It’s very satisfying to write a post that brings so many of you out for a tea party in the comments! If you haven’t been back to the discussion for the How Do Kids REALLY Learn to Write? post, hop on over. You’ll find fantastic insights and experiences shared there.

One of my most essential suggestions in that post was the final one: Help your kids find meaningful, authentic reasons to write. And what was my first example of how you can help make meaningful, authentic writing opportunities for kids? Start a writer’s workshop. If you’ve been reading along here for any length of time, you could have predicted that one. You know that I mention writer’s workshops often, you know that I’m a great fan–yet suddenly I realize that I’ve only written about them at length here once.

So, let’s talk about writer’s workshops.

I’m so convinced of the effectiveness of writer’s workshops and writing clubs that I’m writing an e-book on the topic. (Still cranking away on that! It should be finished in the next few months.) From the introduction of my project:

One of the easiest ways I know to conjure an audience for a child’s writing is to start a writer’s workshop.

Conjure is an apt word here because, in my experience, writer’s workshops can be almost magical in their ability to motivate kids’ writing. I’ve facilitated a variety of groups over a dozen years, working with kids as young as four and as old as seventeen.  Twelve years in, I’m still surprised at how a workshop can inspire a child’s desire to write. I see it in the kids from my current group, overheard at the park, asking each other, “What are you reading at the workshop tomorrow?” I see it in the ten-year-old who emails, begging me to hold our bi-monthly workshops every week, “Please!!!!!!!!!” I saw it last year in the teenage boy who dutifully cranked out regular installments of a Twilight series spoof, because the other workshop kids cheered and whined for them. In the kids who arrive at my house on workshop day, and scurry off to a corner to scratch out the unfinished ending to a story—because they don’t want to miss the party. In my own son, who hollered about how much he hated writing at seven, but months later, after we’d started our first workshop, could be found at the kitchen table, scribbling away at his own Captain Underpants comics before he’d even finished his morning glass of orange juice.

A writer’s workshop may not have such an effect on every child, but I’ll make the audacious claim that it will have such an effect on most kids. It’s a powerful motivator, and it’s hard not to use magic as its metaphor. I’m not the only one to think so; I’ve heard facilitators of other workshops and writing clubs for kids make similar claims.

Yet, for all it offers, a workshop is a fairly simple gathering to facilitate. We’re talking big payoff with minimal effort. Really, all you need to provide is a place for kids to share their writing. And a little help in cultivating a nurturing atmosphere.

There are many ways to format a workshop. In classrooms, teachers typically present a short lesson on craft, often using professional writings as inspiration, and then there’s a longer session of writing time, with sharing at the end. Many home-based workshops follow a similar pattern: the facilitator offers a fun prompt, and kids write, and share what they’ve written.

We do things a bit differently in my workshops. Kids write whatever they want: on any topic, in any genre. They do the actual writing at home. Then they read their work aloud at the workshop, and the group offers feedback. We generally do a quick, fun writing exercise together midway, but bulk of our time together goes to offering feedback on those written-at-home projects. I like this format because it allows kids to take time on their writing, and it offers more freedom in how kids write. Many still dictate their work to parents, which they can easily do at home; some like to write at computers; some enjoy writing bit by bit over the two weeks between our meetings; some prefer dashing off something by hand on their way to our gathering. Many choose to write longer pieces, and offer their latest installment at each meeting.

When kids write at home, it leaves more workshop time for feedback. And that, I think, is where the magic lies. As I mentioned in that last post, people (generally) write for connection and response. A writer’s workshop fulfills that in bucket loads: A child sits at the front of the group and reads his or her writing. And the other kids listen! And offer positive feedback!

That, my friends, is gold to a writer. I know I never tire of getting feedback on my own writing.

You’ll notice that I specify positive feedback. I’m a big believer in positive feedback. I think that hearing what we do well is more instructive than some folks realize. Getting feedback on our strengths teaches us what our strengths are–and many of us don’t recognize our strengths. Positive feedback teaches us what we do well, and encourages us to keep doing it.

A big chunk of my e-book focuses on offering feedback, because it’s such an essential part of a workshop–and it’s also the place where a workshop can go wrong, and turn unproductive. We do, eventually, begin offering constructive, building feedback in our workshop, but we delve into it slowly and with care. But truthfully, you could host a workshop that allows only positive feedback, and the kids would develop as writers.

