Favorite Things Friday

I know this is going to make me sound like a major nerd, but the truth is that I always loved school!

My family homeschooled, so the excitement of the new school year would usually start in early August when the new school books would arrive. The UPS man (or woman...whom our dog Jamie hated because she always called her "Puppers"...Haha!) would deliver boxes and boxes of shiny new books and video tapes (all of our classes were on video), and they would all be stacked in the designated room, which was the "blue room" in our new house (which is what we called the family room because of the blue carpet...we were so original! Haha!). I loved it when Mom would let me be the one to open all the boxes and sort all the books into four stacks, one for each of us kids. Then I would sort those stacks by class: Bible, Math (or algebra or whatever the case may be for that particular grade), English (which also included literature, spelling, and vocabulary), History, Science, and then sometimes another language class or art class or health class something like that. Then, I would separate out all the teacher keys for Mom and line all the books up in their neat little stacks, all ready for school to start. Even when I got to college, I loved the first few days of school...getting my new books and each new syllabus, and then entering all the new assignments and due dates into my palm pilot for the new semester. Of course, once I had to start doing all the work, the 'funness' would rub off...after all, I'm not a total nerd! ;)

So, as I was watching all the kids go back to school this week, I started to have all kinds of memories of being in grade school. Like I said, we were homeschooled, so my grade school experience was extremely different from what these kids are experiencing.

There was one memory in particular that came back to me that I had not remembered for quite a while. I almost started laughing out loud when I thought of it! :D When we kids were all in grade school, we were living at an old farmhouse on an acreage outside of Truman, MN. We loved it there! So many old barns to play in and lots of woods and a huge yard to run around in! But, when it was time for school, Mom would set us up all in our different locations so that we could watch our individual videos without bothering one another. Apparently we kids felt that those few hours of concentrated instruction without any communication with one another was just too much to handle. So, we constructed the 'bell system.' Like many old farmhouses, our house had vents that allowed you to not only hear quite clearly what was being said in the room beneath you, but also often to see down there too. At this time, Julie and Jess had their 'classrooms' on the main floor of the house, and Jason and I had ours in the basement. We gathered up a couple of bells (like the jingle-bell type you can get at Christmas-time) and strung them on some yarn (somehow, we always had plenty of yarn for all our silly ideas!) and then, lowered them through the vent in the floor of Julie's 'classroom' into the basement. The basement was divided into two sections. On the one side of the stairs, the basement was finished and had a big playroom/family room (which was my classroom), and Jason's bedroom (his classroom). The other side was not finished and had some storage and also acted as a mud room/laundry room. That is the side that the bells went to. So, the girls had to ring them pretty loudly for us to hear them, but somehow we managed to make it work...sort of. Usually, we would write important messages to each other (like, "What class are you on now?" or "What do you want to play at break?" or "Do you want to do homework at the kitchen table after this class?" or other highly confidential things like that) and then tie them to the yarn and ring the bell for the other person to know that the message was there. We thought we were very sneaky. I'm not really sure why, since the bells were right in the middle of Mom's laundry room, but we were convinced that she had no idea that the 'bell system' existed.

Mom was always trying to keep us concentrated on our school work (apparently she thought that was more important than our discussing what we should play at break), so she wouldn't let us talk to each other when we were at the kitchen table working on our homework. However, we found a way around that too. ;) We found these big folders and made 'walls' around our work spaces, so that we wouldn't 'distract' each other. But, then we got paper clips and wrote little notes to each other on small scraps of paper and clipped them to the outside of our folders, so that everyone could see important news flashes like, "I'm on my last class" or "I'm writing my spelling words" or "I'm reading my history book."

Somehow, we all made it through school each day (even Mom!) and managed to learn something too! :) I've always been so thankful for my education and I'm so glad that Mom and Dad decided to take on the daunting task of homeschooling us kids!