her class.

Once the breakfast dishes are put away, we scurry down to the schoolroom where we start off class with “circle time.” First, we read a story from a collection of Baha’i children stories and work on memorizing a prayer. Then, we get out the rhythm sticks and clack them together as we sing out a poem about a little bird that is afraid to fly. Hannah Jane and Hunter roll on the floor with giggles because their 4-year-old brother, Haven, gets such a serious look on his face when he recites poetry. Haven loves the attention so he keeps going, louder and more serious than ever, before breaking out of character and joining them in wild laughter. We then move to singing skip-counting songs while we pass bean bags around in a circle and sing our way through all of the 50 states and their capitals. Finally, we do a little Montessori-style grammar lesson on a circular chalkboard that I made from an old tabletop and some chalkboard paint.

Once we’ve worked our way through the energetic, lighthearted subjects that we can all do as a family, the kids head off to their desks. Their three little desks, purchased from a city school liquidation sale, are clustered together so that the kids all face each other. Hannah Jane, age 8, works at her own pace and without much guidance. She starts on her spelling assignments and Latin work before heading upstairs to the family desktop computer to do her online lessons where she writes reports and posts them to her blog. Today’s report is about tsunamis. Her other assignments for the day are all bookmarked in her textbooks and follow a similar course each week, so she can seamlessly move from one activity to the next on her own without much prompting from me.