What never fails to amaze me is the insight that kids can offer about writing. They really begin thinking like writers. At our last workshop, one ten-year-old said, “I like how you took the comedy of somebody messing up a newscast and made it real.” Another said, “I found it interesting that the snatchers couldn’t get the kids, which made me want to hear more of the story.” They comment on everything from specific words to character motivation to plotting. Once, a teen responded to a girl’s Christmas memoir by saying that all the details made him feel like he was looking into a snow globe. (I practically welled up at that one.)

You can get a glimpse into how a feedback session can blossom into a full-blown writerly discussion in my post Still Talking Literature.

A Few Benefits of a Writer’s Workshop:

• Workshoppers experience one of writing’s essential purposes—the opportunity to convey ideas in words to an audience.
• Having an audience to write for can be highly motivating.
• A workshop audience provides feedback on one’s writing. Feedback isn’t always easy to come by.
• The workshop setting encourages kids to write with an audience in mind. Writing for a particular audience can help writers develop clarity in their work.
• The workshop exposes kids to a variety of writing genres and styles. Very often the kids influence one another’s writing.
• The workshop provides authentic deadlines for writing, which can be helpful for writers of all ages.
• A positive workshop environment can help kids recognize their personal strengths as writers.
• A workshop setting values creativity over formula, content over correctness, practice over theory—all qualities essential to developing writers.
• The workshop helps kids understand that writing is a process, that the work is malleable. Writing can always be changed and improved, if the writer chooses to.
• Discussion about one another’s writing helps kids learn how literature works, in an authentic, meaningful, interesting way.
• For homeschooled kids, the workshop provides the audience often missing in a homeschool setting. For schooled kids, the workshop allows for opportunities that may not happen in a classroom: more freedom to write creatively, and in-depth dialogue about kid-generated writing.
• And a benefit not to be underestimated: the workshop shows kids that writing can be fun.

I’d love to keep the tea party going. A few questions to get the chitchat started: Have your kids ever participated in a writer’s workshop or other sort of writing club–or have you hosted one yourself? Was the experience useful? Have you participated in a workshop yourself? Or, have you ever considered hosting a writer’s workshop? What’s kept you from doing so?

Mr. T is just beginning to type his writing on his own.

Warning: some of what follows may sound like heresy to traditional educators.

Recently a reader of this blog sent an email asking for advice. She’s a homeschooling mom, and she wrote after spending time with other homeschooling friends, and hearing how they teach writing to their kids. Basically, these parents have their kids work daily at their writing. Younger kids draft a sentence each day and then combine them into a paragraph at the end of the week. An older child writes a paragraph each day, and then combines them into a traditional “five-paragraph essay.”

My reader writes:

“I wonder if this approach is going to encourage a love of writing and an ability to establish an authentic writing voice of one’s own.”

She then went on to describe some of the writing that her kids do, based on their interests. I won’t describe the details, to protect my reader’s privacy, but she writes,

“Their writing experiences are few and far between, but in my opinion, so rich, so full of voice and purpose…”

Here’s what she wonders:

“Can these kinds of few and far between writing activities be “enough” if they are rich enough and gradually become more frequent?  How can a family keep a sense of play and joy and authenticity in writing while making it a habit, too?  And how can a parent know when it’s time to push a little more and when it’s time to wait?  And am I being overly cavalier and irresponsible to think that teaching my kids paragraphing skills can wait a while?”

There are so many good questions here, enough to fill a chapter in a book. Rather than try to address this reader’s wonderings in an elegant, cohesive way–which would have me tapping at my computer here for days–let me offer instead some random thoughts.

• The notion of learning through routine practice is mostly a school notion. Practicing small pieces of a larger skill day after day is a way of ensuring that a large group of children will eventually learn that same skill. The assumption is that the child will learn the multiplication table, or the rules of grammar, or the parts of the body if he or she works at them repeatedly. The teacher can’t be aware of learning that happens outside of the classroom, in daily life, so all learning gets focused into a lesson format. Many of us who grew up going to school have unwittingly become convinced that a person needs this sort of routine practice in order to learn something.
• Adult-driven, routine practice-type learning rarely takes the child’s interest and motivation into account. In fact, in most cases, the child isn’t terribly engaged in this sort of practice. He or she does it simply because it is required.
• On the other hand, when a child’s interest and motivation are there, that child can often pick up concepts and skills rather quickly. Repeated practice isn’t necessary. Your daughter figures out how to multiply mentally because she wants to win at Yahtzee; your son understands how different ancient civilizations affected one another because he enjoys reading The Cartoon History of the Universe.
• This is not to say that repeated practice doesn’t have a role in learning. Repeated practice when taken on by choice can be the deepest sort of learning. When, for example, a child does that skateboard trick over and over to get it down; when she draws manga characters in the margin of every paper in her path; when she keeps strumming her guitar because she wants to be able to play Hey Jude through the finish. The child learns in these situations because he or she is motivated and the engagement is constant. In this case, practice leads to deep learning, yet it doesn’t feel like practice to the child. The child is simply doing what he or she is compelled to do.

