The Planning Of It

Last spring I took my kids to see the King Tut exhibit at the DMA. It was one of the best homeschool experiences we'd ever had. We thoroughly prepared for it ahead of time. I downloaded PDF files with educators' guides, we watched videos on Discovery Streaming, we understood precisely what we were going to be seeing before we got there; room by room. I knew I was taking a bit of a risk because my daughter was only two-and-a-half, and, although she's a mellow kid, I was asking a lot of her. I did prep-work with her too, as melt-down prevention. I chose a couple of fun items for her to look for in each room, (a fantastic and deeply appreciated suggestion from the educator's guide.) So, for example, we looked for cats, peacocks, beetles, and so on. We looked for things she could easily identify. She was quite eager and tickled to reach the goals of Where's Waldo ancient Egyptian style, and I succeeded in keeping my expectations realistic about how long she'd be able to do it. My boys were older, 5 and 8, even so, I needed to be mindful of their capacity for calm attentiveness too. They did fabulously. Reading about the exhibit beforehand resulted in their own spontaneous version of seek-and-find. They had informally chosen objects that were particular favorites from our reading and they were delighted to spot them as we came upon them in the galleries. It was clear that we had done well when another patron approached me and remarked that she'd overheard some of our conversation and that the children appeared to be remarkably interested and well prepared. She guessed correctly that they were homeschooled. I'd tell you that it made my day, but, given that months later I'm still glowing just from writing about it, it must have had a far greater impact upon me than that! What a rush!

Our homeschool has been a tad off kilter lately. The addition of a deliciously breezy screened-in-porch to the back of our house required six months of destruction, ahem, I beg your pardon…construction. The project included exchanging the function of the Master Bedroom and the Office/Den/Schoolroom. We had to pack up our school materials for summer: the-extended-dance-mix. I sagely determined, that although in the past we've never taken the summer off the way schooled children do, this was the year to give it a try. Now, our lovely porch is completed, the two room swap-out is on the homeward stretch, and I have an enviable schoolroom to show for it. Without school to fill my hours, I had the opportunity to take thorough inventory, sort, discard, re-discover and organize all those bits and pieces of curriculum I'd collected over the years. I labeled shelves, bought cubbies, assembled file cabinets, hung cork boards, divided and tagged books by subject, tossed dried-up markers, classified easy readers and filled and tagged dozens of plastic storage tubs. The schoolroom is truly to-die-for. My homeschool mommy friends come to look at it and they get all choked up just trying to remark. However, we haven't exactly done any schooling in it yet!

So, having enjoyed this hiatus, reality is coming back and we've got to get back to school. I decided to ease into it and give them a very small work load for a couple of weeks, then gradually build up. I knew it was going to be tough on me too. I'd gotten pretty comfortable having more minutes to spend on things of my own choosing. So, instead of just going right back to the place we'd been six months ago, when the burnout dragon was greedily roasting our enthusiasm, I gave our next step some careful thought. We'd had such fun at King Tut, and we'd learned so much, not just about the boy king himself, but about being good museum patrons and the value of preparing ahead of time for an experience. It was just a blast and a half, and I wanted to figure out if we could get our school experience to be more like that more often. Each one of my children are interested in art and history. Art and History are good solid starting points for learning a wealth of other things. Hmmm…I cast about for inspiration, and somewhere along the way I realized that the Dallas Museum of Art, where we saw Tut, has lots and lots and lots and lots of stuff to learn about in its permanent collection! We could repeat that Tut Feeling with all the rest of the museum. Of course we could! We'd taken the kids to the Metropolitan Museum of Art the previous November while on vacation and they'd each, in turn, been mesmerized, by one object or another that day. Fortunately our wisdom of experience helped us, so that, even there, we kept our expectations realistic. We knew there was no way we could properly experience the entire museum anyway, so we planned ahead, chose a handful of items we thought the kids would find most interesting, and shrugged off the vast majority of works we had to skip. At least that way, we could really sink our teeth into the stuff we did see, and we wouldn't feel trodden and deep-fried at the end of the day from trying to drag three kids through far more than they, or we, could handle. This might actually be something our family is good at!

So, here is my plan. I'm going to join the Dallas Museum of Art. (It's just down the highway from me so the drive won't be as long as a flight to New York City, besides which, I just read that the Dallas Arts District is the largest Urban Arts District in the U.S! but that's probably just because of the cheaper real estate, we can afford to spread out more down here) The boys were super enthusiastic when I sketched out the idea to them. I compared it to the other two experiences I've already described, and said we'd be visiting the museum often, at least once a week. We'll usually go on days that Eleanor is in preschool, but I intend to choose works that will be of particular interest to her and prepare her for regular, though less frequent, visits too. I hopped over to the DMA online gift shop this evening and bought myself The Dallas Museum of Art Guide. I haven't figured out my entire system yet, but I thought I'd go ahead and start the blog tonight while I'm still in the meditation and planning stages, because writing about it may help me to clarify my thoughts, and it will make the end result a more complete record of our entire experience. So, Welcome! Thank you for coming along with us as we sink our teeth into the DMA. Yum!