So, how do these ideas apply to writing?

If you’re concerned about helping your kids develop writing skills for their futures, I have a few quotes for you.

Me, squinting and looking sheepish.

I did not write much in 2011.

That realization sort of stuns me. I didn’t recognize it until the year began to dwindle and I glanced back. I spent a lot of time last year working behind the scenes of my writing, without actually writing. I futzed under the hood, you could say, without actually driving the car.

And how, you might ask, did I do that for a year?

I spent the first three or four months of the year researching why writing matters. This was, ostensibly, a means of starting a book chapter called (what else) “Why Writing Matters.” I can’t, I figure, expect parents to read a book about helping their kids with writing unless they’re convinced that the endeavor will be worth their while. So I simply set out to do a little research, and found myself falling into a rabbit hole of studies, reports, articles and books on how writing is becoming more important than ever in the modern world. And concurrently found other studies, reports, articles and books bemoaning the fact that writing is being more neglected than ever in most classrooms. It’s a fascinating, horrifying story, and I couldn’t move on from it; I just kept reading, gathering notes and pulling out my hair. I managed to collect it all into an article query, and wrote an introduction to the article, but haven’t yet had a magazine take me up on writing the actual piece. It’s an important story, and one I’d still like to tell.

I spent another few months preparing workshops which I presented at a homeschool conference and elsewhere. I’ve given workshops before, but these were two completely new ones, and it surprised me how much time they took to put together. Good news: those months of research wriggled their way into both workshops. Suddenly I had more evidence, more grit for parents, to work them up about writing. Giving the workshops was exciting–there’s nothing like sharing ideas with others and getting immediate, tangible responses. (And hugs, even.) The give-and-take with participants gave me all the more insight about kids, parents and writing for my book project.

Still, it wasn’t writing.

I spent another two months redesigning my blog. This was perhaps the most frivolous, not-related-to-writing distraction of all. I just wanted my blog to look more like the vision I had in my mind; I had no idea how much I had to learn about code and such to make that happen. It was a fulfilling little dalliance, though, and it had to be good for the synapses in my forty-six-year-old brain. Now I’m redesigning my homeschool support group’s website, so the experience wasn’t all shallow self-indulgence.

Looking back on how I spent 2o11, and how much I wrote, I realize that I worked on just three projects: that article query, my e-book for parents on facilitating writer’s workshops (still unfinished) and this blog. That’s it.

Sigh.

I also realized something else. There are two things getting in the way of my writing.

1. my book project
2. this blog

I know, I know! How can writing a book get in the way of writing? But a book project is nothing if not big. I knew that writing a book would take years. It’s been almost three years since I got the original audacious idea of writing it. In that time I’ve done a lot of thinking, outlining and note-taking. I’ve even done a lot of writing. But I can see now that I am years and years away from anything resembling a completed book. I just don’t have the time to make it happen faster. I’m still a homeschooling parent, which implies a certain level of busy.

I’m also a monogamous-project person. Ask any of the moms in my homeschooling group, who see me knitting at the park week after week. I work dutifully at one project and finish it before I even swatch for another one. It’s a little ridiculous. I knitted a single sweater coat for nine months until the thing reached my ankles. I’m not sure what this tendency says about me. That I value finished projects over process? That I can’t multi-task? That I’m tunnel-visioned? True. True. True. But it’s also true that if I want something I will work for it. Stubbornly. Single-mindedly. Mulishly.

I thought I wanted to write a book. I do want to write a book. But what I realize, now, is that I want even more to help other parents with their kids’ writing. And if I put all my time into writing a book that won’t make it into another parent’s hands for years and years, then I’m not going to be helping anyone for a mighty long time.

Then there’s the fact that my project single-mindedness hasn’t allowed me any other writing for almost three years. So many times an essay idea has whispered in my ear, and I’ve ignored it, knowing that I’d never get a book finished if I got sidetracked with other whims. But, oh, how I’ve missed writing essays and articles! I’ve missed breathing on them and shining them up until I could see my reflection in them. I’ve missed sharing them with my writer friends, and re-writing them, and re-writing them again, and finding potential markets for them, and sending them off, with held breath and crossed fingers. I’ve missed that enchanted period before the rejection arrives, when the unlikely is possible.

I haven’t written a new essay in almost three years. I stopped writing essays just about the time I started getting them published.

Suddenly I’m feeling a little sad about that.

I’m not giving up on my book project. I’ve just decided to let it become the afghan that I knit at on the side, for years, without worrying about when it will get finished.

In the meanwhile, I’m allowing myself to dally. I’ll keep working at my e-book on facilitating workshops. I’m excited about the e-book model: the shorter format, the self-publishing angle. I’ll try out this first idea, and if it goes well, I very well may release other portions of the book in my brain as e-books. I love the idea of potentially helping other parents sooner, rather than later.

And I’m going to get back to writing essays and articles. I’ve pulled a few simmering-too-long ideas right up to the front burners. Feels good.

But back to that other writing obstacle: this blog.

I’ve kept up this blog as doggedly as everything else I do. A post a week, most weeks. For a long time I kicked myself for not writing more. I was convinced that I needed to post more often to build up my audience. And how I wanted to build my audience! I kept waiting for the month that my blog would take off, and attract masses. But, no. There have been no take-offs or other statistical pyrotechnics. My blog audience has grown slowly and steadily over the months and years. What else did plodding, deliberate me expect? I have a relatively small yet loyal readership. Every month there are a few more of you. I am finally beginning to take satisfaction in the fineness of that gift.

But a post a week here has been too much for me. As this current post is making all too evident, I don’t write short. Wish I could, but I can’t. So even posting every eight to ten days meant that blogging took up a good chunk of my writing time.

No, I’m not giving up the farm. I’m just putting my eggs in the basket that says that most of my readers will keep showing up, even if I only post every two weeks or so. That’s what feed readers and email subscriptions are for, after all.

I’m also hoping to focus my posts here on writing with kids, and passion-driven learning because those are the topics that matter most to me. I’ve finally figured out that I’m not Soule Mama, you know? I may drop in some atwitter posts now and again–heavy on photos, light on text–because I don’t want to things to get too impersonal. But I have a better sense of what my mission is, and what I want to share here.

So. All of this has been a bloated, navel-gazing introduction to my new year’s resolution: In 2012 I will write.

Wish me luck.

Happy new year!

I have a post brewing in my brain, but we are off to the beach today, and I can’t get it together. Still, I wanted to get that Christmas tree off of the top of my blog. We de-Christmased the house yesterday; I wanted to do the same here. I leave you with a photo more in keeping with my current mindset.

I’ll be back soon with the typical blather you expect from me. (Reflections and resolutions, keep mingling in that brain!)

I’ve had half a post written for over a week now. But somehow, cookie-baking, wreath-making, sweater-knitting, gnocchi-shaping, veggie-pickling and Christmas movie-watching have kept that post from getting finished. I thought about simply posting photos of all those acts–a dispatch from Elf Land–but if you’ve seen one artsy, macro peppermint bark shot, you’ve seen enough.

Instead, I’m letting my half-finished post go, and including a photo I snapped with my phone, while dashing around Union Square in San Francisco, shopping. That’s what I have time for right now, and somehow it seems just right.

Merriest of merry Christmases to you, dear readers, and warmest winter wishes.

Dearest H,

I know, I know, you told me not to put this on my blog. I understand that you’re nineteen and a college student and all, and being written about on your mom’s little blog could be pretty embarrassing.

But really, buddy, who’s gonna know? I don’t use your real name, so anyone googling you isn’t going to wind up here.  And if any of your friends read this, you can ask them why the heck they’re reading your mom’s blog anyway.

How did you expect me not to write about this? I mean, you come home for Thanksgiving telling your dad and me about this big project that you needed help with.  You knew we’d jump on it—we’ve been helping you with your projects since you first encountered play dough at two and didn’t know how to roll a snake.  We’ve helped you make a trebuchet, a model of the Duomo, scale papier-mâché planets, a Lord of the Rings game terrain, endless costumes. To name just a few.

And we’ve always loved helping you on your films. Whether we’re scouting out the farm location you need, or making a costume for a boy-king, or hitting up friends to act, or doing nothing more than fetching burritos for your crew.

And this project was cool. You know how much I love The Royal Tenenbaums. I fell hard for that quirkfest when it first came out ten years ago, when you were just nine and still worked  up over the first Harry Potter movie.

Ten years later you’re filming a scene from the movie for one of your film classes. Specifically the scene with Ritchie and Margot in the tent in the living room. And you needed a tent.

Not just any tent, but a tent that could be hung from the rigging (is that the right term?) That would be tiny and tent-sized at the back, but would widen gradually at the front, to accommodate three cameras. And that you could fold up and bring back to New York in a duffel bag. No problem, right?

Hey, if we could make a model of the Duomo out of foam core with no plans, surely we could make such a tent. So off to the fabric store we went, with your sketched plans. Twenty yards of purchased muslin later, and we were back in the family room, moving furniture, rolling fabric across the floor and trying to decide where to make cuts. I said I’d sew if you pinned. (I hate pinning.) You thought I was nuts for insisting on a French seam for the back of the tent, but that seam showed up in your film, didn’t it?  Mothers know these things.

I loved watching you and your dad trying to figure how and where to hammer the eyelets. Felt like the old days, watching you build duct tape sabers together.

You went back to school, and we were all happy and hopeful that your contraption would work.

Still I wasn’t prepared for how much this texted photo would take my breath away:

It’s a blurry shot, taken with your phone in low light, but look at that thing! You can see the traditional tent lines at the back, but something about that splayed-open front strikes me as glorious. More impressive than I envisioned. Somehow a sea of muslin, some eyelets, rope and the right lighting came together into something grand.

That tent is some kind of metaphor to me. A metaphor for how people can come together and create something big with very little. Sort of like homeschooling: it’s really just a series of days made up of books and ideas and small projects, but somehow, over time, it becomes something more. It creates a mindset that says, I can make that winged tent that I’m imagining. I can dream something up, and I can make it real.

I’m being sappier than Wes Anderson, aren’t I? I’m sure this whole post seems a little ridiculous to you, but here’s why I wrote it (even after you asked me not to): Many of the people who read my blog are newer homeschoolers. And while they seem perfectly willing to come back week after week to read endless stories about your little brother–because he’s the only one who still lets me write about him–what really seems to inspire many of them are stories of what happens to homeschoolers when they grow up. (And dream up tents for films. And make them.)

Your dad and I loved helping you with your project. And now you’ve helped  me with mine.

Thank you for indulging me, sweetie. I can’t wait to see your finished film.

Love, Mama

This year Mr. T and I are delving into California history. With a few other families, we’re visiting a different historical site each month. We’ve already had a few wonderful experiences, which I’ve neglected to share here.  One of these days I’ll catch up.

Meanwhile, this week we went on an overnight living history trip to Fort Ross, on the California coast.

It was an amazing adventure.

Fort Ross was established by Russia during the early 19^th century, as a site for growing food for Russian outposts in Alaska, and a place for hunting otter for the fur trade. The Russian-American Company that developed at Fort Ross was an interesting mix of Russians, native Alaskans and natives from California’s Kashaya Pomo and Coast Miwok tribes.

For the trip, each of us took on the persona of an actual person who once lived at Fort Ross.

Mr. T became Kirill Timofeevich Khlebnikov, an accountant for the Fort Ross Company who kept records of everything from how much employees were being paid to how often the cannons were unlawfully fired. T was part of the militia group on our trip, which meant he got to learn about weapons and help shoot a cannon. He’d be happy to tell you what an 1812 Charleville smoothbore flintlock muzzle-loading musket is. He learned how to follow Russian military commands, how to make rope and how to keep a fire going. He also washed a lot of dishes, something he never seems able to do at home.

I was Paraskov’ia Kulika, a half-native, half-Russian (or Creole) woman who married a Russian. After her husband died, Paraskov’ia worked off his debts by serving as a cowherd for the company. During the trip I served as a cook, which was a whole lot of work involving a whole lot of beets.  (Borscht, anyone?)

The coastal site was stunning. The quality of light–an otherworldly mix of sun and fog—made the whole experience seem a little magical, as if we really had stepped into an earlier world.

Portraying real people, and visiting their cemetery especially, connected us to the people who once lived there in a way that we surely wouldn’t have felt by simply visiting as tourists. The whole experience was powerful.

When I talk to H and Lulu about their childhoods as homeschoolers, it seems like our living history experiences are some of their favorite memories. There’s something about leaving behind real life for a day or two, and living as someone else, that transports and transforms you.

It’s an unforgettable experience.

I went away for a writing retreat with friends this weekend.

For years we’ve gathered at the coast, but this time we found ourselves on the backroads of Northern California. Instead of looking out over beaches, we had buttes. And a most changing landscape–for a landscape that at first seemed unchanging.

We were astonished by snow.

We drank strong coffee and wrote words on the backs of tickets. Then we made poetry. (An activity that’s as fun to do with kids as it is with adults, inspired by Susan Wooldridge’s Poemcrazy.)

We watched a heron and a hawk face off from a distance of ten feet, and stare each other down for hours.

We ate well. These pumpkin steel-cut oats were delicious (and will be making a comeback in my kitchen on Thanksgiving morning) and Heidi Swanson’s surprising salad with kale, coconut and farro, from this cookbook, was worth pulling from the fridge, meal after meal.

We stayed warm with a wood stove.

We wrote postcards to each other, from fictional and somewhat emotionally-unstable characters.

We walked alongside fallow rice fields. Then we went back to the cabin and blasted I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got while making barley risotto.

And we wrote. Which is what we’d set out to do.

Getting away like this, once a year or so, matters more to me than I probably realize. It’s about being with friends and being without responsibilities, yes, but it’s also about feeding my artistic self, and keeping it going for the rest of the year, when the time allowed for it comes in fits and starts rather than days.

It’s important for parents to feed themselves this way, especially homeschooling parents.

If you can’t get away for a weekend, maybe you can do it for a few hours. For about fifteen years now, since Lulu was a baby, I’ve gone out to work on my writing in a cafe once a week. Usually Wednesdays. My evenings out have evolved into first eating at a somewhat dive-y Indian spot, where all I have to do is walk in and smile and they write down my order of chana masala and roti. I eat my dinner over an inspiring read (lately Adam Gopnik’s new The Table Comes First.) And then I walk a few doors down to a cafe and work at my writing.

Wednesdays have become a highlight of my week. No matter how busy life gets, I know I’ll have a few hours to indulge my writerly side, and it fuels me. Like that kindling in the wine barrel, in that photo up there.

Chris also takes a night out, generally to rehearse with his band. I’ve known him since (before!) he was a teenager blasting his ears out in a garage band, and I’m only too happy to help keep that part of him alive. (Seeing him play live always makes me feel like a teenager again, even without the thrift store spike heels and leggings.)

Our weekly evenings out have been, I think, one of the smartest things we’ve done as parents. Sometimes it’s hard: the one left at home does all the dinner-prep and parenting duties for the evening, even more of a task when the kids were younger. And I find myself saying no to other weeknight social opportunities because I don’t want to give up my writing night. Still, it’s worth every trouble. Chris and I are helping each other remain creative people, in the midst of a very full life.

What seems secondary, but must be just as important: we’re showing our kids that our creative selves matter. That a week isn’t a week if you don’t find time for writing or music-playing in between dragging out the garbage and doing the laundry. That indulging your creativity is just something you do, like brushing your teeth and exercising.

How do you feed your creative side, in the midst of a busy life?

(P.S. If you’re here via last weekend’s link at Simple Homeschool, welcome! Please consider jumping in and joining the conversation in the comments. That’s where the action is!)

So I have a new home page. Maybe you’ve seen it? You can check it out here, or by clicking about me in the menu above my header.

The home page is at patriciazaballos.com, where the blog used to live. The blog now gets moved next door to patriciazaballos.com/blog. I’ve been assured that the change shouldn’t effect my blog feed, meaning that if you subscribe via email or RSS feed, you should receive updates as usual. Hope so. Please let me know if it’s not working out for you. Resubscribing may be necessary.

Apparently I’ve become something of a code geek. Not that I know much, but I’ve definitely learned to speak a little PHP and CSS in the two months I’ve spent redesigning the blog, and setting up that home page. I thought that the home page would be fairly easy to put together, but it took even longer than the blog redesign, simply because I had to really tweak the blog template to make the page look as I wanted it to. Do you have any idea how complicated it was to set up those buttons linking to Twitter, Facebook and Flickr? I could tell you a whole story populated with image sprites and sprite generators and Firebug menu item numbers. But one sentence is boring enough–suffice to say that those cute little buttons took about three hours of my life.

Perhaps I’m a slow learner. Nevertheless, the whole endeavor brings us to the topic of do-it-yourself learning.

My home page isn’t just DIY in design; it’s DIY in content. Which has me thinking.

The page is, I suppose, an attempt at professionalizing what I’m doing these days. I used to be a credentialed professional, but my teaching credential is long lapsed and honestly, my teacher training has very little effect on my current life as a homeschooling parent. Less and less as time goes on.

Instead, I’ve been working towards my own goals, outside of institutions and without credentials to prove my accomplishments. Is it audacious of me to assert myself as a writer when I’ve only had a few pieces published? Does the fact that I was paid for some of those pieces make me a professional? If I’d spent two years earning an MFA in Creative Writing, would that earn me more respect than the twenty years I’ve spent studying writing on my own? Does it make a difference that I write in some fashion most days, that I think and read and look at the world through the lens of a writer?

I’ve also begun listing my speaking engagements on that page. I’ve been paid for some of those engagements, but not all. Does that make me a professional speaker? I’m likely hired, in part, due to my  yellowing teaching credential, although what I speak about has little to do with my experiences as a credentialed teacher. Instead, I speak about what I’ve learned from my kids in our lives as homeschoolers, and my own research, and my own experiences as a writer. A quasi-professional writer.

It’s a home page mostly based on my own DIY learning, and that feels a little cheeky of me. But at the same time, what kind of a homeschooler would I be if I didn’t value DIY learning? Do I think my kids are lesser learners because they spent most of their childhoods learning outside institutions? Absolutely not! I think they’re learners in the truest sense of the word. Their DIY learning has had a profound effect on who they are as people, and it certainly hasn’t hindered them when they’ve chosen more traditional, institutional learning for themselves.

I believe in DIY learning for my kids, and I believe in it for myself. I can’t really confer on myself a credential or a degree, I suppose, but I can make myself a home page! I can announce to the world what I’ve been doing and where I’m headed.

And that’s what my little home page is all about.

So, it’s November, and you’re certainly Halloweened out. You’ve probably moved on to pureeing pumpkins and writing novels. Still, in the name of DIY projects and for the love of duct tape, I wanted to share Mr. T’s Halloween costume.

(If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve probably seen this costume more times than you care to. I still haven’t figured out how my new phone is posting my photos to Twitter without me realizing it. Upstart phone!)

You may remember that in the spring, T and I fashioned some hoplite armor from duct tape for our homeschool group’s history fair. That was when I realized that you can pretty much make anything from duct tape. (Winter boots? Baby slings? Turkey platters?)

When T mentioned that he wanted to be Thor for Halloween–the Avengers’ Thor, mind you–we Googled up some images.

(Image from fanpop.)

Immediately the duct tape portion of my brain started humming. That helmet! That armor! We could make it!

We used the same technique that we used for the hoplite armor, taping over an old sweatshirt and its cut-off hood. More detailed explanation on that hoplite post.

For the helmet’s wings and for Mjölnir (that’s Thor’s hammer, if you need to brush up on your mythology), we headed over to The Foam Factory. (Who knew that such a place existed, not ten minutes from our house? And that they have a bin full of foam scraps for whatever crazy project you may dream up, available for less than you’d pay for a pack of Pokemon cards?)

If you keep adding layers of duct tape, and trimming them to size, you can build up practically any shape you imagine. Those big shoulder protrusions? No problem! (We ran out of time for making the arm bands and those wacky boot extension thingamajigs. But we could have fashioned them with duct tape too, easy.)

I went to three stores in search of fabric for the cape. Found nothing, even at the third, until I got to the remnant bin. Then I scored a huge piece of absolutely Thor-ish crimson fabric for $7.70. I already had the cape pattern at home, and the pieces fit along the selvedge with an eighth of an inch extra. Honestly. Meant to be.

About a week before Halloween, I found myself in one of those terrifying Halloween superstores. I actually came across a few pre-made Thor costumes, complete with ginormous plastic Mjölnirs, (one already busted at the handle.) But they were expensive and so, well, tacky. (I know, I know, what’s tackier than duct tape? Har, har.)

I could have pulled a piece of plastic from my wallet and been done with it. Yet there’s something so satisfying about getting an image in your mind and asking How could I make this? And when you bring your kid along for the ride, not only is the process fun, but the kid learns that no matter what you dream up, you might be able to make it real.